Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance

Bibliographic Data

ID16347641
AuthorsLu Ann Homza (Johns Hopkins University, corresponding author), Seymour Baker House
Year2000
Volume36
Issue3
Pages69-71
Publication date2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueRenaissance and Reformation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-429X • E-ISSN: 2293-7374
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Libraries - UOTL (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.33137/rr.v36i3.8635
OpenAlexW1509729108
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Lu Ann Homza's study of the nature of religious authority in the Spanish Renaissance is arranged in two sections of three chapters each.The first part examines texts and events that yield insights on "explicit statements on hermeneutics" (p.xxiii), while the second group investigates "pastoral materials" (ibid.) that tend to complement the more theoretical findings argued in the first section.Altogether, she suggests that religious authority in the Spanish Renaissance is more complex than previous studies allow, and that its unique blending of scholastic and humanistic concerns is considerably different from what one would expect to find, given the putative polarization of these two modes elsewhere in Europe.Homza structures the two sections into sequences of case studies, moving from the relatively straightforward to the more complex in each section.The first group opens with a discussion of the trial before the Spanish Inquisition of the well-known scholar and ecclesiastic Juan de Vergara in the 1530s, moves on to an excellent reading of the 1527 Valladolid conference on the implications of various Erasmian positions, and concludes with a study of the Biblical translation of a Spanish converso Pedro Ciruelo.All three cases reveal Homza's close familiarity with her sources and illustrate why such sources deserve a wider audience than they have received to date.Readers might take exception to her assertion that the Spanish Inquisition was a "relatively benign institution" (p.6), and indeed her own study shows that it did convict Vergara on trumped-up charges, but she substantiates her claim that highly placed ecclesiastics like Vergara felt entitled to preferential treatment from the disciplinary organs of the Church, even though they often failed to receive it.Vergara's writings reveal him as "a humanist who invoked Aquinas and an Erasmian who cherished his own rank" (p.45), in apparent contradiction to sixteenth-century stereotypes.The second case study, concerning the 1527 Valladolid conference, details the debate of some thirty-three Spanish theologians over the orthodoxy of various excerpts taken from Erasmus's writing.Homza presents their debate as alternating Reviews

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Autonomy · Battle · Epistemology · Flexibility (engineering · Humanism · Literature · Political science · Scholasticism · The Renaissance · Theology · Classics · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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