Frazier - Possible lives: authors and saints in Renaissance Italy

Possible Lives

Possible Lives

Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy

ALISON KNOWLES FRAZIER

Columbia University PressNew York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2005 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50339-6

Columbia University Press expresses appreciation for
a University Cooperative Society Subvention Grant
awarded by the University of Texas at Austin that
helped with publication.

Columbia University Press also expresses appreciation
for a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
to assist with the production of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frazier, Alison Knowles

Possible lives : authors and saints in Renaissance Italy /
Alison Knowles Frazier.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0231129769 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Christian hagiographyhistoryTo 1500.

2. Christian literature, Latin (Medieval and modern)ItalyHistory and criticism. 3. RenaissanceItaly. I. Title.

BX4662.F74 2004

235'.2'094509024dc22

2004050215

A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

for
Dorothy and Ray,
and
Rufus and Helen,
with love

Table of Contents

:

Possible Lives began with a visit, more than a decade ago, to the Manhattan apartment of Paul Oskar Kristeller. As we sat at a small table, surrounded by books and papers and card files, Kristeller described from memory more than a dozen manuscripts and fonds that I should examine and suggested connections between certain authors. Keep a card file, he urged, and cross-reference everything. Kristeller then dropped the bombshell: he had recorded writings about saints in the course of assembling the Iter Italicum but had not been consistent in his attention to this literature. In consequence, he explained, I should repeat his dpouillement of catalogs. My heart sank; anyone who has consulted Kristellers Latin Manuscript Books will know why. It seemed to me that I could write a dissertation or I could undertake to repeat his lifes work for hagiography in manuscript and early printed sources, buteven supported by the Bollandists catalogsI could not do both. To calm my anxiety, I focused on taking notes. Kristellers eyebrows rose as I began: the writing implement to hand in my bag was a pen with green ink.

Those mortifyingly green notes traveled with me for years, a practical reminder of tasks and a conceptual map. Id long since transferred their contents to index cards and then to computer files, but a talismanic quality now attached to them. They reminded me of the elderly scholar, of his enthusiasm for the project of collecting and analyzing the fifteenth-century humanists lives of the saints. By virtue of his attention to the vitae sanctorum by these authors, Kristeller was unusual. But he was almost unique in his attention to their engagement with a chronological range of saints and in his refusal to dispense with even the most derivative of their contributions. All would be evidence for the reassembly of a forgotten moment in the cult of the saints and in the history of the studia humanitatis.

That visit was the only time Kristeller and I talked face to face about the topic of humanist hagiography. It was easy to convince myself not to bother him: he had the magnum opus of the Iter Italicum under way and was helping many scholars around the world with their projects. Years later, when Kristeller published his article on humanist sources for the supposed child martyr Simon of Trentsurely a model of what he expected from mehe sent a copy. I was surprised and gratified and chastened. We had not been in touch. But the gift of the offprint and the little note that accompanied it showed that he had greater confidence in the significance of the undertaking than I.

This study falls far from what Kristeller would have wished. It incorporates conceptual positions for which he had little patience and does notcould not possiblyrepresent the thorough dpouillement he suggested. But it does attempt to answer wholeheartedly his faith in the multifarious reality of the intellectual moment of humanist hagiography.

If Kristeller is the distant deity of this study, John Monfasani, Eugene F. Rice Jr., and Caroline Walker Bynum are its godparents. To John I owe my first steps in the technical training that lies behind Possible Lives; I hope that the book does not embarrass him. John has read more shaky first and second drafts than anyone, and I thank him for his early encouragement and reliable support.

Gene was still collecting accolades for Saint Jerome in the Renaissance when I arrived at Columbia University. In the wake of that elegant study, of Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bells innovative Saints and Society, and of Andr Vauchezs magisterial La Saintet en Occident, it was not surprising that he sent me off to investigate humanist participation in the cult of the saints. Saint Jerome, however, set me a problem, for it forced me to confront the bivia: how could I answer, on one hand, Kristellers desire for compendiousness and breadth and, on the other, Genes exemplary close study of humanists responses to one saint?

Caroline Bynum began to shape this study in the course of a year-long seminar on hagiography; I am grateful for her insightful and enthusiastic responses to dissertation chapters and then to book drafts. In a series of conversations, she encouraged me to face the problem of structuring Possible Lives. The answer, I gradually decided, was to embrace the contrast of historiographical styles represented by the work of my two constant mentors, Caroline and John. As a result, the chapters that follow might be described as a social history of intellectuals: they are designed to capture the sheer inventiveness with which humans make and respond to their religious environments and to document in detail the contribution of the studia humanitatis. Such an encounter between what is usually treated as elite history and what is usually treated as popular history is relatively unusual. If it succeeds here, that is in large part due to what I have learned from Caroline.

My third great debt is to librarians. At my home institution, the University of Texas at Austin, the interlibrary loan department headed by Wendy Nesmith, the bibliographers for history and religion, Gera Draaijer and Shiela Winchester, and the rare book librarians of the Harry Ransom Research Center have helped with innumerable requests. The Vatican Microfilm Archive at St. Louis University has been an indispensable support for a scholar so far from Italy. Abroad, I was received kindly by librarians and archivists who arranged lighting, described archival organization and bureaucratic procedures, sorted out confusing shelf marks, and made time and space for me when seats were full. I especially thank the staffs at the American Academy in Rome, directed by Christina Huemer; the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; the Bibliothque nationale and the library of Ste. Genevive in Paris; the British Library and the John Rylands Library; and the staffs of