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Pole's Piety? The Devotional Reading of Reginald Pole and his Friends

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2012

M. ANNE OVERELL
M. ANNE OVERELL
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religion, University of DurhamDH1 3RS, e-mail: ma@overell.fsnet.co.uk
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Abstract

In this examination of the piety and devotional books of Reginald Pole and his friends, three booklists are compared: Pole's own, and those of Marcantonio Flaminio and Michael Throckmorton. The article also probes their comments and choices about reading and prayer, sacrament and preaching, as well as the observations of contemporaries. Piety in Pole's household was nourished principally by the Bible, the Fathers and the Imitation of Christ, but scriptural commentaries by suspect reformers also became part of their devotional reading, moulding religious identities which were unusual and became dangerous.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 458 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
ASM

Archivio di Stato, Mantua

CRP

The correspondence of Reginald Pole, ed. Thomas F. Mayer, Aldershot 2002–8

PC

I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi, 1557–1567, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, Vatican City 1998–2000

Reginald Pole, bête noire of King Henry viii and favoured cardinal of Queen Mary Tudor, puzzled his contemporaries: his long exile made him seem as much Italian as English; he appeared ‘lukewarm’, sometimes ‘very cold’, yet his book against Henry viii, called De unitate, was heated and provoked hatred.Footnote 1 There was much uncertainty about his religious beliefs. At his own trial for heresy in 1567, Pietro Carnesecchi said that ‘in the eyes of the world’ Cardinal Pole had died unhappily, ‘being regarded in Rome as a Lutheran and in Germany as a Papist’.Footnote 2 Two years later the English martyrologist John Foxe noted that ‘he [Pole] began somewhat to savour the doctrine of Luther, and was no lesse suspected at Rome’.Footnote 3 So, Pole was an enigma. Yet witnesses at Carnesecchi's first trial stressed that the cardinal was a man of ‘parole catholicissime’ and that his household at Viterbo prayed fervently, went to communion and to confession, and gave alms.Footnote 4 They appeared to be devoted to their faith. Devotion, however, is not uniform, it has themes and expressions, fads and foibles – and rarely more so than in the first half of the sixteenth century, before reformers had systematised the cheerful variety of Christian spiritual life.

This article will attempt to unravel some particular characteristics of the piety of Pole and his friends, in the light of evidence of the devotional books which they owned or recommended.Footnote 5 It will focus on the booklists of three of them: the cardinal himself; his close friend Marcantonio Flaminio, poet, humanist and spiritual writer; and Pole's friend and agent, Michael Throckmorton.Footnote 6 These lists are incomplete and it cannot be assumed that the three men bought, read or even liked the books that they owned. In the case of this trio, it must be remembered that they exchanged references and inherited books from each other. Pole was left in informal charge of Flaminio's goods at the poet's death in 1550, and Throckmorton died in possession of several books that had once belonged to Flaminio.Footnote 7 A complicated and hitherto unrecognised network linked these two Englishmen and one Italian, all humanists and, apparently, all very devout.

In the early 1540s the cardinal's household at Viterbo was their shared landscape. Pole took up residence there as legate to the Patrimony of St Peter in September 1541. In November Flaminio arrived, together with his friend Pietro Carnesecchi, to become part of Pole's famiglia; both had been in Naples where they were profoundly influenced by the Spanish reformer, Juan de Valdés. They were disseminating his views, but Flaminio, like most humanist poets, also needed patronage.Footnote 8 The tables were turned, however, when the new patron began to revere the protégé. By December, the ‘cold’, evasive Pole became euphoric, saying that he was deeply impressed by his guests' ‘useful company’, especially that of Flaminio:

I say useful because in the evening Messer Marcantonio gives me and the better part of my household that ‘food that does not die’, so that I do not know when I have felt greater consolation and greater edification.Footnote 9

His spontaneous enthusiasm at the time casts doubt on the idea, propounded more than a decade later, that Pole invited Flaminio in order to ‘rescue’ him from ‘heresy’.Footnote 10 In the early 1540s Pole, a cardinal but still not a priest, was enjoying religious consolation offered by Flaminio, a poet in minor orders and, from time to time, the trusted layman Michael Throckmorton was there too. Footnote 11 Viterbo was a hothouse which nurtured sixteenth-century Italy's most controversial spiritual book, the Beneficio di Cristo, written by the Benedictine monk Don Benedetto da Mantova and still being ‘polished’ by Flaminio whilst he was in Pole's household at this time.Footnote 12 Pole was involved, passing on at least one important reference for the book.Footnote 13

The always delicate Flaminio was the first to die, in 1550, in Pole's house, leaving most of his goods (and presumably most of his books) in Pole's charge, with a series of verbal bequests.Footnote 14 Alessandro Pastore has published a list of Flaminio's books, sold or loaned after his death, as well as the much longer list of Pole's books delivered to England in 1555 after he had arrived there as cardinal legate in Mary Tudor's reign.Footnote 15 Pastore points out that neither list is complete and that Flaminio's may have been ‘filtered’, cleaned up in case the inquisitors became interested.Footnote 16 Pole's collection, too, is innocent; nothing then condemned as heretical was imported into England in the cardinal legate's boxes.Footnote 17

Throckmorton's booklist is more suspect. It was drawn up on his death in November 1558, in his own house in Mantua, and is the longest of the three, containing some 279 entries of which some are repeats.Footnote 18 There is a vast array of medical and classical books, as well as many devotional texts. These reveal Throckmorton's close connections to the Viterbo group; for instance, he had books written by Flaminio and the Rime spirituali by the poetess Vittoria Colonna, Pole's close friend, and an impressive collection of other works of piety. He also owned at least two books written by German and Dutch reformers and others which were identified by contemporaries as ‘Lutheran’.Footnote 19

What do these three collections tell us about devotion at Viterbo? First, that the spirituality of Pole's circle was biblical and bookish. The Bible was ‘the taproot of all meditation’ for Viterbo, as for the wider Christian world, and all three men had been students in Padua in the 1520s, part of a Christian humanist generation much given to studi sacri.Footnote 20 Pole's thought became ‘permeated by the Bible’, at least from the early 1530s and his biblical education started much earlier than that.Footnote 21 In 1537 Pole's close friend, Alvise Priuli, said that Pole always insisted that Scripture must be absorbed ‘nel suo interiore senso’; people who did not attempt this missed out on its spiritual fruits and could not know ‘la dolceza’ hidden within the text.Footnote 22 The myriad biblical metaphors in the cardinal's letters prove his own lifetime search. Flaminio took the same line: he once said that the first part of Christian prayer was reading: ‘leggendo, meditando et orando’.Footnote 23 Shortly before his arrival at Viterbo, he had been much influenced by the Spanish reformer, Juan de Valdés, who advocated direct ‘consideration’ of the Bible, through divine illumination.Footnote 24 Yet the only strictly biblical work on Flaminio's list is the Hebraist Sante Pagnini's complete Bible.Footnote 25 The booklists of Pole and Throckmorton reveal far more bible study: Pole had Valla's Annotations on the New Testament and Erasmus' commentaries on Luke, on the Pauline Epistles, on the Psalter, as well as his Enchiridion, or Handbook of a Christian knight.Footnote 26 The Enchiridion envisaged a spiritual revolution achieved through laymen reading their Bibles, just as these devotees at Viterbo were reading theirs.Footnote 27

Throckmorton followed Erasmian precepts: his inventory contains litanies of individual books of the Bible owned by the Englishman, probably as parts of a multi-volume set. Theirs was a generation when bible-reading was still encouraged in Italy and these men were praying the Bible.Footnote 28 However, on Throckmorton's list there is another title, harmonising perfectly with the Viterbensian Bible bias, ‘summarium scripture volgare’. This seems to be the notary's version of the anonymous El summario dela sancta scriptura, a miscellany of writings of Erasmus and of Luther, published in Italy in about 1534. In 1544 it was condemned in print by the traditionalist heavyweight Ambrogio Catarino, who called it ‘scismatico, heretico et pestilente’. Catarino's thunderings went unheeded and Throckmorton kept his copy safe until the day of his death, fourteen years later.Footnote 29

The importance of the Psalms for Viterbo's piety was immense, as testified by the booklists and by much external evidence. Flaminio's work on translating and paraphrasing the Psalms was encouraged by Pole and spanned the poet's whole adult life, influencing many other translators, especially the Scottish humanist George Buchanan.Footnote 30 Paradoxically, Flaminio's short booklist contains only one Psalm commentary, that of the Byzantine theologian, Euthymius Zigabenus.Footnote 31 Throckmorton's collection compensated for the shortfall: he owned Flaminio's Paraphrasis in triginta psalmos versibus scripta,Footnote 32 Savonarola's meditations on the Psalms and a commentary marked ‘Campensis’ (the Dutch humanist, Jan van Kampen), a friend of Pole's, admired by Flaminio, who, as a student, had heard van Kampen lecturing on the Old Testament.Footnote 33

Their breviaries and office books reflect the household's daily routines wherein the Bible and the Psalms were read and absorbed; it is important to view these men's biblical studies in the light of their daily devotions.Footnote 34 Throckmorton's inventory contains plenty of office books, such as the offices for Holy Week, of the Virgin and a ‘Diurnale totum officium Romanum Marci antonii Flaminii’.Footnote 35 Throckmorton had inherited the dead poet's own day-time office book and it is known from other sources that Flaminio was very keen on his breviary. Having survived many formative years in the strenuously pious household of Bishop Giberti of Verona, in April 1537 Flaminio could assure Cardinal Contarini that he spent an hour and a half every morning reading his offices and was greatly enjoying the routine (but perhaps he sought to impress).Footnote 36 At his trial in 1566–7 Carnesecchi testified that ‘I am sure that Flaminio had with him [at Viterbo] some of Valdés's writings and I believe they were the book of Considerations and his commentary on the psalms.’Footnote 37 Those works certainly do not appear on any of the three lists, probably because the inquisition decided that anything by Valdés was wicked. All the same, his ideas were already part of Viterbo's spiritual landscape: Hebraic, humanist and, at times, mystical.

Carlos Eire has commented that ‘The return to the Fathers was a search for the best possible devotional literature’. That insight is important for an understanding of Pole and his friends.Footnote 38 Three copies of the pseudo-Augustinian Meditationes de spiritu sancto are listed in Throckmorton's inventory.Footnote 39 Surprisingly, there is no trace of Augustine in the lists of either Pole or Flaminio, yet there are other Fathers in plenty: Pole owned three copies of St Basil's Hexaëmeron and works by St John Chrysostom, St Gregory of Nazianzus and St John Damascene.Footnote 40 Flaminio's list contains St Hilary (whom he quotes in Il Beneficio di Cristo), St Athanasius and St Gregory. Theirs was an age of burgeoning interest in patristic studies, but Pole in particular made these texts speak to the needs of his own generation for ‘reserve’ and conciliation; later there were the claims that he had ‘rescued’ Flaminio from heresy by persuading his friend to read the Fathers.Footnote 41

St Bernard of Clairvaux was important to this trio: Pole owned Bernard's Opera and made confident references to it.Footnote 42 Throckmorton's list had two entries of the pseudo-Bernardine Meditationes piissimae de cognitione humanae conditionis.Footnote 43 In 1549 Flaminio, who liked a joke, was asked for his literary judgement and replied: ‘You should mistrust me because, for many years now all my studies have been directed towards sacred writings, towards St Bernard and other writers of that sort, who are most elegant in their thoughts, but are barbarian in words.’Footnote 44 Stylistic considerations were set aside when one quotation from Bernard was treated as an important ‘find’ at Viterbo, suggested by Cardinal Contarini to Pole, who passed it to Flaminio, who inserted it into his ‘libretto’, almost certainly the Beneficio di Cristo, still undergoing multiple revisions in May 1542.Footnote 45

When Contarini had asked Flaminio to accompany and assist him at the Diet of Regensburg in September 1540, the poet backed out with the barefaced lie that he did not know enough about theological controversy.Footnote 46 Yet four years earlier he seems to have been reading the reformers' writings without licence and had participated energetically in a controversy about free will and predestination.Footnote 47 Throckmorton's booklist gives further evidence that his poet friend was being economical with the truth: the Englishman inherited Flaminio's own copy of the Unio dissidentium, a collection of biblical and patristic extracts, most of them genuine, arranged under doctrinal headings. The compiler, called ‘Hermannus Bodius’ on the title page, expressed eirenic intentions in his preface, but the work shows strong links to the teaching of Martin Bucer and the Strasbourg reformers. It caused protest directly it was published in Italy.Footnote 48 So Flaminio was no stranger to the doctrinal battleground, however much he claimed that he knew only ‘simple things, devotional works, and works of spiritual edification, more fit to arouse feelings than improve the intellect’.Footnote 49

In fact, ‘simple’ piety did not appear on Flaminio's sale list possibly because these cheaper works were less saleable. Throckmorton, however, owned a lot of such texts: the ‘ars moriendi’,Footnote 50 the ‘biblia pauperum’Footnote 51 and the ‘arte del ben pensare’ (meditations, mostly on the passion).Footnote 52 Spiritual writers of the great Rheno-Flemish tradition were well represented.Footnote 53 He had two copies of Heinrich Herp's version of the Speculum perfectionis Footnote 54 and a copy of Ludolf of Saxony's Meditationes uita Christi. This is ‘not a Life of Jesus but extended meditation on it, heavily laced with patristic citations, moral and doctrinal lessons and many prayers’.Footnote 55 That theme leads directly to the Rheno-Flemish classic, the Imitation of Christ, now attributed to Thomas à Kempis.Footnote 56 Its importance at Viterbo was immense.

L'Imitazione di Cristo: Il Beneficio di Cristo: the similarity of the two titles is probably no accident, though their underlying theologies are different: the first emphasises ‘following’; it is part of the scala perfectionis tradition. The second teaches justification by faith, but it does so with several intermissions and flashbacks, which scholars think are heavily dependent on the Imitation. Flaminio's biographer sees imitation, the ‘following’ of Christ, as a unifying theme in all the poet's meditations. Footnote 57 In Pole's households the Imitation was often read aloud and his close friend Alvise Priuli tried insistently to introduce the text to others in their circle.Footnote 58 Throckmorton owned at least two copies of the work (of four entries, two are probably repeats).Footnote 59 Clearly this simple book inspired all three of these complex men.

It is likely that they ‘caught’ their enthusiasm from the Cassinese Benedictines, who were greatest Italian proponents of the Imitation.Footnote 60 In the 1530s both Pole and Flaminio joined in religious discussions in the great Benedictine houses of S. Giustina of Padua and S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.Footnote 61 S. Giustina, in particular, was one of Europe's earliest and greatest centres for the study of the Imitation of Christ – so much so that there has been a mistaken argument that the text was really written by an Italian. No less than sixteen copies of the Imitation are found in the fifteenth-century inventory of the monastery's library.Footnote 62 Cassinese novices were introduced to imitationist spirituality and it is likely that Pole was too, since the Benedictine Marco da Mantova was his spiritual director.Footnote 63

However, Pole may have known the book in English monastic circles before he ever arrived in Italy. He was educated at Sheen by the Carthusians, an order largely responsible for bringing texts of the Imitation to England, where the work was highly valued ‘by a small, conservative, intellectual and spiritual elite’.Footnote 64 In the sixteenth century the Imitation was often wrongly ascribed to Jean Gerson and, in 1532, Pole's friend Thomas More had recommended ‘Gerson of the folowing of Christ’ among three works suitable for ‘the people unlearned’.Footnote 65 The Franciscan William Peto, one of Pole's close associates in Italy and in Marian England, edited an English translation of the Imitation in 1556 as part of a move to restore devotion after the schism.Footnote 66 Englishmen in Pole's circle had their own native Imitation tradition.

Yet it was Flaminio, lifelong friend of Cassinese Benedictines, who came up with the most exuberant recommendations: ‘I can't recommend any book – setting aside the scriptures – that could be more useful to you.’Footnote 67 In his letter to Galazzeo Caracciolo there is an extended meditation on the theme of Imitation.Footnote 68 In the poet's other meditations sent to friends, the motif comes again and again: ‘attendono con ogni studio ad imitare Cristo’; ‘attende con ogni studio a la imitatione di Cristo’.Footnote 69

Another best-selling text, central to Viterbo's piety, was the pseudo-Bonaventuran (but by Ludolf of Saxony) Meditationes uitae Christi.Footnote 70 This work stresses the importance of ‘seeing’ biblical scenes with the mind's eye and experiencing the anguish of the passion at a profound personal level.Footnote 71 ‘Bonaventuran’ emotion is evident in the anonymous Good Friday meditation of 1542, subsequently bound together with Vittoria Colonna's Pianto. Scholars think that the meditation was delivered at Viterbo by Flaminio himself.Footnote 72 If that is so, it is vital evidence of what was happening in the household: an intense devotion to the passion, led by a poet treated like a spiritual master. Far from being a lost soul needing rescue, Flaminio appears to have been chosen for one of the most sacred days of the year. The Good Friday meditation is based on St John's Gospel and Priuli told Beccadelli that Flaminio was taking them through St Matthew's Gospel and then St John's.Footnote 73 At his first trial in 1557 Carnesecchi said that ‘I heard [Flamino preach] but only a few times and those were at Viterbo in the house of Cardinal Pole, where he was speaking on St Matthew [‘s gospel] in the presence of Cardinal Pole.’Footnote 74 Perhaps to adjust the balance, Pole had brought in serious competition just before Christmas in 1541: Nicolás Bobadilla, a well-known Jesuit, came to preach. Pole told Ignatius Loyola that his man had done a fine job. Yet the very next day the cardinal admitted to Contarini that Bobadilla's opinion was completely different from his own and therefore that he, Pole, had resolved ‘to try harder’. However, the Jesuit did not reappear: if there was a competition, Flaminio seems to have won.Footnote 75

Guests at Viterbo had to be ‘clubbable’, ready to participate in the group effort: tellingly, Flaminio once compared the kingdom of heaven to a household.Footnote 76 The task of spiritual direction seems to have been shared within the group: Pole thought that Flaminio's spiritual talks imparted ‘food that never dies’; the poetess Vittoria Colonna regarded Flaminio as ‘our best spirit’ and had religious discussions with him.Footnote 77 Pole acted in the role of director to Colonna; she said he had ‘consoled me above anyone else’, and had taught her to ‘humble myself’ and live entirely in Him ‘who is all consolation’.Footnote 78 Correspondingly, Pole spoke of Colonna as ‘our dearest mother in Christ’.Footnote 79 The terms ‘ecclesia viterbiensi’ and ‘chiesa viterbiense’, used even by sympathetic contemporaries suggest a perception of a tightly-knit group, perhaps of a church-within-the-Church.Footnote 80 From Pole's hurt rejoinder in 1542 it is known that Cardinal Contarini had criticised Flaminio and, by implication, Pole himself for not sharing ‘more widely the goods we enjoy here’; it is clear from the context that ‘goods’ means spiritual goods.Footnote 81 Years later, in October 1566, the inquisitors commented on Carnesecchi's frequent use of collectives and the first person plural: ‘amici di Deo’, ‘noi’, ‘nostri’, ‘nostro reverendissimo Polo’.Footnote 82 The cardinal's household contained a self-conscious ‘santa compagnia’, a top tier of some twenty people, who gathered to read, write and pray.Footnote 83

Some contemporaries thought that the views of the Italian spirituali in general rendered the Church and its sacramental life dangerously secondary: ‘they only understand the Holy Scriptures, having conceived the sentiment and spirit of St Paul … taking little account of the sacraments and other ceremonial practices, speaking about them in such a way as to suggest that our holy doctors had remained mute about them’.Footnote 84 The evidence of Flaminio's views on the sacraments is ambivalent. The final chapter of the Beneficio included the eucharist among the ‘remedies’ for failure of faith, alongside prayer, remembrance of baptism and predestination: the source was Luther and, significantly, the eucharist was just one remedy, not the chief. He owned the Unio dissidentium which ‘emphasises a spiritual understanding’ of the presence of Christ in the eucharist, at odds with the realist position of the Church to which Flaminio belonged.Footnote 85 Several of Flaminio's letters of direction seem to make sacramental life redundant; for instance, his meditation on the Lord's Prayer, and his justly famous letter of spiritual direction to Teodorina Sauli, written about nine months before he arrived in Viterbo, which contains not a word on the sacraments.Footnote 86

After he arrived in Viterbo, Flaminio's comments became more sacramental, probably influenced by the crisis of 1542, when the first exiles left Italy. In 1543 Flaminio wrote an impassioned defence of the doctrine of the eucharist, recommending the sacramental stance of Albert Pighius, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and (especially) the Concilio Coloniense.Footnote 87 The sacramental and liturgical practice of Pole himself may have caused this change: he had long been a key figure in groups which said the offices every day, heard mass frequently and communicated at least weekly.Footnote 88 Throckmorton's ample stock of breviaries and collections of Epistles and Gospels for the mass adds eloquent testimony to that of witnesses at Carnesecchi's trial, who praised these men for going regularly to communion and to confession and being assiduous in their devotion.Footnote 89

When Pole arrived in Viterbo, the Council of Trent's definitions of doctrine had not begun and the flowering of the spirituality of the Catholic Reformation was yet to come: St Ignatius' Spiritual exercises and St Theresa of Avila's works had not been published; St John of the Cross was still a child. So, the devotion of Pole's friends was rooted in rich scriptural soil, tilled for centuries – the Psalms, the Evangelists, St Paul – but often filtered through Erasmus. They read the works of long dead monks, like St Bernard and Ludolf of Saxony.Footnote 90 Every author on the three lists was a man, with the single exception of Vittoria Colonna, one of their own group. High on their list of devotional writers were the Fathers and St Paul. There is an arresting similarity between Viterbo's spiritual books and those recommended by St Ignatius Loyola and the early Jesuits. They shared a reverence for the Meditationes uitae Christi, for Ludolf of Saxony and Heinrich Herp. Both groups set the Imitation of Christ above all other devotional books. Advocated by both Flaminio and Pole, it was owned by most Jesuits, sold out in Cordoba, well-known in Throckmorton's house and also widely adapted by Protestants.Footnote 91 Both Viterbo and the early Jesuits looked backwards in order to find God and their own souls. Among the devotional books of Pole, Flaminio and Throckmorton there are few indications of the direct influence of their own age. Throckmorton lived on until 1558, but only ever acquired one volume relating to Tridentine doctrinal debates and there is no sign of Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual exercises, published ten years before the Englishman died.Footnote 92

Pole and his friends shared the spiritual anxiety of their generation, revealed in their search for spiritual comfort and ‘consolation’ – that latter word crops up again and again. Even the Imitation of Christ was, according to Flaminio, rather too keen on ‘the way of fear’.Footnote 93 They wanted to believe that there was no need for fear, because of Christ's atonement on the cross, hence their fervent devotion to the passion. On the rebound from unholy fear, they looked for ‘consolation’ – another preoccupation that they shared with the Jesuits. Consolation is the leitmotiv of their book, Il Beneficio di Cristo, clearly intended to rescue troubled souls and laced with quotations from Scripture and the Fathers.Footnote 94 The Beneficio, however, also paraphrases and sometimes translates, without attribution, Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin, often at length.Footnote 95

These texts, too, should be counted among Viterbo's devotional books: since the Bible was central to Christian meditation, so were commentaries on the Bible, from many and varied sources. Reading them was a theological activity with profound spiritual implications: the two are inseparable. However, none of the works of named northern commentators appears in any of the three inventories.

At his two inquisition trials, Pietro Carnesecchi made several depositions about books in circulation at Viterbo. At the second trial, in August 1566, he admitted that, whilst he was there, he had read forbidden books without licence: ‘And the first time I began to read them was in the year 1541, in the house of Cardinal Pole and it was the commentary of Bucer on the Epistle to the Romans, which belonged to Flaminio.’Footnote 96 He also mentioned that Flaminio had Valdés's Considerations and his commentary on the Psalms; also that he had once shown Carnesecchi a small part of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian religion. Footnote 97

The detail of his statements is unsafe evidence for several reasons: it was ‘confession’ testimony, given under great pressure and sometimes after torture some twenty-five years after the alleged forbidden reading had taken place. Carnesecchi was offering to his inquisitors episodic and often self-contradictory evidence, about friends who were suspected but had died before the most rigorous investigations began (like Flaminio in 1550, Pole and Throckmorton in 1558). Yet the general conclusion that works of Protestant reformers were known in Cardinal Pole's household is substantiated by several other sources, such as testimonies given in other inquisition trials and confirmed by the extracts from Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin that appear in the Beneficio itself.Footnote 98 Pole himself knew them, hence his ability to summarise their opinions and his advice to the fathers at Trent not to avoid and sneer at the writings of opponents, and not to argue on the lines: ‘Luther said that, therefore it is false.’Footnote 99 Northern Protestant books were known in his house but, with some significant exceptions like the Unio dissidentium, they do not appear on these book lists.

Possibly there had been some checking of book stock, as Pastore has argued.Footnote 100 Flaminio and Pole may have discarded volumes which were (or became) condemned or doubtful as the inquisition began to assert itself. Such an act could be regarded as devout, part of the obedience and rejection of curiosità which Pole had always advocated.Footnote 101 Some of their unwanted volumes may have been filtered into Throckmorton's collection; hence, for instance, his possession of Il sommario della sacra scrittura and his copy of the Unio dissidentium, inherited from Flaminio. Throckmorton could hold on to doubtful texts because he was less famous and safer, having settled far away from Rome, in Mantua, a city ‘ruled peacefully’ by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, who possessed many of the northern reformers' works.Footnote 102 However, who discarded which books, when they did so or how much of their earlier reading had once been permitted by long lost papal licences is unknown. The lists suggest that tidy obedience finally overcame the disorderly urge for variety. In their devotional reading of the Bible and scriptural commentaries, the Psalms, the Fathers and the Imitation of Christ, they had been searching for holiness and for that ‘consolation’ for which Pole praised Flaminio and Colonna praised Pole.Footnote 103 That is why they were so shaken when winds of change began to howl through Rome and Trent, leaving in their wake a different doctrinal and spiritual synthesis.Footnote 104 At Viterbo they had been saving sensitive souls, not starting a reformation.

References

1 Count Feria to Fr Ribadeneyra, 22 Mar. 1558, in Calendar of letters, despatches and state papers relating to the negotiations between England and Spain, ed. G. A. Bergenroth and others, London 1862–1954, 1554–58, no. 415 at p. 370; Giovanni Michieli, ‘Report of England’, 13 May 1557, in Calendar of state papers and manuscripts … in the archives and collections of Venice, ed. Rawdon Brown, London 1864–1947, 1556–57, no. 884 at p. 1070; Reginaldi Poli cardinalis Britanni, ad Henricum Octavum Britanniae Regem: pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quatuor, Rome [1536]; Richard Morison to Reginald Pole, [n.d. 1536], CRP, no. 116; on hatred and danger for Brigden, Pole see Susan, ‘“The shadow that you know”: Thomas Wyatt and Francis Bryan at court and in embassy’, HJ xxxix (1996), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar at pp. 9, 23–4, and Peter Marshall, ‘Catholic exiles’, in his Religious identities in Henry VIII's England, Aldershot 2005, 225–61 at pp. 250–5.

2 ‘in opinione a Roma di lutherano et in Alemagna di papista’: PC ii/2, 492.

3 John Foxe, The ecclesiastical history … containing the acts and monuments, London 1570 (RSTC 11223), bk xii, p. 2158.

4 PC i. 390. On Carnesecchi's opinion of Pole see Fenlon, Dermot, ‘Pietro Carnesecchi and Cardinal Pole: new perspectives’, this Journal lvi (2005), 529–33Google Scholar at p. 531.

5 Devotional books will be defined as ‘any text that could be viewed as a means of stirring religious fervour or of shaping the faith of its readers’: Carlos Eire, ‘Early modern Catholic piety in translation’, in Peter Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia (eds), Cultural translation in early modern Europe, Cambridge 2007, 83–100 at p. 85.

6 The booklists of Pole and Flaminio are printed in Pastore, Alessandro, ‘Due biblioteche umanistiche del Cinquecento: libri del Cardinal Pole e di Marcantonio Flaminio’, Rinascimento 2nd ser. xix (1979), 269–90’Google Scholar, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, forthcoming. On Throckmorton see Overell, M. Anne, ‘Cardinal Pole's special agent: Michael Throckmorton, c. 1503–1558’, History xciv (2009), 265–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For instance, Flaminio's own office book and the ‘unio Hermani Bodii Marci Antonii Flamini’: ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 96v.

8 Massimo Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali: studi su Juan de Valdés e il Valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del'500, Florence 1990, 127–38; Massimo Firpo (trans. Tedeschi), John, ‘The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés’, Sixteenth Century Journal xxvii (1996), 353–64Google Scholar.

9 Pole to Cardinal Contarini, 9 Dec. 1541, CRP, no. 341; Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole, prince and prophet, Cambridge 2000, 105, 115–17. Flaminio left Viterbo for Trent on 26 October 1542.

10 ‘Vita del Cardinale Reginaldo Polo’, in Lodovico Morandi, Monumenti di varia letteratura tratti dai manoscritti di mons. Ludovico Beccadelli, Bologna 1797–1804, i/2, 277–353 at p. 326; Filippo Gheri to Ludovico Beccadelli, 29 Apr. 1553, ibid. 350.

11 Marcantonio Flaminio, Carmina, ed. Massimo Scorsone, Turin 1993; ‘Messer Michaele’ [Throckmorton] seems to have stayed at Viterbo even when Pole was absent: Vittoria Colonna to Pole, 19 Aug. 1543, in Nuovi documenti su Vittoria Colonna e Reginald Pole, ed. Sergio Pagano and Concetta Ranieri, Vatican City 1989, 96–7; Monumenti Beccadelli, i/2, 290; Overell, ‘Cardinal Pole's special agent’, 272–4.

12 On the original author see Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine scholars and the Reformation: the Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua, Oxford 1985, 157–63.

13 Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Cristo, Venice 1543. This and other sixteenth-century publications of the Beneficio in several European languages are printed in Benedetto da Mantova, Il Beneficio di Cristo, con le versioni del secolo XVI: documenti e testimonianze, ed. Salvatore Caponetto, Florence 1972. On Flaminio's ‘polishing’ of the text see PC ii/1, 170–1; Mayer, Pole, 119–23 at p. 120; and Paolo Simoncelli, Il caso Reginald Pole: eresia e santità nelle polemiche religiose del Cinquecento, Rome 1997, 29. By 1544 Flaminio thought it impossible to publish his ‘Apologia’ for the ‘Beneficio’: Apologia del ‘Beneficio di Cristo’ e altri scritti inediti, ed. D. Marcatto, Florence 1996, 27; CRP, no. 358.

14 Alessandro Pastore, Marcantonio Flaminio, Milan 1981, 167.

15 Idem, ‘Due biblioteche umanistiche del cinquecento: libri del Cardinal Pole e di Marcantonio Flaminio’, Rinascimento 2nd ser. xix (1979), 269–90. Five of Flaminio's books were loaned to Sebastiano Regoli, who lectured at Bologna, and other texts that he owned are extant in the Biblioteca Nazionale and the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (ibid. 273, 276). Books that Pole bequeathed to New College, Oxford, at his death in 1558 came from the collection that he inherited from Longolius: CRP, no. 14; A. B. Emden, ‘Longolius’ collection of books', in Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Rotterdami, ed. P. S. Allen, Oxford 1947, ix. 380–3.

16 Pastore ‘Due biblioteche’, 270, 275–6; PC ii/1, 92, 171; Pastore, Flaminio, 276.

17 On censorship see Paul F. Grendler, The Roman inquisition and the Venetian press, Princeton 1977; Gigliola Fragnito (ed.), Church, censorship and culture in early modern Italy, trans. Adrian Belton, Cambridge 2001; and Ambrogio Catarino Politii, Compendio d'errori et inganni luterani contenuti in un libro senza nome di autore, intitolato ‘Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Christo crucifisso’, Rome 1544.

18 Michael Throckmorton's inventory, ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fos 94v–97v.

19 For instance, the anonymous ‘Summarium scripture volgare’ and ‘un buono tratato de dieci Comandamenti’: ibid. fo. 97r; ‘unio Hermani bodii’: fo. 96v. An entry referring to an item by ‘Rodolpho’ (fo. 96v) may suggest Throckmorton's ownership of some of Rudolf Gwalther's work on the New Testament, but this is unlikely.

20 Eire, ‘Early modern Catholic piety’, 87; Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English students in Italy, 1485–1603, Cambridge 1998, 109; Overell, M. A., ‘An English friendship and Italian reform: Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton, 1532–1538’, this Journal lvii (2006), 478–93Google Scholar at p. 480.

21 Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and obedience in Tridentine Italy, Cambridge 1972, 30–1; Pole to the countess of Salisbury, ‘Venge’ [?Venice] 1536, CRP, no. 103.

22 ‘et ci concluse infine S. Sria che chi non facea cusi dei libri sacri non poteva ricever molto frutto da essi ne sentir la dolceza che è in quelli nascoste’: Alvise Priuli to Beccadelli, 10 Aug. 1537, Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Ital. c. 25, fo. 24v, quoted by Fenlon, Heresy and obedience, 43.

23 Flaminio, Apologia, 122–3. See the development of this phrase in the letter dedicating his ‘Meditationi e orationi formate sopra l'epistola di San Paolo a Romani’ [1542]: Marcantonio Flaminio to Giulia Gonzaga, ibid. 69–70.

24 Firpo, Tra alumbrados e spirituali, 45.

25 Pagnini (1470–1535), Hebraist and exegete, taught oriental languages in Rome until 1521, when he moved to Avignon and then Lyons. He took part in controversy against Valdesians and Lutherans. His principal work was Veteris et Novi Testamenti nova translatio (1527).

26 Pastore, ‘Due biblioteche’, 280.

27 Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion militis christiani, Louvain: T. Martin, 1515, published in many editions; Parker, Douglas H., ‘The English Enchiridion militis christiani and reformation politics’, Erasmus in English v (1972), 16–21Google Scholar.

28 The clamp-down on bible reading gathered pace later: Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo: la censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della scrittura (1471–1605), Bologna 1997.

29 ‘summarium scripture volgare’: ASM, Registrazioni notarili, 1558, fo. 97r. The Sommario was a translation from the Dutch text, Summa der Godliker Scrifturen or, in the Latin version, Oeconomica Christiana. On the scandals surrounding the Italian translation of this work see Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, Dai Paesi Bassi all'Italia: il Sommario della sacra scrittura; un libro proibito nella società italiana del Cinquecento, Florence 1997. For bibliographical details and importance see Ugo Rozzo and Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘The book and the Reformation in Italy’, in J.-F. Gilmont (ed.), The Reformation and the book (ed. and trans. Karin Maag), Aldershot 1998, 319–67 at pp. 347–8, 354. Il Sommario was condemned by the controversialist Ambrogio Catarino Politi as ‘schismatic, heretical and pestilent’ and containing ‘Lutheran conclusions’: Resolutione sommaria contra le conclusioni Luterane, estratte d'un Libretto senza nome del' autore, intitolato il Sommario dela sacra scrittura: libretto scismatico, heretico et pestilente, Rome 1544 (published with his work against the Beneficio: see n. 17 above.)

30 He had begun work in 1533, then resumed at Pole's urging, and in 1538 published his paraphrase of thirty-two Psalms, Paraphrasis in duo et triginta psalmos, Venice 1538. This was followed by M. Antonii Flaminii In librum psalmorum breuis explanatio, Venice 1545, and Paraphrasis in triginta psalmos versibus scripta, Venice 1546. These were published bound together in Paris in 1546, and M. Antonii Flaminii In librum psalmorum breuis explanatio, atque in eorum aliquot, paraphrases luculentissimae: his adiecimus alias eiusdem in psalmos triginta, paraphrases, carmine conscriptas in Venice in 1564. See Madison, Flaminio, 94–5; Pastore, Flaminio, 143–8; and Ian D. McFarlane, Buchanan, London 1981, 248–50.

31 Pastore, ‘Due biblioteche’, 200. Euthymius Zigabenus (Zigadenus, Zygadenus) died after 1118, near Constantinople.

32 ‘M. Antonii Flaminii paraphresis in 30 psalmos’, ‘l'espositione del Savonarola in salmi’, ‘Campensis supra salmos’: ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fos 97r, 96v.

33 ‘Io restai contra il mio consueto in Verona per trovarmi alle lettioni del Campense’: Flaminio to Contarini, 16 Jan. 1536, in Marcantonio Flaminio, Lettere, ed. Alessandro Pastore, Rome 1978, ii. 24. Van Kampen's works appeared in Cardinal Gonzaga's library too: Paul V. Murphy, Ruling peacefully: Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and patrician reform in sixteenth century Italy, Washington, DC 2007, 22.

34 Whereas the liturgical and devotional importance of studies of the Psalms in Protestant countries is often highlighted, it is less noticed in Italy, but equally significant: Pastore, Flaminio, 85.

35 ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 96v.

36 Flaminio was with Giberti from 1524. In 1531–2 he tried to join the rigorous Theatines but was refused by Caraffa on the grounds that he appeared unwilling to keep the whole rule: ‘Marcantonio Flaminio’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani.

37 ‘So bene che il Flaminio haveva seco una parte delli scritti di Valdes et credo che fussero il libro delle Considerationi, et il commento sopra li Psalmi’: PC ii/3, 1031.

38 Eire, ‘Early modern Catholic piety’, 89 [my italics].

39 ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fos 96v, 97r.

40 Two copies of Basil [the Great], Hexameron Magni Basilii per Ioannem Argyropolum e greco in latinum conuersum, Rome 1515, were in the collection that Christophe de Longueil (Longolius) bequeathed to Pole: Emden, ‘Longolius’ collection’, 382. Basil's Hexaemeron also appears among Pole's own books: Pastore, ‘Due biblioteche’, 278.

41 Caponetto, Beneficio, 36, 79. Patristic ideas of ‘reserve’ and conciliation through liturgy influenced Pole greatly, both in Italy and in Marian England: Dermot Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the pulpit’, in John Edwards and Ronald Truman (eds), Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor, Aldershot 2005, 81–97 at pp. 91–5, and review of CRP i–iii, in Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa xlii (2006), 345–56; Gheri to Beccadelli, Rome, 29 Apr. 1553, Monumenti Beccadelli, i/2, 350.

42 Pole to Priuli, 12 Apr. 1536, Venice, CRP, no. 94.

43 ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 96v.

44 Flaminio to Ulisse Bassano, 27 June 1549, Flaminio, Lettere, no. 63, p. 182.

45 Pole to Contarini, 1 May 1542, CRP, no. 358; ‘Il loco di S. Bernardo del quale S.S.R.ma [Contarini] ha advertito Monsignore è grandemente piacuto a Messere M. Antonio fra gli altri, tal che ha pensato d'inserirlo nel suo libretto’: Priuli to Beccadelli, Viterbo, 1 May 1542, Bodl. Lib., ms Ital. c. 25, fo. 197v, quoted in Pastore, Flaminio, 128. For quotations from St Bernard in the Beneficio see Caponetto, Beneficio, 37, 80–1, 85.

46 Flaminio to Contarini, 25 Sept. 1540, Flaminio, Lettere, no. 32, p. 98; Pastore, Flaminio, 106–7.

47 Gregorio Cortese to Contarini, 22 June 1536, cited in Pastore, Flaminio, 94. For Flaminio's part in the contemporary predestination controversy see pp. 96–7.

48 ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 96v; Robert Peters, ‘Who compiled the sixteenth-century patristic handbook Unio dissidentium?’, in G. J. Cuming (ed.), Studies in Church History ii (1965), 237–50. The first part of the Unio dissidentium was published in Antwerp in 1527. Publication in Venice as Unio Hermani Bodii in unum corpus redacta et diligenter recognita doctorum (1532), led to protest from the nuncio Girolamo Aleandro: Grendler, Roman inquisition, 75. For the text's appearance in Venetian inquisition cases see Rozzo and Seidel Menchi, ‘The book and the Reformation in Italy’, 340. On the probable use of Unio dissidentium in the preparation of the Beneficio see M. Anne Overell, Italian reform and English reformations, Aldershot 2008, 74–5.

49 ‘di cose piane, devote et di edificatione sperituale, et piu atte a mover l'affetto che illustrare l'intelletto’: 25 Sept. 1540, Flaminio, Lettere, no. 32, p. 98. On tensions between emotion and intellect in Italian reform circles see D'Elia, Una Roman, ‘Drawing Christ's blood: Michael Angelo, Vittoria Colonna and the aesthetics of Reform’, Renaissance Quarterly lix (2006), 90–129 at pp. 100–3Google Scholar.

50 There were many versions, so it is impossible to know which was on Throckmorton's shelves, but see for instance, Tractatus breuis ac valde vtilis de arte et scientia bene moriendi, Monteregale 1510, and Schutte, Anne, ‘Printing, piety and the people’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte lxxi (1980), 5–19Google Scholar at p. 11 n. 27 and p. 19.

51 The Biblia pauperum was usually printed as by St Bonaventura (d. 1274), but the author was Nicolaus de Hanapis (c. 1225–91): Victor Scholderer, Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1936), 61–2.

52 Pietro Bernardini da Lucca, Arte nova del ben pensare e contemplare la passione del nostro signore jesu Christo benedetto, Venice 1525.

53 Eire, ‘Early modern Catholic piety’, 86.

54 The works of Heinrich Herp (d.1477) were translated into several European vernaculars. An early Italian edition was Incomentia lo specchio della perfettione del … patre fratre Henrico Herp de lordine di frati minori, Venice 1522. See Eire, ‘Early modern Catholic piety’, 87.

55 Ludolf of Saxony (c. 1300–c. 1378) was a mystic, theologian and Dominican (later Carthusian). His Meditationes uita Christi, first printed in Latin (Strasbourg–Cologne 1474) was one of the books that Ignatius Loyola had in his sick room: Eire, ‘Early modern Catholic piety’, 83, 87.

56 Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471). Six editions of the Imitation appear in Anne Schutte, Printed Italian vernacular religious books, 1465–1550, Geneva 1983. For this text's influence in Italy see Picasso, Giorgio, ‘L'Imitazione di Cristo nell'epoca della “devotio moderna” e nella spiritualità monastica del sec. xv in Italia’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa iv (1968), 11–32Google Scholar, and Maximilian von Habsburg, Catholic and Protestant translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650, Farnham 2011.

57 These passages occur especially at the end of ch. iv, at the beginning of ch. v, and also in ch. vi: Caponetto, Beneficio, 48–9, 53–5, 78. See ‘The Beneficio di Cristo’, ed. Ruth Prelowski, in John Tedeschi (ed.), Italian reformation studies in honour of Laelius Socinus, Florence 1965, 21–102 at pp. 52, 71–2, 74–7; Pastore, Flaminio, 122; and Collett, Italian Benedictine scholars, 178.

58 Priuli to Beccadelli, 10 Aug. 1537, in Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Monumenti Beccadelli’, in A. Casamassa (ed.). Miscellanea Pio Paschini: studi di storia ecclesiastica, Rome 1948–9, ii. 251–68 at p. 265; Fenlon, Heresy and obedience, 43–4.

59 ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 97r–v. Three of the entries referring to the Imitation are marked ‘Gerson’ or ‘qui dicitur Gerson’.

60 Collett, Italian Benedictine scholars, 184.

61 Ibid. 77–8, 184; Fenlon, Heresy and obedience, 30–4, 92. Flaminio was a protegé of Gregorio Cortese osb, from 1532 abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.

62 Giovanna Cantoni Alzati, La biblioteca di S Giustina di Padova: libri e cultura presso i benedettini padovani in età umanistica, Padua 1982. For the mistake about authorship see R. Pitigliani, Il venerabile Ludovico Barbo e la diffusione dell'Imitazione di Cristo per opera della Congregazione di Santa Giustina, Padua 1943.

63 Collett, Italian Benedictine scholars, 39; Fenlon, Heresy and obedience, 31–5.

64 Lovatt, Roger, ‘The “Imitation of Christ” in late medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. xviii (1968), 97–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 114.

65 Jean Gerson (1363–1429); More, Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, in Thomas More, Works (1557), 356–7, quoted in Lovatt, ‘“Imitation of Christ”’, 97.

66 The folowinge of Chryste, London [1556] (RSTC 23966); I am much indebted to James P. Carley for sending his unpublished paper ‘William Peto O.F.M. Obs. and the 1556 edition of “The folowinge of Christ”’.

67 Flaminio to Carlo Gualteruzzi, Naples, 28 Feb. 1542, Flaminio, Lettere, no. 42, p. 121. For imitationist reflections see Flaminio to his cousin, Cesare Flaminio, 15 Feb. 1544, Flaminio, Lettere, no. 49, p. 145.

68 Flaminio to Galeazzo Caracciolo, Viterbo, 14 Feb. 1543, ibid. no. 48, pp. 139–43.

69 Flaminio, Apologia, 128; Flaminio to Priuli, 1540–1, in ‘Modo che si dee tenere il principio della religione christiana’, printed in Flaminio, Apologia, 166. Precisely the same words occur in the Beneficio: Caponetto, Beneficio, 78.

70 Pseudo-Bonaventura, Incomincia le devote meditationi sopra la passione del nostro signor Jesu Christo cavate originalmente da Sancta Bonaventura cardinale del ordine minore & da Nicolao da Lira, Bologna 1520. This text comes third in Schutte's list of Italian religious best-sellers between 1465 and 1494 in ‘Printing, piety and the people’, appendix, 18–19. Throckmorton also had a copy of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Dieta salutis: ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 96v. For an example see Gulielmus de Lanicea, Sancti Bonauenture doctoris eximij De dieta salutis nouem tractatus. In prima dieta tractat de peccato in communi … In nona dieta tractat de generali iudicio … Tractatus de penis inferni, Venice 1502.

71 See, however, Roman D'Elia, ‘Drawing Christ's blood’, 100–3.

72 ‘Meditatione fatta da un divotissimo huomo nel Venerdi santo sopra la passione di Christo', in Pianto della Marchesa di Pescara sopra la passione di Christo: oratione della medesima sopra l'Ave Maria, Bologna 1557, 17–36, cited by Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the spiritual poetics of the Italian Reformation, Aldershot 2008, 56–7, 138. For a summary of this Good Friday meditation see pp. 56–63. The full text of the meditation is printed in Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento: questione religiosa e nicodemismo politico, Rome 1979, appendix 3 at pp. 433–44.

73 Bodl. Lib., ms Ital. c. 25, fo. 191v, undated. For dates see Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano, 219 n. 46. Flaminio was speaking on at least three books of the Bible at Viterbo: John, Matthew and Romans. Carnesecchi told the inquisitors that the ‘Meditationi et Orationi’ on Romans was by Flaminio, transcribed by one of Carnesecchi's secretaries, but that the original was loaned to him by M. Honorato Toffetti: Flaminio, Apologia, 50–2.

74 ‘Si che ne ho audite, ma poche et quelle in Viterbo in casa del cardinale Polo, dove egli legava san Mattheo in presentia del cardinale Polo’, 16 May 1560, PC i. 63–4; Flaminio, Apologia, 50–2.

75 Pole to Ignatius Loyola, 22 Dec. 1541, CRP, no. 344; Pole to Contarini, 23 Dec. 1541, CRP, no. 345. For Flaminio's prominence at Viterbo see Pastore, Flaminio, 133.

76 ‘La chiesa di Dio è simile alla corte d'un gran signore, nella quale sono istituiti diversi officii per la bene comune’: Flaminio ad una donna, 31 Dec. 1547, Flaminio, Lettere, no. 55 at p. 162; Pastore, Flaminio, 162.

77 Pastore, Flaminio, 119.

78 Colonna to Pole, 21 June 1541, 25 Dec. 1545, CRP, no. 325, 460.

79 Pole to Contarini, 4 Feb.1541, CRP, no. 314.

80 Beccadelli to Carlo Gualteruzzi, 31 May 1542, and Francesco Martelli to Beccadelli, 9 May 1545, quoted by Fragnito, Giuliola, ‘Gli spirituali e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino’, Rivista storica italiana lxxxiv (1972), 777–811Google Scholar at p. 787 n. 35.

81 Pole to Contarini, 29 Jan. 1542, CRP, no. 350.

82 PC ii/1 at pp. xlviii, 224.

83 Pastore, Flaminio, 125–6.

84 For instance, Don Joannes Evangelista Bononia, a Cassinese Benedictine abbot, in the undated ‘Trattato di quello che concorre alla giustificatione’, BAV. Ottob. Lat. 896, fos 1r–39r (fo. 11v), quoted and translated by Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the religious controversies of the sixteenth century, Turnhout 2006, 111. For a summary of this tract see Collett, Italian Benedictine scholars, 188–91.

85 Caponetto, Beneficio, 66–9; Peters, ‘Who compiled … the Unio dissidentium?’, 249.

86 Flaminio to Bassiano, n.p. n.d., and Flaminio to Teodorina Sauli, Naples, 12 Feb. 1542, Flaminio, Lettere, nos 68, 41, pp. 191–3, 117–19. For Pole's probable alarm at Flaminio's views on the sacrament of penance see Fenlon Heresy and obedience, 89.

87 Flaminio to Pietro Carnesecchi, Trent, 1 Jan. 1543 (probably misdated [1545]), Flaminio, Lettere, no. 47, pp. 133–8. There had been much enthusiasm for the Concilio in Bishop Giberti's circle: Adriano Prosperi, Tra evanvelismo e controriforma: G. M. Giberti (1495–1543), Rome 1969, 254–5. Throckmorton owned a copy: ASM, Registrazioni notarili, 96v.

88 Monumenti Beccadelli, i/2, 295, 332; Fenlon, Heresy and obedience. Frequent communion is advocated in the Imitation of Christ (bk 4, ch. v). Eamon Duffy emphasises Pole's sacramentalism in Marian England: Fires of faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, New Haven 2009, 131–3, 193. These beliefs had roots among sacramental spirituali: Fenlon, ‘Pole, Carranza and the pulpit’, 91–3, and review of CRP i–iii, pp. 345–56.

89 PC i. 199, 240, 390.

90 Anne Schutte's comment is relevant: ‘these writers were Italian male professed religious and the great majority of them were dead’: ‘Printing, piety and the people’, 10.

91 On the importance of the Imitation for Jesuit spirituality see John O'Malley, The first Jesuits, Cambridge, Ma 1993, 43, 83, 264–6, and p. 358 for other favourite Jesuit texts. For instance, Queen Catherine Parr's Prayers and meditations (1545) (RSTC 4818.5) was based on the Imitation, bk iii, in the English translation attributed to Richard Whitford [1531] (RSTC 23961, 23964): James McConica, English humanists and Reformation politics, Oxford 1965, 228.

92 ‘summa. doctrine de predistinatione Reuerendi p. d. Ambrosii Chatarini episc’: ASM, Registrazioni notarili, fo. 97r. This was presumably Lancellotto Politi [Ambrogio Catarino Politi], Summa doctrinæ de prædestinatione reuerendi p.d. Ambrosii Catharini, Rome 1550; Ignatius Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, Rome 1548.

93 ‘cioe che non appruovo la via del timore della quale egli [l'autore] spesso si serve; ma basta esserne avvertito’: Flaminio to Carlo Gualteruzzi, Naples, 28 Feb. 1542, Flaminio Lettere, no. 42, p. 121.

94 The theme of consolation pervades contemporary Jesuit writing: O'Malley, First Jesuits, 19–20, 41–3, 82–4.

95 All apparent borrowings from the writings of other reformers are recorded in Caponetto, Beneficio, 13–85, and Prelowski, ‘The Beneficio di Cristo’, 21–102.

96 ‘Et la prima volta ch'io cominciassi a legerli fu nell'anno [1541] a Viterbo in casa del Cardinal Polo et fu il commento di Bucchiero spora l'epistola ai Romani ch'era del Flaminio’: PC ii/1, 170–1.

97 PC ii/2, 92, 150; ii/3, 1031.

98 For instance Caponetto, Beneficio, 61, 64, 66–9, 82, and Il processo inquisitoriale del cardinal Giovanni Morone, ed. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto, Rome, 1981–6, i. 222.

99 Nelson H. Minnich, ‘“Wie in dem Basilischen Concilio den Behemen Gescheen”: status of Protestants at the Council of Trent’, in his Councils of the Catholic Reformation: Pisa I (1409) to Trent (1545–63), Aldershot 2008, vi, 201–19 at p. 211 n. 30; Fenlon, Heresy and obedience, 134; Thomas F. Mayer, ‘“Heretics be not in all things heretics”: Cardinal Pole, his circle and the potential for toleration’, in J. C. Laursen and C. J. Nederman (eds), Beyond the persecuting society: religious toleration before the Enlightenment, Philadelphia 1998, 107–24. Eamon Duffy argues for Pole's ‘commitment to silencing heresy at all costs’ in Marian England: Fires of faith, 154. This was not in evidence in the Viterbo years.

100 Pastore, ‘Due biblioteche’, 276.

101 ‘massime havendo il cardinale più volte ammonito la detta signora che non dovesse essere troppo curiosa’, 20 Feb. 1567: PC ii/3, 1041.

102 Murphy, Ruling peacefully, 22–9.

103 CRP, nos 341, 325.

104 Pastore, Flaminio, 168–71; Fenlon, Heresy and obedience, 124–36, 209–13; Mayer, Pole, 151–4; Giorgio Caravale, Forbidden prayer: church censorship and devotional literature in Renaissance Italy, Farnham 2012.