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Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools: Five Reformation Satires. by Erika Rummel Review by: James V. Mehl The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 454-455 Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542927 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 12:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sixteenth Century Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:44:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools: Five Reformation Satires.by Erika Rummel

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Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools: Five Reformation Satires. by Erika RummelReview by: James V. MehlThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 454-455Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542927 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 12:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

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This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:44:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

454 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXV / 2 (1994)

Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools: Five Reformation Satires. Erika Rummel, trans. NewYork: Fordham University Press, 1993. 122 pp. $25.00, $15.00 pb.

This slim volume with a catchy title should be given serious consideration for adoption as a textbook of newly translated primary source readings for more advanced students. It also provides scholars easier access to several of the more obscure satires from early sixteenth-cen-

tury Germany. Erika Rummel, best known for her work on Erasmus, has selected and trans- lated five works of satire printed between 1517 and 1526, during the formative years of the Reformation. Two were written by humanist reformers sympathetic to the cause of Luther, two by supporters of the traditional church, and one by Erasmus, who attempted to take a middle road. The five selections include: "The Powers of the Romanists" (from Philalethis civis Utopiensis dialogus defacultatibus Rhomanensium nuper publicatus: Henno rusticus, c. 1517, at- tributed to Ulrich von Hutten or Jacobus Sobius); "A Reuchlinist's Ascent to Heaven" (Ep. I 30 of Ortwin Gratius' Lamentationes obscurorum virorun, 1518); "Theologists in Council" (from the Conciliabulum theologistarum, 1520, by Crotus Rubeanus; "The Great Lutheran Fool" (fromThomas Murmer's Von demgrossen Lutherischen Narren, 1522), and "A Journey for

Religion's Sake (1526, one of Erasmus' more familiar stories from the Colloquia). Rummel

explains in her introduction that three major satires of the period-the Letters of Obscure Men, Praise of Folly, and Gargantua and Pantagruel -have tended to dominate our understanding. So her purpose is "to bring some of the surviving (and undeservedly neglected) satires to the attention of an English-speaking audience." (3) The very topicality of these minor satires, which has relegated them to obscurity, also established them as period pieces that provide comment on particular historical issues. For that reason, she argues, they offer very instruc- tive and attractive reading.

Precisely because these satires were written for specific purposes and dealt with particular issues in the course of the religious controversy, Rummel provides a good deal of useful

background/contextual information in her introduction, as well as in the headnotes and endnotes for each selection. The volume includes an index and a very short bibliography, with only eight titles suggested for further reading. Some of the most important recent works on Reformation satire, such as the studies by Barbara Konneker and Robert W Scribner, are

unfortunately not on the list. Rummel is to be thanked for her efforts in retrieving these minor works for the use of

our students and congratulated on the high quality of her translations. Rummel bases her translation of the first three selections on the Latin texts in Eduard Bocking, ed., Hutteni

Opera omni (Leipzig, 1859-70; repr. Aalen, 1963), the selection from Murner on the text in Paul Merker, ed., Thomas Murners Deutsche Schrfiten (Strassburg, 1918), and the colloquy from Erasmus on the Latin text in ASD I-3.The translations of the first, second, and fourth selec- tions are abridged, with the translation of Murner treating only excepts from the first half of the original text. These abridgments are usually indicated clearly in the translation, although I noticed one missing on page 42. Much of the information in the endnotes is taken from notes to the critical editions, although Rummel often updates the information. Note 44 on

page 46 needs to be corrected, however, to refer to Bocking, IV, 499, note to lines 24-25. The translator has also added a number of notes, especially to explain points of theology and other terms in the texts that would seem obscure to many students of the late twentieth cen-

tury. Metaphors, proverbs, and puns which defy easy translation are often explained in the notes. Scholars, of course, will still have to rely on the critical editions. A parallel reading of the two texts will often clarify the meaning of certain translations, as, for example, the spe-

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Book Reviews 455

cific sexual description of men and boys being used by Roman churchmen for homosexual

purposes (22) is confirmed in the Latin concubitus praestantissimos. Or one will notice that the

repeated translation of"Magister" and "Magister noster" as "Professor" in the third selection, while correct, fails to capture the sense of literary reference and transmission of this satirical title from Crotus' earlier Letters of Obscure Men to his Conciliabulum theologistarum. Indeed, after reading these satires together, there is a clearer understanding of the complex interrela-

tionship between the uses of satire during the controversies of the pre-Reformation and those of the early Reformation in Germany.

James V. Mehl ...................................... Missouri Western State College

The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture. Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Muller. trans by Tim Spence and David Craven. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Hu- manities Press International, 1992. 193 pp. $35.00.

Arcadia or Utopia? The authors locate the villa in the regressive bucolic world ofArcadia, in "flight from the bad and hostile city," but not as in Utopia, "to another, better city" (112). The ideology of the Renaissance villa and the practice of villeggiatura

disguised conflicts of authority, reconstituted archetypal conditions, and saw itself as a counter to urban emancipation. From this point of view, then, the villa-which art

history has deemed a progressive, far-reaching cultural form when seen in aesthetic terms only-otherwise unveils itself de facto as a reactionary phenomena (113).

What is empowering in this description is that the villa is not seen as a passive form filled in by the dominant ideology, but as participant in dynamic social, cultural, economic, and

political processes.The dialectic of city versus country receives a supple critique based on an

analysis of sources, both classical and sixteenth-century villa literature, is one of the strengths of this book, as well as of contemporary German post-Marxist scholarship.

The latter is the primary rationale for this translation of Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur: Versuch einer kunst und sozialgeschichtlichen Analyse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970; plus an after- word in the 1971 edition) as given in the foreword by Otto KarlWerckmeister and introduc- tion by David Craven. Illustrations have been incorporated from text figures and a later added appendix, but the illustrations lack the explanatory captions that originally accompa- nied them and they receive little analysis in the text, from which they are frequently divorced in positioning.The first four chapters explore the circumstances, a "parallelogram of forces- aesthetic, economic, political, and philosophical", that led to the migration from Venice to the terraferma and the development of the "villa as ideology." Studies of architecture and villa culture, particularly in the Veneto, where much of Bentmann and Miiller's attention is

placed, have been extremely active since the mid-1960s and readers will experience some disjunction in approaching material that may seem dated, even while the theoretical position remains relevant.

The pivotal figure of chapter 5 is Alvise Cornaro, whose household included Ruzante

(Angelo Beolco, the illegitimate son of a nobleman), author of villanesque peasant plays and dialect comedies that are mentioned as forming a Paduan foundation for a post-League of Cambrai terraferma society. Despite the indisputable interest that Cornaro holds for this sub-

ject, through his writings, his building and land reclamation projects and his patronage, it is hard to see him as completely symptomatic of the Venetian patriciate given that he was denied admittance into it. In a way his position in transfiguring agrarian capitalism into ag- ricultural humanism must be seen as reflecting a sense of exile with more complex motiva-

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