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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
Just as a particular life, though largely conditioned by material needs, is on occasion given a new direction by unpredictable forces of religion, culture, election and whim, so general history is determined by the stresses set up by forces that economics cannot measure, by the opposition of spiritual ideas, the incalculable action of personalities, the tendencies of the acquired prejudices, conventions and enthusiasms of a period. The econoinic interpretation of history, indispensable as it is, must appear singularly partial when applied to the sixteenth century. It is the merit of a recent book of Reformation studies — The Reformation and the Contemplative Life—to relate a wide and learned selection of facts to a significant aspect of the time, and to watch them in the medium of biographical religious psychology.
1 A Study of the Conflict between the Carthusians and the State. By David Mathew and Gervase Mathew, O.P. (Sheed & Ward ; pp. 321 ; 716.)
In sixteen papers, with full notes on the text, the authors consider the first rush of the Reformation on the Carthusians, its retreat and return : how it was viewed from the Grande Chartreuse : its effect on the houses in Swabia and Franconia, and beyond in the Marches and the Baltic countries. To the east the Turk was riding into the lands of the charterhouses in Hungary and Carinthia; but the chief interest is the position in England, which is made the subject of delicate and allusive writing.
The period was particularly rich in personalities ; Europe was wider in experience than it had been in the medieval centuries and complication had not yet set into patterns. To all this the style of the authors is admirably fitted ; the knack of suggesting real individuals, not types ; the adjectival justice of the descriptions often supported by references. How fresh, for instance, to be told of the devotion of Pope Leo X to the stark sanctity of St. Bruno and of the fundamental scholasticism of Blessed Thomas More. One point I would question: that a long calm settled upon Bavarian religion between the Peasants’ War and the Aufklärung of the eighteenth century (p. 132). It is true that the Dukes and Electors of Bavaria, politically astute and Catholic by conviction, succeeded in holding the country for the Church ; nevertheless, it was the central battle-field of the Counter-Reformation.-T. G.
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