Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters

Theological Studies, Sept, 2007 by William V. Hudon

ERASMUS, CONTARINI AND THE RELIGIOUS REPUBLIC OF LETTERS. By Constance M. Furey. New York: Cambridge University, 2006. Pp. xiv 255. $65.

Furey imaginatively examines epistolary interactions between Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, Margaret More Roper, Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole, and Vittoria Colonna, finding among them shared religious and literary interests that formed them into a religious community. She insists that they guided, supported, and advised one another in their pursuit of a spiritualized scholarship, forming a religious life that sidestepped contemporary ecclesiastical institutions, gender roles, social norms, devotional conventions, and doctrinal definitions. This religious life among them, she argues, contradicts conventional notions about 16th-century spiritual community.

The chapters are organized mainly around individuals, pairs, or subsets of these scholars as they exemplified trends of the larger group. Chapter 1 focuses on the development of religious ideals about scholarship-specifically the notion that scholarship can be redemptive and salvific for individuals and for Christianity at large--through the writings of Erasmus and More. In chapter 2 F. brings Pole to center stage--in particular, his denunciation of his cousin and patron, Henry VIII--to indicate that the rejection of things secular was part of the religious ideology of the community. She then permits Vittoria Colonna and Gasparo Contarini in chapter 3 to display their many ambivalent reactions to reading and writing: the anxiety or peace such activity produced; the higher and lower nature--in their view--of various kinds of literature; their unease with devoting themselves wholly to a life of either scholarly withdrawal or public action. Chapter 4 highlights the relationships formed within the broader community including Michelangelo Buonarrotti and Marguerite de Navarre. Here F. analyzes written expressions of desire for God and for each other, especially using the letters of Michelangelo, Contarini, and Colonna. In the final chapter, she appeals to writings about two other community members-Roper and Colonna--to argue that the community rejected 16th-century ideals of what bishops, martyrs, and women should be. Here again F. marshals evidence from a portion of the group, mainly letters by Pole and Contarini.

While the subjects of F.'s individual chapters exemplify one or another trait, when she claims that the six--and by implication considerably more-formed a community bound by these various common commitments, her argument is less than convincing. Her title does suggest that she has in mind an analogue to the "republic of letters" that Jurgen Habermas described as emerging from within the absolutist state. Habermas's men of letters create a public sphere, aside from many key intellectual institutions of the time, within which they can begin what many consider to be "modern" political discourse. F. found among her authors the construction of a religious republic of letters and, thus by implication, modern religious discourse. This latter phrase seems to refer to a discourse that emphasized individual devotional life, mainly without commitment to existing religious institutions and authorities, or at least as sidestepping the demands of those existing institutions and authorities. Still, I am not convinced that there is anything especially "modern" about such a social space. Is this not rather an example of reform discourse that has characterized individuals and groups across the entire history of Christianity, from the age of Jesus to our present?

Further, F. insists that we will be collectively unable to notice this religious version of the republic of letters (and, hence, the reason for her study) if we expect to find in the early modern period an emergence of compelling secularism. That a faulty presupposition about secularism can distort our view of early modernity might well be the case. However, the current explosive popularity of anything with religion in its title suggests we may have passed beyond the expectation she assumes. No doubt F.'s work challenges the notion that early modern intellectuals led the charge away from a religious middle ages toward a godless modernity. But that notion has been under assault since the insights of Jacob Burckhardt began to be questioned. In our post-everything age, are we not also profoundly post-Burckhardtian? Is not the conventional chronology of Western intellectual development that F. assumes passe?

Finally, F. leaves unchallenged other questionable assumptions. For example, she retains spirituali as a useful concept, and she reiterates the idea that zealous conservative forces had seized control of the Roman Church by the 1550s. Both notions have been attacked, and consideration of the archival documentation about the lives of characters here studied reveals, in my view, the legitimacy of those attacks. Still, with these limitations, this is a thought-provoking work for specialists in the history of religion.