Éresia e Riforma nell'Italia del cinquecento: Miscellanea I by Albano Biondi; Mariano Sozzini:Guireconsulto senese del quattrocento by Paolo NardiReview by: Myron P. GilmoreThe American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Feb., 1977), pp. 139-140Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1857271 .

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Modern Europe I39

fostered plague epidemics. Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance is a significant contribution to the growing body of literature by which social, economic, and demographic histo- rians are uncovering that dialectic between natural and social history which produced the modern world.

DONALD G. BATES

McGill University

PETER E. BONDANELLA. Francesco Guicciardini. (Twayne's World Authors Series, number 389.) Boston: Twayne Publishers. I976. Pp. i6o. $7.50.

This book is a brief, routine intellectual biography of the Florentine homo politicus and matchless Ren- aissance historian. But there is less reason than usual to complain about its quite ordinary pur- poses: "a detailed account of Guicciardini's major contributions to Renaissance thought ... of use not only to the general reader but also to Renais- sance specialists" (p. 9). Guicciardini's power and weight, aristocratic airs, corrosive but confining brilliance, and pose of self-sufficiency have always been forbidding. In Italy he has been a "case" to test moral, methodological, or patriotic com- mitments, even though (and perhaps partly be- cause) he has been known piecemeal, since a num- ber of his works have been published in scattered editions only during the past century. Despite new interest, which has produced English translations of his works, Guicciardini remains dispersed among monographs, articles, or chapters of books on Florentine history and Renaissance political thought, historiography, or literature. He is still, in ways that would have pleased him, difficult to manage and impossible to miss.

Peter E. Bondanella sorts out and synthesizes the contemporary scholarly consensus, from Ro- berto Ridolfi's philologically precise and personally expressive biography to the analyses of Guicciar- dini's political and historical works by Vittorio de Caprariis, Rudolf von Albertini, Felix Gilbert, Ni- colai Rubinstein, and Emanuella Scarano. These studies serve as a gridwork for his own reading of Guicciardini. After a biographical chapter, Bondanella follows Guicciardini, and the best scholarship, through the class-conscious, family- oriented early History of Florence (chapter 2), politi- cal and autobiographical works (chapters 3-6), and the purportedly humanistic and empirical Flo- rentine Affairs (chapter 7), to the culminating History of Italy (chapter 8). Chapter 9 concludes with an "assessment" of Guicciardini's "place in world literature," which is actually a discussion of his reputation and the diffusion of his works. An an- notated bibliography is appended.

The traits Bondanella delineates in Guicciardini will seem, at least to the cognoscenti, as familiar and insistent as the features in his portrait by Bugiar-

dini. The ideological prejudices of the Florentine aristocrat, the self-interest in practice and prin- ciple, the critical empiricism and historical sense, and the driving, and in the end saving, pre- occupation with method come forward in full re- lief. The pattern of development is by now the standard one of movement from more parochial, more political commitments to a comprehensive historical vision, exacting and resigned, against a background of personal misfortune and the loss of both Florentine and Italian independence. Even elusive points-the problematic relationship be- tween the public figure and the private man, or a specificity of thought which one talks about with- out exactly conveying-are predictable. There is nothing new in this; perhaps in a man as "once- born" as Francesco Guicciardini there never could be. What counts is that Bondanella's book is in- telligently clear, comprehensive, and generally re- liable. It should do much to make Guicciardini and his historians more accessible.

RANDOLPH STARN

University of California, Berkeley

ALBANO BIONDI et al. Eresia e Riforma nell'Italia del cinquecento: Miscellanea I. (Biblioteca del "Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum. ") DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, and Chicago: The New- berry Library. 1974. Pp. 356.

PAOLO NARDI. Mariano Sozzini: Giureconsulto senese del quattrocento. (Quaderni di "Studi Senesi," number 32.) Milan: Dott. A. Giuffre Editore. 1974. Pp. xiv, 203.

The Biblioteca del Corpus Reformatorum Itali- corum, under the direction of Luigi Firpo and Giorgio Spini with the collaboration of Antonio Rotondo and John A. Tedeschi, has undertaken the important task of publishing hitherto unavail- able sources of the heretical and reformation movements of sixteenth-century Italy. This vol- ume is a collection of monographic essays which illuminate many of the most important problems in the religious history of the period. Within the scope of this review it is impossible to discuss in detail the significance of these contributions, but a brief summary of the contents gives an impression of the variety and interest of the subjects treated.

In the first essay Albano Biondi analyzes the theme of simulation and dissimulation and points out that it extends far beyond the Nicodemism condemned by Calvin to include attitudes toward social behavior recommended by authors as di- verse as Castiglione, della Casa, Guicciardini, and Montaigne. He suggestively concludes that "on the road which leads from Nicodemism one meets also Tartuffe."

Sylvana Seidel-Menchi discusses the reactions to

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140 Reviews of Books

Erasmus by two lesser-known figures, Bartolomeo Cerretani in Florence and Battista Casali of the Roman Academy. She also analyzes the influence of Erasmus on one of the famous martyrs of the Italian Reformation, Aonio Paleario, whose reli- gious orientation seems, on the basis of a letter of Paleario to Erasmus of 1534 (wrongly dated I536

on p. 130), to have owed much to the earlier ideas of Erasmus.

Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi recon- struct the successive versions of the much dis- cussed Beneficio di' Cristo, and interpret its signifi- cance in the light of the debates, around the middle of the century, on predestination and free will, particularly as these themes were formulated in certain centers of the Benedictine Order. Aldo Stella describes the ecclesiological doctrines of the group of Anabaptists who were condemned at Trieste in 1540. Carlo Ossola analyzes the pre- viously unknown Italian translation and com- mentary on St. Matthew by Juan de Valdes and its significance for his religious thought in the last period of his life. Uwe Plath writes on the objec- tions of the authorities in Basel to the publication of the De amplitudine beati regni Dei of Celio Secondo Curione in 1554.

The economic activity and ideas of an Italian exile are the subject of the contribution of Manfred Welti. He describes the extraordinary career of Giovanni Bernardino Bonifacio, a wealthy Nea- politan, who fled for reasons of conscience and invested his capital with northern bankers but who later renounced the taking of interest and lost his fortune.

The final essay, by Luigi Firpo, gives the list of capital executions in Rome from 1567 to 1671, drawn from the dispersed archives of the Arciconfraterni- tA di San Giovanni Decollato, whose members had the duty of comforting the condemned in their last moments.

Sources made available in this volume include two letters to Erasmus, one from Casali, and one from Aonio Paleario, published by Seidel-Menchi; six letters from the Mantuan Archive from the correspondence of Ercole Gonzaga, concerning the monks of San Benedetto, published by Ginzburg and Prosperi; three letters on the Curione affair published by Plath; and the two inventories in the Firpo article of those condemned to capital pun- ishment.

The high level of scholarship in these essays and the new data and new interpretations which they include make this publication one of great impor- tance for all students of the Reform in Italy.

Paolo Nardi's scholarly study of the quattro- cento Sienese jurist, Mariano Sozzini, appears in the series Studi Senesi, under the sponsorship of Domenico Maffei, the distinguished historian of law at the University of Siena.

The first chapters trace the biography of Sozzini, his early education in Siena, his training in canon law under Niccol6 dei Tedeschi, the great Panor- mitanus, his eventual appointment to succeed his master, and with the growth of his reputation, his opportunities to teach at Florence and Ferrara.

As a highly successful jurist he was closely allied with many leading figures of his generation, fore- most among whom was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolo- mini, Pope Pius II, who had been a fellow student at Siena and with whom he always maintained a close friendship. Although Aeneas Sylvius some- what ironically praised Sozzini as an "uomo uni- versale," he had a sincere regard for him and, as Pope, appointed him a consistorial advocate.

In the analysis of Sozzini's legal works and his method of interpreting the law, Nardi revises the older opinion which had exaggerated the extent to which Sozzini was influenced by humanism. In fact it appears that, although he had a consid- erable acquaintance with classical authors, he never used this knowledge as an instrument for reconstructing the history of institutions. Nardi concludes that, "In the very years in which the humanist philology, known but not applied by Sozzini, was becoming the instrument which his descendants would use to question the foundations of traditional theology, and the jurists of the mos gallicus to discredit the methodology of the school of commentators, the work of Mariano il Vecchio remained that of an authoritative exponent of the older juridical tradition which was leading to the school of the mos italicus."

Appendix I contains thirty-five pages of docu- ments illustrating Sozzini's life and work, and Ap- pendix II a bibliography of all manuscripts of his works and all editions published in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

MYRON P. GILMORE

Harvard University

RICHARD TILDEN RAPP. Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice. (Harvard Historical Monographs, number 69.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1976. Pp. ix, 195. $16.50.

J. R. HALE, editor. Renaissance Venice. Reprint. Lon- don: Faber and Faber; distributed by Rowman and Littlefield. 1976. Pp. 483. Cloth $35.00, paper $12.50.

Although the sixteen articles in Renaissance Venice do not share a single theme, two concerns pre- dominate: the crisis created by the League of Cambrai and the heightened interest in the terra ferma in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries coupled with the increased instability of maritime trade. Stanley Chojnacki dispels some old mis- conceptions by revealing that the composition and internal configuration of the Venetian patriciate

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