Sam Kennerley

Rome and the Maronites in the Renaissance and Reformation provides the first in-depth study of contacts between Rome and the Maronites during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This book begins by showing how the church unions agreed at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1445) led Catholics to endow an immense amount of trust in the orthodoxy of Christians from the east. Taking the Maronites of Mount Lebanon as its focus, it then analyses how agents in the peripheries of the Catholic world struggled to preserve this trust into the early sixteenth century, when everything changed. On one hand, this study finds that suspicion of Christians in Europe generated by the Reformation soon led Catholics to doubt the past and present fidelity of the Maronites and other Christian peoples of the Middle East and Africa. On the other, it highlights how the expansion of the Ottoman Empire caused many Maronites to seek closer integration into Catholic religious and military goals in the eastern Mediterranean. By drawing on previously unstudied sources to explore both Maronite as well as Roman perspectives, this book integrates eastern Christianity into the history of the Reformation, while re-evaluating the history of contact between Rome and the Christian east in the early modern period.

This article reconstructs the troubled history behind the editio princeps of Theodoret of Cyrus’s anti-heretical works, which was printed at Rome in 1547. It is split into three parts, each of which corresponds to a key word in its title. The first part of this article identifies the manuscript of Theodoret used for this edition, its scribe, exemplar, and the timeline, circumstances, and methods of its creation. It then explores the uproar that the initial printing of this edition created among the Greek community of Rome, using this incident to examine the prosecution of Greeks by the inquisitions in Italy. The final part of this article analyses how different members of the Catholic hierarchy sought either to save or to suppress the edition of Theodoret, uncovering the documents and assumptions that ultimately ensured its survival. A conclusion summarises the main findings of this article, while highlighting paths for future research.

This short article briefly surveys historiography about early modern patristic scholarship, before outlining the contents of the volume 'The Reception of the Church Fathers and Early Church Historians in the Renaissance and the Reformation, c.1470-1650' that follows.

Until relatively recently, patristics (that is, the transmission and study of the works of authoritative writers of ancient Christianity, often called the Church “Fathers” [patres in Latin]) was a peripheral concern in the history of ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation. The Renaissance was principally associated with the recovery of classical, pagan texts; the Reformation with the increased importance of the Bible. But after some pioneering works printed in the 1970s, a rise of interest in the history of scholarship and religion over the past twenty years has led to a burst of publications about early modern patristics. It is now accepted that some—or even most—humanist scholars of the Renaissance were interested in Christian antiquity as well as its pagan counterpart, and that patristic writings mattered for Protestant as well as Catholic authors of the Reformation. This bibliography gathers the works that have proven to be essential points of reference for this historiographical shift, or that point to topics that merit further exploration in this still relatively new field of inquiry.

This chapter provides the first study of Roger Ascham’s (1515/16-1568) Latin translations of the commentaries on Philemon and Titus attributed to ‘Oecumenius’ (1541-1543). It identifies Ascham’s Greek exemplar, analyses his translation style, and follows the evolution of his scholarship on the Bible. Moreover, it uncovers the wider context of Ascham’s translations, finding that they were stimulated by his desire to attract patronage from conservative churchmen such as Edward Lee, a goal that misfired when Ascham offended this prelate by translating a passage of ‘Oecumenius’ that approved clerical marriage. The chapter concludes by assessing Ascham’s translations against the longer history of patristic scholarship in sixteenth-century England, and by speculatively attributing to him an anonymous translation of the liturgy of St James that was completed in the reign of Mary I.

This chapter explores the existence of Ethiopian Christians in early modern Rome. Despite the distance that separated Rome and Ethiopia and the doctrinal differences between their churches, Ethiopians were a surprisingly familiar presence in the papal city. Dozens of Ethiopian pilgrims and ambassadors are attested in Rome in the 15th century. This presence was institutionalized by the establishment of the complex of Santo Stefano dei Mori as a base for Ethiopian and other eastern Christian visitors. Santo Stefano became the primary centre for contact between Ethiopians and Catholics in the first half of the 16th century, leading to lively intellectual collaboration between figures like Tasfā Ṣeyon and Marcello Cervini. However, the importance of Santo Stefano declined in the second half of the 16th century, when organs of the Counter Reformation became increasingly important in the processing of Ethiopian visitors. The Jesuit mission to Ethiopia stimulated a final burst of exchange and activity before the effective extinction of the Ethiopian community of early modern Rome in the early 18th century. Besides exploring this history, this article recommends possible areas of future research, as well as discussing extant sources and the difficulties of their interpretation.

This article investigates the relationship between tradition and historical criticism in France during the earliest years of the Reformation. Its key sources are two polemics between Josse Clichtove (1472–1543) and Noël Beda (c. 1470–1537) over the cult of Mary Magdalene and the Exultet hymn. A student of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Clichtove enunciated modern-sounding criticisms of received traditions. His opponent Beda is, instead, famous for his scholastic defences of inherited doctrine against humanists like Clichtove and Erasmus. Drawing on an in-depth reading of Clichtove and Beda’s tracts, this article will contextualise the clashes between these two scholars and analyse their respective methods and conclusions. While demonstrating the sophistication of Clichtove’s historical thought and Beda’s own surprising skill as a historian, this article will contend that the central issue of these polemics was not history, but whether tradition was a legitimate subject for historical criticism. It will conclude by considering the implications of these polemics for the study of sacred history in the Reformation, as shown in the change of Clichtove’s method after his conflict with Beda.