Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O'Malley, S.J. 9781442674202

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Bibliography of John W. O'Malley's Scholarshipp
The Last Two Councils of the Catholic Reformation: The Influence of Lateran V on Trent
Humanism and Early Modern Catholicism: Erasmus of Rotterdam's Ars Moriendi
The Papacy in the Age of Reform, 1513-1644
The Episcopacy in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Calvin and Borromeo: A Comparative Approach to Social Discipline
Overcoming Gender Limitations: The Daughters of Charity and Early Modern Catholicism
'Popular Catholicism' and the Catholic Reformation
Confessionalization and Polemic: Catholics and Anabaptists in Moravia
Sub Jugo Haereticorum: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe
Ignatius, Confratello: Confraternities as Modes of Spiritual Community in Early Modern Society
Seeing the Place: The Virgin Mary in a Chinese Lady's Inner Chamber
The Jesuits and the Non-Spanish Contribution to South American Colonial Architecture
Clerical Education, Catechesis, and Catholic Confessionalism: Teaching Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Some Unusual Genres of Sacred Music in the Early Modern Period: The Catechism as a Musical Event in the Late Renaissance - Jesuits and 'Our Way of Proceeding'
Recovering the Apostolic Way of Life: The New Clerks Regular of the Sixteenth Century
'Showing the Inventions of God': Preaching and Ritual on Holy Thursday at the Court of Pope Paul V
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

EARLY MODERN CATHOLICISM Essays in Honour of John W. O'Malley, S.J. Edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel

The so-called Counter- or Catholic Reformation has traditionally been viewed as a monolith. John O'Malley, a distinguished scholar of the Renaissance and Reformation, has decisively challenged this interpretation, emphasizing the diversity, vitality, and complexity of Catholicism in the early modern era. The essays in Early Modern Catholicism, written in O'Malley's honour, present new research on subjects ranging from popular religion to colonial architecture, and suggest new interpretations of the accepted picture of various societies, institutions, and individuals which together constituted the Catholic Church in the period from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The book examines a wide variety of themes through many different methodologies and offers perspectives from a number of disciplines, including social history, law, art history, education, musicology, and philosophy. Unique in both scope and subject, it is a significant contribution to the growing field of interdisciplinary studies of Early Modern Catholicism, and will be especially useful in various courses in history and religion. KATHLEEN M. COMERFORD is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University. HILMAR M. PABEL is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University.

Peter Paul Rubens, Madonna with Saints (ca. 1638-40), Sint-Jakobskerk, Antwerp. Photo courtesy Guy Meyer.

EARLY MODERN CATHOLICISMM Essays in Honour off John W. O'Malley, S.J.

Edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3547-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8417-6 (paper) @*

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title Early modern Catholicism : essays in honour of John W. O'Malley, S.J. ISBN 0-8020-3547-7 (bound)

ISBN 0-8020-8417-6 (pbk.)

1. Catholic Church - History - Modern period, 1500— I. O'Malley, John W. II. Comerford, Kathleen M. III. Pabel, Hilmar M. (Hilmar Matthias) BSX1305.E27 2001

270.6

c2001-900833-3

This book has been published with the assistance of grants from the Detroit Province of the Society of Jesus, the Institute of Jesuit Sources, the Jesuit Institute of Boston College, the Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu in Rome, and the Renaissance Society of America. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface

ixx

Acknowledgmentss xviii Introduction

xixx

BENJAMIN W. WESTERVELTt

A Bibliography of John W. O'Malley's Scholarshhip xxxcviii The Last Two Councils of the Catholic Reformation:: The Influence of Lateran V on Trent 33 NELSON H. MINNICH

Humanism and Early Modern Catholicism: Erasmus off Rotterdam''s Ars Moriendiiii 26 HILMAR M. PABELL

The Papacy in the Age of Reform, 1513-1644

46

WILLIAM V. HUDON

The Episcopacy in Sixteenth-Century Italy

67

FRANCESCO C. CESAREO

Calvin and Borromeo: A Comparative Approach to Social Discipline 84 WIETSE DE BOER

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Contents

Overcoming Gender Limitations: The Daughters of Charity and Early Modern Catholicism 97 SUSAN E. DINAN

'Popular Catholicism' and the Catholic Reformation 114 KEITH P. LURIA

Confessionalization and Polemic: Catholics and Anabaptists in Moravia 131 D. JONATHAN GRIESER

Sub Jugo Haereticorum: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe 147 CHRISTINE KOOI

Ignatius, Confratello: Confraternities as Modes of Spiritual Community in Early Modern Society 163 NICHOLAS TERPSTRA

Seeing the Place: The Virgin Mary in a Chinese Lady's Inner Chamber 183 XIAOPING LIN The Jesuits and the Non-Spanish Contribution to South American Colonial Architecture 211 GAUVIN ALEXANDER BAILEY

Clerical Education, Catechesis, and Catholic Confessionalism: Teaching Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

241

KATHLEEN M. COMERFORD

Some Unusual Genres of Sacred Music in the Early Modern Period: The Catechism as a Musical Event in the Late Renaissance Jesuits and 'Our Way of Proceeding' 266 T. FRANK KENNEDY, S.J.

Recovering the Apostolic Way of Life: The New Clerks Regular of the Sixteenth Century 280 MARK A. LEWIS, S.J.

Contents vii 'Showing the Inventions of God': Preaching and Ritual on Holy Thursday at the Court of Pope Paul V 297 CORRIE E. NORMAN

Contributors Index

319

315

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Preface

Privately and publicly, historians have lamented the lack of texts to update the work of H. Outram Evennett, A.G. Dickens, and Jean Delumeau, to name the usual suspects, although recent books by R. Po-Chia Hsia, Michael Mullet, and Robert Bireley are welcome additions to the survey literature of Early Modern Catholicism.1 This Festschrift was born in part out of the discontent with the inadequate coverage of earlier years, in part to supplement synthesis with specific studies of important problems, and in part to honour a scholar who has done much to sustain and deepen interest in the history of Catholicism. We do not intend it to be any ordinary Festschrift, but then we are not honouring any ordinary scholar. Indeed, this volume is a hybrid. We gathered together a group of people whom we thought represented what John O'Malley did best: support the up-and-coming and embrace the experienced; stake out new territory and place it in context with the familiar; and, in general, challenge the tendency to interpret Catholicism in the early modern period as a monolith. Just creating a list of topics proved an intriguing task. We have striven to be complete in our coverage of topics centred on an underlying theme: what was Early Modern Catholicism, and how is our understanding of it changing? These questions arose early in O'Malley's scholarship and have played a significant role in every project he has undertaken. In an essay published more than ten years ago, O'Malley observed that the more we study sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholicism, 'the more its variety and vitality manifest themselves.'2 Here and in a more recent historiographic survey - Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (2000) - he provides us with a stimulus to discover the dynamic diversity of Catholicism. That very diversity moves him to propose, in Trent and All That, 'Early Modern Catholicism' to exist alongside the more traditional categories of Catholic Reform, Counter-

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Reformation, Tridentine Catholicism, and Confessional Catholicism. The new term is a much more inclusive historical category, encompassing the complete range of change and continuity within Catholicism in the early modern period. 3 The scholars who have contributed to this volume address the same questions in a rich variety of ways. The issue of continuity with previous expressions of Catholicism inevitably arises, and the pre-Tridentine influences on Catholic Reform are the subject of Nelson Minnich and Hilmar Pabel's papers. Minnich establishes the tradition of using councils to define and discipline, and considers the relationship between these councils, focusing on Lateran V and its influence on the watershed Council of Trent. The long-term consequences of Lateran V itself were minor, except as that council directly informed the practices, discussions, and outcomes of sessions of Trent; such influence has not been sufficiently appreciated and clearly supports the argument of traditionalism in Catholic Reform. Pabel focuses on Erasmian Catholicism as seen in the great humanist's 'modernization' of a medieval genre, the ars moriendi. Humanism and a desire for reform coexisted in Erasmus with traditional values and their expressions, even if they sometimes sounded challenging to the church. Hence, even early in the Reformation Era, we must speak of Early Modern Catholicism as multifaceted rather than monolithic. Did the church see itself that way? Efforts to improve discipline and devotion, as described in a number of our chapters, answer that question with a resounding 'yes and no.' Three articles explain not only how the hierarchy was affected but also how it defined its own task. William Hudon's study of the papacy from Leo X through Urban VIII considers not only individual popes but the role of the institution in the creation and maintenance of reform initiatives. He challenges the traditional viewpoint that the papacy directly controlled all Catholic Reforms by offering nuanced descriptions of the complex characters who reigned as popes. Francesco Cesareo raises the question of how successful the hierarchy was at turning bishops into pastors - physically (i.e., resident in the diocese and engaged in regular visitations) as well as spiritually (i.e., able to exercise the care of souls) - in the face of such obstacles as a greater interest in writing disciplinary canons than in observing them. Wietse de Boer uses the example of confession to demonstrate how Carlo Borromeo exercised Calvin-like social control in a devotional setting. The bishop of Milan created a means of enforcing penitential discipline, in which a committee of ecclesiastics met weekly to discuss both general issues and particular cases; this paralleled the Calvinist Consistory. Borromeo viewed sin - and the consequences of

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not correcting it - as social phenomena. Susan Dinan frames her work in general questions of both hierarchy and terminology. The changing role of women in a changing church raises a variety of questions, and organizations like the Daughters of Charity, by avoiding direct confrontation with that hierarchy, both responded to a clear set of needs within the church (poor relief) and challenged the decisions of that church to restrict the actions of women (through claustration and clearly defined gender roles). These articles argue against the simple and traditionally held explanations of early modern church organization and its moral impact. The mirror-image issue is the response to these various institutional changes among 'the people/ Keith Luria demonstrates not only that 'popular Catholicism' defies easy definition but also that, in attempting to spread knowledge of church doctrine and practice to remote areas, the hierarchy embraced many 'popular' practices for its own purposes - for example, the post-Tridentine Church employed collective ritual and harnessed the devotion to certain saints. Jonathan Grieser and Christine Kooi look at Catholicism in confessional conflict, reminding us of how high the religious stakes were and explaining local attachments to beliefs. Grieser examines Catholic polemics against Hutterites by the Jesuit controversialist Christoph Erhard in generally tolerant Moravia, demonstrating another success of the Society of Jesus. Kooi's exploration of the survival of minority Catholicism in the face of opposite pressures - the attempts of governments in the Netherlands and England to coerce Catholics to convert to state or established churches - sheds light on the scattered faithful and their abilities to resist change despite persistent dangers. Both of these articles show that Catholicism was not just what the Roman establishment defined; it was also personal, emotional, and, even in the face of violence and counter-propaganda, vital where we might least have expected it. Nicholas Terpstra's study of confraternities demonstrates how another form of organized Catholicism could function in the underground, by examining these associations in Protestant areas, and even in the background, by noting relationships between Catholic confraternal statutes and Protestant Church Orders. The question of popular appeal is applied to non-European areas in articles by Xiaoping Lin, Gauvin Bailey, and again Terpstra, who address the use of art, architecture, and confraternities in bringing Catholicism to China and South America. Lin's explanation of the response of Ming Chinese women to Marian imagery, in biblical and domestic settings, contributes to our understanding not only of the success of missions but to the limits of the process of acculturation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Asia. Bailey focuses on spiritual colonization in a different manner, asking

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whether or not Jesuits imposed a certain style of religious architecture and therefore of envisioning Catholicism. The churches he analyses were, he explains, not only Catholic but also catholic: simultaneously international (European), humanist, Jesuit, and papal. Terpstra includes non-European, and even non-Catholic, confraternities in his study as a means of demonstrating the widespread appeal of devotional communities and a way of asking to what extent colonized areas were, in fact, acculturated to the practices of the colonizers. These articles all pose essentially the same question: what role, exactly, does religion play in society and in socialization? Finally, this volume addresses the relationship between people and institutions. Kathleen Comerford, T. Frank Kennedy, Mark Lewis, and Corrie Norman consider the question of how the Catholic Church changed the rank and file by working to reform the hierarchy. Theological education had to be improved in order to inject life into priests and congregants alike; the most successful avenue of improvement should have been the diocesan seminary, the brainchild of mid-sixteenth-century reformers who recognized the many limitations of contemporary educational institutions at creating a group of pastors. Unfortunately, as Comerford explains, those reformers gave so little direction and allowed for so little enforcement that their very good idea was almost ineffective until the early eighteenth century. Far more successful were the many local foundations of religious orders (and the confraternities studied by Terpstra) which revitalized both lay education and clerical and lay spiritual life. Lewis discusses the work of these new institutions and associations and shows how, in different ways, they expressed the Tridentine/Catholic Reformation goals of increasing devotion, clarifying the content of faith, and reforming religious practice. Concentrating on 'reformed priests' and the work of educational orders, including Angela Merici's Ursulines but particularly the Society of Jesus, he elucidates a variety of connections among the orders and their common devotion to reform of the church based on 'personal holiness and apostolic action/ Like the organizations studied by Dinan, those Lewis describes lived the active life in a variety of ways, and bridged the gaps between doctrine and practice. Preaching and religious music, which were used in liturgical as well as non-liturgical settings, appealed to large audiences through theatricality, ritual, and calls to action. These were effective means of teaching the faith, as both relied on Scripture and tradition, while reinforcing Catholic practices. Norman details how preachers intended to give their congregations an understanding of the biblical text, and, through dramatic presentation, to involve them emotionally and produce an active response. The dramatic involvement was also achieved through musical expression, and

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Kennedy demonstrates the use of music as catechesis as well as ceremony. Italian Jesuits taught doctrine and led spiritual exercises, concentrating more on the former than the latter, via music; in this, they were aided by the general support of catechesis among religious orders (as described by Lewis) and bishops (as noted in Cesareo). Both Kennedy and Norman show clearly that an appeal to emotion and to ease of repetition were pedagogically successful among European Catholics in spreading information as well as devotion. This collection is held together not only by several common themes, but also by its honouree and the work he has done. As a further reflection of Catholicism in the early modern period, we have chosen as the frontispiece Peter Paul Rubens's Madonna with Saints; Rubens is a favourite of John O'Malley's. The painting was one of Rubens's last religious pictures, if not the last, executed sometime between 1638 and 1640. A symbol of the painter's deep personal devotion, it adorns the baroque altar in the Rubens family chapel in the Sint-Jakobskerk in Antwerp where the famous artist lies buried. Connoisseurs have long tried to unravel the painting's meaning. Traditionally, it has been thought that the saints represent Rubens and various members of his family, but Jacob Burckhardt, and, more recently, Ulrich Soding, have flatly rejected this interpretation. 4 Given the lack of an interpretive consensus, we offer our own brief remarks in light of the current context. The painting can be taken to indicate what O'Malley in his recent book, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, has identified as 'the diversity and complexity, sometimes the incoherence' inherent in Catholicism as well as the 'diffuse' nature of the Church's leadership and of the Church as a whole.5 The people who inhabit Rubens's canvas - Saint Jerome, Mary Magdalene, Saint George, the Virgin Mary, the infant Jesus, and an unidentified cardinal - display in their facial features and their physical poses a complex, diverse, and incoherent ensemble.6 We may see them as representative of the different aspects of this historical period which is so difficult to name: George standing for militant Catholicism, the church of the CounterReformation, ever-vigilant in the quest to quash heresy; Jerome, serious almost severe - in demeanour, embodying both the critical scholarship championed by Renaissance humanism and the spirituality of austerity (and therefore the church of Catholic Reform, leavened by intellectual and spiritual currents that existed before and independently of the challenge from Protestantism); the juxtaposition of Mary Magdalene - mature, beautiful, sexual - and the pious cardinal teaching us that the church of the socalled Tridentine Age was not simply a hierarchical structure, for within

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Catholicism the powerless coexisted with the powerful, the popular with the elite; and the Virgin with the infant Christ, presenting a universally potent symbol of confessionalized Catholicism, of an ecclesiastical polity doctrinally opposed to and culturally distinct from Protestantism. Analysed in its individual components, Rubens's painting conceivably represents the principal and yet exclusive names or categories that scholarship has pinned upon Catholicism, but seen as a whole, it also symbolizes a Catholicism more latitudinarian, more multifaceted, even more attractive, than these names suggest. In the end, we must look at Rubens's painting as a whole - in its diffuse and complicated entirety. Similarly, we must look at Catholicism as a diffuse and complicated ensemble, led by, among others, prelates, warriors, common people, and scholars; populated by men and women of all walks of life; and animated by the pursuit of heavenly salvation, earthly conquest, austere reverence, gentle love, childlike playfulness, and - dare we say - at least a modicum of sensuality! This is what O'Malley encourages us to call Early Modern Catholicism, a name that covers a multitude of sins and achievements, a new scholarly denomination that bids us to keep the whole picture in mind as we investigate its parts. This volume is obviously not a monograph-type survey, but we have from the beginning intended it to be of use to students as well as specialists. We believe that this intention, like the rest of the project, represents the type of work that John O'Malley continues to do. This collection of papers on Early Modern Catholicism is in no way the last word, but a means of understanding previous work, and of helping to direct our future attentions. NOTES 1 R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1750 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1999); Michael A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (New York: Routledge, 1999)2 Tradition and Traditions,' in John W. O'Malley, Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1989), 37. This essay first appeared as 'Tradition and Traditions: Historical Perspectives/ The Way 27 (1987): 163-73. 3 O'Malley first proposed 'Early Modern Catholicism' in 'Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism/ Catholic Historical Review 77 (1991): 177-93. Now see O'Malley, Trent and All That:

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Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 6-8, 140-3. 4 Jacob Burckhardt, Rubens (Vienna and Leipzig: Bernina-Verlag, 1937), 85; Ulrich Soding, Das Grabbild des Peter Paul Rubens in der Jakobskirche zu Antwerpen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1986), 181-3. 5 O'Malley, Trent and All That, 122-3. 6 According to Soding, Das Grabbild, 102, 188, 199-202, the cardinal is probably a seventeenth-century prelate and not a canonized saint.

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Acknowledgments

This volume is the result of the contributions of a number of fine scholars, whose work you will read in the following pages, but it also depended on other sources of support. We first owe gratitude to Nelson Minnich, who provided guidance in the early stages of the project, and to Corrie Norman, who enriched both our list of topics and our perspective on the job at hand. Ron Schoeffel, at the University of Toronto Press, has been enthusiastic and accommodating from the beginning and truly deserves our thanks. All who have opened this book know that John O'Malley is more than an ordinary scholar, and that his life is more than scholarship. Because of his long service to the Society of Jesus, several Jesuit organizations were happy to contribute to the cost of producing this tribute to him: we gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of the Detroit Province of the Society of Jesus, the Institute of Jesuit Sources, the Jesuit Institute of Boston College, and the Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu in Rome, of which Mark Lewis is director. The Renaissance Society of America contributed to honour a past president. We have been overwhelmed at the response. This book belongs as much to these associations as it does to those who have written articles. In the final analysis, the volume is itself an acknowledgment of a mentor to every person who studies Renaissance and Early Modern Catholicism. Some know John O'Malley well, others meet him once or twice a year, still others have never met him. All of us, however, clearly recognize how he has defined our field and how much we owe to his work. We offer this Festschrift as an expression of gratitude.

John W. O'Malley, S.J.

Introduction BENJAMIN W. WESTERVELT

Professor John W. O'Malley, S.J., requires no introduction to scholars of medieval and early modern Europe. His teaching, his scholarship, and his service to a community of scholars and students have earned him recognition and distinction beyond my abilities to praise. My purpose here, therefore, is not to introduce our distinguished colleague but simply to highlight the variety and vitality of his works. Most of O'Malley's admirers know him as a scholar. Many too know him as a servant of his profession and have benefited from his tireless service. Perhaps the fewest have had the privilege and the pleasure of being his students in classrooms at the University of Detroit, at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, at Harvard University, at Boston College, and elsewhere. The O'Malley of all three categories, however, may be characterized by the same qualities: dedication, imagination, creativity, and generosity of spirit. The reviewer seeking to summarize the peregrinations of O'Malley's scholarship faces a daunting task. The range of his scholarly interests is vast - and inspiring. Any scholar must start somewhere, of course, and the author himself makes a sound case for the importance of Giles of Viterbo, the subject of his first book. But does Erasmus follow logically? Of course the great Dutch humanist is, like Giles, an iconic figure in an age of transition, and in his articles and editions O'Malley participated in the recovery of the pious and pastoral Erasmus. But what of O'Malley's labours in the theory and practice of sacred oratory, which led to Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome? In the introduction to that monograph, he recounts the serendipity by which he found the text that led to it and to half a dozen critical articles. The tale is told in a self-effacing tone. He came across the oratory of the papal court while working on another project and, although he wrote a paper about 'my distraction,' he did not follow it up despite the

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paper's positive reception. Others 'more perceptive than I' pursued the topic but later still O'Malley came back to the subject of rhetoric, sacred oratory, and the Renaissance as he worked on still another project and finally gave it his full attention. Of course what is striking about the story is not that it took him so long to come to the project but that he kept returning to the material until he was ready to write the book. A similarly productive crossfertilization characterizes his discovery that Alfonso Zorrilla's De sacris concionibus recte formandis formula (1543), dedicated to one of the papal inquisitors and with a 'seemingly impeccable pedigree/ was derived largely from the rhetorical works of Philip Melanchthon. The rich vein of sacred oratory led him to study Erasmus, and O'Malley reminds us that no one has paid sufficient attention to Erasmus's idiosyncratic treatise on sacred rhetoric, the Ecclesiastes. Moreover, he has played an important role in recovering the pietas of Erasmus, otherwise largely ignored by scholars, through his editing of several volumes of Erasmus's lesser known spiritual and pastoral works for the University of Toronto Press's Collected Works of Erasmus. What of O'Malley's judicious forays into art history - his essays on the nakedness of Christ, the theology of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, and Caravaggio and early modern Catholicism? All of these thoughtful explorations, worked out with masterful research and presented in playful and lucid prose, comprise the systematic sketching of the contours of early modern European religious culture. Even his latest scholarship - nothing less ambitious and urgently needed than the revision of Hubert Jedin's seminal essay on the nature of Catholicism in the Reformation era, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? (1946) - is the quest to find the most expansive, generous, and descriptive title for this culture. In all its stimulating variety, O'Malley's thirty years of scholarship can be considered under three rubrics. Most obviously he is a scholar of late medieval and early modern Europe, that constellation of studies that used to be called Renaissance and Reformation. Second, his work is part of the great ferment that has enriched Roman Catholic scholarship in the latter half of this century. Finally, it is an example of the excellence, the commitment, and the uniqueness that characterize the varied works of the Society of Jesus. After concluding his studies as a Jesuit scholastic and fulfilling the obligations that his vocation in that order demanded, O'Malley received his doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1966. There he studied with such luminaries of Renaissance and Reformation as Myron Gilmore and Heiko Oberman and patrolled the disciplinary border lately disturbed

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by what Wallace K. Ferguson called the 'revolt of the medievalists/ His first book, an amplification of his doctoral dissertation, entitled Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought (1968), addressed a significant terminological issue prominent in the debates between medieval and Renaissance scholars. O'Malley presented the 'thought-world' of a liminal figure between the late medieval and the early modern to illuminate his subject with such clarity that few works on Reform, Reformation, and even Counter-Reformation after 1968 failed to refer to what has become a classic assessment of the contemporary meaning of those oft used and illunderstood terms of art. Like his study of Giles of Viterbo, his second major monograph, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 (1979), fell ostensibly on the Renaissance side of things. In his conclusion, O'Malley reviewed the project and its significance: Through a study of three "old problems" [the nature of Renaissance preaching, the quality of the religious worldview at the papal court, the character of Renaissance Humanism] the book has addressed a single, altogether more fundamental one: what was Renaissance culture, and what happened during the period that allows or requires distinguishing it from the Middle Ages.' As with his study of Giles of Viterbo, his grappling with the porous border between what is medieval and what is Renaissance brings into focus an entire culture through the careful reading of the 'text' of the papal capelle and its sacred oratory. There was another important consequence of this volume, which won the Harold R. Marraro Prize for Italian History and Culture in 1979. It prompted a number of case studies applying its insights about preaching and rhetoric to new problems and bodies of material. Once again, the study of the footnote is instructive: most subsequent works on early modern preaching cite Praise and Blame as a pioneering work in those rich fields of study. The term pioneer is appropriate when considering the importance of O'Malley's scholarship in the study of Renaissance culture. But that image captures only his enviable mastery of a sort of historical synecdoche - an eye for the important problem and a deft touch for capturing the whole in its part. Also evident in his work, and exercising a significant influence on his students, is a nuanced and joyful scholarly ecumenism. I do not mean by the term ecumenism that rapprochement among the families of Christianity that has been a particular feature of the twentieth century, though ecumenism in that sense is certainly also present in O'Malley's scholarship. Rather, I mean his grasp of the historiography in his field and in its allied disciplines, his awareness of the prevailing intellectual winds of the day, and

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his integration of new method and trends into his own scholarship. Besides the value of showing how this may be elegantly and effectively done, this scholarly ecumenism has greatly enriched the study of early modern European history and especially the study of Early Modern Catholicism. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in O'Malley's work The First Jesuits (1993). That volume disposes of the tedious caricature of the Jesuits as 'the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation/ The topically organized chapters exploring the 'Jesuit way of proceeding' rest upon a marriage of the rich sources edited and published by the Jesuit Historical Institute and the insights and advances of two generations of scholarship about the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation that accompanied it. O'Malley not only synthesized the considerable scholarly advances of the past fifty years, he has also applied them with valuable results. Though scholars following in O'Malley's footsteps may lament the constraints that have denied them a bibliography for this work, we may be grateful for the terse historiographical and bibliographical summaries of the current state of research on a host of important subjects that many of the work's notes contain. Moreover, O'Malley's willingness to use the case of the first Jesuits as an opportunity to escape such limiting terms as 'Catholic Reformation' or 'Counter-Reformation' or even Tridentine Reformation' made The First Jesuits both the definitive early history of the order and the prolegomenon for a more effective characterization of the experience of Catholics in the early modern period. O'Malley's reflections on the historiographical problem of naming early modern Catholic experience - an issue of interest never far beneath the surface of any of his works - draws our attention to the second important rubric under which we may categorize O'Malley's scholarship. As he aptly stated in his essay on 'Catholic Reform' in Steven Ozment's collection Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (1982), 'the study of Catholicism is now enjoying a revival.' He went on to note that the subject required a volume of its own rather than simply a chapter, counsel which prompted the Center for Reformation Research to commission him to edit its second volume of Reformation Guides to Research, entitled Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research (1988). The revival to which he referred stemmed from the work of Roman Catholic historians since the Second Vatican Council in particular to submit early modern Catholicism to the rigorous historical standards demanded in other fields and to present works of scholarship at once rigorous and scientific and neither polemical nor pious. In an essay entitled 'Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism,' O'Malley regrets the 'stagnant

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condition in which scholarship on his [Ignatius's] side of the situation languished until quite recently.' All of O'Malley's monographs and articles may be seen as a response to this stagnation, culminating in his current scholarly project: the celebration and revision of Jedin's groundbreaking essay in the D'Arcy Lectures at Oxford University (1993), in Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (2000). In this volume O'Malley summarizes research and reflections on the importance of naming the phenomena of Catholic experience in early modern Europe. Trying on again and rejecting such familiar titles as Counter-Reformation, Catholic Reformation, Catholic Restoration and even Tridentine Catholicism, O'Malley argues for Early Modern Catholicism as the best vessel for containing the complex reality of the subject. If The First Jesuits provides a valuable example of a scholarly ecumenism, it is also securely based in the Jesuit tradition of rigorous self-study. It is not my place here to analyse the particular characteristics and charisms of that order which have prompted such undertakings as the Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu and the founding of the Archivum Historicum Societatis lesu. It has long been a ministry of the Society of Jesus to make its own history the subject of systematic and scholarly inquiry. In this century alone, this fruitful preoccupation has led to the publication of such landmark studies as Pietro Tacchi Venturi's Storia della Compagnia di Gesii in Italia (1938-51), Georg Schurhammer's Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times (Eng. ed. 1973-82), and Mario Scaduto's L'epoca di Giacomo Lainez (196474). The First Jesuits belongs in this tradition but provides the additional advantage of making this enterprise accessible outside the Society of Jesus and indeed, outside of academia itself. Yet O'Malley's illumination of the first Jesuits' way of proceeding serves as well to prompt his fellow Jesuits to a deeper understanding of their own contemporary identity. It is worth noting that he dedicates the work fratribus carissimis in Societate ]esu (to his most dear brothers in the Society of Jesus). This application of history to the contemporary life of the church animates as well a collection of six essays assembled in 1989, Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II. The essays constitute a sustained analysis of a discrete historical problem from several fruitful angles. They are also evocations of the historian of religion at work. In an essay entitled Tradition and Traditions,' O'Malley asks 'the most crucial question with which every historian must struggle: continuity and discontinuity, duration and change' of an institution in time - the Church - which claims for itself the responsibility of passing on a timeless message. His tentative answer - that '[r]ightly understood, creativity and imagination do

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not militate against tradition and traditions, but are at the very heart of them' - is the warrant for the historian's role in the life of the church. In another essay, 'Developments, Reforms, and Two Great Reformations/ he advances his thesis that Vatican II may be seen as 'another "great reformation."' He goes on to acknowledge that although 'a definitive judgement is at this point impossible ... [B]y engaging in this kind of assessment, tentative though it is, we are enabled to get a helpful perspective on the Council and thus ourselves. That last is the ultimate objective, I believe, of good historical studies.' Stated clearly here, this philosophy of history is a persistent motif in all of O'Malley's scholarship and his ministry. Indeed, it is the living application of Pope Leo XIII's famous remark on the occasion of his opening of the Vatican Archives (1883) to scholars: the church has nothing to fear from historical truth. O'Malley's scholarship entitles him to his place of honour; the same impulses of creativity and intellect have also made him widely available to his colleagues as a servant of his professional community. He has served as president of the Catholic Historical Society (1991) and of the Renaissance Society of America (1998-2000). He has held visiting lectureships at the University of Michigan, the Divinity School and the Fine Arts department of Harvard University, Boston College, and Fordham University. He was also elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995) and elected to the American Philosophical Society (1996), in addition to other academic honours including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975-6) and research fellowships from the American Academy in Rome (1963-5), Villa I Tatti in Florence (1966-8), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1983). Besides his visiting academic appointments, he has lectured widely and generously on the many subjects that have occupied his scholarly interests. Active as well in the Society of Jesus, he served as a delegate to the thirty-second (1974-5) an