This collection of essays demonstrates with clarity and detail the central role played by Cardinal Giovanni Morone in the influential closing sessions of the Council of Trent. At the same time it illustrates Morone's value for historians. As the editors point out, Morone's success as the papal legate who brought the council to a close was the crowning achievement in a dramatic personal history that itself embodies all the contradictions of the sixteenth-century Catholic Church. The book's seemingly narrow focus on Morone's activities in the early 1560s, therefore, actually contains in microcosm many broader themes of Catholic reform.
Morone is best known to American scholars as a friend of Contarini and a member of the nebulous spiritual camp, tried for heresy under Paul IV despite his great prominence. (The trial was published in 1987 by Dario Marcatto and Massimo Firpo, who is one of the coeditors of this volume and who has devoted much of his scholarly life to Morone.) The essays collected here balance that view of Morone as a philo-Protestant by examining his later activities on behalf of the council after his acquittal. They detail his years chairing the council during its final stage, his close relationship with Pius IV, his influence and correspondence with colleagues of various religious attitudes, and his political negotiations between the holy see and the Hapsburg family, itself split into opposing Spanish and Austrian camps. Two essays on the historiography and iconography of Morone remind us that Morone's lasting influence has been far better appreciated in Italy than among Anglophone scholars.
This collection is the fruit of a 2009 conference specifically emphasizing Italo-German historical relations. Perhaps because of this context, it considers Morone's diplomatic efforts, and analyzes the Tridentine policies he championed or resisted, in an international and political light. This focus moves the book beyond older and more theological debates about spirituali and intransigenti, and about how to label developments in the early modern Catholic Church. It reminds us that the decisions of sixteenth-century reformers were as political and practical as they were pious.
Taken together, the essays highlight key difficulties for the future of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century: bitter debates over the ius divinum (divine right) of episcopal residence; broadening definitions of heresy to include erratic behavior and anti-curial attitudes; the contingency and diplomacy involved in the conciliar decisions, and again, the impossibility of extricating religious from political motivation. Eleonora Bonora makes this point cogently (50) in aligning Carlo Borromeo's conversion experience at the council not only with the Theatines, and later, the Jesuits, but also with the Spanish faction at the council and its stricter attitudes towards Inquisition.
Older questions when they appear are brought in new ways. Gigliola Fragnito and Lucia Felici each revisit the question of the spirituali through the decisions of one of Morone's close colleagues: Ludovico Becadelli, the exiled archbishop of Ragusa and carrier of the spirituale torch, and Egidio Foscarari, who succeeded Morone as Bishop of Modena. Morone's diplomatic skills came most to the fore during the 1560s. They are ably demonstrated here by Umberto Mazzone's essay on Morone's mission to Innsbruck and Alain Tallon's comparison of Morone's effectiveness with that of the French cardinal of Lorena. Fragnito points out that these moments of political triumph after his acquittal must have seemed to reform-minded Italians like an incomprehensible and unforeseeable about-face. Morone's activities eventually inspired Becadelli to lose hope in the council and Foscarari to acquiesce to it.
On the whole, these essays make detailed use of little-known archival sources and copious primary research; Fragnito's footnotes helpfully reprint some of Becadelli's letters in full. As with many works of Italian religious history, one wishes for greater familiarity with related anglophone scholarship on Morone's contemporaries and close colleagues.
This book should be especially noted in light of important recent works on sixteenth-century Italian religious history making similar use of access to new archives or of an international comparative perspective. These include Christopher Black's The Italian Inquisition (2009) and the collection La Reforme en France et en Italie: Contacts, comparisons et contrastes (2009). The Council of Trent and its implementation and aftermath is a subject ready for revisiting.
