This Festschrift for Carlos Eire compiles well-written and interesting essays by colleagues and former students. Most draw upon or point explicitly toward Eire’s own scholarship and influence. The editors did their job effectively, for editorial errors are rare and the material is well organized into three parts, each of which intersects with a trajectory in Eire’s own research.
In part 1, “Exploring Boundaries,” Alison Weber charts a rising “icono-enthusiasm” in sixteenth-century Spain stimulated by perceived threats: Protestant iconoclasm, New Christian iconophobia, and the icono-indifference of Erasmians and Alumbrados. Emily Michelson considers Francesco Visdomini’s efforts to interpret Providence in English politics. While in 1555 he emphasized God’s specific, active providential care in raising Mary Tudor, a Roman Catholic monarch, he later struggled to make sense of her death, retreating to God’s inscrutable will. An eighteenth-century English debate about biblical episodes involving demons is the subject of H. C. Erik Midelfot’s essay. The debate evolved into a complex discussion of the relationship between reason and revelation in an intellectual climate that saw enlightened and rational Christians discomfited by such stories. And David D’Andrea analyzes Giovanni Felice Astolfi’s history of Marian miracles. D’Andrea contextualizes the work amid Protestant iconoclasm and theological attacks against images, relics, altars, and holy places, which made the defense of the miraculous a “critical battlefront in the war to protect Catholic theology and popular devotion” (69).
Part 2, “Living One’s Faith,” explores the relationship between religious ideas and actions. Darren Provost foils the image of Erasmus as a rational, individualistic skeptic by exploring the humanist’s endorsement of spiritual warfare. Playing off Eire’s own study of Teresa of Avila’s postmortem significance, Jodi Bilinkoff emphasizes the profound impact of the saint’s active life on those inside and outside of the cloister. Mary Noll Venables considers the shifting patterns of Lutheran thought and piety in the years following the horrific destruction of Magdeburg. Her subject, Sigismund Evenius, urged Lutheran readers to repentance in order to assuage God’s anger, calling them to study (especially the Bible and Luther’s catechisms), meditate, and diligently practice their faith. Rather than an individual’s living faith, Ping-Yuan Wang focuses on a group of Belgian Visitandine nuns. Wang’s sources reveal the more mundane convent life of (generally) wealthy and aristocratic women drawn, for a variety reasons (both religious and not), to a moderate asceticism.
Finally, part 3, “The Physicality of Spirituality,” considers the presence of the divine on Earth. William Christian Jr. describes the “congruent itineraries and procedures” used by sixteenth-century Spaniards to curry favor at both earthly and heavenly courts (149). Bruce Gordon examines Heinrich Bullinger’s writings on death and the afterlife, emphasizing that a pastoral agenda often dovetailed with confessional debates. Records of peyote consumption in postcontact Mexico lead Martin Nesvig to describe a “hybrid religious and cultural practice” in which indigenous ritual and meaning became conflated with Spanish Catholicism — peyote with the Virgin Mary (179). And while humoral-based medicine had little difficulty explaining the physical and mental effects of tobacco, Scott Taylor argues that medical vocabulary could not describe tobacco’s effect on the will. Instead, commentators relied upon religious language, “with its rich vocabulary of miracles, ecstasies, mysticisms, bodily transformation, death and rebirth” (202).
A final chapter, by Ronald Rittgers, engages early modern instances of miraculous levitation and brings to the fore the “countercultural” nature of Eire’s own scholarship — countercultural to “the broader culture of modern western academia” and its “materialistic . . . anti-supernaturalism” (206, 210). Eire, a Roman Catholic, makes no pretense about his own willingness to embrace the “impossible” and his conviction that doing so helps him to wrestle with the past. Rittgers positions Eire in relation to other Christian historians and others who challenge the “Weberian narrative about the transition from the premodern to the modern world” (207–08). For Rittgers, Eire’s scholarship evidences “epistemic openness to the transcendent in history, not epistemic certitude about the mind and will of God in the past” (212). One wonders what early modern folks would have made of that epistemic openness. Does it make Eire more like them or separate him from the levitators of the early modern era?
