Antonio Augustin Between Renaissance and Counter-Reform.

Antonio Augustin (1517-1586), Spanish-born jurist and ecclesiastic, emerged as a central figure among a group of antiquarians of mid-sixteenth Rome who turned with renewed vigor to investigating ancient Roman institutions. Augustin's intellectual commitments grew out of the humanistically-inspired jurisprudence of Bude and Alciato, and he aspired to situate legal scholarship upon a concrete knowledge of ancient legal process. Initially he looked to textual study as the means to disentangle the historical origins, transmission, and codification of Roman legal practice. The stage to which these efforts had brought him by 1544 and where he expected to go next are set forth in a remarkable letter to his friend and patron, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, then imperial ambassador to Venice (the Latin text and English translation appear as Appendix I in this volume, and Nicholas Barker, in his contribution, explicates the letter's significance). But upon reaching Rome late that same year to take up the post of Auditor of the Sacred Rota, Augustin found his investigations turning in a new direction, away from textual studies to the examination of inscriptions, coins, and other historical evidence so abundantly available in the Eternal City. He became convinced that only by establishing the precise institutional and historical contexts in which Roman laws had been generated could the extant manuscript sources of Roman law be fully understood. To this end Augustin and his associates, over the next dozen years, became founders of scientific epigraphy. It is these activities, inspired by the still vital Renaissance humanist tradition of mid-Cinquecento Rome, that forms the focus of the thirteen papers, written by a distinguished international group of scholars, that are collected in this volume.

The papers fall into two general categories. Several are in substance extended research notes, of interest primarily to specialists. These include E. Duran's discussion of Augustin's family origins and relations; J. J. Wilkes' presentation of new found archeological evidence vindicating the authenticity of Cyriac of Ancona's recording of inscriptions from Dalmatia against Augustin's suspicions that they were forgeries; Jean-Louis Ferrary's observations on the textual development of Augustin's De legibus et senatus consultis (conceived in 1544, but published only in 1583); J. Carbonell's investigation of the Augustin epistolary as sources for his epigraphic activity; Marcus Buonocore's notes on Augustin's contributions to two Vatican mss. of sylloges of inscriptions; and Anna Maria Prestianni Giallombardo's remarks on the Greek and Latin inscriptions Augustin gathered during a brief sojourn to Sicily in 1559-60. Of more general interest to Renaissance scholars are the essays that explore more fully the nature and significance of the epigraphic and related antiquarian investigations Augustin undertook and inspired. These include two papers (by Richard Cooper and Ron Truman) on Jean Matal, Augustin's closest collaborator, who in fact did much of the spade work; M. H. Crawford's essay on Benedetto Egio, a specialist in Greek epigraphy; Dirk Jacob Jansen's inquiry into the connections between Augustin's numismatic research and the antiquarian interests of Jacopo Strada, a Mantuan artist patronized by the Fuggers; and Henning Wrede's study of S. V. Pighius's iconographic explication of an ancient statuette then in the possession of Cardinal Granvelle. Particularly insightful is William McCuaig's examination of Augustin's memorandum on the Roman Republican reform of the centuriate assembly.

Augustin's ambitious scholarly program came to an abrupt halt in the late 1550s, a casualty of Counter-Reformation religious politics. Only late in life did he publish some of his earlier findings, but most of his and Matal's epigraphic undertakings have remained in unpublished mss. Only now, as this volume makes clear, is their significance being grasped.

Charles L. Stinger STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, BUFFALO