Jennifer Mara DeSilva
The early modern period is arguably the age of the bishop. Just as historians have debated whether to call Catholicism post 1517 the Counter-Reformation or the Catholic Reformation, one might debate whether to cite it as “the age of episcopal crisis” or “the age of episcopal reform.” In each title there is implicit judgement, just as there was in Europe through the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Prior to the Council of Trent (1545–63), which is sometimes called the Council of Bishops, critics decried the venality, ambition, absenteeism, and ignorance of bishops, and marshaled the example of Antonino Pierozzi of Florence or Pietro Barozzi of Padua to encourage reform. After the Council of Trent, critics pointed to the conciliar decrees enjoining episcopal residence, visitations, synods, and seminaries, and invoked the example of Gian Matteo Giberti of Verona or Carlo Borromeo of Milan as a model.1 Contemporary sources suggested a convenient dichotomy of corruption succeeded by reform, urged by the elite Catholic Church, yearned for by the diocesan faithful, and embraced by enthusiastic bishops.
In fact, there were enthusiastic men committed to diocesan work long before the Council of Trent and men without pastoral vocations long afterwards. This introductory essay’s title, “A Living Example,” originates with the Latin phrase “exemplum vivum,” used by the Camaldolese reformers Paolo Giustiniani and Pietro Quirini in their program of reform (Libellus ad Leonem X) sent to Pope Leo X in 1513, and by many other reformers after them.2 Giustiniani and Quirini considered the ideal [2] bishop to be focused exclusively on his diocese and its salvation, and that the chief issues in episcopal reform were non-residence and disinterest. In contrast to this view, the contributors to this volume have shown that bishops indeed acted as living examples of the challenges met by Christian clergy, but that they modeled a variety of behaviors, substantial interest in reform, and many preoccupations beyond salvation. As these essays show, the key to the early modern episcopate is privileging the local needs and challenges when transposing reform models and hierarchical directives from the elite center to the parish church.3 In this volume, “local” is interpreted variously as geographically within the bishop’s diocese, interpersonally through his relations with individuals and local institutions, or professionally in terms of challenges to his immediate mandate and practical authority. As this collection of essays shows, a deeper examination of the early modern episcopate reveals a spectrum of behaviors and backgrounds that do not easily divide into groups traditionally labeled “corrupt” and “reformed.”4 A similar diversity existed in the plethora of challenges that bishops faced in fulfilling their duties. Not withstanding this reality, one of the Tridentine conclusions that all members acknowledged was the importance of the bishop in creating an orthodox community of virtuous and active Christians that would serve as a bulwark against the further encroachment of Protestantism.5 Perhaps the disagreement that appeared in other Tridentine discussions encouraged the conciliar fathers to assert their unity on what had become a universally accepted issue: the ideal bishop.
While there is little to surprise the reader in the discussion of the Tridentine episcopal ideal, the vehemence surrounding episcopal reform is striking. This emphasis on the bishop as the linchpin in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, connecting the salt of the earth to the princes of the Catholic Church, portrays the bishop as a Janus figure. Caught between the demands and politics of his superiors and the salvation and demands of local individuals and groups, the bishop might appear two-faced, looking both up and down the hierarchy and prepared to minister in both directions. This would be an oversimplification of the situation. However, as the essays in this collection indicate, the bishop was everything to everyone, functioning in fundamentally different spheres (ecclesiastical and secular), just as he might have spoken different languages to the elites in Rome and to the faithful in [3] his diocese. In many areas the bishop held secular rights and responsibilities that naturally grew out of his historic role as a local landowner and judge. Rather than two heads, the bishop needed many eyes, ears, and mouths to watch over, listen to, and negotiate with his clergy, confraternities, monastic orders, secular governors, local patrons, and many other diverse groups involved in early modern life.
Following the exhortation of Jesus and Peter to the apostles and disciples (Acts 2:14–47), the fabled precursors of the episcopate, to preach the gospel, teach the Christian lifestyle, and aid the indigent,6 the literature, letters, and conciliar decrees of the early modern period urged bishops to do the same. John Colet’s “Convocation Sermon,” preached at the opening of the Convocation of Clergy in the English province of Canterbury in 1512, is infused with scriptural invocations to reform that assert the enduring challenges in achieving the episcopal ideal. Through a combination of scriptural exegesis and exhortation to his audience, Colet reveals that both in spirit and in actions the bishops were considered a motley crew whose reform was of great consequence for the health of the church.7 Across the centuries and the continent, Colet’s words would reverberate:
Let the laws be rehearsed concerning the residence of bishops in their dioceses, which command that they watch over the salvation of souls, that they disseminate the word of God, that they personally appear in their churches at least on great festivals, that they sacrifice for their people, that they hear the causes of the poor, that they sustain the fatherless and widows, that they exercise themselves always in works of piety.8
Yet, as H. Outram Evennett argued, corruption and reform existed side by side in the period before Trent: “the fifteenth century—so full of contradictions—was full of reforms and reformers who between them could not make a reformation.”9 Notwithstanding several examples of excellent episcopal virtue, who likely witnessed Colet’s sermon,10 his exhortation shows that, by 1512, the corrupt bishop, the absentee bishop, the bureaucrat bishop, and the pluralist bishop had become rhetorical standards that were familiar to most Christians.11 As mediators between [4] the lay faithful and the elite clergy, the bishops were emblems of both groups, and their behavior could be mobilized variously as an example of the elite clergy’s privilege of politics over pastoral care or as an example of the ignorance and venality of the local community. While the unreformed bishop seemed forever available to prove the church’s need for reform, the pious, learned, and locally active bishop is underrepresented in the historical literature.12
The gospel invocation that the bishop “is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife [the church], temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach”13 contrasts with the bishops lives’ that edified and entertained early modern readers. Vespasiano da Bisticci’s Lives of Illustrious Men of the Fifteenth Century (1480–98) shows the challenges faced by historians when approaching contemporary depictions of bishops. This well-known collection includes a section entirely devoted to clergy, containing twenty-one bishops and four archbishops. The first biographical sketch, a life of Antonino Pierozzi (archbishop of Florence 1446–59), is the longest in this section by far at nearly seven full pages.14 Antonino’s life functions as an ideal standard by which the twenty-four other clergy are implicitly judged. Vespasiano eulogizes Antonino as a learned, pious, and honest bishop who made himself accessible to his diocese and distinguished himself as a diplomat, while maintaining a modest and ascetic lifestyle. Many of the other bishops shared one or two of Antonino’s characteristics, usually his learning and good relations with the papal court, but few shared his concern to avoid high office or his interest in charity. By comparison, the other bishops, drawn from Italy, England, Iberia, and Hungary, are renowned for their elite scholarship, are ambitious for a cardinal’s hat, and are likely to meet an unfortunate end. Vespasiano closes several biographical sketches by warning the reader that “His [the bishop’s] end would have been better had he turned more to Almighty God.”15 This conclusion rests on the modest praise of good administration, very few anecdotes of the bishop’s piety or pity for the poor, and the insinuation that the [5] bishop must make a greater local impact. Vespasiano makes his standard clear in his description of the bishop of Volterra, Antonio degli Agli (1470–77):
When the bishopric of Fiesole became vacant the Pope gave it to him, and afterwards offered him Raugia, which he declined because, situated as he was, he could not reside there. [ . . . ] He cared nothing for state and spent most of his time there [at his abbacy of S. Maria in Pruneta], going occasionally to visit his bishopric of Volterra. He lived with great simplicity and spent his time between Divine offices and reading and writing. His income was expended in helping the poor to the honour of God, and few went away without succour. [ . . . ] He left an excellent name, both in life and habit, for he lived as a good prelate ought to live; no one was more studious and efficient. He was an excellent preacher and often spoke from his own pulpit.16
While Vespasiano’s purpose in writing the Lives was to document and preserve briefly the deeds of great men, both rulers and intellectuals, as his translator indicated, the collection offers a snapshot of elite fifteenth-century Italy and a sharp judgement on each profiled man’s goals and practices. While Vespasiano knew very well of both the church’s and state’s dependence on prelates who served as administrators, the bishops who balanced these duties with diocesan involvement or eschewed administration for charity, preaching, and performing the divine offices generally received a more flattering portrayal. Vespasiano’s bishops show that this division of duties characterized the bishops in either pastoral or administrative roles, decades before the opening of the Council of Trent.
The Evolution of the Episcopate before the Council of Trent
The combination of idealism and challenges that appears in Vespasiano’s Lives has characterized the office of bishop from its origin. As noted, the episcopal experience has been historically and geographically diverse. The earliest bishops were the organizers and overseers of local churches, episkopoi, who eventually became “bishops” in the hierarchical sense. These men performed a variety of functions, but are best identified as the individuals that organized and presided over the group of presbyters that ministered to a single community.17 By the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) bishops were common enough figures to necessitate some clarity regarding their authority and jurisdiction. Canon 6 of Nicaea provides a sense of [6] the emergence of dioceses and documents the existence of bishops in the cities of Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, with large dioceses extending far beyond the urban limits.18 By 500 CE the Eastern Empire’s bishops had taken on many of the tasks formerly done by secular urban authorities (curiales), including substantial poor relief, maintenance of public buildings, and protection from attackers. This expansion of duties occurred as a result of ecclesiastical organizational systems that remained strong even as imperial systems experienced shrinking resources.19 The Roman provinces of Gaul and Spain, settled throughout with towns and rural villas, were Christianized early and turned to both the bishop and the walled cathedral towns when Germanic tribes swept through Europe in the mid-fifth century. Generally these bishops came from the landed aristocracy, a class that had a traditional role in Roman civic administration and that began to invest its energy in the church, which emerged as the local authority with growing resources and a social mandate. Among other scholars, Peter Brown has shown the importance of fifth-century Gallic bishops in defending their towns against the Huns, maintaining Christian morale, dispensing charity to offset the effects of attacks, and ransoming captured serfs.20
In the ninth century, Byzantine sources identify the bare essentials for a territory’s Christianization as “baptism and a bishop,” both of which usually originated from a secular ruler’s request.21 More than simply performing the baptismal rite, the bishop became the local mediator and organizer of both clergy and laity in his new church, often proving by his own virtues, preaching, and companionship the strength of Christianity to the converting ruler and the local elites. Sean Gilsdorf has described the early medieval bishop as “in the middle of things, not as a permeable membrane or medium of interaction, but as a node or nexus, a mediator in the fullest sense of the term.”22 This description reflects the bishop’s liminal role as a negotiator, which he would retain into the modern period, between clerical and lay, elite and common, and saint and sinner. Throughout [7] the early Middle Ages, Frankish kings had sought the promotion of court officials to bishoprics and incorporated bishops into royal administration in order to establish local loyalty to central authority, acquire information, establish a common culture, and maintain judicial roles and civil institutions.23 By the year 1000 in western Europe, both ecclesiastically and topographically, “all roads led through the bishops, their churches, and their institutions.”24 As medieval rulers established increasingly more reliable systems of communication, taxation, and security, the bishops, as a corps of educated men with organizational skills and local connections, played a greater role in state development. Through the Middle Ages, diocesan centers were equally important in facilitating travel, commerce, and government, as frequently they were established at the intersection of several Roman roads, for example the Gallo-Roman towns of Tours, Orléans, Toulouse, and Rheims in Francia.25
Beyond merely the bishop’s role as a functionary and mediator, the bishop’s involvement on behalf of the ruler brought his office and his diocese more land, prestige, and authority. One consequence of this elevation to the role of royal advisor or lord was the model of the courtier bishop that developed from the tenth to twelfth centuries.26 An extant letter from the twelfth century reveals the ideal bishop from a royal perspective and emphasizes the crossover between secular and ecclesiastical functions as well as the Christian embrace of classical virtues. The letter dictates that the bishop should be moderate in all things (“circumspecta moderatio”), be educated (“sublimis scientia”), be of noble birth (“nobilitas generis”), maintain high morals and personal discipline (“elegantia morum, continentia laudabilis”), and show complete devotion to his congregation and the wider secular community (“amor civium, sollicitudo pastoralis”).27 While the former characteristics identify good leadership candidates, the latter characteristic emphasizes the flexible quality of episcopal skills and the close proximity between ecclesiastical diocese and secular district in the premodern period.
[8] Although secular leaders found bishops to be effective provincial agents, periodically in the Middle Ages bishops drew criticism for the diversity of their responsibilities. In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas I (r. 858–67) chastised Frankish bishops for not attending a Roman council due to their involvement in secular affairs.28 While strength of virtue, organizational skills, and literacy had prompted the close relationship between lay and clerical elites and the episcopacy’s initial entry into areas other than ecclesiastical supervision, the increasing criticism of “spiritual vassals,” who worked in tandem with the royal court or on international issues, focused on the bishop’s essential role in local pastoral care and diocese administration.29 Over the centuries in the Holy Roman Empire and France, noble titles evolved that emphasized certain bishops’ territorial and political roles (i.e., Fürstbischof and évêque-duc). While this perception of distance from diocesan concerns gained ground during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, late medieval bishops themselves would have found it alien and impractical to disentangle their role as the local diocesan administrator and judge from a greater role in provincial and national affairs. On becoming the bishop of Rome, Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) described the paradox of the episcopate, being an office dedicated to local and individual salvation, but steeped in the acquisition of political support, economic advantage, and territorial privileges and security: “Under the colours of episcopacy, I have been brought back to the world, in which I am subject to as many worldly responsibilities as I remember myself to have had in my life as a layman.”30
Through the Middle Ages this dichotomy grew, of the local pastor and the royal advisor, both potentially bishops. Meanwhile, the potential distance between bishops and the secular world shrank, as provision to the episcopate increasingly became a site of conflict between the pope and secular princes. The Concordat of Worms (1122), which brought an end to the Investiture Controversy, describes the limited influence that either the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor should exert over the provision to a bishopric. Neither man should provide candidates to the episcopal office as a reward to clients or in order to covertly appropriate resources.31 Nevertheless, the attraction of the bishopric as a conduit for centralizing authority and accessing ecclesiastical wealth persisted. [9] Where the Concordat of Worms states specifically that there should be free and canonical election of bishops, protected from secular influence, the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) insinuates that there was continued secular intervention: “the king, or the princes of his kingdom, without violating the canonical rules, may make recommendations when elections are to occur in the chapters or the monasteries.”32
The episcopacy’s place between these two powerful individuals, who were so often at odds over bishops for reasons of authority, had the effect of reaffirming the bishops as instruments of administration and politics, rather than as the shepherds of souls. Moreover, through the late medieval period there is no doubt that, as prelates, bishops were tarred with the same brush as cardinals and popes while the papacy was in exile in Avignon (1305–78) and divided during the Great Schism (1378–1417). The initial expansion of the papal bureaucracy at Avignon increased the administrative hunger for men educated in Latin letters, who themselves hungered for the prestige and wealth of the episcopate, but would seek a dispensation for absenteeism and remain at the papal court. The codependency of the papal court and the absentee bishop-bureaucrat would become a trope of sixteenth-century reformers33 and prompt centuries of both hostile and apologetic historians.34 Francesco Petrarch’s dismay at the expanded papal court at Avignon further reduced the episcopacy’s image as provided by God to effect local salvation.35 This emphasis on the corruption of prelates remained dominant through the early modern period, encouraged by the Council of Constance’s (1414–18) recourse to the secular leadership of Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund III and decrees that underlined the separation between clergy and laity in dress and behavior.36 The growing interest in the Observant Reform movement of the late fourteenth century makes a stark comparison with the call for reformatio in capite et in membris that echoed through this period and gained support from Petrarch’s remark.
From the close of Constance to the close of Trent, bishops occupied an important place in the culture of reform variously as models of best pastoral [10] practice or as ambitious villains responsible for Protestantism’s popularity.37 The Council of Trent focused on reform of the episcopate as the solution to criticism of both elite and popular practices. In the two final sessions of the council (September to December, 1563), the debate turned to church reform, a vast topic that almost entirely fit within the bishop’s organizational and supervisory mandate. The issues discussed included authority over chapters, colleges, and monastic communities, restricting appeals to Rome, regularizing episcopal visitations, enforcing clerical residence, and removing unchaste clergy from office.38 While the council intended that the resulting decrees help to build a stronger and more virtuous church, they presented the episcopate with a list of challenges, none of which would prove easy to conquer, and all of which depended upon the bishop’s own entrenchment of the authority delegated to him through the decrees. While Catholic reform and renewal was an institutional campaign fought by the church across continents, it was also a deeply personal battle fought by every bishop in his diocese.
As William Hudon discusses in the foreword to this volume, the council’s “one-size-fits-all ecclesiastical legislation” was designed to guide all bishops towards the energetic, residential, pious, and pedagogical ideal, who in turn would inspire the same character in his hungering diocese.39 Yet, the legislation assumed that the bishop occupied an ideal world in which every diocese was financially secure, every monastic house valued episcopal guidance and reform, secular leaders acknowledged clerical autonomy, the bishop was in residence, and the lay faithful lived uncomplicated lives and always asked the bishop’s advice before acting. While the Council of Trent’s achievement was substantial, it was a work in progress, which continued through the seventeenth century as individual bishops implemented conciliar decrees and proposed solutions to frequent challenges to the Tridentine mandate.40
Viewing the history of the European bishop from late antiquity to the early modern period, there is no doubt that the episcopate came by its broad responsibilities organically, by circumstance and skill, rather than as a rule through ambition [11] and a desire to evade pastoral duties. The episcopate’s history weaves spiritual and secular concerns together in an attempt to create communities of healthy, economically and physically secure, pious Christians. Nonetheless, as secular authorities sought increasingly centralized systems of government and socially the model of the interior spiritual life grew in popularity, critics connected the historic, worldly, extra-diocesan responsibilities of the bishop with a venal preoccupation inappropriate to a local shepherd. It is likely that by singling out individual bishops for study, historians have implicitly enforced the dichotomy seen in Vespasiano’s memoirs that polarized pastoral care. Rather than evaluating the bishop in isolation, this volume’s multidimensional perspective contextualizes the bishop at the center of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and surrounded by local, provincial, and regional organizations with their varied activities and demands.
Bishops and Historians
Undoubtedly, modern historians have been influenced in their analytical perspectives by their sources, which can be deeply partisan and committed to goals vastly different from the goals of modern scholars. This is best seen in the Middle Ages when traditionally the line between episcopal history and biography was thin and blurred. The Gesta episcoporum celebrated the deeds of Carolingian bishops, often with the intention of bolstering enthusiasm for canonization or establishing a local public record, precedent, or cult. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro has argued that these texts intended to present the bishop and his diocese spiritually, politically, and architecturally as a cultural center, just as Gilsdorf asserted.41 Biographies of bishops that proved to be more extensive than those by Vespasiano became common through the Middle Ages as diocesan boundaries solidified, local cults focused on bishop saints grew, and clergy found them to be useful pedagogical tools. In the early modern period there was a shift from using Gesta or Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (ca. 1260) as rough models to a more document-based practice imbued with contemporary reform ideals. At the same time, though, Simon Ditchfield has shown that Tridentine sacred biography continued to bear evidence of these earlier influences, just as late antiquity and early medieval saints continued to offer models of ideal behaviors to Christians. In the same vein, Alison Knowles Frazier has shown the renewed enthusiasm of both [12] lay and clerical authors for writing episcopal biographies during the Italian Renaissance, and cited those texts as having the most straightforward message with a clear pedagogical purpose.42
This enthusiasm for bishops has not persisted into the modern period. In the nineteenth century, when a renewed interest in the Italian Renaissance prompted Ludwig von Pastor, Leopold von Ranke, and Ferdinand Gregorovius to write monumental histories of Rome and the papacy, the episcopacy remained a target for criticism. In Ranke’s work, the early modern bishops were a frequent cause of division and factionalism within the church, whereas Gregorovius portrayed them as venal and grasping. Pastor leaned more toward the traditional arc of episcopal development, noting the change in episcopal devotion and quality after the Council of Trent and citing the influence of the archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo as a certain spur to change.43 In the same period, the Whig tradition of English history “exaggerates conflict, accelerates change, and gives a one-sided story of protest and victory,” implicitly judging the Catholic episcopacy to be corrupt, since by the nineteenth century all English bishops were Protestants.44 The combined effect of historians following these two groups has been to marginalize bishops as ineffective and obstructive hurdles negotiated by heroic reformers with varying success. Fortunately, the increased access to episcopal and papal archives in the last several decades has moved the scholarly discussion beyond an anticlerical analysis and toward a more clear knowledge of episcopal activity.
However, in the past couple of decades only a small number of volumes have attempted to situate the bishop within a period of several centuries, across the European continent, amid the competing secular and spiritual demands, and within a sometimes historically unfriendly historiography.45 In their introduction to the 2007 collection entitled The Bishop Reformed, John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones noted [13] that in modern scholarship the medieval bishop was generally ignored, even though the bishop and his cathedral acted as the spiritual, territorial, social, and juridical center of medieval life.46 A few years earlier in 2004, Sean Gilsdorf edited a collection entitled The Bishop: Power and Piety at the First Millennium, which grew out of a 1999 conference at the University of Chicago. Much like the present volume, Gilsdorf found an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars working on bishops that lacked connections and a venue in which to explore, exchange, and expand their ideas on diverse men sharing a centuries-old office. Episcopal historians needed a facilitator. The extremely valuable website Episcopus, which is sponsored and maintained by John Ott and Evan Gatti, strives to serve this purpose by collecting open-access primary source translations and notices of publications and conferences from the late antique to the early modern periods.47 Through Episcopus, the international community of episcopal scholars has become more accessible, increasing the flow of information and the dissemination of publications. Unlike medievalists, early modern scholars have been slow to join Episcopus, or create their own similar communities.
In addition, there has been no scholarly vogue for bishops in the same way that has occurred for popes in the past two decades.48 This is due to the bishop’s relative ubiquity compared to the singularity of the pope, and the centuries-old public rituals that still attract observers to papal Rome. Nonetheless, the ubiquity,49 constancy, and substantial historical agency of the European episcopate demand attention. In France, the Groupe de recherches pour l’édition des actes des évêques de France des origins à 1200, led by Michel Parisse,50 as well as the successor group Répertoire prosopographique des évêques, dignitaires et chanoines des diocèses de France de 1200 à 1500 that publishes Fasti Ecclesiae Gallicanae, have worked to preserve French episcopal acts and other texts.51 A similar project, the English Episcopal Acta, begun by the eminent historian Frank Barlow and with the support of the British Academy, has resulted in the [14] publication of episcopal acts from many medieval English sees.52 In Germany, Monumenta Germaniae Historica has produced a shorter series of Capitula Episcoporum that has proved valuable to historians working on German bishops of the same period.53 In Italy, which had far more bishoprics than any other state and has needed no encouragement to publish,54 there has been a great deal of work done on bishops, dioceses, and primary sources, but few large-scale projects that collect and organize the predominantly local studies. The best attempt at this sort of collection is Vescovi e Diocesi in Italia dal XIV alla metà del XVI Secolo, which resulted from a conference in Brescia in 1987. These two volumes provide information about the political, social, and spiritual contexts of bishops, their clergy, and the cure of souls across the Italian peninsula from some of the best-known Italian ecclesiastical historians.55
While these projects have done much to preserve and reconstruct medieval episcopal documents, there are no such projects for the early modern period. There is a similar absence of studies on the European episcopate or comparative studies of episcopacies, which is mitigated slightly by several excellent monographs on national churches or regional episcopates.56 Part of this phenomenon [15] is linked to the sustained interest in the actions of kings and princes, and the revival of studies on the college of cardinals. In the early modern period the cardinals faced similar criticism of worldliness, and were often bishops themselves. Yet, the cardinals’ superior resources, political position, and periodically more abundant extant documentation have attracted more scholars who find a college of fifty men to be a more manageable study than a perennially changing episcopal cohort of more than 600.57 In their recent study The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety, and Art, 1450–1700, Mary Hollingsworth and Carol Richardson noted that scholars have adopted the case-study approach in order to explore the intersection of spiritual, familial, political, and corporate pressures in substantial detail and with minimal confusion. In collecting case studies, historians are not tempted to consider the regional idiosyncrasies found in each cardinal’s goals and experiences to be indicative of a cardinal’s standard experience.58 Likewise, the essays in this volume focus less on geographic or national episcopates than on models, tensions, and relations common to bishops across Christendom.
Context, Strategy, and Struggle
As part of the ongoing discussion of bishops and early modern European society, this collection offers examples of episcopal contexts, strategies, and struggles. By no means did all of the bishops discussed here enthusiastically adopt the ideals articulated by contemporary reformers. This volume expands the current discussion by offering commentary on how some bishops viewed their mandate and authority, interacted with other groups and institutions both lay and ecclesiastical, and occupied an increasingly challenging position in the social hierarchy. As a supposed public embodiment of Christian knowledge and virtue, the bishop was on constant display and judged against the local mores. Moreover, contemporaries compared him to an ideal standard developed by the Gospels, perpetuated by church fathers, venerated by individual dioceses, and passionately invoked by early moderns. Continued enthusiasm for medieval bishop-saints attests to the popularity of the episcopal ideal,59 but the absence of many new bishop-saints in the post-Trent period shows the difficulty in balancing the contradictions found [16] in the bishop’s spiritual and secular responsibilities.60
This collection brings together an international group of scholars who first presented aspects of their research at the 2010 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Montréal, Canada. The interest in the experiences of bishops shown by presenters and the audience was exciting, and the events related by these historians were diverse and compelling. The essays that evolved from these presentations discuss in detail the timeless pressures of financial exigency, the tyranny of distance, enthusiastic patrons, vocal reformers, and untiring and resourceful opponents. These studies reveal the episcopate’s importance at a variety of levels, from the local laity to the elite monarch, and every level’s interest in influencing the bishop’s behavior or appropriating his role. The essays in this collection divide relatively easily into three parts—Episcopal Authority, Clerical Reform, and Pastoral Practice—although, as with the bishops themselves, each essay involves issues far beyond the single broad heading. To some degree these divisions are artificial, for one advantage in studying bishops is the opportunity to examine the convergence of several themes, groups, and conflicts in one incident, place, or career. Just as Gregory the Great lamented, the bishop did not live in isolation and these studies reflect the multifaceted obligations and the challenges of the early modern episcopate.
The first section, entitled Episcopal Authority, includes three studies examining different facets of the episcopate simultaneously as leaders and recipients of patronage in England, the Netherlands, and Italy. In the first essay, Raymond A. Powell investigates trends in Queen Mary Tudor’s (r. 1553–58) promotion of bishops. Rather than seeking models of Tridentine reform, Mary privileged men who had connections to herself and her late mother, Queen Katherine of Aragon, and who had suffered deposition or imprisonment due to these connections or as a result of English Protestantism. As Powell shows, the Marian episcopate, charged with re-establishing English Catholicism, was influenced very little initially by Cardinal Reginald Pole (archbp. Canterbury 1556–58), who had attended Trent from 1545 to 1547. Rather Queen Mary’s choices had everything [17] to do with the more traditional values of restoration, retention, and restitution. There was a similar fashion of regal intervention in the provision to bishoprics in the Low Countries. As Hans Cools shows, the geographic distribution of bishoprics across Imperial-French borders necessitated that Habsburg rulers control the provision to the episcopal thrones in order to maintain civil peace and political loyalty in the diocese. The added responsibility of secular rule that was attached to several bishoprics intensified their importance during the struggles between the Valois and Habsburgs, as well as during the religious wars that followed. Cools compares the background of bishops in the Low Countries from 1515 to 1559, nearly all of whom were aristocratic, and finds notable similarities to their episcopal contemporaries in France, some of whom also served as metropolitan archbishops over these Dutch bishops. In contrast to the theme of acquiring episcopal authority that both Powell and Cools pursue, Antonella Perin and John Alexander use the lens of patronage in order to qualify the limits of Cesare Gambara’s (bp. of Tortona 1548–91) power at several levels. The bishop’s inability to fund and implement his own plan for rebuilding his cathedral reflects his weakness in relation to external forces that otherwise could have provided him with support: the archbishop of Milan, Tortona’s feudal lord, and a local cardinal. The campaign to rebuild the cathedral moved quickly from episcopal control into negotiation amongst these three individuals, all of whom ranked above Gambara on the social hierarchy. Instead of embracing the bishop as the proper local leader and putting their resources at his disposal, these three privileged their own standards and desires, supported with their more extensive wealth and justified by their elite status. As Perin and Alexander show, in contrast to contemporary reform rhetoric, the bishop in residence did not always know best, nor did he receive the support or resources to fulfill his acknowledged mandate.
Whereas the first section examines ways of using, bestowing, or subverting episcopal authority, the second section, entitled Clerical Reform, reveals the bishop at work reforming his diocese and being reformed himself. While Tridentine decrees and reform rhetoric alike emphasized episcopal residence and supervision to be the cure of all religious conflict and ignorance, this section shows the challenges encountered by bishops in France and Italy as they sought to implement reform programs within their diocese. As these essays show, the traditional reference to the bishop as the proper local spiritual authority ignores centuries of reservation by monastic houses, continued local intervention, and, as seen in Perin and Alexander’s study, conflict between the bishop and his own superiors, or even Rome and secular authorities. Linda Lierheimer’s study of [18] Sébastien Zamet, the bishop of Langres (1615–55), reveals the strategies pursued by nuns, who resisted cloistering and more general reform programs introduced variously by the bishop and sometimes in collaboration with other nuns. Although the Council of Trent insisted on episcopal authority over convents, several communities fought to maintain their autonomy using a variety of resources and supporters that put the lie to the universality of episcopal privilege and the desire for religious reform. Lierheimer shows plainly the interaction between various levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy throughout the decades-long conflicts, explores the fundamental gendering of clerical rights, as well as the application to the French Parlements of Dijon and Paris for support against the bishop. Celeste McNamara encounters similar objections to reform in her study of Gregorio Barbarigo, the bishop of Padua (1664–97). As another conscientious bishop eager to follow the Tridentine episcopal injunctions to supervise and educate the laity, Barbarigo spent much of his episcopate conducting visitations of the parishes in his diocese, most of which were small, poor, and ill-supervised. McNamara presents examples that show the independence of local populations, who seemed to consider episcopal authority to operate only when the bishop was present in their town. Using Barbarigo’s voluminous visitation records, McNamara shows how the tyranny of distance, personal desires, and local toleration combined to thwart the observance of episcopal decrees. Moreover, McNamara reveals that there was substantial understanding of the practice and theory of reform among the laity that could join with a disinclination to follow it. Jean-Pascal Gay pursues a similar theme of negotiation between local and ecclesiastical authorities in his study of judicial jurisdiction over the French episcopate. This discussion moves the focus from concern for the orthodoxy of local populations to the international level in which the bishops themselves faced trial for heresy. In France jurisdiction over the episcopacy was fraught with diplomatic struggles between the monarchy and the papacy, both of which saw bishops as their own agents who were to be judged exclusively under their authority. Through the seventeenth century the reform of certain French bishops was an opportunity to discuss the episcopate’s authority, either as a divine appointee or an earthly creation, and the bishop’s place in the greater hierarchy, as well as negotiate relations between two international powers.
The third section, entitled Pastoral Practice, draws together themes seen elsewhere in the volume, but focuses on the mechanics of the episcopal duty amid the evolving atmosphere of sixteenth-century reform rhetoric. John Christopoulos’ study of confessing the sin of abortion allows a close examination of [19] the politics behind the episcopal and papal reservation of the power of absolution. This negotiation of ecclesiastical authority was undermined by the practical reality of how one acquired absolution. Individual penitents were forced to travel either to the episcopal center or to Rome in order to be absolved, and the challenges in doing so destroyed the privacy of confession. Christopoulos examines the process by which individual bishops and popes colluded in undermining papal reservation of abortion in order to avoid scandal and preserve the honor of the penitent. Jennifer Mara DeSilva continues this theme of episcopal preservation of social norms in her examination of Paris de’ Grassi, the bishop of Pesaro (1513–28), in order to explore how a non-resident bishop contributed to his diocese through a series of brief visits. De’ Grassi’s conception of episcopal responsibility was consistent in theory with contemporary reformers, but limited by his commitment to work and reside at the papal court in Rome. Records from several visits made over the course of his fifteen-year episcopate provide an opportunity to follow a well-informed and conscientious bishop whose activities sought maximal benefit to and connections within his diocese. De’ Grassi was fully aware of the physical and spiritual needs of the Pesaresi and sought to provide them with salvation, security, and episcopal leadership, while paradoxically living permanently outside the diocese. Moving north, Jill Fehleison examines preaching in the strategies of François de Sales, the exiled bishop of Geneva (1602–22), as a means of preventing Protestant growth and drawing people back to Catholicism. Undoubtedly, the sermon was one of the most powerful clerical tools, as it could reach both aural and print audiences and had both an intellectual and emotional force. Consistently biographers and reformers alike celebrated preaching as both good for society and as an episcopal prerogative. In order to explore de Sales’s strategies and his conception of the difference between Catholic and Protestant beliefs, Fehleison discusses the imagery of the Eucharist and crucifixion employed in de Sales’s sermons and the Catholic activities that made those images real to listeners and readers. All three of these essays examine the actions of reform-minded bishops who worked to establish strong Christian communities in spite of practical interference and systemic challenges.
The ambition of this collection is to show the mechanics of episcopal action and mentalities across Europe by dispelling unfounded stereotypes, presenting new documents, and answering important questions. This collection presents a broad perspective of episcopal responsibilities and concerns in the expectation that it will inspire further work on other early modern bishops, their challenges, experiments, and networks in an age of reform. To this end the following essays [20] provide a framework for understanding the early modern episcopate in its global, regional, and local contexts. The contributors to this volume have identified bishops whose experiences were living examples to their congregation, but also to other bishops. Through this collection, these men provide an avenue for connecting the church hierarchy with the Catholic faithful, and unravel the knot of diverse lives, exhortations to reform, and practical limitations that personified the early modern bishop.
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