The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna.

Howard Louthan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xvi + 185 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-58082-X.

Howard Louthan has written a study of irenicism within the Habsburg court during the second half of the sixteenth century. Although the concept is a slippery one, eluding easy definition and blending into related practices such as religious toleration or the pragmatism of the politiques, the author rightly chooses this neologism to depict the spirit of religious conciliation present in the activities of certain members of the imperial court. He defines irenicism loosely, using it to refer to the "peaceful attempt to reconcile theological differences between various confessional parties" (9) set within the larger context of Erasmian humanism and its more cosmopolitan views of politics, culture, and religion.

Although the work is by no means an exhaustive study of either irenicism or the Habsburg court (a point made frankly by the author himself), it is a thoughtful and engaging study of four members of the Hofstaat who were active in four different kinds of imperial enterprise: the Swabian soldier and statesman Lazarus von Schwendi in the area of war and politics; the Italian artist Jacopo Strada in the area of art and architecture; the Silesian physician Johannes Crato in the area of religion; and the Dutch scholar and librarian Hugo Blotius in the area of humanist learning. Each figure is treated as emblematic of a pervasive, if contested, "Austrian middle way," an irenic approach to affairs that emerged during the reign of Ferdinand I (1556-1564), reached its fullest expression in the court of Maximilan II (1564-1576), and lost ground decisively to the forces of Tridentine Catholicism under Rudolph II (1576-1612).

Arranged both thematically and chronologically, the book advances a two-part thesis. First, it establishes the existence of an irenic sentiment through a careful analysis of the work and activities of the figures under discussion. It next outlines the demise of this sentiment by mapping the relative successes and failures of this group in the face of increasingly staunch Catholic resistance to both compromise and conciliation in the Habsburg court. The religious ambivalence of Schwendi and Strada (both questionable Catholics), as well as Crato and Blotius (both marginal crypto-Calvinists), which had served them so well when a religious settlement in the empire seemed possible, made each an easy target from all sides in the religious debates, as Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic positions hardened during the 1570s and 1580s. In short, within a changed atmosphere, the nuances of their religious positions - bordering on dissimulation at times - compromised them all as effective leaders or advisers.

The real strength of The Quest for Compromise is its author's attention to the emergence of irenicism as one possible position among various competing perspectives in the areas of war, art, religion, and learning. Setting his analysis within current historiographical debates about confessionalism and confessionalization, he puts the concepts to good use, allowing them to frame his discussion of the activities of Schwendi, Strada, Crato, and Blotius, without allowing them to exert a deterministic bias. Indeed, irenicism may have "failed," when viewed with hindsight and in light of emerging confessional currents late in the sixteenth century, but Louthan decisively shows that irenic sentiments certainly shaped the individual careers of the figures under discussion and clearly illustrates, in turn, how their activities shaped the culture of the Habsburg imperial court during the key decades between 1550 and 1580. In navigating sagaciously between increasing confessionalism and its irenic alternative, Louthan himself has struck a convincing compromise.

EDMUND M. KERN Lawrence University