It is a welcome sign of changing perspectives in the field of pre-modern studies when the barriers between the Middle Ages and the early modern period are lowered, if not even completely removed. But we have to be rather careful in this global strategy of dismantling most valuable heuristic categories because we could also deprive ourselves of important cultural-historical markers in that process. On the one hand, for instance, there were Wycliffe and Hus, and on the other, Luther and his fellow Protestant Reformers. There was certainly a tradition connecting them all, but critical mass was achieved only in the early sixteenth century. Literary traditions also continued well into the early modern age, although new genres, topics, themes, styles, and narrative strategies emerged and clearly marked the new world.
The contributors to the present volume, who had delivered their original papers at a colloquium at the University of Tours, France, in 2015, try to make a case that the religious connections across time were stronger than we would normally assume. To do justice to that topic would require a detailed and careful analysis of the transmission of late medieval thoughts, texts, and organizations to the early modern world, but the papers only present highly specialized case studies, mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the editors emphasize in the introduction that the authors have pursued “the religious textual traditions which ran from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era, and the uses of religious texts in various historical, social, and cultural contexts” (12), it remains very uncertain what the real purpose might be. If we take, for instance, the endless reception process involving the Bible, we would not be able to distinguish between late antiquity, the entire Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque.
After having summarized briefly what each article pursues, the editors then conclude that in the process of putting this volume together, “[r]epeated themes and observable features and processes have emerged...the exceptionality yet comparability of local circumstances; the incompleteness and ambivalence of many cultural educational processes and directives; the proximity of hospitality and conflict...” (19). What might they really mean by that? There are eleven articles, all in English, and they are bookended by a list of brief biographies of the contributors and an index of persons and places. Going through this volume, it becomes exceedingly difficult to figure out what the shared theme might really be. A bit mysteriously, Marleen Cré begins with a study of Gertrude More’s seventeenth-century Confessiones Amantis in the Cambrai Benedictine Community, which was globally inspired by St. Augustine’s Confessiones, but she emphasized contemplation as the most important approach in religious life. From here, Otto Gecser reflects on the larger discourse on helper saints as it raged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which has nothing to do with Cré’s study or anything else following. Those saints were commonly appealed to for help but otherwise generally disregarded, which constituted a theological dilemma. Gecser draws mostly from Thomas More’s A Dialogue Concerning Heresies from 1531 (first published in 1529), in which the abuse of saints is one of the major topics.
There might be a slim segue to the paper by Daniele Solfaroli Camillocci on French Protestant propaganda against popular devotion, as especially formulated by the Lausanne reformer Pierre Viret (ca. 1509-1571), but it is really only slim. Highly respected Marco Mostert reflects on the modes through which people both prior to and after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press were able to read in a technical sense of the word (layout, separation of words, punctuation, etc.), but I feel a bit lost here as to the relevance of this paper for this volume.
Unfortunately, this problem continues throughout the rest of the book, as when Erminia Ardissino examines the tradition of biblical literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Élise Boillet traces the genre of printed Italian vernacular biblical literature. These studies would have fit better into the Gutenberg Jahrbuch, whereas here they seem to be odd outliers. Melina Rokai at least highlights the notion of religious communities among the Hussites and the Bogomils in Hungary vis-à-vis biblical studies or the proper interpretation of the Bible, which reflects the global theme as indicated on the book cover. It remains unclear what innovative perspectives might have been unearthed here, apart from the fact that Hussitism emerged in South-Eastern Europe during the fifteenth century. Václav Žůrek reflects on the parallel use of Latin and Czech in fifteenth-century Bohemian religious disputes between the Catholics and Utraquists (primarily between Václav Koranda the Younger and Hilarius of Litoméřice), emphasizing that the employment of the vernacular carried deeply political goals.
One of the most interesting studies proves to be the one by Wojciech Świeboda on fifteenth-century Polish jurists such as Stanislaw of Skarbirmierz (d. 1431), Paulus Vladimir of Brudzeń (d. 1436), and John Falkenberg (d. 1435), who more or less collectively argued that under certain circumstances war was justified and that Christian leaders could align themselves with pagan kings to defend their cause, especially because missionizing should not be done by means of military force. The defeat of the Teutonic Knights in the battle of Grunwald in 1410 was one of the critical consequences, especially because the latter had really lost their own raison d’être in a world where Christianization progressed considerably. This is well followed by Waldemar Kowalski’s article on the failed efforts to convert sixteenth-century Polish peasants. Finally, Daniela Rywiková takes us to sixteenth-century Moravian Ostrava and studies the impact of the Protestant Reformation there, which did not lead to a complete turnover; instead, as she notes, religious freedom dominated in a surprisingly strong fashion.
It is true that some of the authors address “new communities” in late medieval Europe, i.e., religious groups. But there is little cohesion and barely a common platform that would bind the contributions together. Each author deserves respect for the solid research presented, but the conference topic did not lend itself well to a volume. No contributor seems to have engaged with the work of the others; we are forced to move from one country and social or religious group to another. The effort to bridge the divide between the late Middle Ages and the early modern age does not yield the desired outcome (see the subtitle on the book cover). Altogether, this is a rather disjointed volume.