Ercole Gonzaga (1505–1563), bishop, cardinal, and regent of the duchy of Mantua (1540–1556), is perhaps best remembered, Paul Murphy concedes, in Tommaso Casselli's description of “il vecchio pro forma” (42, 241). In this lucid, carefully crafted, and judicious study, Murphy draws on a wealth of untapped personal correspondence and administrative records in the Mantuan archives to rescue Gonzaga from this cliché and to flesh out the portrait of one of Italy's most powerful, privileged, and—until the end—respected prelates.
Gonzaga was complex. A committed reformer of the circle of Gian Matteo Giberti, Gasparo Contarini, and Reginald Pole, he nevertheless fathered five children, acquired a mass of benefices, and looked carefully after his family's interests and honor. An open-minded but conservative intellectual among his peers and friends with the spirituali who looked aside as Bernardino Ochino fled Italy, he nevertheless reformed the Mantuan diocese with an eye to maintaining decorum and social order and brooked no tolerance of Lutheran discussions among his flock. Eschewing “rigid historiographical frameworks” (xix), Murphy finds that he fits neatly among neither the spirituali nor the intransigenti (117). Rather, he is best understood as an exemplar of “patrician reform”: well intentioned and humanistically educated, he was “more than just a . . . self-aggrandizing Renaissance prelate and less than an ideal reformer” (249), one whose aristocratic view of the Church and reform in the end made him “anachronistic” (244).
His family ties brought him rapidly to a bishopric (1521), cardinalate (1527), and after his ordination (1556) nearly to the papacy (1559), but strained relations with the Farnese and the Habsburgs prevented it. Often dismissed as an intellectual lightweight, he left the University of Bologna without a degree in 1525, relied heavily throughout life on private tutors, and wrote few original works. But his extensive correspondence and Murphy's careful analysis (and appendix) of his book purchases reveals the deep impress of Pietro Pomponazzi's Aristotelian lectures; a taste for patristics, Erasmus, and humanistic biblical scholarship; curiosity about Protestant writings and the spirituali; and, until Trent, disinterest in late medieval speculative theology.
Inspired by his friends Giberti, Contarini, and Pole, Gonzaga oversaw the reform of his Mantuan diocese directly after taking up residence in 1537 and publicly but calculatingly renounced a Spanish benefice a decade later. Controlling temporal power as regent from 1440 greatly facilitated his episcopal reforms, though his tight fiscal administration should not be mistaken for “Counter-Reformation rigor” (169). Supervising visitations aimed at ameliorating as well as correcting conditions among the clergy, Gonzaga issued constitutions and manuals based on those of Ghiberti and Antoninus of Florence (d. 1459), founded schools and held discussions, curbed private masses and burials as well as public festivals (save those highlighting the Gonzaga house), and worked to enforce the enclosure of nuns and to organize the laity into Eucharistic confraternities. Preachers were encouraged to stick to moral themes and tread carefully on justification. Open criticism of the Catholic faith was strictly prohibited, but uncooperative clergy were discreetly transferred and no one was executed for heresy.
Gonzaga shared the reforming and theological interests of his peers among the spirituali but stopped short of embracing justification by faith. He invited Ochino to Mantua and turned a blind eye to his flight, collaborated with Pier Paolo Vergerio on several manuals (until he found him disseminating Lutheran writings among his clergy), staunchly defended Giovanni Morone, offered discreet advice to Benedetto Fontanini, and worried less about Renée of Ferrara's Protestantism than the embarrassment she might cause her husband, his cousin.
Gonzaga was involved through Contarini in discussions about hosting a council at Mantua in 1530 and 1536, but deflected similar plans in 1542. He followed Trent closely from Mantua, favored giving the Protestants some sort of hearing, and was prepared to accept limited curbs on papal prerogatives to preserve the principle of monarchy. He would have preferred addressing discipline before doctrine and thought the council's decree on scripture and tradition much too loose. But he may have had a hand in the decree on original sin, and he firmly supported the council's refusal to compromise with the Protestants on justification.
As one of Pius IV's legates to Trent in its third period, Gonzaga's disposition toward negotiation and compromise availed him little. His efforts to revise the Index to bring Italian Protestants like Vergerio back into the Catholic fold were strongly resisted by representatives of the Spanish and Roman inquisitions, and his willingness to accommodate the Germans by offering the chalice to the laity was undermined by the Italians. His final humiliation came when he got caught between reformers determined to enforce episcopal residence as a matter of divine law (jure divino) and a pope equally determined to preserve his right to issue dispensations, and who was secretly communicating with another of Gonzaga's fellow legates, Ludovico Simonetta. Murphy resists the view that Gonzaga's failure was due to incompetence or lack of intellectual preparation and finds Hubert Jedin's critical judgment biased in favor of Cardinal Morone (243). Despite the apparent impossibility of Gonzaga's position, Murphy nevertheless judges his failure at Trent as confirming the broad anachronism of his patrician views of the Church and reform (244).
Murphy's concluding suggestion that “if there is a type of European reform that most resembles that of Gonzaga, it is that of the territorial princes of Germany” (252) comes as a mild surprise. The thesis is not argued throughout the book. But it aptly signals the importance that Murphy's rich study will have not only in the field of Catholic reform but for studies of sixteenth-century reformations more broadly.
