1 Past Belief T h e Fa l l a n d R i s e of E c c l e s i a s t ic a l H i s t or y i n E a r ly Mode r n E u r op e Anthony Grafton Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul. . . . —K a r l M a r x, T h e E igh t e e n t h Bru m a i r e of Lou is Bona pa rt e Davos sum, non Oedipus: A Swiss Confrontation Once upon a time, snarky teenagers knew their ecclesiastical history, and had fun when they found a chance to put their knowledge to work. Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas Platter and five of his friends stopped on the way from Zurich to St. Gallen, to hear mass. One of the priests called them heretics, since they came from a city that rejected papal supremacy. Platter asked the priest why the pope was head of the church. The priest answered: “For this reason, that St. Peter was the pope at Rome, and has there given the papacy over to his successors.” “St. Peter,” the boy replied, “has never once been in 13 14 Pa s t B e l i e f Rome.” He pulled his New Testament from his rucksack and “showed him how in the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul sends greetings to so many, and does not think of mentioning St. Peter, who according to his own speech, was yet above them all.” But, the priest replied, when Christ had met Peter outside Rome, and asked where he was going, Peter had answered, “To Rome, to allow myself to be crucified.” When the boy asked where he had read this, the priest answered that his grandmother had told him the story. Platter’s response was caustic: “So I perceive truly that your grandmother is your Bible.”1 It would be hard to stage a more clear-cut and dramatic confrontation. On the one hand, we have the priest: a transmitter of traditions, as much oral as written. On the other hand, we have the young humanist, Thomas Platter, who would eventually print Calvin’s Institutes: a critic with a sharp-edged method. The priest passes on an inherited conglomerate of doctrines and stories— a complex, overgrown mass, in which the stone of original texts has disappeared under the clinging, interlaced ivy of tradition. When he describes Christ’s exchange with Peter, he draws not on the New Testament but on the Acts of Peter, a second-century text—and not even directly but indirectly, from oral tradition. The humanist demands to know if the traditions correspond with the evidence of the sacred text, identified as authoritative and critically treated. He reads Paul’s letter against its grain, using the text to reconstruct not the doctrines of the Apostle but the membership of the early urban church in Rome, and caustically rejects the story of Christ’s confrontation with Peter. Scissors cut paper: the young scholar who knows how to reverse-engineer a social network from scattered references in a text designed for other purposes puts the priest, tightly bound by the spiderwebbed traditions of his own family and social networks, to flight. It is not easy to know how to read this story. On the surface, modernity and victory seem to lie on the side of humanism and print. Platter’s account has the clarity of caricature: he represents Catholic willingness to embrace traditions as well as texts as openness to legends and superstition. But the Catholics never acknowledged defeat, at his hands or anyone else’s. In 1601, Annibale Carracci depicted Christ’s meeting with Peter in an unforgettable painting, for which his patron, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, rewarded him with a gold chain and large medal of Our Lord, between them worth a stately 200 scudi.2 Earlier painters had rarely illustrated this scene, dramatic though it was. Like Platter, Carracci took part in a distinctive effort to re-create the early church, one that emphasized the human drama of its story rather than the prosaic dealings of its social networks.3 This Catholic project dominated much of Roman scholarship and art in the years around and after 1600, and left rich deposits of texts, images, and buildings, as early churches were restored, the Catacombs were opened, and early customs became the object not only of A n t h o n y G r a f t on 15 debate among scholars but also of depiction by artists. Did Platter’s side really win out? Perhaps Platter’s story should not be taken literally. Old scholars are not on their oath when they reminisce about the debates they won in their youth. In this case, moreover, Platter introduced a puzzle into his story, perhaps by mistake, or perhaps as a deliberate effort to call attention to the fact that he too was generating a kind of apocryphal story. In the Acts of Peter and in the Carracci painting that it inspired, Peter asks the question “Domine, quo vadis?” and Christ replies that he is going to be crucified. In Platter’s telling, their roles are reversed: Christ asks and Peter answers. Did Platter mean to signal the confusion that necessarily ensued when traditions were transmitted orally, from grandmother to child? Or did his own aging memory slip? We will never know. In all its complexity, Platter’s encounter with the priest can serve as a milestone—perhaps a third of the way along the long story that I hope to tell: that of how Renaissance scholars and others came to envision early Christianity in new ways. This story begins in April and May 1440, when Lorenzo Valla composed his attack on the Donation of Constantine—the document according to which Constantine, grateful to Pope Sylvester I for curing him of leprosy, transferred the western Roman empire to the church.4 Valla deftly wielded the tools of rhetoric to show that the Donation swarmed with inconsistencies— especially linguistic ones. He also proved, by composing the speeches that all involved would have delivered if Constantine really had tried to give away half of his empire, that he could have produced much more convincing forgeries if he had wished to.5 Valla did not limit his criticism to the Donation. Like a stern Protestant tourist staring at the hologram Jesus in a contemporary Roman shop window, he denounced the painted images of spurious stories about the origins of Christianity that were displayed at Ara Coeli and elsewhere, and the texts that justified such embroidery on history and the Gospels: “These stories do more to overturn faith, because they are false, than to strengthen it, because they are miraculous.”6 Something like a program comes into view with Valla. The end point of the story is harder to fix. But one contender might be June 1686, when Jean Mabillon visited the monastery of Bobbio in Emilia-Romagna. Among the treasures that he found in the library was what he described as “a manuscript of the highest quality, written in capital letters.”7 Mabillon cracked—and even took a facsimile of—the difficult script, transcribed and edited the text, and identified it as a liturgy used in Merovingian Gaul.8 In making this precise, and still powerful, diagnosis, he wielded a bagful of tools that neither Valla nor Platter would have known. Mabillon himself had assembled, by 1681, the De re diplomatica. This magnificent treatise on Latin 16 Pa s t B e l i e f writing, a masterpiece in the material history of the book, dealt with everything from the instruments used in writing and the spaces where documents were produced to the multiple families of Latin script. The book broke new ground in a number of areas. Most important, it included large, precisely engraved plates in which samples of related scripts were reproduced; broken down, letter by letter; named; and discussed in detailed captions.9 To obtain these, Mabillon mobilized friends—and friends of friends—across the Republic of Letters. Scholars and librarians carefully unfolded the pieces of paper made transparent by oil or pork fat or animal membranes that they were sent, spread them painstakingly across the manuscripts or documents, not allowing them to slip, and traced samples of ancient scripts.10 Less well known—but no less foundational—was the work of generations of liturgists like Mabillon’s correspondent Giovanni Bona, whose detailed history of Catholic ritual practices made clear how much they had varied in time and space and offered hints for localizing new witnesses.11 Mabillon’s analysis of the text spurred plenty of controversy. But it was the product of a new age. Mabillon and his fellow Benedictines agreed with the Jesuits on one point only: both groups preferred learned English Protestants like John Marsham to the members of the rival Catholic order. Accordingly, disagreements were no longer purely theological in motivation. Ecclesiastical scholarship—Catholic and Protestant, Reformed and Anglican—still served the task of building confessional identities. But its practitioners had attained consensus on many points. Their compilations would provide the underpinning for much of the work of Edward Gibbon, whose references to them regularly mingled irony with respect.12 Genealogies of Modern Scholarship Since the middle of the twentieth century, one form of historical research, as reconstructed in one majestic journal article, has dominated accounts of the origins of modernity in scholarship. In 1950, Arnaldo Momigliano argued that antiquarians—scholars who specialized in the use of material evidence and in the creation of synthetic accounts of ancient constitutions, rituals, and practices—created a distinctive kind of history. They also saved the standard, narrative kind, since they provided evidentiary foundations that could withstand the attacks of philosophical skeptics.13 Modern historiography took shape, he argued, when Edward Gibbon fused the erudite methods of the antiquaries with the reflective form of large-scale narrative created by the philosophical wing of eighteenth-century historians.14 Since Momigliano wrote, scholars have shed a flood of light on the practices of the antiquaries. We have learned how they copied, interpreted—and sometimes faked—inscriptions; how they identified and published sculp- A n t h o n y G r a f t on 17 tures; how they devised new ways to write the history of constitutions and of religion.15 Some segments of Momigliano’s argument have come in for sharp criticism.16 Markus Völkel, for example, has argued that the methods of the antiquaries took shape before, not after, the rise of historical skepticism and had little to do with the resolution of that crisis.17 Others have shown that antiquaries often worked at least as much from texts as from material remains.18 Yet a consensus exists on the central point: the rise of antiquarianism caused a seismic shift in the practices of early modern historians. Sixteenth-century historians and observers already said as much. Francesco Patrizi, for example, did work of high originality on both the theory of historical writing and the development of the Roman military order. He described antiquarianism as a set of new forms of historical writing, concerned with structures and customs rather than narratives and built on material as well as textual evidence: “Some historians have not so much described events as customs, ways of life and laws. . . . And there is another sort, those who, especially in our day, write in another way about the clothing of the Romans and Greeks, the forms of armament they used, their ways of making camp, and their ships, their buildings, and other things of this sort, which are necessary for life.”19 As Patrizi suggested, this new history could be as practical as it was exciting: Justus Lipsius’s reconstruction of the Militia Romana underpinned the new military order created by Maurice of Nassau. Nothing was of more practical importance, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, than decisions about theology and liturgy. In an age of religious war, these were matters of life and death. And over time, as Owen Chadwick wrote, “The center of theological gravity was shifting from theology into the field of ecclesiastical history”—the field that could supply the charter, of one sort or another, that every church claimed to possess for its doctrines and its practices alike.20 Powerful men took a passionate interest in these questions. Matthew Parker—the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury— spent much of his life dealing with practical questions about everything from clerics who refused to wear traditional ecclesiastical vestments to radicals who insisted on adult baptism for their children.21 Like Donald Rumsfeld, he seems to have scattered “snowflakes”—short memoranda on particular problems and policies—all about him.22 Still, throughout his time in office, he devoted a massive amount of energy and resources to the study of English ecclesiastical history. The relationship between past and present was dialectical. Contemporary concerns and debates spurred research, which in turn yielded historical information that mattered, here and now. No wonder, then, that those who plowed this field did their best, like the military men, to master the new historical methods. Antonio Bosio, the “Columbus of the Catacombs,” led his colleagues into the underground tombs 18 Pa s t B e l i e f outside Rome when these were publicly opened up in 1588 and after. His associates mapped the tunnels in the tufa as an earlier generation had mapped the ancient city of Rome. Gradually they assembled a vast corpus of evidence about early Christian art and practice, which Giovanni Severano finally saw into print. They made mistakes of every kind. Their illustrations misrepresented the narrow, dank tunnels as broad, regular underground roads, and they saw instruments of martyrdom in paintings that contained none.23 Yet the material and information that they brought to light transformed scholars’ understanding of the visual world of the early Christians. Thanks to them, when the Vatican librarian Lucas Holstenius recovered and edited the Passio Perpetuae, with its extraordinary core text by a female Christian martyr, he could explain the nature of the imprisonment that she and her companions underwent and establish that the symbolism of her visions matched the Christian art of her period.24 Other results of the scholars’ spelunking were less ethereal. A profitable export industry took shape, as bones were wired together or skeletons were reproduced in wood, identified as those particular martyrs and sold to Bavarian and Swiss believers, who swathed them in rich costumes and gleaming jewels.25 The new, material form of history thus paid dividends of more than one kind. Jan Marco Sawilla argues in his study of the Bollandists that their epoch-making critical approach to the lives of saints amounted to a form of applied antiquarianism.26 Yet Momigliano himself saw the story of ecclesiastical scholarship in different terms. In an essay published in 1963, he identified a second millennial tradition of erudite historiography. The early Christian bishop and scholar Eusebius, he pointed out, had been a dynamic and successful historian. Eusebius created a new genre as he composed a clutch of related works: the Chronicle, which laid out all of history in tabular form as the story of the triumph of Christianity; the Ecclesiastical History, which told the story of the church; and the Life of Constantine, which gave the same cast and drama to the history of Rome.27 Borrowing from the Jewish historian Josephus, Eusebius turned history into the story of a righteous nation persecuted by unbelievers. Like Josephus, too, he gave his narratives credibility and impact by filling them with original documents, quoted in full. After the great disruptions of the third century, both the Empire and the Church fell into the hands of new elites, with new needs. The drowned, both Roman aristocrats and Christian clerics, had known more or less what they needed to about the societies they served and the rituals and institutions that they carried on. The saved did not know: but the new historiography gave them basic information. At the same time, it offered charters for beliefs and practices, in the form of the multiple documents that studded it like plums in a pudding.28 No wonder, then, that ecclesiastical history flourished, in different ways, for centuries to come. After Eusebius’s first continuators, to be sure, the genre A n t h o n y G r a f t on 19 changed in scope. The ecclesiastical historiography of the medieval West narrowed its focus from Christianity as a whole to the story of individual nations, as in Bede, or individual religious institutions. More and more political history entered the mix. So, occasionally, did jokes. Adam of Bremen noted that the Danish king believed everything his archbishop told him from the Scriptures, except that he must give up gluttony and women, “which vices are inborn in that people.”29 At last, however, in the sixteenth century, when the Reformation challenged the primacy and hierarchy of the Roman Church, the Protestant Flacius Illyricus and the Catholic Cesare Baronio revived a full-blown form of Eusebian historiography and transformed it in a last, crucial way. Like Eusebius, both men wrote church history on the universal scale and both stuffed their work with documents. Unlike Eusebius, though, they both showed a new “care for minute analysis of the evidence”: they passed from primitive accumulation to something more like intellectual capitalism.30 And here was Momigliano’s second new framing of the story. Ecclesiastical historians used documents critically because they engaged in controversy. It was no coincidence that Tillemont—originally an ecclesiastical historian—revolutionized the methods of political history. He was carrying out a translatio studii from one discipline to the other. “We may well wonder,” Momigliano wrote, “whether modern political historiography would ever have changed from rhetoric and pragmatism to footnotes and appendixes without the example of ecclesiastical history.”31 Momigliano’s new story revised the history of modern historiography as radically as his article on antiquarianism did. As a former student of mine once put it, “The idea of Christian scholarship—of any religious scholarship—flies in the face of our own ideas of objectivity and professionalism.”32 And yet it turns out, if Momigliano was right, that methodological protocols fundamental to the pursuit of historical objectivity and professionalism crystallized not in the modern, non-sectarian university but in the premodern and radically sectarian worlds of Protestant printing houses and Catholic monasteries. Ecclesiastical histories are long, and life is short. Nonetheless, in the last half century, many scholars have followed Momigliano’s lead. Bruno Neveu, Simon Ditchfield, and Jean-Louis Quantin have devoted classic studies to ecclesiastical historians and philologists.33 Arresting monographs have traced the origins of everything from Enlightenment criticism to ethnography to the ecclesiastical scholarship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.34 In his Sather Lectures, finally, Momigliano recast the history of ecclesiastical history as a double helix, one strand of which he reconstructed more elaborately than the other. He continued to tell the story of an integral discipline, created by Eusebius. But he also traced a separate tradition of ecclesiastical antiquarianism, which took shape in late antiquity and survived, in learned 20 Pa s t B e l i e f cathedral chapters, through the Middle Ages and after. Unfortunately, some of the scholars who emphasize the role of antiquarianism in the ecclesiastical field have never come to terms with these arguments. Central questions, accordingly, remain open. Did the revival of Eusebius— like the revival of Tacitus—play a central role in provoking the creation of new forms of historical research and writing? Did the new antiquarianism transform ecclesiastical scholarship? What became of the older form that Momigliano identified? Are there still other ways in which we can usefully tell the story that goes from Valla to Mabillon? This essay takes a first look. Handy-dandy, Which Is the Justice, Which Is the Thief? Early Forms of Ecclesiastical Antiquarianism On March 31, 1499, all hell broke loose at the Mass in the old basilica of Saint Peter. A madman had been confined inside the iron railing that surrounded one of the twisting pillars before the altar—the one farthest to the Gospel side. He climbed the metal railing and crossed the beam that the columns supported. When the Swiss guards provoked him, he began throwing down small pieces of marble. No one was hurt, but the pope and those in the choir were thrown into panic, and rumors that the pope had been captured or the church destroyed bounced and echoed down Rome’s many whispering galleries. As usual, nothing serious happened, and the pope eventually managed to give communion to those who wanted it.35 Ecclesiastical antiquarianism helped bring the madman to his pillar. Maffeo Vegio—the fifteenth-century scholar who wrote a detailed history of the old Vatican basilica—explained that God had endowed this column with so much power that it could free such wretched sufferers from their misery. Research confirmed this: “I have now established this with many great and certain examples.”36 Another cleric of antiquarian interests offered an explanation. In 1438, Cardinal Giordano Orsini installed a marble plaque. Its inscription recorded that Jesus had leaned on this pillar when he preached in the temple. Orsini also identified the temple as that of Solomon, from which the pillars had been brought, “triumphantly,” to the Roman basilica. Hence the power of the Santa Colonna, as it is still known, to expel demons. Like other powerful antiquaries, Orsini acted on his research: he built a balustrade around the pillar, probably designed to make dealing with demoniacs more orderly. This may well have been the enclosure from which the madman escaped in 1499.37 Neither Orsini nor anyone else ever explained why these men decided that the pillars had come from Solomon’s Temple—destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II after the fall of Jerusalem, early in the sixth century BCE—rather than from the much more recent, if also ruined, temple of Herod, which Jesus actually A n t h o n y G r a f t on 21 would have known. But their views nicely illustrate the way in which, in great old churches, individual structures and even building elements became charged with layers of historical meaning, every bit as much as Roman ruins— and how these in turn organized and shaped religious practices, and were reframed and reinterpreted by them.38 Ecclesiastical antiquarians also used their eyes. When Vegio recorded the inscription from the great triumphal arch in the old basilica, which celebrated Constantine as its founder, he emulated earlier compilers.39 But he not only quoted the text but also examined its script, and used the alien form of its capital letters to date it to the period it recorded: “The characters, which are very old and practically ruinous, seem to show clearly that this was written precisely in the time of Constantine.” Vegio even took the time to record a few words from another, less legible inscription.40 Like his contemporary, the Bristol antiquary William Worcester, who showed a keen interest in the development of the sculptural styles used in effigies of the dead, Vegio already possessed the “skilled eyes” that would, in the seventeenth century, become a hallmark of the skilled antiquarian.41 Unlike later forms of antiquarianism, however, the early variety was not necessarily intended to challenge contemporary forms of religious life. By comparison with their successors, many early antiquaries found it hard to imagine a past material world radically different from what they saw in front of them. Some particularly daring scholars made these leaps of the historical imagination. One of the many errors that annoyed Valla in the Donation was the passage in which Constantine awarded property to what he described as existing churches. “You miserable dog,” Valla wrote, “did Rome have churches, or rather temples, dedicated to Peter and Paul? Who built them? Who would have dared to build them?” History tells us (historia ait), he argued, using the language of Lucky Jim’s Professor Welch, that early Christians had worshipped in “little shrines, not buildings; chapels, not temples; places of prayer in private dwellings, not public places of worship.”42 Evidently Valla, the expert on the New Testament, had drawn a vivid personal vision of early Christian places of worship from the references to house churches in Acts and the Pauline epistles. Leon Battista Alberti applied his imagination, similarly, to the first large Christian basilica—perhaps inspired by Augustine’s account of Ambrose’s church in Milan. He argued, in his pioneering treatise on architecture, that these had been simple, austere buildings, with only one altar each, and he contrasted them to the costlier—and less Christian—churches of his own day.43 The Morgan Library possesses a splendidly illustrated copy of Alberti’s book, in which a late fifteenth-century artist of antiquarian tastes entered many diagrams of machines, buildings, and architectural elements—including 22 Pa s t B e l i e f some drawn from the Lateran and other Roman buildings.44 Confronted by Alberti’s description of the ancient Christian altar, the artist drew one.45 But when he turned the page and read Alberti’s tribute to the simplicity of ancient Christian churches and the services held in them, he left the margin blank.46 Visions of early Christian life like Valla’s and Alberti’s, drawn from textual evidence, were too radical to be given precise visual form, even by someone who specialized in imagining or reproducing ancient objects and buildings. Evidently, then, the telling of tales, transmitted orally rather than by documents, and the scrutiny of material objects went together, as joint features of ecclesiastical antiquarianism. Some of the combinations of arguments that took shape can seem dizzying now. The encyclopedist Raffaele Maffei, for example, drew on Vegio’s work to shed light on what Constantine had done in Rome: “Few notice in Saint Peter’s that above the arch in the center of the church, verses like this in the form of ancient mosaics are still legible.”47 He rejected the story of Constantine’s miraculous cure from leprosy as absurd.48 But he also rejected the views of Antoninus of Florence—and, though he did not say so, of Lorenzo Valla. They argued that since no contemporary author had mentioned the Donation, it could not have taken place. Maffei pointed out that Isidore of Seville, “a serious and holy author who lived almost 800 years ago, says openly in his history that Constantine gave way to the pope in the city.”49 Yet he never explained why the account of the Spaniard Isidore, written several hundred years after the event, should outweigh the contemporary one of Eusebius. From our anachronistic standpoint, someone like Maffei seems to be carrying out a strange sort of dance, one step forward, one step back. From his own point of view, however, he was collecting every tradition he could—textual and oral as well as epigraphic—that might illuminate the origins and customs of the structure he inhabited and the religious community he belonged to. That too, of course, is a definition of antiquarianism. Vertigo In other provinces of ecclesiastical scholarship, however, powerful tremors threatened to break the cake of custom—or at least to call received ideas about the past into question. Consider the world of ancient texts, and the humanists who corrected and translated them, first for the great manuscript libraries of the fifteenth century and then for the printers. Traditional accounts of “the revival of classical antiquity” emphasized the humanists’ passion for the texts of pagan Greece and Rome. Yet even the self-consciously revisionist Petrarch included the works of Augustine, along with the classics, in his list of his favorite books. As Carol Quillen has shown, he devoted his most passionate and A n t h o n y G r a f t on 23 engaged moments as a reader to Augustine.50 In the next century, George of Trebizond translated Cyril of Alexandria, Eusebius, and John Chrysostom as well as Aristotle and Ptolemy.51 The Bible, the Fathers, and even the lives of the saints weighed down many humanists’ bookshelves.52 The textual record of early Christianity, in other words, expanded enormously in these years. But the expansion may have induced more vertigo than clarity. Many of the new texts were not what the archives yielded to patient exploration but what the punters wanted to find there. Late medieval Christians, as Lucien Febvre and Johan Huizinga taught us long ago, had a passion for vivid, familiar details about Jesus and his family. One text well designed to satisfy this need was the letter of Lentulus, a detailed description of Jesus’ physical appearance that came into widespread circulation at the beginning of the fifteenth century. A hundred years later, learned humanists like Willibald Pirckheimer were still collecting manuscripts of this text, passing it on to printers and meditating on it. Pirckheimer’s friend Albrecht Durer read the letter carefully. It helped him to frame not only his images of Jesus but also his most famous effort at self-portraiture.53 Valla, who always appreciated a skillful forgery, remarked that “I wish that Lentulus’ letter about the image of Christ were . . . authentic.” In reality, though, he had to condemn it: “it was no less knavishly forged than the grant that we have refuted.”54 The Roman Valla had reason to worry about this particular fake. Roman learned circles—circles we have already met—gave this text the push that made it popular. One of the manuscripts of “Lentulus” identifies it as “the letter of Jacopo, in the year 1421, found in the annals of Rome, in a very ancient book in the Capitol.”55 The Colonna, of course, were the sworn enemies of the Orsini—who, as we saw, did their best to popularize the idea that the Santa Colonna came from ancient Jerusalem. It seems quite possible that their conflict extended from the bravos insulting each other in the streets to the families’ more scholarly members, who concocted rival imagined Christian pasts in their studies. The early Christian world, as the scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked back to it, must have seemed to them to pop into clear visibility, like a slide covered with tiny organisms, viewed through a microscope as it is being focused. But the apparently hard-edged precision of these new views was as often the result of bold invention or untrammeled nostalgia as it was of exacting philology. The creators of the Magdeburg Centuries, for example, knew from the start that they had to detect and expose the spurious texts that clogged the record. François Baudouin, the erudite jurist who served as their consultant on historical method, warned them that the Fathers themselves had complained about the prevalence of forgeries. In modern times, many new “trifles” had been composed and ascribed to “apostolic men,” and 24 Pa s t B e l i e f even learned humanists patched together their pictures of the early church “from these stinking rags.”56 The Magdeburg scholars cast doubt on such problematic texts as some of the letters ascribed to the very early Christian writer Ignatius of Antioch.57 But when they described the life and works of Jesus, they included what they called “texts recorded by illustrious authors”—in fact, a comprehensive series of spurious texts that began with the ancient (but spurious) correspondence of Jesus with Abgar of Edessa, preserved by Eusebius; continued through the testimonium Flavianum, the ancient (but spurious) passage on Jesus preserved in the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, and the late antique (but spurious) letter of Pontius Pilate to the Roman emperor; and wound up with the latest of them all, the letter of Lentulus.58 It was a spectacle to annoy the critical, like poor Baudouin, and to bemuse anyone who hoped to arrive at clarity. Waiting for Godot: Ecclesiastical Scholarship before Flacius and Baronio Well before new histories of the church on the grand scale began to be written, well-informed humanists and scholastics knew that something was rotten in the kingdom of ecclesiastical scholarship. Juan Luis Vives lamented that “a license for lying” had established itself “where holy things are concerned.” He listed apocryphal stories and texts, starting with Constantine’s leprosy, and denounced them: “we shriek and bark at lesser errors and wink at these— which, if they fall into the hands of the impious, will make our most holy and profound religion look absurd to them.”59 Melchior Cano, the Dominican who rethought the Catholic tradition from end to end in the years running up to the Council of Trent, complained about the incompetence of ecclesiastical historians. He agreed that it was not a good thing to introduce historical errors into the liturgy and denounced those who found it necessary to exaggerate the piety and courage of the saints. But he also suspected that scandal might do the church more harm than minor error. Accordingly, he wrote with obvious ambivalence—at one point acknowledging the service that Erasmus had done by correcting errors, at another denouncing him for accusing the greats of the Christian church of lying.60 What was to be done? Back to the Future: The Eusebian Tradition and the Use of Documents in History Did a revival of Eusebian history provide the answer to these problems? If so, how did it all happen? Like reviving Galenic anatomy or Plinian natural history, bringing Eusebius back to full textual life was a complicated project. A n t h o n y G r a f t on 25 Church histories entered libraries, in this period, not single spies but in battalions. The Ecclesiastical History was read in the Latin translation and adaptation by Rufinus, through the Latin Middle Ages and after. So was the Chronicle, in the Latin adaptation by Jerome. Both texts were also continued, imitated and brought up to date, as Momigliano noted, and some of the adaptors followed or even extended Eusebius’s practices. In the ninth century, when the Venerable Bede compiled his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, he actually named some of his sources and assistants—for example, Nothhelm, later archbishop of Canterbury, who went to Rome and “with leave of the present Pope Gregory, searched into the archives of the holy Roman Church, found there some epistles of the blessed Pope Gregory, and other popes and returning home, by the advice of the aforesaid most reverend father Albinus, brought them to me, to be inserted in my history”—perhaps the first explicit thanks ever offered by a historian for research assistance in an archive.61 In parts of Bede’s history, especially the first book, documents pop up as thickly as mushrooms on a forest floor. As documentary culture developed in medieval Britain and elsewhere, citations in chronicles became even more profuse and their character more selfconscious. The eleventh-century abbot of Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire, Ingulf, wrote a history of his house in which many facts and claims rested on charters, which he cited in full. He made clear in his commentary that these documents were written in Anglo-Saxon script, and that he had taken special pains to preserve them and maintain their accessibility, in a Norman world that saw Old English writing as barbaric. Happily, his precautions worked when tested by a calamitous fire: A few years before [the great fire of 1091] however, I had, of my own accord, taken from our muniment-room several charters written in Saxon characters, and as we had duplicates of them, and in some instances triplicates, I had put them in the hands of our chauntor, the lord Fulmar, to be kept in the cloisters, in order to instruct the juniors in the knowledge of the Saxon characters; as this kind of writing had for a long time, on account of the Normans, been utterly neglected, and was now understood by only a few of the more aged men. In so doing, my object was that the juniors, being instructed in the art of reading these characters, might, in their old age, be the better enabled to cite the sources for their monastery against their adversaries. These charters having been deposited in an ancient press, which was kept in the cloisters, and surrounded on every side by the wall of the church, were the only ones that were saved and preserved from the fire. These now form our principal and especial muniments, after having been long considered as of secondary value and thrown aside, neglected and 26 Pa s t B e l i e f despised, in consequence of the barbarous characters in which they were written.62 Both the chronicle and the documents were forged, sad to say, by the monks of fourteenth-century Crowland Abbey. Yet even they were outdone in ingenuity by the fifteenth-century Cambridge scholar—traditionally identified, on weak evidence, as Nicholas Cantilupe—who included a charter granted by King Arthur, as well as similar companion pieces, in his short history of Cambridge University.63 When the same authors composed political and ecclesiastical chronicles, practices moved from one genre to the other. The Benedictine Joannes Trithemius included a fair number of quotations from sources in his massive history of the Abbey of Hirsau in Baden-Württemberg—which he represented as playing an even more glorious role than it actually had in the Cluniac reform movement. But he really made play with charters in his brief history of the Franks—as he did with summaries of his glorious and imaginary Frankish historians, Marcomir and Hunnibald. Trithemius even printed a charter that he condemned as spurious, drawing critical arguments from its dating and its physical condition.64 Joannes Vergenhans, known to his fellow humanists as Nauclerus, was a doctor of canon and civil law. He drew up a massive history of state and church, which was posthumously completed and printed in two volumes, with no small splendor, in 1516.65 The Augsburg humanist Konrad Peutinger—an expert on Roman inscriptions and other forms of historical evidence—took care to identify the charters that Nauclerus quoted, since the printed text did not use special characters or line breaks to set them apart. He even added passages that Nauclerus omitted, and at least one rough facsimile of a seal, from his own collection of documents, copied from originals in the ancient Benedictine Abbey at Reichenau. Like some of the documents used by Eusebius and Bede, these were spurious. Yet it is clear that author and reader alike saw it as normal, by the early sixteenth century, to include original documents in the text of an ecclesiastical history.66 What made Eusebius seem special, in the sixteenth century, was not, then, the presence of documents, which readers would have felt every reason to expect in any work on the history of the church (or indeed of a church). Eusebius’s book had a special character: it was an attractive textual nuisance. Readers of many different kinds noticed that his text was neither the sort of seamless narrative tapestry that most pagan historians had woven nor a normal medieval chronicle punctuated by documentary quotations but a mosaic. And for all the differences in their approach to the text, few could restrain themselves from starting to examine individual stones and test the firmness of their settings. Thomas Cranmer, for example, was not a historical scholar by A n t h o n y G r a f t on 27 training or inclination, though he made extensive use of documents to argue for Henry VIII’s side in the King’s Great Matter.67 But as he read the 1544 first edition of the Greek text of Eusebius’s church history, with its constant references to earlier sources, he noted again and again that Eusebius had quoted the words of an earlier writer, such as the Jewish Neo-Platonist Philo or the Christian scholar Julius Africanus.68 More elaborate notes identified “the letter of the church of Smyrna on the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp” and the “letter of the Christians living at Vienne and Lyons.”69 At least once Cranmer allowed himself a touch of donnish humor. Eusebius quoted a letter from Dionysius of Corinth, which evoked the traditional generosity of the Roman church, always ready to send help to brethren and churches elsewhere. “An ancient tradition of the Roman church, which has fallen out of use nowadays,” Cranmer drily remarked.70 John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury and master of controversy, read his copy of the text in a similar way, repeatedly noting the presence of texts by others in Eusebius’s work.71 Cranmer noticed other, more distinctive points as well. More than once he recorded Eusebius’s remark that he had compiled a whole collection of Christian martyrdoms, evidently as part of the preparation for writing the Ecclesiastical History.72 It was not necessary to be a professional scholar like Cranmer to notice that Eusebius had done extensive research—or to realize that it was difficult to verify his references. Mary Roper Clarke Bassett, daughter of Margaret More Roper, dedicated a translation of the first five books of the Ecclesiastical History to Mary Tudor. Among the practices that made Eusebius hard to read and translate, she explained in her dedication, was the fact that he “doth . . . alledge many authorytyes owt of sundry Greke authores, which were in hys tyme abrode in mennys hande, but syns have been loste, and are nowe therfoure to owr knowledge, no where to comme by, by reason whereof who so studyeth or redyth that storye ys fayne many tymes to passe over some poincte thereof not fully and wholly satysfyed therein, for that such allegacions, being here and there brought in by small patches and peycys, do for ye moste parte necessarily requyre ye knowledge of the sentence in the wryters whence they be alledged, both foregoing and after folowyng.”73 Meredith Hanmer, who translated the full Greek text of Eusebius into English, inferred from the same set of inconsistencies and glitches that the transmitted text was unfinished, the provisional result of a long process of compilation, which he could reconstruct in part: he that is acquainted with Eusebius will confesse: that oftentimes in many places he repeateth one thinge, though not vpon the selfe same occasion, neither in the selfe same order, neither with the same words, he hath made mention of his bookes of martyrs and of the bokes he wrote of the life of 28 Pa s t B e l i e f Phamphilus almost in every booke, he reporteth the selfe same martyrdomes in diverse bookes and sundry places. As for the placing no marvell at all though he be out of order, Eusebius published not his own history but left it with his familiars.74 The Ecclesiastical History, in other words, offered many strings to pull and buttons to push. What else, a careful reader had to ask himself, had been omitted, what else could be reconstructed? Eusebius, moreover, for all his antiquity, did not enjoy anything like unchallenged authority. True, the first humanist scholars to concern themselves with the history of the early church preferred Eusebius to later writers. Nicolas of Cusa used the fact that he did not mention the Donation of Constantine as powerful evidence that it had never taken place.75 Lorenzo Valla cited Eusebius with respect, as an authoritative witness to the fact that Constantine converted to Christianity before Sylvester became pope.76 Maffeo Vegio argued bitterly in his treatise on the Basilica of Saint Peter that while most people accepted that they needed training and qualifications to practice an art, every stable-boy, druggist, and “little woman” seemed eager to offer prescriptions, and every sailor, barber, and “talkative old lady” to tell historical tales. That was how the legend had grown that images of Peter and Paul had appeared to Constantine in his sleep and converted him. In fact, though, Eusebius, “the most learned and honorable author of ecclesiastical history,” told the true story of Constantine’s vision of the cross and subsequent conversion.77 In most cases, these scholars were judging the value of Eusebius’s work in the traditional way that testimony had always been judged: the qualities of the witness determined the value of the testimony. Yet some made the case in different terms. Erasmus’s friend Beatus Rhenanus noted that he and his contemporaries would have had no access to many early Christian writers had Eusebius “not provided us with some fragments from their books.”78 For him, Eusebius deserved respect not for who he was but for what he preserved. Yet questions always seemed to arise. Beatus Rhenanus admitted that the fifth-century pope Gelasius had criticized Eusebius as an Arian heretic in his Decretum, a list of accepted and prohibited books, biblical and non-biblical, which is no longer attributed to Gelasius. Yet he insisted that a second passage, in which Gelasius declared the whole Ecclesiastical History “an apocryphal work,” “was added by some ass.”79 Melchior Cano argued that the theologian must know history, since it played so prominent a role in the theological debates between Catholics and Protestants. He lamented the condition of the history of the church: “I say in sorrow, rather than in slander, that Diogenes Laertius has written the lives of the philosophers more rigorously than Chris- A n t h o n y G r a f t on 29 tians have written the lives of the saints.” But he dismissed Rhenanus’s criticisms of the condemnation of Eusebius in the Decretum as “rude, crude and ignorant.” After all, he insisted, Eusebius had twisted facts and documents to make his story support the Arian heresy, to which Eusebius himself had adhered.80 Evidently, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the pedestal on which Eusebius stood was wobbling. Many scholars were uncertain of his good faith—and pretty much everyone agreed that his use of documents was anything but exemplary. Yet the fact that Eusebius did not provide an exact and trustworthy matrix, a set of protocols and practices that others could simply apply, may have been what made his presence so provocative. “Error can sometimes be fertile”—so A. J. P. Taylor liked to say—“but perfection is always sterile.” In the Renaissance, ancient writers who made visible errors proved very fertile indeed. Galen offered anatomists both a model of direct study through dissection and results that dissection of humans did not confirm. Ptolemy offered astronomers both a complex Aristotelian system of cosmology and models of motion that violated Aristotelian proposals. These inconsistencies provoked creative responses. So too, Eusebius’s history was fascinating above all where cracks opened and bits fell off. He provided primary documents. But some of the most vivid ones, the letters between Abgar of Edessa and Jesus, were already condemned as apocryphal in the Decretum ascribed to Gelasius, as Melchior Cano pointed out.81 Eusebius not only cited sources but also offered models of philological analysis to justify relying on them. In book II, for example, he quoted, from the Jewish writer Philo, descriptions of a group of Egyptian ascetics known as Therapeutae. Eusebius decided that they were early Christians converted by Mark. He also recorded a tradition that Philo met Peter. And he argued that it was not improbable that Philo had known and praised Christians, “for the work of which we have spoken, and which was composed by him some years later, clearly contains those rules of the Church which are even to this day observed among us” (HE 2.17.1). This argument actually raised new problems. True, it was traditional, in much Christian writing, to treat Philo as if he had almost been a Christian.82 Jerome, who learned much from Eusebius, described Philo, like Josephus and Seneca, as ecclesiastical writers. But Erasmus, who had a cultivated historical sensibility and no love of Jews, ancient or modern, found this surprising, and he said so in his edition. Jewel noted the observation with interest.83 No doubt many others did as well. When the Magdeburg Centuries were being planned, the authors wrote to Baudouin to confirm their view that Philo had not been describing Christian ascetics. “I warmly agree,” he replied, “that Philo was describing not so much Christian as Jewish 30 Pa s t B e l i e f monks.”84 The question of the Therapeutae remained controversial for decades. J. J. Grynaeus, a Basel scholar whose lectures on political and ecclesiastical history packed in large audiences, published a commentary on Eusebius in 1570. He noted with apparent approval that “Eusebius affirms that these ascetics were Christians.”85 Scaliger disagreed—and treated Eusebius’s mistake as cardinal evidence of his untrustworthiness.86 One point was clear: one could not follow Eusebius, either as a model or as a source, without sailing into philological Bermuda triangles. The modern ecclesiastical scholar had to engage with Eusebius as he had engaged with his sources: to do what he himself had done, on the much larger scale required by the long history of the church and the vast range of documentation now available, and with a more sophisticated method. Modern Eusebians, I: Big History In a lecture of 1958 on Jean Mabillon and Italy, Momigliano surveyed not individual scholars and their visions of the past but the institutions of learning that they inhabited: “There was nothing in Italy comparable with the Abbey of Saint Germain des Prés to which both Mabillon and [Bernard de] Montfaucon belonged. There was perhaps nothing comparable in any part of the world. . . . The monks were working co-operatively. Their team spirit became a legend. The healthy and the sick, the young and the old were made to contribute to the work of the house; and proof-reading was the most usual occupational therapy. The Abbey functioned as an Academy.”87 Subsequent studies have confirmed this picture of high systematization: when the Maurists set out to edit the works of Augustine, uniform red pencils were distributed to all those involved in collating manuscripts in any of the order’s houses.88 Students of the history of historical thought and work have traditionally seen the seventeenth century, as Momigliano did, as a special time— the time that saw the rise of large collaborative projects, in both the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. It was an age of academies, after all—an age in which imaginary societies of Rosicrucians and alchemists and real societies of Italian and British, French and German natural philosophers met to devise new programs of experiment and observation. No wonder, then, that it also saw the rise of the Maurists, who edited vast series of documents and lives and created the new sciences of diplomatics and paleography; of the great Jesuit dream team in Antwerp, the Bollandists, who devoted themselves to combing the spurious saints out of the underbrush of the Christian calendar; and of Protestant counterparts like the network of antiquaries, centering on William Dugdale, who created the magnificent Latin guide to England’s medieval monastic heritage, the Monasticon Anglicanum.89 A n t h o n y G r a f t on 31 Grand though these projects—and some of the teams that created them— were, they were less novel than Momigliano and others have suggested. Consider Flacius. At first he set out on a lone voyage across Europe to gather the sources of church history, from church histories to Waldensian liturgies and the trials of supposed heretics—the voyage on which he was accused, perhaps justly, of using the culter Flacianus to harvest texts that librarians would not let him copy.90 Soon, however, he realized that one scholar, working alone in the traditional manner of the secular political historian, could not possibly master and deploy all the materials for a church history. Accordingly, he floated a scheme before possible patrons and advisors—perhaps the world’s first historical grant proposal. In 1554 Flacius told the bookish Count Ottheinrich of Palatinate-Neuburg that he needed a stock of books so large that he could not list all their titles. He also wanted to create a team of four to work through these texts, breaking them down into excerpts that could in turn be stored under topical headings and worked up into a history: two researchers to find material, a “nice stylist” to write up their findings, and a secretary.91 Did he have in mind the model of those collaborative teams that Amerbach and Froben had assembled to create their big editions? When scholarship becomes collaborative, projects expand. Grantsupported projects expand infinitely. Flacius himself, rather like a modern senior life scientist, exalted as a spokesman but exiled from the bench and criticized by his collaborators, withdrew from the active composition of the history, relinquishing day-by-day control to Caspar von Nidbruck and other colleagues. The team grew almost as quickly as the leadership. By 1558 von Nidbruck and three colleagues had hired seven students to make excerpts from the sources, two MAs to assess the material and work it up into coherent form, five “inspectors” to allot the texts to be excerpted and help write and polish the final drafts, and a scribe to make fair copies, and the numbers continued to rise.92 Money was always short—perhaps the first cost overruns in the history of collaborative research. Still, critics materialized almost at once, not only in Rome but also in Wittenberg. Catholic scholars accused Flacius of stealing the money contributed by his patrons. Lutheran scholars did something even worse: they ridiculed him. Flacius and his friends described their students as carrying out public anatomies of their sources (a metaphor that Flacius himself liked to use when trying to describe rigorous textual interpretation).93 Melanchthon’s followers immediately replied that Flacius had carried out all too many literal anatomies of books. They devised an ugly set of anatomical metaphors, based on the processes of digestion, with which to describe the production of the Centuries.94 In fact, however, Flacius and his followers collected, collated, and copied plenty of manuscripts. Von Nidbruck, for example, discovered the Codex 32 Pa s t B e l i e f Carolinus, a massive collection of the correspondence of the popes with Pippin and Charlemagne, in the library of Cologne Cathedral (it is now Österreichische Nationalbibliothek MS 449). He had a copy made. Flacius himself prepared this for use, correcting lemmata and entering notes to explain what he had done (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 27.9. Aug. fol.). Flacius’s collections of documents included such now-famous texts as the Capitulare de villis, the great set of rules for the conduct of Carolingian manors.95 Collaborative scholarship based on teamwork and supported by grants— and its evil twin, furious criticism from those not in receipt of such largesse— thus began to figure in historical research as early as the sixteenth century.96 The Benedictines praised so beautifully by Momigliano knew better than Flacius how to direct their revenues to scholarly ends. In substance, however, they brilliantly used the institutions of their monastic order to expand an existing pattern of collaborative research—and to take over such tasks as the production of patristic Opera omnia from the independent publishers who had once dominated that field. Over time, ecclesiastical historians also developed formidable arrays of tools and became formidably skilled at wielding them. Matthew Parker amassed manuscripts on a scale never seen before. He hoped to prove that the Anglican church he was helping to create was not a new institution but a restoration of the pure Christianity founded in England by Joseph of Arimathea, preserved in large part by the Anglo-Saxon churches but gradually corrupted over time, first by Augustine’s mission and then by the imposition of the Norman church. Inspired in part by John Bale, in part by the Centuriators, he organized a team of scholars to publish editions of sources and compile a history of the English church and collective biography of the archbishops of Canterbury, the De antiquitate ecclesiae Britannicae, which appeared in 1572.97 With the help of his fellow bishops and others—including the Privy Council, which gave official sanction to his hunt for sources—Parker assembled a magnificent collection of medieval manuscripts. Hundreds of them, bequeathed under strict terms to Corpus Christi College Cambridge, remain there and have been made accessible around the world by a splendid digitization project based at Stanford.98 Yet the Parker Library on the Web is not the original Parker Library. Dozens of other manuscripts that Parker and his group assembled and annotated remain in other repositories, from Cambridge University Library and other college libraries and the Bodleian, to the British Library, to the Scheide Library in Princeton, which possesses a Parkerian copy of William of Malmesbury.99 Parker and his men did their best to date and identify each manuscript that came into their purview—as well as to paginate them and, sometimes, to move illustrations and bits of prose from one text to another.100 They did not A n t h o n y G r a f t on 33 always do this with the claims of strict accuracy foremost in their minds. Early in the Reformation, Protestant scholars seized upon a text, written in response to the Gregorian reform, which defended clerical marriage. Written by Ulricus, bishop of Augsburg, it was dedicated to Pope Nicholas I. Catholic scholars noticed with delight that this was impossible, since Nicholas had died in 867, while Ulricus held the see of Augsburg from 924 to 973.101 Parker frantically compiled bibliographical information in the hope of finding a more appropriate author.102 Eventually, he came upon a manuscript that ascribed the work to a different author, one Volusianus. He made this point known to friends and associates and printed the text with a preface that asserted the new theory of its authorship.103 The manuscript that Parker used is now part of a miscellany in the library of Gonville and Caius College. He had a copy made, which remains in his collection in Corpus, and he used this for his edition.104 But he told friends and informed readers that his source for the edition had been—as John Jewel put it—“written in old vellum, of very ancient record”; or, as John Foxe relayed Parker’s account, “of an old and auncient writing, bothe by the forme of the characters and by the wearing of the Parchment almost consumed by length of years and tyme.”105 It takes only the shortest of looks at the actual text in the library of Gonville and Caius College to see that it was a perfectly legible manuscript of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, excellently preserved. In this case Parker used all his resources of descriptive rhetoric to give a false impression of his source. Still, the coin has another side. Parker carefully distinguished between his Anglo- Saxon manuscripts—which he did not put into the hands of his printers—and his Anglo-Norman ones, which he did.106 His secretaries— above all John Joscelyn—did work of extraordinary depth and precision as they worked through these new texts. Joscelyn, for example, scrutinized the D text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle down to minute details, noting where it departed from its Latin sources: when the author had Caesar keep his legions in Scotland, Joscelyn explained, he was misreading his Latin source, which had them sent into winter quarters (hyberna, not Hybernia).107 More remarkably, Joscelyn supplemented this version of the Chronicle, which has a large gap early on, so skillfully that his work was printed in a scholarly edition of the text as recently as 1926.108 Gradually Parker and his men came to appreciate Anglo-Norman authors. Parker or his spokesman wrote appreciatively, in the preface to his edition of Matthew Paris, of Matthew’s qualities as a bookman: He was extremely skillful at his very elegant and shapely script, of the form called Textualis, and at the exquisite depiction of events in their true form 34 Pa s t B e l i e f and in perfect proportion. . . . He left a fine specimen of his artistry in the first copy of his history, written with his own hand, in which he often depicted for the eye the very stories that he had told in words, giving a neat and lively image of the things he mentioned.109 Parker promised that “We will preserve all of this diligently, to give the contents of this work greater authority.” He also praised Matthew for adding “the heraldic insignia of the various princes, in their proper forms and colors”—a practice that he emulated in his own account of the antiquity of the British church.110 Parker had the presentation copies of his books that he destined for the good and the great illuminated in varied ways. The surviving ones represent a fascinating effort to endow printed books with something of the visual appeal that he and his assistants had learned to appreciate in medieval manuscripts. Flowers, fish, and a very lifelike shrimp—labeled “A shrimpe 1573”—in a presentation copy of one of Parker’s editions reveal that Parker liked the Flemish trompe l’oeil style of illumination as much as Matthew Paris’s elephant.111 Parker and his men must have discussed and classified many different scripts, on many occasions. Even when they engaged in practices that now look shady, they displayed a considerable knowledge of and a well-developed sensibility for the varieties of writing, the ways in which they changed over time, and the aesthetic principles that regulated a good Gothic Textualis every bit as much as they did humanist minuscule. Most striking of all is Parker’s fourteenth-century manuscript of Gervase of Tilbury. Facing the first recto, one of his men has supplied a transcription of the heavily abbreviated text. Its title reads: “For the benefit of those who have not had practice with abbreviations like these, which the ancients used.”112 Long before Mabillon, ecclesiastical scholars were experimenting with the forms of presentation and exposition that the Maurists brought into the public realm of print. Similar experimentation was going on elsewhere: from England, where Henry Spelman tried to work out the history of Latin scripts a generation after Parker, to the Escorial, where Spanish scholars planned—but did not carry out—to create a dossier of datable manuscripts and use their scripts to re-create the history and chronology of writing.113 To view Mabillon and Montfaucon in the light of these earlier experiments is to see that their work derived in part from the older world of ecclesiastical scholarship. The effort to emulate and replace Eusebius led naturally both to the collaborative forms of scholarship that the Bollandists and Maurists also practiced and to their efforts to turn the history of manuscripts into a formal art. There is some further irony here. Twentieth-century scholarship has stressed the fact that Eusebius himself practiced big scholarship, for his day.114 A n t h o n y G r a f t on 35 An impresario of scribes and a builder of archives, he assembled an impressive team of skillful artisans. When Constantine needed fifty large pandect bibles for the new churches of Constantinople, he turned to Eusebius to produce them—even though that meant he had to send the necessary skins all the way to Caesarea, by the cursus publicus, and have the books sent back. Neither Flacius nor Mabillon, nor those between, had any reason to realize that when they built their teams and networks, Eusebius was their model, as he was when they collected and assessed documents. Yet he was present, in spirit. Eusebian Dreams Matthew Parker made clear that he was a dedicated follower of Eusebius when he suggested to the Magdeburg Centuriators that they should be more consistent about printing entire primary sources, rather than sometimes offering only references.115 But he also found inspirations in Eusebius that moderns might not. In 1566 Parker printed the Easter sermon of the erudite tenthcentury cleric Aelfric, in the original Anglo-Saxon, with a facing English translation. He hoped to show that Aelfric had denied transubstantiation and accepted clerical marriage—and thus confirmed a major Anglican doctrine and practice. Only a few scholarly adepts, some of whom worked for Parker, could actually judge this edition and translation. In order to guarantee its accuracy, Parker held a conference with his bishops, went through the whole text and translation, and had them sign an attestation of their correctness. His edition included his name, that of the Archbishop of York, and those of thirteen bishops. It has long been known that this operation involved a certain pathos. For Parker silently omitted the names of two of the original signatories.116 So much for Parker’s effort to use the new medium of print to provide a new form of proof that no critic could deny. More important, for our purposes, is that Parker here revived an ancient practice of authentication described by Eusebius. Eusebius tells us that Serapion, bishop of Antioch, wrote a letter to Caricus and Pontius, denouncing the Phrygian heresy. In the same letter of Serapion the signatures of several bishops are found, one of whom subscribes himself as follows: I, Aurelius Cyrenius, a witness, pray for you to be well. And another in this manner: Ælius Publius Julius, bishop of Debeltum, a colony of Thrace. As God lives in the heavens, the blessed Sotas in Anchialus wished to cast the demon out of Priscilla, but the hypocrites did not permit him. And the autograph signatures of many other bishops who agreed with them are contained in the letter, which has been exhibited. So much for these persons. (HE 5.19.3–4) 36 Pa s t B e l i e f Though Parker never said so, he emulated Eusebius when he created his own list of signatures to substantiate a polemical statement—as opposed to the charters that appeared with long lists of signatories in medieval chronicles, and the canons of ancient church councils, which also came equipped with stately lists of those who had passed them.117 New Wine in Old Bottles? Tradition, Irritation, and Inspiration Eusebius, perhaps, was never more suggestive than when his readers did not see that he was leading them. Flacius had little good to say about Eusebius. He complained from the start, in fact, that existing church historians were inadequate because they concentrated on sentimental portraits of individual holy men and women: “The ecclesiastical histories that now exist concern themselves chiefly with describing and praising individuals. They tell us what sort of person, and how holy, someone was, what a marvelous life he led, how much he fasted and prayed, what miracles he carried out alive or dead.” By contrast, he pointed out, “they show hardly any interest in doctrine”—which, for Flacius, had to be the center of any proper history of the church.118 He made clear—first, in 1554, to his potential patron Ottheinrich, and then to all the readers of the first volume of the history he had organized—that the chief target of his criticism was Eusebius.119 Cesare Baronio agreed with Flacius about very little: his Annales, which began to appear in 1588, were regarded by many—even many Protestants—as a largely successful effort to crush the Protestant church history under the weight of the vast accumulation of documents preserved in the Vatican Library and other Catholic repositories. But he too dismissed Eusebius—not for discussing the wrong issues but simply because “he lied” in order to support the Arian heresy he adhered to and to please his Arian patron, Constantius.120 One aspect of the new church history, moreover, seems at first sight particularly distant from Eusebius. The study of the Christian past—as it took shape in the sixteenth century—bore on every aspect of Christian practice in the present, from the vestments priests wore to the liturgies that they performed. Sources that do not now read as eminently historical supplied rich information on these questions. The massive thirteenth-century Rationale divinorum officiorum of Guillaume Durand, bishop of Mende in Languedoc, for example, offered detailed accounts of every aspect of church architecture and ritual. In 1499 the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil had issued a neat little work in three books on the inventors of everything from religion and obelisks to printing—a subject that fascinated his contemporaries, keen to work out whether possessing the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press really A n t h o n y G r a f t on 37 made them superior to the ancients. More than two decades later, he added five new books. In these he traced the history of Christianity, feature by feature. Church and mass, liturgy and vestments all found places in his work, and Durand and other ecclesiastical sources provided much of his core evidence. Polydore’s compilation fascinated readers—especially Protestant readers, anxious to show that the church had introduced innovations without biblical sanction into worship and religious life. In the 1540s, controversy spread about how far Protestants could accept traditional observances. Philipp Melanchthon argued that many points of practice were “adiaphora,” “things indifferent,” and supported the 1548 Augsburg Interim, an effort at religious peacemaking that would have required Protestant ministers to restore a large number of Catholic observances. Flacius—who violently rejected Melanchthon’s views and became the leader of the “Gnesio-Lutheran” or “genuine Lutheran” party—responded by translating Polydore’s treatment of the Mass into German and printing it with commentary. He noted that Catholics could hardly refuse to accept the testimony of one of their own that the Mass was a late creation.121 Through the 1540s Thomas Cranmer was struggling to reform the English church order against the opposition of Stephen Gardiner and others. He had his secretaries copy the Latin original of Polydore’s chapter into one of the Great Commonplace Books that he compiled in the 1540s.122 Cranmer also studied Polydore’s sources. Durand traced a story of the evolution of the Mass, from primitive variety to mature uniformity: “In the early church, different men sang different things, each as he liked, so long as they sang only things that pertained to the praise of God.” From the start, all services included the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed. Over time, however, the rise of heresies made it necessary for the papacy to impose uniformity on the Mass, and Ambrose, Gelasius, and Gregory gradually filled it out. Cranmer read this passage with close attention, underlining parts of it and jotting down key terms in the margin.123 He certainly did not approve of all features of Durand’s text. A dramatic account of how God guided the decision to use the Gregorian Mass throughout the world but retain the Ambrosian in Milan sparked a sharply critical remark: “ffabula de officio Gregoriano & Ambrosiano” (an invention about the Gregorian and Ambrosian office).124 But he learned, probably from Polydore, how to read Durand’s work against the grain and draw on it for his own liturgical purposes. So did others with whom he disagreed sharply. In 1550, when John Hooper refused to be consecrated a bishop if he would have to wear the traditional “Aaronic” vestments based not on Scripture but on the practices of Jewish priests, he cited the evidence assembled by Polydore Vergil to support his position.125 When the Vestiarian Debate revived in the 1560s, both opponents and supporters of traditional vestments would continue to cite the evidence compiled by Polydore and 38 Pa s t B e l i e f Durand.126 Research about the early church, in other words, took shape in a constant dialectical interplay with the development of modern churches: each shaped the other. Some—including Cranmer—did their best to draw information about the customs of the early church from Eusebius. In book 5, he described how one Natalius, bishop of a heretical group, was scourged by angels overnight and repented. In the morning, he covered himself in sackcloth and ashes and prostrated himself before an orthodox bishop. “This,” Cranmer wrote in his copy, “is the form of confession and penitence that the ancients used.”127 Hanmer told readers of Eusebius that he would show them “the Bishops hovve they governed, Ministers hovv they taught, Synodes vvhat they decreed, Ceremonies hovv they crept into the Church, Heresies hovv they rise and were rooted out.”128 Hanmer’s vision of these changing rituals was chiefly critical. But Grynaeus seemingly showed a little more sympathy when he noted that Eusebius described the “life, customs, studies, homes, meetings and scriptural interpretations” of the ascetic Therapeutae.129 Perhaps, Flacius and Cranmer really learned from reading Eusebius, as well as from reading Polydore Vergil, to see that the Christian past had been a different country. Yet they needed far more and richer materials than Eusebius had collected in these realms—if they were to bring the early church back to life in a form vivid and three-dimensional enough to serve as a pattern for their own churches. Flacius insisted, when his friend and ally Caspar von Nidbruck opposed him, that the new history had to describe not only doctrines, lives, and works but also something more: “You write that ceremonies and church music are irrelevant to us. But we definitely want to show not only what doctrines existed in the church, but also what ceremonies and songs, though briefly, for all of these things were connected with one another.”130 He had his way. As the Magdeburg history took shape, the excerpts from sources collected for each century were laid out under systematic headings. One of these was “ceremonies.” Over time, to be sure, the continuators of Flacius’s own enterprise did relatively little to pursue this segment of his interests. Once they fell out with him and extruded him from the enterprise entirely, they drafted a massive argument in favor of sticking to some of the very traditions he had denounced. Flacius himself, however, kept on collecting evidence of many kinds. He did pioneering work on the history of the liturgy, collecting many texts of the Mass, one of which he published, and setting himself in dialogue with the irenic Catholic George Cassander (whose own anthology of early texts of the Mass began, strikingly, with the Jewish Passover ritual).131 Like Matthew Parker, he also gathered and published evidence that proved that vernacular Bible had been in use long before the Reformation.132 The forms of research A n t h o n y G r a f t on 39 that Flacius developed—and that Catholic scholars would push much farther than he did in the next century—represented a fundamental departure from anything Eusebius had envisioned. A Question of Quality How well did the modern ecclesiastical historians practice their craft? Well enough to entertain contradictory ideas and still function. Consider, once again, Matthew Parker. In the 1560s, he argued vehemently that the church had been at its simple best in its early centuries. Over time, however, as we have seen, he collected, studied, and issued editions of a number of Norman Latin sources. And as he read them, his sympathies shifted, in part. When Parker began to study the past, he disliked the great monasteries, which he saw as centers for the diffusion of the corrupt traditions that had entered the land with the Normans and grew floridly thereafter in both power and wealth. Reading through his manuscripts, moreover, he found what he saw as evidence that monastic scholars had deliberately corrupted texts in order to falsify the history of the church. His copy of Rabanus Maurus’s work De universo, for example, skipped a key passage at the point where the author treated the sacraments (V.11). A marginal note stated that “there is material missing here, apparently by the deliberate action of the scribe.” One of Parker’s men entered the relevant passage in the margin.133 In the works of the erudite twelfth-century scholar and chronicler William of Malmesbury, Parker found what he took as further evidence that the change was intentional. The passage from William was copied in the margin of Parker’s Rabanus manuscript as well.134 In 1570, in the preface to one of his editions of medieval historical texts, Parker (or one of his servants) described these changes at length and interpreted them as evidence of a massive Catholic effort to poison the wells of history.135 Yet Parker also came to appreciate the sturdy independence of Matthew Paris and other monastic writers—as well as the visual appeal of their books. More important, perhaps, he underwent criticism, as Flacius did, for the vast sums he spent, in part on having other people do scholarly work.136 As Parker went on looking through his manuscripts, he came to see the monastic culture of Norman England, in which they had come into being, in a much more positive light. The monks, after all, had been learned men who produced, collected, and guarded manuscripts. They had also written serious histories. In his manuscript of the fifteenth-century Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, he read that every British monastery—especially that of St. Albans—had systematically compiled historical notes, woven these into chronicles, and preserved them in their archives—rather as if they had been so many Matthew 40 Pa s t B e l i e f Parkers.137 In his 1571 edition of Matthew Paris, Parker laid out this material, in as much detail as he had told the story of Rabanus Maurus—as if to show readers as vividly as possible that judging the monastic world of Norman England was not a simple task.138 Evidently, Parker could see the past from multiple angles. Early modern ecclesiastical scholarship, though less centered on Eusebius himself than Momigliano believed, was as independent of other traditions and as inventive as he argued. 244 Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 13. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, 2000). 14. Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 15. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1983). 16. See, for example, David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 17. The most eloquent exponent of this position is Rajeev Bhargava, “What Is Secularism For?” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Bhargava (Oxford, 1998), 486–542. In the United States, there is a way of thinking, “common ground secularism,” that understands secularism not as a repudiation of faith but as an outgrowth of Christian values, as a form of attenuated Protestantism. For common ground secularism, see Linnell E. Cady, “Rethinking Secularism through a Theological Lens,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, ed. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (New York, 2010), 248. 18. Charles Taylor, “Western Secularity,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, 31–53. 19. Talal Asad, “Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitation,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, 282. Chapter 1 This is a first map—and one of far lower than Google quality—of a vast and rough terrain. References, as will be obvious, have been held to a minimum. For guidance to recent scholarship, see Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford, 2012). Warm thanks to the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, for the award of a senior research fellowship in 2015 and 2016; to my teachers, Eric Cochrane and Arnaldo Momigliano; and to Adam Beaver, Harald Bollbuck, Simon Ditchfield, Nick Hardy, Bertram Lesser, Dmitri Levitin, Greg Lyon, Madeline McMahon, Scott Mandelbrote, Katrina Olds, Nick Popper, Richard Serjeantson, and Joanna Weinberg for advice and criticism. 1. Thomas Platter, Autobiography, in Paul Monroe, Thomas Platter and the Educational Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1904), 138; Thomas und Felix Platter: Zur Sittengeschichte des XVI. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinrich Boos (Leipzig, 1878), 39–40. Platter refers to the salutations in Romans 16. 2. Silvia Ginzburg Carignani, Annibale Carracci a Roma: Gli affreschi di Palazzo Farnese (Rome, 2000), 111–15. 3. See esp. Helge Gamrath, Roma Sancta Renovata: Studi sull’urbanistica di Roma nella seconda metà del sec. XVI con particolare riferimento al pontificato di Sisto V (1585–1590) (Rome, 1987); Carmelo Occhipinti, Pirro Ligorio e la storia Cristiana di Roma: Da Costantino all’umanesimo (Pisa, 2007); Ingo Herklotz, La Roma degli antiquari: Cultura e erudizione tra Cinquecento e Settecento (Rome, 2012) and Apes urbanae: Eruditi, mecenati ed artisti nella Roma del Seicento (Città di Castello, 2017); Herklotz’s essays in John Osborne and Amanda Claridge, Early Christian and Medieval Antiquities, vol. 2, Mosaics and Wallpaintings in Roman Churches, Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 245 Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, series A, 1 (London, 1996) and in Ingo Herklotz and Amanda Claridge, Classical Manuscript Illumination, Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, series A, 6 (London, 2012). 4. See the exemplary edition in the I Tatti Renaissance Library: Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA, 2007), with bibliography. For Valla’s interest in the history of Christianity, see esp. Salvatore Camporeale, Christianity, Latinity and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, trans. Patrick Baker, ed. Patrick Baker and Christopher Celenza (Leiden, 2014). 5. See Glenn Most, “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik: Zur Konstitution der Neuzeitlichkeit,” Antike und Abendland 30 (1984): 62–79; Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof (Hanover, NH, 1999); and, more generally, Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, 1997). 6. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 118–19; see in general 118–33. Valla argues that the pagan Romans were less given to inventing miraculous stories than were Christians. 7. Jean Mabillon and Michel Germain, “Iter Italicum,” in Museum Italicum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1724), 1:217. 8. “Sacramentarium Gallicanum,” in Museum Italicum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1724), 1:273–97. See The Bobbio Missal: Liturgy and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Rob Meens (Cambridge, 2004), esp. Hen, “Introduction: The Bobbio Missal—from Mabillon Onwards,” 1–18. 9. Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI (Paris, 1681). For an expert recent discussion, see Alfred Hiatt, “Diplomatic Arts: Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 3 ( July 2009): 351–73. 10. See the documents printed by Leonard Doucette, Emery Bigot: Seventeenth-Century French Humanist (Toronto, 1970), 94–95. 11. Giovanni Bona, De rebus liturgicis (Rome, 1671). For Mabillon’s fascinating exchanges with him—which involved much reflection on the nature and limits of historical evidence—see Mabillon, Dissertatio de pane eucharistico, azymo ac fermentato, ad Eminentiss. Cardinalem Bona, in Vetera analecta, new ed. (Paris, 1723), and their letters in Jean Mabillon and Thierry Ruinart, Ouvrages posthumes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1724; repr. Farnborough, 1967), vol. 1. 12. See Owen Chadwick, “Gibbon and the Church Historians,” Daedalus 105, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 111–23. For the prominence of ecclesiastical scholarship in his source base, see also I. W. J. Machin, “Gibbon’s Debt to Contemporary Scholarship,” Review of English Studies 15, no. 57 ( January 1939): 84–88. 13. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315, repr. in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 67–106. 14. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method,” Historia 2 (1954): 450–63, repr. in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), 40–55. 15. Some of the most important studies include: Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995); Jean-Louis Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquités romaines (Rome, 1996); Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano Dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1999); Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2000); Miller, Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History 246 Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 in the Seventeenth Century (Farnham, 2012); William Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (London, 2005); and Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2010). 16. See Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter Miller (Toronto, 2007). 17. Markus Völkel, “Pyrrhonismus historicus” und “fides historica”: Die Entwicklung der deutschen historischen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (Frankfurt, 1987), and “Historischer Pyrrhonismus und Antiquarismus-Konzeption bei Arnaldo Momigliano,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 31, no. 2 (Sonderheft Historischer Pyrrhonismus) (2007): 179–90. Carlo Ginzburg rebutted the latter article in a public lecture on Momigliano at the Primo Levi Center, New York, on December 8, 2016. 18. Kelsey Jackson Williams, “Antiquarianism: A Reinterpretation,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2 (2017): 56–96. 19. Quoted by Anthony Grafton, What Was History? (Cambridge, 2007), 131. 20. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newton, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1987), 4. 21. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.n. “Parker, Matthew,” by David Crankshaw and Alexandra Gillespie. 22. For an example, see Morgan Library, Literary and Historical Manuscripts—Bound, MA 674: a note from Parker to the bishop of Norwich (“as for the Anabaptiste if he suffers his children to be christined and will recant before his owne people and becum a true man yow maie release him: and order him as yow see cause”). 23. Simon Ditchfield, “Text before Trowel: Antonio Bosio’s Roma Sotteranea Revisited,” Studies in Church History 33 (1997): 343–60; “Reading Rome as a Sacred Landscape ca. 1586– 1635,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge, 2005), 167–92; Herklotz, La Roma degli antiquari; Madeline McMahon, “Representing Material Evidence: The Catacombs in Print,” https://jhiblog.org/2016/03/28/representing-material -evidence-the-catacombs-in-print/. 24. Passio sanctarum martyrum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, ed. Lucas Holstenius (Rome, 1663). 25. Trevor Johnson, “Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter-Reformation in Bavaria,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 274–97; Paul Koudounaris, Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs (New York, 2013); Noria Litaker, “Embodied Faith: Whole-Body Catacomb Saints in the Duchy of Bavaria, 1598–1803” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2017). 26. Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten: Ein wissenschaftshistorischer Versuch (Tübingen, 2009). 27. The fullest and most enlightening study of Eusebius’s work and thought remains T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1984). 28. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963), 79–99, repr. in Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 2 vols. (Rome, 1966), 1:87–109. For the development of Momigliano’s work in this area, see Anthony Grafton, “Arnaldo Momigliano and the Tradition of Ecclesiastical History,” in The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Tim Cornell and Oswyn Murray (London, 2014), 53–76. And for a more detailed treatment of the Renaissance revival of Eusebius, see Anthony Grafton, “Mixed Mes- Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 247 sages: The Early Modern Reception of Eusebius as a Church Historian,” to appear in International Journal of the Classical Tradition. 29. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990), 148. 30. Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography,” 101. 31. Ibid. 32. Tamara Griggs, private communication with the author. 33. Bruno Neveu, Un historien à l’école de Port-Royal: Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, 1637– 1698 (The Hague, 1966), and Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1994); Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, 1995); Jean-Louis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les pères de l’Eglise: Un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris, 1999), and The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009). 34. See esp. Dmitri Levitin, “From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism and Christianity in European Historiography from Reformation to ‘Enlightenment,’ ” Historical Journal 55, no. 4 (2012): 1117–60; Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015); and William Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015). 35. Johannes Burchardus, Diarium, ed. L. Thuasne, vol. 2, (1492–1499) (Paris, 1884), 521–22. 36. Maffeo Vegio, De rebus antiquis memorabilibus Basilicae S. Petri Romae, II.3 (Vat. lat. 3750, 26 recto, printed in Acta sanctorum for June VII): “tantam Deus virtutem præstitit, ut qui a dæmonibus arrepti sint, apud eam divinis habitis supplicationibus liberentur: quod multis iam certis magnisque exemplis compertum habemus.” On Vegio and his work, see Fabio Della Schiava, “ ‘Sicuti traditum est a maioribus’: Maffeo Vegio antiquario tra fonti classiche e medievali,” Aevum 84, no. 3 (2010): 617–39. 37. Printed by Michele Cerrati, in his commentary on Tiberio Alfarano, De Basilicae Vaticanae antiquissima et nova structura, ed. Cerrati (Rome, 1914), 56. 38. See esp. Lex Bosman, The Power of Tradition: Spolia in the Architecture of St. Peter’s in the Vatican (Hilversum, 2004). 39. E.g., the Carolingian Einsiedeln Itinerary, MS Einsiedeln 346 (1076). 40. Vegio I.1, Vat. lat. 3750, 2 verso: “Quorum characteres longe vetusti, peneque dixerim decrepiti, nullum etiam aliud, quam Constantini tempus, quo ibi conscripti sint, manifeste arguere videntur. Sunt & in alio arcu absidæ super altare maius aliæ litteræ, quæ negligentius habitæ, maiore ex parte corruerunt; sed ex paucis earum, quæ vix adhuc legi possunt, deprehenduntur, licet non integra, verba hæc, Constantini expiata hostili incursione.” 41. T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950); see the recent study by Tina Meganck, Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) (Leiden, 2017). 42. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 76–79. 43. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria VII.13 (Florence, 1485), sig. [r v recto–verso]. 44. Morgan Library, PML 44056 ChL 1108b. 45. Ibid., sig. [r v recto]. 46. Ibid., sig. [r v verso]. 248 Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 47. Raphael Volaterranus, Commentariorum urbanorum . . . octo et triginta libri (Basel, 1559), 539: “In basilica Petri quod pauci animadvertunt, supra arcum qui est in medio fere templo, huiuscemodi versus antiquissimo in opere museo adhuc leguntur: Quod duce te mundus surrexit in astra triumphans, Hanc Constantinus victor tibi condidit aulam.” 48. Ibid.: “Libellus autem apocryphus de elephantia, deque sanguine puerorum, & Sylvestri baptismate, quum manifeste a nostrorum doctorum quos adlegavi authoritate dissentiat, omnino reijciendus.” 49. Ibid.: “De dono eius, aut concessione, apud nullos extat authores, praeterquam in libro Decretorum: idque in antiquis voluminib. minime contineri, author est Antoninus praesul Florentinus in chronicis. Quod valde miror, quum Isidorus qui fuit abhinc annos prope DCCC. gravis author & plane sanctus: in historia sua aperte dicat eum urbe Roma pontifici cessisse, ornamentisque omnibus imperialibus, diademate videlicet, habituque & albo equo quo vectetur.” 50. Carol Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor, 1998). 51. John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976), 71–74. 52. On saints’ lives, see Alison Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2005). 53. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993), 116. 54. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 120–21. 55. Cora Lutz, “The Letter of Lentulus Describing Christ,” Yale University Library Gazette 50, no. 2 (October 1975): 91–97, at 93. 56. Baudouin to the Centuriators, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, MS Guelf. 11.20 Aug. 2°, fols. 138 recto–verso, reiterated in summary form in the “Regulae Balduini,” ibid., MS Guelf. 11.20 Aug. 2°, fol. 39 verso. Both texts are available, like a vast amount of further material, in an indispensable digital resource, “Historical Method and Working Techniques of the Magdeburg Centuriators,” compiled by Harald Bollbuck with Carsten Nahrendorf and Inga Hanna Ralle, at the Herzog August Bibliothek (http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000086/start.html). 57. Hugh de Quehen, “Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy,” Seventeenth Century 13 (1998): 69–84. 58. Ecclesiastica historia I (Basel, 1560), 353–54. 59. Juan Luis Vives, De causis corruptarum artium II, in De disciplinis libri xx (Cologne, 1536), 97–99. 60. Melchior Cano, Loci theologici XI.6, in Opera, ed. Hyacinthus Serry (Padua, 1762), 287– 304. For Erasmus, see 297, 299. 61. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, praefatio, 2–3; V.24.2. For Bede’s sources and his use of them, see André Crépin, introduction, in Bede, Histoire ecclésiastique du peuple anglais (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), ed. Michael Lapidge, trans. Pierre Monat and Philippe Robin, I (Paris, 2005), 38–41. On Nothhelm, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Nothhelm,” by William Hunt, revised by Henry Mayr-Harting. 62. Ingulf, Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, trans. Henry Riley (London, 1908), 201 (slightly altered); original text in Rerum Anglicarum scriptorum veterum tom. I (Oxford, 1684), Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 249 97–98, at 98: “Praecedentibus autem paucis annis gratiose assumens de Cartaria quaedam Chirographa manu Saxonica exarata, eo quod eadem duplicata et quaedam triplicata habumus, tradideram ea Cantori nostro Domino Fulmaro in Claustro conservanda, pro juniorum doctrina ad manum Saxonicam addiscendam, quoniam talis litera a longo tempore, causa Normannorum jam neglecta viluerat, et jam nisi paucis senioribus erat agnita: ut juniores instructi legere hanc literam, in suo senio fierent aptiores ad monumenta sui Monasterii contra suos adversarios alleganda. Quae Chirographa quoniam in Claustro in quodam veteri scrinio per Ecclesiae parietem circumcluso fuerant reposita, solummodo salvata sunt et ab incendio conservata. Haec jam principalia sunt et praecipua nostra monumenta, quae quondam secundaria et seposita, causa barbarae literae fuerant jam a longo levipensa et despecta.” On the forgeries in the Croyland Chronicle, see Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London, 2004), chap. 3. 63. Ibid., chap. 4. 64. Johannes Trithemius, Tomus I [–II] Annalium Hirsaugiensium, 2 vols. (Saint Gallen, 1690); Compendium sive breviarium primi voluminis annalium sive historiarum de origine regum et gentis Francorum (Paris, 1539). In the latter work, see esp. 111: “Et quia nunc assertionem hanc nostram magis cognovimus esse veram, ex confictis et ineptissimis literis quas in praedicto Monasterio Erphurdiano vidimus nullo munitas sigillo cuiuscunque et legimus sub nomine Dagoberti et rescripsimus, ne quis falsitatis nos argueret, operae precium fore duximus, si earundem litterarum exemplar cum aliis rationibus nostrae assertioni coniungamus.” The text appears on 111–13, and Trithemius’s technical arguments for its spuriousness on 113–14. He notes, for example, that the original of the document in Erfurt had no seal, “licet foramen appareat in charta quasi prae antiquitate nimia sigillum decidisset” (113). On Trithemius as a scholar, see Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 56–78. 65. Ioannes Nauclerus [and N. Baselius], Memorabilium omnis aetatis et omnium gentium chronici commentarii, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1516). 66. Peutinger’s copy is in the New York Society Library, shelf-mark Z-Fl N2894 C3. For detailed notes on a charter, see I, fol. CXXV recto–verso, and for a full account, see Anthony Grafton, “Reading History: Konrad Peutinger and the Chronicle of Nauclerus,” in Gesammeltes Gedächtnis: Konrad Peutinger und die kulturelle Überlieferung im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Reinhard Laube and Helmut Zäh (Luzern, 2016), 18–25. 67. For Cranmer’s books, see David Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996). On his ways as a reader, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996), 26–31. 68. Thomas Cranmer, notes in Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica with De vita Constantini, Socrates, Theodoret, Sozomen, and Evagrius, 2 pts. (Paris, 1544), British Library C.79.g.4, I, fol. 6 recto–verso; fol. 16 recto–verso. 69. Ibid., fols. 37 recto, 44 verso. 70. Ibid., fol. 41 verso, on 4.23.10: “Vetustissima Romanae ecclesiae traditio, quae hodie obsolevit.” 71. Jewel’s copy of the 1544 Greek Eusebius is in Magdalen College Oxford, Old Library e.8.1. For source notes see, e.g., on 1.18.2.2.: “τὰ τοῦ φίλωνος συγγράμματα”; on 2.25.8: “διονύσιος ὁ Κορινθίων ἐπίσκο.” 250 Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 72. Cranmer, notes in his 1544 Eusebius, I, fols. 39 verso: “liber Eusebii de antiquis martyribus”; 44 recto: “significare videtur Eusebius opus suum de antiquis martyribus, cuius ante etiam meminit.” 73. British Library MS Harley 1860, fol. 5r-v. The text of Bassett’s preface has been edited by Jaime Goodrich, “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clarke Bassett’s Translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History [with text],” English Literary Renaissance 40 (2010): 301–28; for this passage see 324–35. On this version, see Eugenio Olivares Merino, “Mary Roper Clarke Bassett and Meredith Hanmer’s Honorable Ladie of the Lande,” Sederi 17 (2007): 75–91; and Sarah Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 161–66. 74. The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories of the First Six Hundred Yeares after Christ, trans. Meredith Hanmer (London, 1577), 157. 75. Riccardo Fubini, “Humanism and Truth: Valla Writes against the Donation of Constantine,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 79–86. 76. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 54–55. 77. Vegio, De rebus antiquis memorabilibus Basilicae S. Petri Romae I.1, Vat. lat. 3750, 6 recto–verso. 78. Autores historiae ecclesiasticae, ed. Beatus Rhenanus (Basel, 1528), sig. aa 2 recto. 79. Ibid., sig. aa2 verso. See Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, ed. Ernst von Dobschütz (Leipzig, 1912), 46, 55. 80. Cano, Loci theologici, 258, 302–3. 81. Ibid., 302. 82. See Joanna Weinberg, “The Quest for Philo in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Historiography,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein (London, 1988), 163–87; and Jan Machielsen, “Sacrificing Josephus to Save Philo: Cesare Baronio and the Jewish Origins of Christian Monasticism,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23, no. 3 (2016): 239–45. 83. Magdalen College Oxford, e.12.10, I, 307. Erasmus wrote: “Nonnihil demiror, quid Hieronymus hic senserit, cum Philonem ponere non sit veritus Iudaeum non Christianum, et item Iosephum, et nonnullos haeresiarchas. Cur vocat catalogum sanctorum?” Jewel commented: “Philo sanctus . . . En Iosephus sanctus . . . Seneca sanctus.” 84. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, MS Guelf. 11.20 Aug. 2°, fol. 145 verso. 85. J. J. Grynaeus, Ecclesiastica historia (Basel, 1570), prooemium and commentary on II.17, 25: “Hos ascetas Christianos fuisse astruit Eusebius.” 86. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983–93), 2:299–301. For a fuller study of this mind-bendingly complex story, see Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Scholarship and Demonology in the Counter-Reformation (Oxford, 2015), 335–40, and “Sacrificing Josephus to Save Philo.” 87. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Mabillon’s Italian Disciples,” Terzo contributo, 1:135–36. 88. See the studies collected in Troisième centenaire de l‘édition Mauriste de Saint Augustin: Communications présentées au colloque des 19 et 20 avril 1990 (Paris, 1990). 89. For brief but rewarding treatments of the first two of these groups, see David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), as well as the immense and richly informative work of Sawilla; for the third, see Alexandra Walsham, The Refor- Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 251 mation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), chaps. 1–4. 90. On Flacius, see, most recently, Martina Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 2001); Oliver Olson, Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (Wiesbaden, 2002); and, above all, Harald Bollbuck, Wahrheitszeugnis, Gottes Auftrag und Zeitkritik: Die Kirchengeschichte der Magdeburger Zenturien und ihre Arbeitstechniken (Wiesbaden, 2014). Bertram Lesser has found new evidence that Flacius retained stolen manuscripts in the course of recataloguing the Helmstedt MSS of the Herzog August Bibliothek. 91. Flacius, “Consultatio de conscribenda historia ecclesiae,” in Karl Schottenloher, Pfalzgraf Ottheinrich und das Buch: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der evangelischen Publizistik (Münster in Westf., 1927), 154. 92. See the description in De ecclesiastica historia quae Magdeburgi contexitur narratio (Wittenberg, 1558), [A iiij verso]–B recto. 93. Flacius, De ratione cognoscendi sacras literas, ed. and trans. Lutz Geldsetzer (Düsseldorf, 1968), 98–101. 94. Narratio, F recto–verso. 95. See Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik; and Martina Hartmann and Arno Mentzel-Reuters, Die “Magdeburger Centurien” und die Anfänge der quellenbezogenen Geschichtsforschung: Eine Ausstellung der Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Katalog (Munich, 2005). 96. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Gregory Lyon, “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 253–72; Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, 98–113. 97. See, in general, Timothy Graham and Andrew Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, 1998); Graham, “Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts: An Elizabethan Library and Its Uses,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2006), vol. 2; and Madeline McMahon, “Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History,” to appear in Erudition and Confessionalism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin (Oxford, forthcoming). 98. See the Parker Library on the Web, http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/actions /page.do?forward=home. 99. Scheide Library, Princeton, MS 159. 100. R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books (Kalamazoo, MI, 1993). 101. See Erwin Frauenknecht, Die Verteidigung der Priesterehe in der Reformzeit (Hannover, 1997); Catherine Hall, “The One-Way Trail: Some Observations on CCC MS 101 and G&CC MS 427,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11, no. 3 (1998): 272–85; and Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” (Cambridge, 2011), 150–52. 102. Gonville and Caius College Cambridge MS 427/427, 98–99. 103. See Parker’s note, ibid., 99, where he underlines the words “sancti Odalrici” and writes: “volusiani carthaginensis / ut in antiquo codice manuscripto. ut postea”; and Parker’s publication: Epistolae duae d. Volusiani Episcopi Carthaginensis (London, 1569). 104. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 101. 252 Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 105. In his preface, Parker writes: “Ita nos ex codice (antiquissimi exemplaris) manuscripto, adiuti, et diligenti perscrutatione hac in re usi, malo dolo substitutum hunc Huldericum amovimus, et hoc scriptum Volusiano Episcopo Carthaginensi, vero et indubitato authori rursus ascripsimus. Nam et temporum ratio, et ipsius Volusiani verba, exemplari nostro (ante scripto, quam Guilielmus primus huius regni tenuit gubernacula) idipsum postulare videntur” (aij verso). For Foxe, see Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England; for Jewel, see his Works, ed. J. W. Jelf, IV, London 1862, 615–16; VI, 255. 106. McMahon, “Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History.” 107. British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B IV, fol. 3 verso: “Quae continentur in hoc folio sunt omnia ad verbum translata e primis duobus capitibus ecclesiasticae historiae Bedae. sed autor primus, quisquis fuit, huius historiae, minime videtur intellexisse hunc apud Bedam latine loquendi modum, scilicet legiones in Hyberna dimisit. nam haec verba in hunc modum facit anglica. ¶ þa he forlet his here gebidan mid Scottum, id est, tum autem permisit ut suae copiae vel suus exercitus remaneret apud scottos, hoc est in Hybernia, cuius incollae sunt Scotti. Similitudo horum verborum Hybernia et Hyberna decepit hominem.” Joscelyn did not raise the question whether the author’s text of Bede’s history, 1.2, might have read “Hybernia.” 108. An Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. E. Classen and F. E. Harmer (Manchester, 1926); see Angelika Lutz, “Das Studium der angelsächsischen Chronik im 16. Jahrhundert: Nowell und Joscelyn,” Anglia 100 (1982): 301–56. 109. Matthew Paris, Historia maior (London, 1571), sig. † iij recto. 110. Ibid. 111. Morgan Library PML 2972. 112. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 414: Madeline McMahon, “Ancient Letters and Old Paper: Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Investigation into the History of Medieval Manuscripts, 1559–1575,” forthcoming. 113. For Spelman, see the versions of his Archaismus graphicus in British Library MS Stowe 1059 (reference and text generously supplied by Aaron Shapiro) and Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 238; for the Escorial, see Charles Graux, Essai sur les origines du fonds grec de l’Escurial, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, 46 (Paris, 1880), 313–14, and Juan-Baptista Cardona, De regia S. Laurentii bibliotheca. De pontificia Vaticana. De expungendis haereticor. propriis nominibus. De diptychis (Tarragona, 1587), 4–6. 114. See Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 115. Matthew Parker, Correspondence, ed. John Bruce and Thomas Thomason Perowne (Cambridge, 1853), 238. 116. The list of signatures is preserved in British Library MS Add. 18160, a copy of Parker’s Testimonie with marginalia and manuscript additions. The two signatories omitted in the printed version were the bishops of Chester and St. Asaph. 117. For the signature lists for early councils, see, e.g., Canones Apostolorum, Veterum Conciliorum Constitutiones, Decreta Pontificum Antiquiora, De Primatu Romanae Ecclesiae, ex tribus vetustissimis exemplaribus transcripta omnia, ed. Johannes Cochlaeus (Mainz, 1525). For the signatures on the Accord of Winchester, which was reproduced in Parker’s De antiquitate as it had been in William of Malmesbury’s histories of the English monarchy and church, see McMahon, “Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History.” 118. Flacius, “Consultatio,” 147. Not e s to Ch a p t er 1 253 119. Ibid., 151. 120. Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici I (Mainz, 1601), Praefatio, sig. )( )( iiij verso. 121. [Flacius Illyricus], Zwei Capitel (ca. 1550); see Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s De inventoribus rerum (Tübingen, 2007); and Anthony Grafton, “Christianity’s Jewish Origins Rediscovered: The Roles of Comparison in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Scholarship,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1, no. 1 (2016): 13–42. 122. British Library MS Royal 7B.XII, fols. 75r–77r. 123. Guillaume Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum (Lyon, 1508), British Library C.77.d.17, fol. lxxxixr. 124. Ibid., col. 2. 125. Constantine Hopf, “Bishop Hooper’s ‘Notes’ to the King’s Council, 3 October 1550,” Journal of Theological Studies 44, no. 175/176 ( July/October 1943): 194–99, at 198–99. 126. See, in general, Constantin Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1946), 131–70, and Judith Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamics of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York, 2005), 78–111, 243–51. 127. Cranmer, note in his copy of the 1544 Eusebius, I, 56 verso on 5.28.12: “Poenitendi confitendique forma apud veteres.” 128. Eusebius, trans. Hanmer, sig. [* v verso]. 129. Ecclesiastica historia, ed. Grynaeus, 25: “Recenset Eusebius ex Philone τῶν ἀσκητῶν, qui statim post Christum in coelos assumtum, in Aegypto et alibi floruerunt, vitam, mores, studia, sedes, synodos, et de scripturae divinae interpretatione iudicium.” 130. Flacius to von Nidbruck, September 9, 1555, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 9737b, fols. 14 verso–15 recto. 131. In addition to his Missa Latina (Strasbourg, 1557), an edition of the so-called Missa Flaciana preserved in what is now Herzog August Bibliothek MS 1151 Helmst., Flacius started to prepare but did not complete a remarkable anthology of versions of the Mass: Herzog August Bibliothek 332 8o Helmst. (1–3). For the Missa Flaciana, see Oliver Olson, “Flacius Illyricus als Liturgiker,” Jahrbuch für Liturgie und Hymnologie 12 (1967 [1968]): 45–69. 132. See Ernst Hellgardt, “ ’der alten Teutschen spraach und gottsforcht zu erlernen’: Über Voraussetzungen und Ziele der Otfridausgabe des Matthias Flacius lllyricus,” in Festchrift Walther Haug und Burghart Wachinger, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1992), 1:267–86; John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge, 2008), 122–23; and Ralf Georg Czapla, Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zur deutschen Geschichte einer europäischer Gattung (Berlin, 2013), 108–19. 133. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 11 (twelfth century), fol. 45 verso, col. 1: “hic desunt. ex industria ut videtur. scriptoris.” 134. Ibid., fol. 45 recto, bottom margin. There is also a reference to Bullinger in the side margin. 135. Ps. Matthew of Westminster, Flores historiarum (London, 1570), Praefatio, esp. sig. a2 recto–verso. Later, at sig. [¶ verso], Parker quotes another passage to support this argument from the first part of the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais. The start of the relevant passage is underlined in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 8, fol. 1 recto, col. 1. 136. See, e.g., the defensive note in Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, fol. [332] recto, preceding a list of Parker’s expenses in London, 1559–63: “This written by ArchBp Parker hym self Who best knew what hym self did.” 254 Not e s to Ch a p t er 2 137. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 171B, fol. 353 recto, where parts of the passage quoted by Parker are underlined in red. 138. Matthew Paris, Historia maior, Praefatio, sigs. † iii verso–† iiii recto. Chapter 2 1. Gerson D. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia, 1991), 271–97. 2. Elisheva Carlebach, “The Sabbatian Posture of German Jewry,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism, ed. Rachel Elior ( Jerusalem, 2001), 2:6. See also Carlebach, “Between History and Hope: Jewish Messianism in Ashkenaz and Sepharad,” Third Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History (New York, 1998). On this debate, see David Berger, “Sephardic and Ashkenazic Messianism in the Middle Ages: An Assessment of the Historiographical Controversy,” (Hebrew) in Rishonim ve-Ahronim: Mehkarim be-Toledot Yisrael Mugashim le-Avraham Grossman, ed. Joseph Hacker, B. Z. Kedar, and Yosef Kaplan ( Jerusalem, 2010), 11–28. While Berger significantly qualifies Carlebach’s revision of Cohen’s thesis, it seems that he agrees with this identification of Sephardic rabbinic conservatism underplayed by Cohen. See his discussion of Sasportas on 14 and 20. 3. On Maimonides and Nahmanides, see below. On Solomon Beit ha-Levi, see Leon Wieseltier, “A Passion for Waiting: Liberal Notes on Messianism and the Jews,” in For Daniel Bell, ed. Wieseltier and Mark Lilla (n.p., 2005), 141–42; for mention of Sasportas, see 133. On Hagiz, see Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York, 1990). On Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi, who was not Sephardic but ministered to a Sephardic congregation for a time, see Jacob J. Schacter, “Motivations for Radical AntiSabbatianism: The Case of Hakham Zevi Ashkenazi,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath, ed. Elior, 2:31–49. For mention of Sasportas, see 34–35n5. 4. See Joel L. Kraemer, “On Maimonides’ Messianic Postures,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, vol. 2, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 109–42. David Berger, “Some Ironic Consequences of Maimonides’ Rationalist Approach to the Messianic Age,” (Hebrew) Maimonidean Studies 2 (1991): 1–8, reprinted and translated in his Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews (Boston, 2011), 278–88; for mention of Sasportas, see 282–84. Israel J. Yuval, “Moses Redivivus: Maimonides as the Messiah’s Helper,” (Hebrew) Zion 72 (2007): 161–88. 5. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, 1973). 6. Ibid., 262, 528, and passim. 7. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nazir, 23b. See Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), 110. 8. See Gershom Scholem, “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists,” in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), 144–45. 9. Allegations of sexual improprieties surfaced in the period of peak Sabbatian enthusiasm between 1665 and 1666; however, it turned into a leitmotif in the anti-Sabbatian literature of the eighteenth century. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai, Zevi 1666–1816 (Oxford, 2011); and Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia, 2011). Formations of Belief H istor ic a l A pproach e s to R e l igion a n d t h e Se c u l a r E di t e d by Ph i l i p Nor d, K at ja Gu e n t h e r , & M a x W e is s Pr i nceton U n i v e r sit y Pr e ss Pr i nceton & Ox for d