[In the following essay, Olin examines the long history of religious reform and explains how the efforts of Renaissance humanists to lessen the disparity between the ideal and reality influenced Church reform.]

The Church in the late Middle Ages endured what may be called a “time of troubles”—a time marked by challenge and dissent, manifesting the symptoms of spiritual and institutional decline, climaxed by the great crisis and disruption that broke in the sixteenth century. The pattern is large and complex and its texture is uneven, but the observer can hardly fail to perceive that trial and peril beset the vast ecclesiastical structure of the West in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its organization and authority as well as the integrity of its inner life and mission seem to have been placed in prolonged jeopardy by the events and currents of that age. And it was not simply a matter of external forces beating against the Church and taking their toll of its power and substance. Within the religious community itself there were ominous signs of weakness and disorder: the schism resulting from the double papal election of 1378 and continuing down to 1417, the exaggeration of papal power and a concomitant opposition to it both in practice and in theory, the worldliness and secularization of the hierarchy that reached to the papacy itself in the High Renaissance, ignorance and immorality among the lower clergy, laxity in monastic discipline and spiritual decay in the religious life, theological desiccation and confusion, superstition and abuse in religious practice. The picture should not be overdrawn (there were many instances of sanctity, dedication, and even spiritual renewal during this time), but in general, Catholic life in the late Middle Ages seems grievously depressed—hollowed out, to use Lortz's image¹—and the evidence of deep-seated trouble is inescapable.

A considerable body of contemporary comment and observation can be cited to this effect, and indeed the texts presented in this volume bear frank witness to the ills that afflicted the Church. But at the outset two voices may be allowed to speak to lend credence and confirmation to the state of affairs we have described. Lorenzo de' Medici, Il Magnifico, wrote a letter of paternal advice in early 1492 to his son Giovanni, who at the age of sixteen was about to go to Rome and take up his residence as a cardinal. The youth is the future Pope Leo X. Lorenzo urged him to virtue and an exemplary life, and he added: “I well know, that as you are now to reside at Rome, that sink of all iniquity, the difficulty of conducting yourself by these admonitions will be increased. … You will probably meet with those who will particularly endeavor to corrupt and incite you to vice.”² From north of the Alps the German scholar and versifier Sebastian Brant gave a broader and more public warning. In his moralistic poem Narrenschiff, first published in Basel in 1494, he wrote the following quatrain:

St. Peter's ship is swaying madly,
It may be wrecked or damaged badly,
The waves are striking 'gainst the side
And storm and trouble may betide.(3)

Such voices can be multiplied, and it must also be stressed that the plight of the Bark of Peter evoked a fuller response than the mere advertisement of its fitful course or the castigation of its crew. There arose the call for remedying the evils that had come to pass. There was counsel and advice on restoring the vessel to its former efficiency and its original progress. Nor were efforts lacking in the attempt to achieve these goals. This response, constructive and restorative, to the condition of the Church is generally what we mean when we use the words reform and reformation. And it is of course the subject of our study.

Basically the two terms reform and reformation mean a return to an original form or archetype or ideal and imply the removal or correction of faults which have caused deformation. The object of reform is restored to its original character, its essential mode of being. Applied to the Church and to religious faith and practice, the significance of these words is obvious. They mean a return to the original purity and splendor of Christ's Church and indeed to Christ himself, the model of Christians and the very form of the Church. Dante's words in De Monarchia come to mind:

Now the form of the Church is nothing else than the life of Christ in word and in deed. For his life was the idea and pattern of the Church militant, especially of its shepherds and most especially of its chief shepherd, whose duty it is to feed the sheep and lambs. He himself said, in John's Gospel, as he bequeathed the form of his life to us, “I have given you an example that as I have done to you, so you do also.” And specifically to Peter, after he had assigned him the post of shepherd, he said, “Peter, follow thou me.”⁴

The call for such reform may be said to arise from the nature of things—from the disparity between the ideal and the reality that to a lesser or greater degree is ever present in man's history. With respect to the Church, as Jedin points out, it “originated in the consciousness that Christ's foundation, as historically realised in its individual members, no longer corresponded to the ideal—in other words, that it was not what it should be.”⁵ And so the disparity must be ended and the historical Church brought into conformity with the ideal. It must strive to be what it should be—faithful to Christ and the mission He enjoined, drawing close to that glorious Church of which St. Paul speaks, “without spot or wrinkle or any such disfigurement.”⁶

Because of conditions in the late Middle Ages the consciousness of a contrast between the contemporary Church and the primitive form and ideal was particularly acute. Dante is expressing it in the chapter we have quoted from the De Monarchia, and in several striking passages of the Paradiso he observes the grave discrepancy between the Church of his day and that of Christ and the Apostles and the saints.

Barefoot and lean came Cephas, came the great
Vessel of the Holy Ghost; and they would sup
At whatsoever house they halted at.
Pastors today require to be propped up
On either side, one man their horse to lead
(So great their weight!) and one their train to loop.
Over their mounts their mantles fall, full-spread;
Two beasts beneath one hide behold them go!
O patience, is thy meekness not yet fled?(7)

Thomas à Kempis in his Imitation of Christ—the title of which is a reform program—also marks the difference, though in more personal moralistic terms. “Behold the living examples of the old fathers in which shineth true perfection, and thou shalt see how little it is and almost naught that we do. Alas, what is our life compared to them?” And, after describing their life of sanctity and virtue, he exclaims: “O how great was the fervor of religion in the beginning of its institution!”⁸ Savonarola is likewise deeply conscious of the discordance between present ways and the model of the early Church. “In the primitive Church the chalices were of wood, the prelates of gold; in these days the Church hath chalices of gold and prelates of wood.”⁹

Given this awareness, the task then was correcting what was wrong and restoring the Church to her pristine state. However, we have perhaps said enough in general terms about the nature and occasion of Catholic reform in the late Middle Ages. Let us now look briefly at the historical development of the notion of reform and at some of its specific manifestations in the life of the Church. Our perspective on the Catholic Reformation in the sixteenth century will thereby be enlarged.

The original concept of Christian reform is one of the reform of the individual—of his personal renewal and the restoration in him of the image of God, the form of his creation. It is the concept found in Holy Scripture and in the Fathers of the early Church, and it has been studied very thoroughly by Gerhart Ladner in his work The Idea of Reform.¹⁰ The Church as such was not the object of a reform endeavor, but rather the inner man who was to be remade ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei. This original and fundamental concept never disappears, for it is an integral part of the Christian message. “If then any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the former things have passed away; behold, they are made new!”¹¹ Erasmus underlined this doctrine in the introduction to the New Testament he published in 1516. “What else is the philosophy of Christ,” he asks, “which He himself calls a rebirth, than the restoration of human nature originally well formed?”¹² Rebirth (the Latin term Erasmus used is renascentia), restoration, and reform refer then to the very basic personal renewal that Christianity entails.

By the eleventh century, however, the idea of reform had also come to include the correction and renewal of the Church at large. This expanded concept found expression in the Gregorian reform of that time.¹³ So-called because Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) was its leading figure, it sought to end the feudal lay domination of the Church and restore her freedom and her spiritual mission. It centered chiefly on the clergy or sacerdotium, and its thrust was what we would call institutional. Papal primacy and authority were forcefully asserted; elections to ecclesiastical office were to be freely and properly conducted; old canons governing the Church were renewed; bad customs and practices were to be abolished. The Church, in short, was to be reformed in line with its original and authentic constitution so that its true apostolate might be realized.

But such institutional reform is not to be conceived apart from the reform of the individual Christian. “Gregory VII and the Gregorians,” writes Dom Leclercq, “many of them monks and all of them influenced by St. Augustine, conceived of reform as an essentially spiritual matter. For them, as for their master, there could be no reform of the Church without reform of the Christian.”¹⁴ The latter is the primary goal, and the Church reformed is actually the Church made more effective in the cura animarum—in the work of teaching, guiding, and sanctifying her members. Vatican II formulated that in a memorable way when it declared that “every renewal of the Church essentially consists in an increase of fidelity to her own calling.”¹⁵ Her reform and renewal, however, must come in some way through her members, and this presupposes their own personal conversion and commitment. The institution per se does not reform itself but is reformed by men who are reformed. In this sense the Church needs saints, that is, men who truly are reformed and whose example and efforts are the means for further reformation.

The life of St. Francis of Assisi (1181/2-1226) is particularly instructive in this regard. His own conversion was accompanied by those symbolic words he heard in the chapel of San Damiano: “Repair my house which, as you see, is being totally destroyed.” And his remarkable life was lived in such close imitation of Christ that it became an inspiration and strength for the whole Church. Of him the Cardinal of Santa Sabina reported to Pope Innocent III: “I have found a man of most perfect life, that is minded to live conformably with the Holy Gospel, and to observe in all things Gospel perfection: through whom, as I believe, the Lord is minded to reform throughout the whole world the faith of Holy Church.”¹⁶ The Pope himself saw in Brother Francis “the holy man by whom the Church of God shall be uplifted and upheld.”¹⁷

The two kinds of reform—institutional and personal—thus are closely related, and, as Ladner suggests, the Gregorian and Franciscan movements are complementary phases and aspects of the same idea.¹⁸ It is also clear that St. Francis moves at the deeper level, more in keeping with the original and fundamental concept of Christian renewal. Yet thereby the Church and Christendom were renewed.

He'd not long risen when the earth was stirred
By touches of invigorating power
From his great strength …(19)

The expanded concept of reform is also in a sense expressed in the formula reformatio in capite et in membris which gained currency in the late Middle Ages. Attributed to William Durandus at the time of the Council of Vienne (1311-12), its most famous usage perhaps is in the decrees and pronouncements of the Council of Constance (1414-18).²⁰ The decree Sacrosancta of 1415, for example, declares the Council's purpose to be the ending of the great schism which had rent the Church since 1378 and the Church's reformation in its head and members. Thus used, the phrase became linked with the conciliar movement that was born of the Western Schism and the plight of the Church at that critical time, and it serves to underline the fact that conciliarism was essentially a reform movement. Asserting the supremacy and active role of the General Council in the government of the Church, the conciliarists sought to limit papal authority and end the abuses connected with papal appointments and papal taxation.²¹ This was the heart of their reformatio in capite and the first principle of the more general reformation that must follow, for, as Durandus himself had pointed out, “when the head languishes, all the members of the body suffer pain.”²²

The Council of Constance did resolve the Western Schism, but it was not eminently successful in its reform endeavors. Nor did the subsequent Councils of Pavia-Siena (1423-24) and of Basel (1431-49), as provided for by the decree Frequens of 1417, achieve that reform and renewal that so many sought. Basel featured from beginning to end a bitter struggle between the conciliarists and the Papacy and climaxed its antipapal legislation in 1439 by deposing the reigning Pope Eugenius IV and electing an antipope Felix V. In this instance a Council had led to schism, and the spectacle thus afforded contributed decisively to the defeat of the conciliar movement and the victory of the papal monarchy in the fifteenth century. The hope too of achieving a reformatio in capite et in membris through the agency of a General Council was also ended.²³ It was now incumbent on the Papacy whose primacy had been reasserted and confirmed to give leadership in that cause.

In this heavy responsibility the Papacy failed. Neither its own reform nor that of the Church at large was sufficiently promoted, and therein lies one of the darkest features of the religious scene at the close of the Middle Ages. A deeply moving page of Gordon Rupp's Luther's Progress to the Diet of Worms is recalled: “What are the inexorable consequences of the sins of the New Israel? … What happens when the successors of the Apostles betray, deny, forsake their evangelical vocation?”²⁴ Stern judgment will be rendered, and Rupp, evoking the tremendous vision of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel of a Christ risen in wrath, sees the Reformation as an ordeal, the Doomsday of the late medieval Church. Yet an awareness of the need for reform was not lacking in the Roman Curia following its triumph over the rebellious Council of Basel.²⁵ The Advisamenta of Cardinal Capranica during the pontificate of Nicholas V (1447-55)—it “reads like a complete programme of the Catholic reformation,” says Jedin²⁶—and the reform memorials of Domenico Domenichi and Nicholas of Cusa in the days of Pius II (1458-64) are witness to this fact. And even the notorious Alexander VI, struck by remorse over the assassination of his son, the Duke of Gandia, in 1497 appointed a reform commission which seriously and competently reported on the state of the Church and drafted comprehensive reform measures. But these were all dead letters. Nothing was accomplished, nothing gained. In fact, the Papacy itself in the later decades of the fifteenth century—the “Papacy of Princes,” as Father Hughes has called it—entered a period of moral disintegration which culminated in the most scandalous venality and secularization.²⁷ The deformatio in capite was most acute as the hour of judgment began to strike.

But if Council and Pope had eliminated themselves from the quest for reform in the actual circumstances of the time, what other avenues or agencies for Christian renewal and the Church's reformation remained? Here the picture is not quite so dreary; here the signs of regeneration may be discerned. For this perspective, however, we must turn for the moment from our concern with institutional reform, that is, from the reformatio in capite which had been obstructed and denied, to the matter of personal reform, that is, to the reformatio in membris which could and did have a spontaneous life. The two reformations, as we have said, must be joined in the Catholic concept, and they are of course closely related in their mutual interaction, but there is an obvious difference in their proximate goals and in their spheres of activity and effective means. We must turn then to the reform of the members if we would observe the beginnings—and the wellspring in the immediate sense—of the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century. The documents in this volume and the development they represent by the same token are linked very closely to these endeavors.

There are many examples of personal renewal and partial reform in the late Middle Ages. Jedin has given clear indication of this in a substantial chapter in his History of the Council of Trent.²⁸ The Church was not without religious communities or prelates or zealous men and women who sought to live by the highest spiritual ideals. The Charterhouse of Cologne, the Augustinian Canons of Windesheim, Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, the scholarly Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, St. Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, Thomas à Kempis, the great preacher St. Bernadino of Siena are but a few of the examples—notable ones, to be sure—the fifteenth century affords. And these are characterized not only by their own individual virtue and dedication but by the wider influence their labors bore. A movement broader than any single individual or community can also be cited as witnessing and in turn contributing to the religious renewal so needed at this time. This was the Devotio moderna, originating in the Netherlands and associated primarily with the Brothers of the Common Life and the congregation of Windesheim, but casting wide its net of inspiration and revival. It was, to quote Margaret Aston, “probably the most generative religious movement of the whole century,” and it forms a major source of Catholic reform in the following era.²⁹

The Devotio moderna was a spirit of personal piety, based above all on the following of Christ and the cultivation of a simple and fervent interior life. It centered its doctrine on Christ and the Gospels; it stressed meditation and methodic prayer; it aimed at a life of practical virtue. Gerard Groote of Deventer (1340-1384) was its father, and his life and preaching—docuit sancte vivendo—were the inspiration for two religious societies—the Brothers of the Common Life and the Canons Regular of Windesheim—that continued and expanded its spiritual ideals. Florence Radewijns was Groote's most important disciple and the actual founder in 1387 of the Windesheim congregation. A canon in the monastery of Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle, Thomas à Kempis, wrote (c. 1411) its most celebrated and characteristic work, The Imitation of Christ. From the end of the fourteenth century on, the influence of this new spirituality spread widely in Europe. Its schools and convents multiplied, and its writings circulated everywhere (more than 600 manuscripts and 55 printed editions of the Imitation date from the fifteenth century). Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus were its pupils; Jacques Lefèvre and St. Ignatius Loyola came within its orbit.³⁰ There is no question that we are in the presence of a reform current of the utmost importance.

It is also frequently pointed out that the Devotio moderna represents, at least to some extent, a “lay” spirituality, an assertion of the layman's need for spiritual life and renewal in the face of an ecclesiasticism that had become decadent and corrupt.³¹ Too much of a thesis or dichotomy should not be made of this, but there seems little reason to doubt that the Devotio does signalize a quest for a more personal religious experience on the part of laity and clergy alike as against the merely formal or traditional practices of piety and prayer. Evennett's judgment that “we see here the individualism of the age taking its appropriate form in Catholic spirituality” would seem to go the heart of its particular historical derivation and significance.³² And at this juncture and in this sense we can also connect the Devotio moderna with other efforts toward personal sanctification and renewal during this time—with the revival preaching of St. Bernadino, St. John of Capistrano, and Savonarola, with lay confraternities like the Oratory of Divine Love, with the devout humanism of so many of the scholars of the Renaissance. The age itself served to stir the need, mold the shape, and impel the surge of religious reform.

Our reference to humanism brings us to another important movement, parallel to the Devotio moderna, different in character and spirit from it but nevertheless manifesting basic reform features and certainly contributory to actual Catholic reform in the sixteenth century. Humanism is the name given to the so-called classical revival in Renaissance Italy. There are controversies regarding its origins, nature, significance, and influence, but the view that it was a pagan or anti-Christian movement is no longer tenable.³³ Indeed a contrary evaluation seems much closer to the mark. As a literary and scholarly movement it bore from the beginning a very prominent ethical character and a lively awareness of the problem and task of reconciling an authentic classicism with Christian values and beliefs. In fact, there are signs that in its origin and impulse humanism was a profound regenerative movement within the context of the classical and Christian tradition, that it was, in short, what we can at least loosely call a reform.³⁴ Its emphasis on rhetoric or philology or classical learning should not blind us to its deeper hopes and implications. The important humanists were convinced that the study of classical letters, the studia humanitatis, was the foundation for the education and development of the whole man, and they held this conviction as Christian scholars and Christian educators.³⁵ And they believed too that this heralded a new day, a return to a golden age.

In quite a different way humanism also had very great bearing on religious renewal and reform. This relates to its scholarly approach and method. The humanists sought to discover the authentic texts of the ancient classics, to read them in their original language, and to understand them in their original context and meaning. When this “return to the sources” together with the critical scholarship and the historical perspective such a “return” entailed were applied to the Christian classics, that is, to Holy Scripture and the early Fathers, the way was opened for a theological and religious reorientation, the dimensions of which encompass both Catholic and Protestant reform in the sixteenth century. “To be able to read the book of God in its genuine meaning is to be a genuine theologian.”³⁶ This extension of classical humanism we are accustomed to call Christian humanism and to associate with the northern humanists—Colet, Erasmus, Lefèvre—but it must be remembered that biblical and patristic study was “a real and very extensive phenomenon” in the Italian Renaissance.³⁷ Lorenzo Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum (c. 1444), the first printing of which Erasmus arranged in 1505, Gianozzo Manetti's Latin translations of the New Testament and the Psalms (c. 1450?), and Pico della Mirandola's Genesis commentary called the Heptaplus (1489) are monuments to this scholarly endeavor. Nor must one forget the related contribution—indeed the life's work—of the great Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who sought to restore a docta religio in the guise of a Neoplatonic Christian theology.³⁸ His mission and purpose at least were primarily religious, apologetic, and reformative.

By the turn of the sixteenth century Renaissance humanism was beginning to have a galvanizing effect throughout Europe. Ad fontes was becoming more and more a guiding principle for those who sought religious renewal and reform, and the return to Scripture and the Fathers was seen as the means of reforming theology and revivifying Christian life. Erasmus is usually cited as the leader and exemplar of this European-wide humanist reform movement.³⁹ There is no need to challenge his preeminence in this regard, but it should be pointed out that just as Erasmus was not the first to move in this direction, so humanism's influence on reform can be observed in many other instances and in many diverse ways. Not a few of the documents in this volume bear this out, though they do not by any means exhaust the subject. Its spectrum is vast indeed, and Protestant reform as well as Catholic reform comes within its range.⁴⁰ There is, however, a striking example which we have not otherwise recorded of actual reform within the Church in the early sixteenth century closely associated with the expansion of humanism. This is the undertaking and achievement of the great Cardinal of Spain, Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1436-1517).

From 1495 on, this remarkable man, the most important figure perhaps in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, held the primatial see of Toledo.⁴¹ From that post and in close cooperation with the Catholic monarchs he pursued the task of reforming the Spanish Church and restoring its discipline and spiritual zeal. In his synods of Alcalá (1497) and Talavera (1498) he set down the program his priests must follow in their own consecrated lives and in preaching the Gospel and caring for the souls entrusted to them.⁴² Soon afterward he founded the University of Alcalá—the original college of San Ildefonso was opened in 1508—for the education of a clergy who would constitute, in the words of Bataillon, “the cadres of a Church more worthy of Christ.”⁴³ Alcalá was from the start the center of humanism in Spain. The greatest humanist scholars were invited there; the three languages—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—were studied; Scripture and the Fathers as well as the pagan classics were engaged, though there were also chairs in Thomist, Scotist, and Nominalist theology. Unquestionably the crown of this enterprise was the preparation of the famous Complutensian polyglot Bible by the scholars Ximenes had gathered at Alcalá. Begun in 1502 under the Cardinal's direction and printed in the years from 1514 to 1517, its six large volumes are “the greatest achievement of early Spanish humanism.”⁴⁴ They are also a witness of the orientation and the increasing momentum of the early Catholic Reformation.

There was much amiss within the Church and within Christendom at the close of the Middle Ages. There was serious and urgent need for religious reform. But there were attempts also to achieve it in various places and in various ways. These efforts in turn form the background—the preliminaries, so to speak—of the movement we seek to document in the pages that follow. A most serious crisis within the Church, however, was destined soon to intervene. Involving basic questions of doctrine, practice, and authority, this severe trial was to put in jeopardy the very life of the existing Catholic Church. Needless to say, it had major, nay decisive, effect on the course of reform in the Catholic Church. The pattern of that reform nevertheless had been indicated, the foundations laid.

Notes

1. Joseph Lortz, How the Reformation Came, trans. O. M. Knab (New York, 1964), pp. 105, 111. See also the judgment of Ludwig Pastor in The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, trans. F. I. Antrobus, R. F. Kerr, et al. (40 vols.; St. Louis, 1891-1953), V, 226, and VII, 292 ff.

2. William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de' Medici (10th ed.; London, 1851), pp. 285-86. Lorenzo's low estimate of the College of Cardinals was “unfortunately only too well founded,” says Pastor, op. cit., V, 361.

3. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York, 1944), p. 333.

4. Dante, On World Government (De Monarchia), trans. Herbert W. Schneider (2d ed.; New York, 1957), p. 76. The quote is from Bk. III, Chap. 15, of De Monarchia.

5. Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Dom Ernest Graf (2 vols.; St. Louis, 1957-61), I, 6-7.

6. Ephesians 5, 27.

7. Paradiso, XXI, 127-35, quoted from the Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds translation (Penguin Classics; Baltimore, 1962), pp. 244-45.

8. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Pt. I, Chap. XVIII (Everyman's Library ed.; London, 1910), p. 30.

9. Savonarola's Advent sermon XXIII of 1493, quoted in Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, trans. Linda Villari (London, 1896), p. 184.

10. (Cambridge, Mass., 1959; Harper Torchbook ed., 1967.)

11. II Corinthians 5, 17.

12. From the Paraclesis, in Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, ed. John C. Olin (New York, 1965), p. 100.

13. Ladner, The Idea of Reform, pp. 277, fn. 147, 401-2, 423-24; idem, “Reformatio,” in Ecumenical Dialogue at Harvard: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Colloquium, eds. Samuel H. Miller and G. Ernest Wright (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 172 ff.; and Jean Leclercq, “The Bible and the Gregorian Reform,” in Historical Investigations (Vol. 17 of Concilium; New York, 1966), pp. 63-77.

14. Ibid., p. 74.

15. From the Decree on Ecumenism, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott (New York, 1966), p. 350.

16. The Legend of Saint Francis by the Three Companions, trans. E. G. Salter (London, 1905), p. 78.

17. Ibid., p. 82.

18. Ladner, “Reformatio,” pp. 172, 190. See also David Knowles' portrait “Francis of Assisi,” in his Saints and Scholars (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 86-87.

19. Dante's Paradiso, XI, 55-57 (Sayers and Reynolds translation).

20. William Durandus the Younger, Tractatus de modo generalis concilii celebrandi (Paris, 1671), Pt. I, Chap. I. For the decrees of Constance, see Readings in Church History, ed. Colman J. Barry (Westminster, Md., 1960), I, 504-5. See also Cardinal D'Ailly's reform proposal, De reformatione ecclesiae, presented at Constance in 1415 (in the volume containing Durandus' Tractatus cited above).

21. Jedin, op. cit., I, 9 ff.; E. F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (2d. ed.; Manchester, 1953), pp. 18-23; and Paul de Vooght, Les Pouvoirs du concile et l'autorité du pape au concile de Constance (Paris, 1965). See also Joseph Gill, S.J., Constance et Bâle-Florence (Paris, 1965), for a general history of the fifteenth century Councils.

22. Durandus, op. cit., p. 241.

23. This must be understood only with reference to the conciliar movement in the fifteenth century. A General Council might still be deemed a necessary and essential means for achieving reform, as indeed the address of Egidio da Viterbo at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512 clearly shows (see Chap. IV infra). As for the consequences of conciliarism on reform in the Church, the argument is tangled. J. N. Figgis, in his Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414-1625 (Cambridge, 1916), pp. 31-32, views the failure of the conciliar movement as making the more violent Protestant Reformation inevitable. Philip Hughes, in A History of the Church (3 vols.; New York, 1935-49), III, 282-84, 306-7, 330-33, comes down hard on conciliarism as sponsoring inadequate and misdirected reforms and as creating conditions which made the needed reforms all the more difficult to achieve. Jedin, in the opening chapters of his History of the Council of Trent, I, gives the fullest and most nuanced treatment of this difficult question.

24. (New York, 1964), p. 49.

25. Jedin, op. cit., I, Bk. I, Chap. VI; Pastor, op. cit., III, 269 ff. (for Pius II), V, 500 ff. (for Alexander VI); L. Celier, “L'Idée de réforme à la cour pontificale du concile de Bâle au concile du Latran,” Revue des questions historiques, LXXXVI (1909), 418-35; and idem, “Alexandre VI et la réforme de l'église,” Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire, XVII (1907), 65-124.

26. Jedin, op. cit., I, 121.

27. Hughes, op. cit., III, 386 ff., and H. O. Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 103-5.

28. Vol. I, Bk. I, Chap. VII.

29. Margaret Aston, The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of Europe (New York, 1968), p. 157; Evennett, op. cit., pp. 9, 18, 33; and L.-E. Halkin, “La ‘Devotio moderna’ et les origines de la réforme aux Pays-bas,” in Courants religieux et humanisme à la fin du XVe et au début du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1959), pp. 45-51. On the Devotio moderna, see Albert Hyma, The Christian Renaissance, a History of the ‘Devotio Moderna’ (2d ed.; Hamden, Conn., 1965); Jacob, op. cit., Chaps. VII and VIII; R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion (Leiden, 1968); and Dictionnaire de spiritualité, III, cols. 727-47 (article Dévotion moderne, by Pierre Debongnie).

30. On the very interesting question of the influence of the Devotio moderna on St. Ignatius Loyola, see I. Rodriguez-Grahit, “La Devotio moderna en Espagne et l'influence française,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, XIX (1957), 489-95, and idem, “Ignace de Loyola et le collège Montaigu. L'influence de Standonck sur Ignace,” ibid., XX (1958), 388-401. One of Evennett's main themes in The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation is this influence; see Chaps. II and III and John Bossy's comments in the Postscript, pp. 126-28.

31. Aston, op. cit., pp. 157-61. See also the closely related view in Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (2 vols.; New York, 1968), I, 260, 274-75.

32. Op. cit., p. 36.

33. P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (New York, 1961), Chap. IV. On the interpretation of humanism, see William J. Bouwsma, The Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism (an A. H. A. pamphlet; Washington, 1959), and P. O. Kristeller, “Studies in Renaissance Humanism during the Last Twenty Years,” Studies in the Renaissance, IX (1962), 7-30. On humanism, see also idem, Renaissance Thought II (New York, 1965); Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism, trans. Peter Munz (New York, 1965); R. Weiss, The Spread of Italian Humanism (London, 1964); and A. Renaudet, “Autour d'une définition de l'humanisme,” in his Humanisme et renaissance (Geneva, 1958), pp. 32-53.

34. Garin lays great stress on this, as do Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance, trans. David Moore (London, 1958), pp. 191-95, and Heer, op. cit., I, Chap. XII.

35. This seems clear enough from W. H. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, 1897; repr., New York, 1963).

36. Garin, op. cit., pp. 70-71. On scriptural humanism in its late medieval and Reformation context, see Werner Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation (Cambridge, 1955), and Henri de Lubac, S.J., Exégèse médiévale, Second Part, II (Paris, 1964), Chap. X.

37. P. O. Kristeller, Le Thomisme et la pensée italienne de la renaissance (Montreal, 1967), pp. 65-66. See also Raymond Marcel, “Les perspectives de l'apologétique de Lorenzo Valla à Savonarole,” in Courants religieux et humanisme à la fin du XVe et au début du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1959), pp. 83-100, and E. Harris Harbison, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation (New York, 1956), Chap. II.

38. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II, Chaps. IV and V; Garin, op. cit., pp. 88-100; and Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935), Chap. III.

39. See Chap. VI infra.

40. For an introduction to at least part of that spectrum, see Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), and Alain Dufour, “Humanisme et Réformation,” in Histoire politique et psychologie historique (Geneva, 1966), pp. 37-62.

41. The major study is L. Fernandez de Retana, Cisneros y su siglo (2 vols.; Madrid, 1929-30). There are several works in English, including Reginald Merton, Cardinal Ximenes and the Making of Spain (London, 1934), and Walter Starkie, Grand Inquisitor (London, 1940). Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (Paris, 1937), Chap. I, is devoted to Ximenes' reforms. On the role of Ximenes and the development of a “Spanish thesis” concerning the origins of the Catholic Reformation, see the discussion in Evennett, op. cit., Chap. I.

42. Cisneros, Sinodo de Talavera (Madrid, 1908). The parallel with Giberti's regulations at Verona (see Chap. XI infra) is striking.

43. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 14.

44. The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I: The Renaissance, 1493-1520 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 124.