Three students of Carlos Eire, distinguished historian of early modern religion and society at Yale, offer here a festschrift in his honor that is a worthy tribute to a scholar of breadth and subtlety. In these days, when many publishers eschew festschrifts entirely or force those who wish to produce them into an elaborate pretense that the volume is something else, it is good to see that St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History and Ashgate Publishing are unabashed about a genre that, albeit over-used, has a venerable tradition and an admirable purpose. Of course, it is easier to pull together a wide-ranging collection when one's model is Carlos Eire.
Like Eire's own scholarship, the essays in this volume situate spirituality and practice in their social context. They treat religions, not confessions. While attuned to the harsh confrontation of Protestant and Catholic in the early modern world, they nonetheless witness the concerns common to the many reformations and religions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It is of the nature of such a collection that the individual essays tend to be rather narrow case studies. Here we find, to list only some of the topics: an Italian preacher in the 1550s commenting, somewhat ambivalently, on Mary Tudor's life and death; a seventeenth-century Venetian cleric's history of Marian miracles; a Lutheran theologian struggling to respond to the devastating siege of Magdeburg in 1631; and the lives of ordinary nuns as depicted in the necrologies of Brussels Visitandines in the late seventeenth century. The editors have tried to organize the essays under three themes drawn from Eire's own writings: exploring boundaries, living one's faith, and the physicality of spirituality. However appropriate they may be to describe Eire's interests, the headings do not work very well to group the essays. Indeed, they force the authors of the introduction to produce short summaries that tend sometimes to misrepresent what the individual authors actually say. Moreover, not every essay succeeds in what Eire does so well: conjuring up cases with crisp specificity while clearly stating their broader historical significance. Among the most successful are Martin Nesvig's exploration of a high-status woman's relatively mild punishment in colonial Mexico for ingestion of peyote, which interprets, not as secularization but as cultural hybridization, the process by which an object of divine access becomes a divining tool, and Scott Taylor's examination of the rhetoric concerning tobacco use between the 1560s and 1780s, which argues that observers found it necessary to use the language of spirituality to characterize the addictive power of the new commodity. In both essays, particular events are treated with precision and originality—respected exactly for their particularity—while their significance for larger historical trends is carefully explained. Equally impressive is Erik Midelfort's treatment of the discussion by eighteenth-century English theologians of demoniacs, which manages in a few well-chosen phrases not only to show how seemingly odd theological debates can raise deep questions but also to suggest a hitherto under-appreciated impact of English debate on German biblical scholarship. The appended bibliography of primary sources makes it clear that Midelfort's succinct discussion here is only the tip of an iceberg of research. With similar learning and clarity of exposition, Alison Weber's opening essay explores the ways in which three different leaders in sixteenth-century Spain reacted to images, by-passing or even rejecting the Tridentine prohibition of attributing supernatural agency to them—an exploration that not only picks up on the subject of Eire's first book but also intersects with the discussion of the power of images very much alive at the moment in art historical circles.
The volume concludes with an essay by Ronald Rittgers that considers Eire's controversial talk “The Good, the Bad, and the Airborne,” first given at Harvard in the mid 1990s and published in 2009. The essay, which asks whether we should believe the large number of claims of early modern observers who saw levitating monks, is cited by several other contributors to the festschrift and directly and unavoidably poses questions for us not only about the nature of evidence but also about what we do as historians. For, after all, we never have direct access to the experience of the past but only to what witnesses from that past tell us they saw. Even when earlier objects survive, they have inevitably faded, been repainted, moved and modified, so that they too are only a means by which we see and not an unaltered bit of the past. In these essays, Eire's students and colleagues have confronted such issues better than many historians, in part because they never reduce religion to anything else.
The editors of this festschrift suggest that Carlos Eire's career has been devoted to idiosyncratic and neglected topics (1). It may be true that Eire's early book on iconoclasm can be so characterized, but I would submit that the description has not been true since then, in part because his students have learned from him; in taking up his themes they render his concerns no longer “neglected” or “idiosyncratic.” As Ritters makes clear, even the levitating monks have become almost a trope of historical investigation. But I suggest that it is also not true in another sense. Carlos Eire's distinctive combination of personal memoir and scholarship has been, for some time now, widespread. We live in the age of the memoir and the first-person account. Insofar as Carlos Eire has pioneered in bringing autobiography and history writing together, he is a child of his age and not an outlier. Perhaps in this too lies part of his power—a power reflected in the festschrift crafted in his honor.
