Stephen D. Bowd. Reform before the Reformation: Vicenzo Querini and the Religious Renaissance in Italy.

Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. xv + 267 pp. index. bibl. $86. ISBN: 90-04-12379-2.

One of the more prominent episodes in the history of reform in Italy during the Renaissance was the decision by two Venetian nobles, Tommaso Giustiniani and Vincenzo Querini, to leave Venice and take up life in the hermitage at Camaldoli in Tuscany. Their correspondence with their friend and fellow noble Gasparo Contarini, which included discussion of the relative merits of a life of seclusion and prayer on the one hand and the active life in the city on the other, is well known to scholars of sixteenth-century Italy. Giustiniani and Contarini have received extensive scholarly attention. Querini's role in efforts for reform has received less attention. Stephen Bowd's study of Querini seeks to shed new light on his career and his reform efforts through an examination of his letters and the reform proposal that he co-authored with Tommaso Giustiniani, the Libellus ad Leonem X.

After initial studies in the humanities at Venice and in philosophy at Padua, Vincenzo Querini (1478-1514), like his friend Contarini, began his public career as a promising Venetian diplomat. Even at a young age he was entrusted with embassies to the courts of Burgundy and the empire. This involved travel to Germany, England, and Castile. Despite the apparent success of his work, Querini desired a deeper experience of God. For a number of years he struggled over whether to enter the religious life. Finally in 1511, at a time of great political difficulty for the Venetian Republic, Querini entered the monastery at Camaldoli and subsequently took part in the reform of the Camaldolese congregation. Querini's entrance into the monastery in the difficult years after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello has led some to charge that he abandoned Venice in an hour of need and that his vocational choice was less than entirely spiritual. One element of Bowd's thesis is that Querini had considered this vocational choice for many years before he acted upon it. The lengthy process of discerning this move, which Bowd documents, suggests that Querini made his choice deliberately at the conclusion of a lengthy period of consideration.

After his arrival at Camaldoli, Querini's interests soon turned to the larger issues of reform of the church. This was in the period immediately preceding the Fifth Lateran Council. Bowd presents Querini as a staunch supporter of the papacy as the sole institution capable of reforming the church in head and members. He regards Querini as "conciliar" but not as a "conciliarist." That is, he presents Querini as one who believed that effective reform would only take place as a result of firm action by the pope in a general council. The Libellus, co-authored with Giustiniani, is an example of a flank assessment of the church's woes. Querini's support for reform under Leo X led him to the papal court where he might have been appointed a cardinal at the time of his death in 1514.

The greatest strength of this work may be Bowd's presentation of Querini as a reformer whose views on politics, monastic reform, and reform of the church at large was, in many respects, quite conventional. This is particularly valuable in a chapter on the role of prophecy in reform. Bowd highlights the relationship of Querini and Giustiniani with the Florentinepiagnoni and the points of convergence and divergence in their attitudes to reform. His call for reform both within his religious congregation as well as in the universal church reflects similar views held by reformers from the fifteenth century to the Council of Trent. Like many of his generation he did not seek novel solutions to the church's problems but rather a return to an older discipline. The greatest shortcoming of this work is that Querini himself remains somewhat hidden. At times the reader encounters far more concerning the thought of Contarini, Giustiniani, and other religious figures of the early sixteenth century than the thought of Querini himself.

PAUL V. MURPHY 

University of San Francisco