Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters

Church History, March, 2008 by Peter Marshall

Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters. By Constance M. Furey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv 258 pp. $65.00 cloth.

This is an elegantly written and perceptive monograph, with fresh and interesting things to say about the dynamics of humanist scholarship in the early Reformation period, and about the origins of that apparently quintessentially Enlightenment phenomenon, the "Republic of Letters." The book is a group portrait focusing on six individuals about whose reading, writing, and corresponding practices we know a fair amount: Erasmus, Thomas More, his daughter Margaret Roper, Cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini, and the aristocratic widow and poet Vittoria Colonna. Its central theme is how in varying ways all of them were committed to a vision of spiritualized scholarship and to the attempt to construct a kind of virtual religious community, based on epistolary friendships and a shared approach to reading texts. In contrast to traditional exegetical methods, reading became for them a means both of transcendence and of solidarity, as the reader strove to establish a relationship with a text's author. On all counts, the model works best for Erasmus, a refugee from a monastic community with solid walls and a communal rule, who became the linchpin of a Europe-wide network of sympathetic correspondents. It was a model that, as Furey admits, ultimately failed for Thomas More, as the community of like-minded pious scholars in England buckled and compromised in the face of Henry VIII's unyielding demands.

At the center of the picture Furey paints is an intriguing modulation between public and private. Her subjects regarded their scholarly pursuits as a type of withdrawal, a substitute for the cloister. But at the same time they were often engaged actively in public affairs and lived in a world where "private" spaces often involved some aspect of display, and where systems of patronage complicated any clear demarcation between public and private spheres. Here, Furey's discussion of female participation in the Republic of Letters is of particular interest. The inclusion of highly educated women like Vittoria Colonna and Margaret Roper indicates the distinctiveness of these networks, which self-consciously stood aside from calculations of worldly advantage, without surrendering claims to intellectual excellence and prestige. This was a fraternity where, if gendered distinctions were not effaced, they were at least not straightforwardly reinforced. It is striking that in a book dedication Thomas More could address the nun Joyce Leigh as his "friend," a word usually freighted with connotations of likeness and equality.

Throughout the book, Furey makes a sensitive attempt to enter into the subjectivity of her main characters and to insist on how reading, writing, and learning were for them devotional acts, and on how their desire for God was inseparable from a desire for affective relationships with like-minded scholars. There is a historiographical point being made here, for most modern studies of the origins of the Republic of Letters, and of the early modern genesis of a new type of intellectual, have explicitly or implicitly adopted a teleological and secularizing perspective within which scholars start to shed a sense of the sacred in order to embrace a devotion to scholarly exchange for its own sake. Furey counters, convincingly, that secular notions of sociability can fail to take account of what people might actually be seeking in their relationships with others and points to an all-important "transcendent dimension," even where the rituals and traditions of the institutional Church appear to be marginalized.

There are some questions about the thesis. Furey has rather more of substance to say about reading practices than about the construction of spiritualized friendship, where the rhetorical conventions of Renaissance letter-writing can prove a formidable thicket to negotiate. One structural principle of the book is unfortunate, and threatens to beg some important questions: her decision to exclude from close consideration all who ended up supporting the Reformation on the grounds that "learned men and women who committed themselves to a Protestant vision of Christianity between 1520 and 1550 were part of a new religious movement" (12) with radically different priorities. Yet it was only over the course of these decades that divisions between "Catholics" and "Protestants" became either clear or permanent. This was a period when people were spiritually and (in the case of Erasmus) literally on the move, when some intellectuals, like Contarini, were conspicuously attempting to repair the growing schism, and when many important figures (like Colonna's correspondent Marguerite de Navarre) seemed to resist clear confessional labels. A reference to the English reformer "Matthew Tyndale" (6) is an unfortunate slip, as is the misdating (96) of the fifth-century philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not quite accurate to say (137) that the Nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, was hanged "under a revised law of treason that was later used to convict More." The new law was in fact a subsequent response to the Barton case. But such errors are forgivable in a rewarding and thoughtful study, which serves not least to remind us that, for the early sixteenth century, the phrase "Christian humanism" is a patent tautology.