Lawrence of Brindisi's missions to protestants in the Commissariat of Bohemia-Austria-Styria between 1599 and 1613, in the last years of his life, are important in a number of ways, for he was a man of many parts. He rose to recognition as a Doctor of the Church in 1959 and in his lifetime he became prominent as a diplomat, military chaplain, administrator and preacher as well as a missionary.
This definitive study, the first in English to rely on a comprehensive search of the archive sources begins with a brief biography and a discussion of his continuing influence after his death. The first of its main chapters provides a history of the creation of the Commissariat, with its first three friaries in Graz, Vienna and Prague. The meat of the book lies in its chapters on the way Lawrence tackled the task of persuading the ‘heretics’ he encountered in this part of the Holy Roman Empire that they were in error. In Saxony and the Palatinate Lawrence could and did engage with both Lutherans and Calvinists, but most of his efforts were directed towards the Lutherans who dominated protestant thinking in the lands of the Commissariat.
First comes a description of his preaching. which witnesses described as energetic, and as involving impassioned argument both against the errors he was challenging and for the true faith. He did not work alone but accompanied by other Capuchins, though it seems to have been his own preaching which was remembered. The published written record of some of his sermons survives as evidence of the arguments he advances, but contemporary descriptions of how it struck observers, his strength of feeling and fierce concentration, communicate something of his famously confrontational style of delivery.
Chapter 4 deals with the ‘Theological Disputations’ he held with in Prague in 1607. The Disputation with the Lutheran Polycarp Leyser concentrated on the topics of Justification and ‘good works’. Three years later he disputed with another Lutheran whose name does not survive, on veneration of the Virgin Mary. Chapter 5 explores Lawrence's treatment of Lutheran ‘hypotheses’ in his ‘The Express Image of Lutheranism’. This was a result of an order by the nuncio Caetani to refuse Leyser's teaching.
The Jesuit Neubauer was involved in Leyser's attacks as well as Lawrence and matters were complicated by the fact that Leyser and Neubauer naturally used German while Lawrence preached in Italian. Leyser described how Lawrence would throw books from the pulpit in his energetic homiletic denunciations. Lawrence's rebuttals as he began to write his ‘Image’ pointed to a disorderliness and personal spite in the points Leyser made. He did not complete it as speedily as he began it and was still working on it as his health started to fail. It was not published in his lifetime. But read now, it provides an invaluable post-Tridentine resource to supplement the corpus of debate Counter-Reformation between Lutherans and Roman Catholics. He relied more heavily on patristic sources than he tended to do in his sermons, where he mostly cited Scripture, but to the modern eye and ear the polemic is the less persuasive because of what would in a modern social media age have to be described as ‘trolling’.
The conclusion asks whether Lawrence's preaching to the protestants brought about any conversions. There is evidence that there were some. Perhaps that is not where his influence lay in the long-term. Drenas suggests that his great achievement lay in his effect upon the landscape of the Roman Empire. This is a book of profound scholarship, though sometimes less than felicitous in style, with a Bibliography, a Chronology and a list of the ‘polemical themes addressed’ in Lawrence's homiletic works.
