Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus.

This Festschrift recognizes the eightieth birthday of Charles Trinkaus, who is well known to readers of this journal as one of those scholars most directly responsible for the postwar revival of Renaissance studies in this country. His contributions have been many, but Trinkaus will undoubtedly be remembered most clearly for his In Our Image and Likeness, a magisterial, two-volume survey of the moral, philosophical, and religious ideas of Italian humanism. Accordingly, the contributors were asked to write on "issues concerning human nature, especially in its ethical and religious dimensions, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (7). This is precisely what the eleven contributors have done.

After Paul Oskar Kristeller's generous "A Tribute to Charles Trinkaus" and John W. O'Malley's "Introduction" come the first group of three essays, all of which deal with issues of broad significance in interpreting western culture. In "The Renaissance Discovery of Human Creativity," William J. Bouwsma argues that the appropriation of the creation story from Genesis legitimized a confidence in human creativity that ranks as a significant discovery in the Renaissance. This essay thus traces one key concept of modernity back to the Renaissance, as does the next one, "Renaissance Culture and Western Pragmatism in Early Modern Times," by Jerry H. Bentley. Bentley defines pragmatism as the identification of the principles that govern nature and human affairs, followed by the effort to take best advantage of these principles; he then shows how pragmatism became more widely diffused during the Renaissance than it had been in previous centuries. The third essay, F. Edward Cranz's "A Common Pattern in Petrarch, Nicholas of Cusa, and Martin Luther," is a remarkable tour de force. In it, Cranz shows that around 1100 A.D., the categories of western thought were reoriented in such a way that it was impossible to recapture the world of the ancients; nevertheless, three thinkers as different as those studied here perceived what was lost in this reorientation and strove to attain some of the old values in the new, post-Anselmian world.

The second group of four essays approach particular aspects of Renaissance culture through the writings of Petrarch, Valla, and Ficino. In "Petrarch and Pre-Petrarchan Humanism: Stylistic Imitation and the Origins of Italian Humanism," Ronald Witt locates Petrarch's originality in developing the Ciceronian link between ethics and eloquence within a Christian context, something which scholars like Lovato and Mussato did not fully succeed in doing. In "Renaissance Humanism and the Origins of Humanist Theology," Salvatore I. Camporeale focuses on Lorenzo Valla as the humanist who insisted on replacing the tentative synthesis of philosophy and scripture with philological study of the Word - on moving, that is, from "philosophical" to "rhetorical" theology. The last two articles in this section are on Marsilio Ficino. In "The Soul as Rhapsode: Marsilio Ficino's Interpretation of Plato's Ion," Michael J. B. Allen shows how Ficino's Ion commentary develops the idea that the soul is a rhapsode and its song an ascent into the mind of the poet who is God, and in "Hermes Theologus: The Sienese Mercury and Ficino's Hermetic Demons," Brian P. Copenhaver shows how Ficino's interpretation of Hermes Trismegistus derives from Lactantius' favorable attitude rather than Augustine's hostile one.

The last group of four essays deal with the Reformation and its connection to the Renaissance. In "Nicholas of Cusa and the Reform of the Roman Curia," Morimichi Watanabe outlines Cusanus' efforts at reform and suggests reasons for their failure, and in "Explaining God's Acts to His People: Savonarola's Spiritual Legacy to the Sixteenth Century," Donald Weinstein explores aspects of Savonarola's religious thought that appealed to spirituali of the 1520s-1540s. Paul F. Grendler uses "Man Is Almost a God: Fra Battista Carioni Between Renaissance and Catholic Reformation" to show how Carioni joined a Renaissance conception of man's potential to the traditional values of monasticism. The subject of Heiko A. Oberman's essay is Protestant, but Oberman also traces connections between humanism and Christianity in "The Pursuit of Happiness: Calvin Between Humanism and Reformation," where Calvin is shown to have shifted analysis of the fall from a change in ontological status to a change in psychological orientation. The volume closes with two appendices, one by Thomas M. Izbicki entitled "Lorenzo Valla: The Scholarship in English Through 1992," the other entitled "The Works of Charles Trinkaus: A Bibliography," compiled by Pauline Moffitt Watts and Thomas M. Izbicki.

While some of the essays are somewhat stronger than others, the editors of this volume have devised a recipe for preparing a successful Festschrift: select established scholars who have something to say, and set them to work on a theme that binds them to the honoree. The result reflects favorably on all concerned.

Craig Kallendorf TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY