Julien Ries, ed. Erasme et la montee de l'humanisme: Naissance d'une communaute europeenne de la culture.

(Collection Homo Religiosus, 7.) Louvain-la-Neuve: Centre d'Histoire des Religions, 2001. 214 pp. bibl. 25 [euro]. ISBN: n.a.

This interesting but uneven collection of essays, with an appendix of text excerpts in French, derives from a 1990 colloquy organized by the Catholic historical and cultural magazine Notre Histoire at l'Universite de Louvain-la-Neuve. Ries, editor of this volume and in charge of the series, has pulled the book together around the theme of Erasmian humanism as a model of cultural unity for the contemporary European Union.

The pieces which directly serve this thematic goal, though well done, are not very scholarly. "Erasme, un renovateur sans frontieres," by Jean-Pierre Massaut, provides a bio-bibliography of Erasmus and a thematic analysis of the epistemology and program of humanism that would be ideal for a survey textbook of western humanities. "Les Humanistes, pionniers de la rencontre des religions," by Ries, surveys contributions of Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to ecumenical approaches to religion in a way that is useful to the theme but offers nothing to the specialist. There are two more pieces by Ries: a chapter by chapter epitome of Jean-Claude Margolin's Erasme, Precepteur de l'Europe (1995) and a brief concluding essay, "Des Humanistes Precurseurs de la Modernite" which returns to the theme of Erasmus as a model of ecumenism. The overview of Margolin's excellent book on the pedagogical influence of Erasmus down to the present day is obviously appropriate to the theme but useful mainly to a general audience.

The remainder of the book is of greater academic interest. "La papaute face a la renaissance et a la Reforme" by Jean-Claude Margolin constructs a slightly tendentious survey of the revival of papal power and influence between Martin V and Gregory XIII by looking at successful papal policy toward Renaissance culture, Protestantism, and Catholic internal reform.

"Les humanistes face a la decouverte de l'Amerique" by Monique Mund-Dopchie, a very interesting paper, though mostly from secondary sources, looks at the humanistic revival of ancient geography, humanists' resistance to integrating the new discoveries into their cultural narrative, and how gradual acceptance of new knowledge resulted in accounts of global human culture that privileged Europe but became increasingly aware of the relativizing of Christendom that discovery of American cultures implied.

"Nicolas de Cuse et L'Orient" by Jean-Michel Counet compares Cusanus and a contemporary Orthodox theologian, Gregory Palamas, on issues relating to negative theology and revelation and finds Cusanus, as opposed to Palamas, to be an expression of humanistic directions in Christian thought.

Jean-Francois Gilmont's "Le livre, vecteur d'une nouvelle culture?" examines the relations between humanism, books, and printing. He argues that humanism's reformative impact on the nature of the book, the demand for quality in the text and high readability, antedates printing, having developed from the time of Petrarch and that, despite the importance that has been attached to the emergence of the silent reader, humanism remained traditional in privileging spoken over written language.

In "Devotion moderne et renaissance des arts" Christian Loubet discusses contrasting ways of orchestrating the meeting of mundane and transcendent worlds in fifteenth--and sixteenth-century Flemish and Italian painting in relation to contrasts in the attitudes of Modern Devotion and humanism and argues for a synthesis, seen in Michelangelo and Bruegel, that was mediated by Erasmian humanism.

The sense of Francois Pichon's contribution, with extensive footnotes and bibliography formally the most scholarly article in the set, is summed up in its title: "La figure de Nod darts les Illustrations de Gaule et singularities de Troie de Jean Lemaire de Beiges, ou du recours a l'autorite biblique pour fonder les contours de l'Europe chretienne." Pichon examines the political use made by "rhetoriqueur" Lemaire, whom he sees as a transitional figure in the early northern Renaissance, of humanist-influenced Burgundian traditions of historiography and literary culture. Bringing to detailed knowledge of the biblical sources a new allegorical interpretation of his texts, Lemaire defended the sacred and providentially secured authority of French and German princes in conflict with the Turks and Italians by tracing their lineages back through Troy to Noah and the flood.

WOOD BOULDIN

Villanova University