Unlike “biblical history,” “church history,” or “religious history,” the term “sacred history” tends to evoke negative, partisan associations among professional historians. Yet sacred history lies very much at the heart of the historical enterprise—names like Eusebius, Augustine, Gregory of Tours, and Bede spring immediately to mind, to say nothing of a whole host of medieval chroniclers. The greatest stimulus to this field occurred during the early modern period, when the technology of printing spurred Reformation debates. Yet, it is precisely these efforts that modern historians most disparage, especially by contrast to the supposed political realism of Renaissance historical writing and the advances in critical scholarship made during the early modern “historical revolution.” In a most judicious and timely volume, the editors of Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World set out to correct this negative impression.

Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan are to be commended for producing an exceptionally coherent work, especially given that it originated from colloquia held at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and the Notre Dame Centre in London. From these disparate beginnings, the editors and contributors have crafted a tripartite approach to an immense subject. Part 1 lays a sure foundation by outlining the general characteristics of sacred history in the Renaissance and Reformation, part 2 builds on this foundation by exploring the relations between sacred and national history, and part 3 examines the ways in which Catholic writers in particular used themes from sacred history to relate the early Christian past to contemporary religious questions. This third part lacks some of the balance and focus of the previous two, being both more eclectic in its subject matter and more focused on Catholic authors, but these qualities should be viewed more as features of, rather than bugs in, a necessarily wide-ranging inquiry.

Anthony Grafton's contribution, “Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation,” opens part 1, laying a firm foundation for the entire volume with a warts-and-all assessment of sacred history, especially by comparison to the new, more critical style of history introduced by the Renaissance humanists. Yet Grafton moves far beyond this common criticism to explore the many intersections between sacred history and humanism, which resulted in the creation of scholarly communities devoted to vast research projects and, most notably, in a deeper appreciation of the Jewish origins of Christianity. Euan Cameron follows up this general introduction with a consideration of Protestant visions of early Christianity, specifically those of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. In a remarkably nuanced assessment, Cameron denies the existence of any strict evolutionary pattern in Protestant historiography—whether from Lutheran to Reformed or from humanistic to dogmatic—showing instead how these traditions continually cross-fertilized. Ultimately humanist scholarly techniques insinuated themselves into all forms of sacred history, no matter how dogmatic, as illustrated by Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli's essay, “Cesare Baronio and the Roman Catholic Vision of the Early Church.” To rebut the Protestant authors of the Magdeburg Centuries, Baronio used his Annales ecclesiastici to establish the Catholic Church's continuity with its apostolic origins. Despite this ahistorical goal—or, perhaps, because of it—Baronio had to engage in critical historical research, such as determining with precision the date of Peter's appointment as bishop of Antioch, a chronological detail crucial for establishing the apostle's primacy. Simon Ditchfield concludes the introductory part of the volume with a fascinating consideration of what the term “sacred history” actually meant to contemporaries, especially through an analysis of library collections catalogued by early modern archivists under this heading.

Part 2 of the volume, on the relations between national and sacred history, can be divided into two groups of essays, those dealing with the effects of humanism and those dealing with Reformation debates. Among the former, David J. Collins describes how early German humanists—while utilizing classical sources, styles, and themes—incorporated so much religious material in their national and regional histories as to render our modern distinction between sacred and secular history meaningless. In a fascinating account of the humanist heritage in Spanish historical writing, Katherine Elliott Van Liere describes how humanist chroniclers fabricated such a convincing account of the apostolic origins of the Spanish church that this myth endured until the twentieth century. In the second group of essays, on Reformation debates, Howard P. Louthan outlines diverse Catholic visions of sacred history in Central Europe, Rosamund Oates surveys Elizabethan accounts (both Catholic and Protestant) of church history, and Salvador Ryan focuses specifically on Irish Catholic accounts.

The third part of the volume explores Catholic uses of sacred history in a wide variety of contexts: literary, artistic, geographical, colonial. Jean-Marie Le Gaul points to the continued vitality of hagiographic literature in the French Renaissance, Liam Matthew Brockey describes how the figure of the apostle Thomas lay at the intersection of religion and empire as the Portuguese expanded into Asia, Iriana Oryshkevich explores innovative Catholic interpretations of the early Christian art in Rome's catacombs, and Adam G. Beaver shows how the humanists propagated an antiquarian vision of the Holy Land that called the itinerary of traditional pilgrimages into question. These wide ranging essays nicely demonstrate how the theme of sacred history opens onto wider vistas, and they bring this illuminating volume to a most fitting conclusion.