In this fine book, Lawrence Buck set out to answer several research questions. He wanted to identify the iconographic significance of images of an infamous monster allegedly revealed by receding Tiber River floodwaters in 1495. He hoped to explain the process by which the image made its way from Rome to Wittenberg, nearly three decades later, to become the exemplar of all that was wrong about the papacy. He wanted to examine both Philip Melanchthon's meaning when he called the monster a figure of the papal Antichrist, and his argument in the popular pamphlet he composed on the topic, The Pope-Ass Explained. Buck further sought to examine the manner in which the monster—and Melanchthon's interpretation of it—may have influenced Reformation polemics. In a model of clarity advisable to all scholars, Buck laid out all these questions, plus the basic conclusions forming the thesis for the book, in the first five pages. He included reproductions of thirteen woodcuts beautifully illustrating the image and its use in early modern religious literature, plus a complete translation of Melanchthon's 1523 pamphlet.
Buck successfully provided answers to those research questions. The representation of the monster, first as an icon and later in the polemics of Melanchthon and Luther, drew upon well-known, pre-Reformation commonplaces that Buck called “theologic and folkloric topoi” (12). It was an ass with the torso of a woman, the scales of a fish, an elephantine right arm, one hooved leg, one leg with a talon, plus a bizarre tail and hind quarters complete with the face of an old man. By the time a Moravian engraver named Wenzel von Olmütz got hold of an Italian copy of the image, more than one version was apparently circulating. All variants, everything from satirical pasquinades to cathedral decorations, drew upon the idea that God used perversions of nature to promote repentance. They also drew upon medieval demonic iconography and made allusions to political corruption popular among Hussite and Waldensian sympathizers in Moravia. Hence, the iconography was traditional, linked to ancient images of the ass, standard demonology, and traditional criticism of overbearing popes and their instruments of power.
Buck indicated that it is unknown how the illustration came to the attention of Von Ulmütz, a sympathizer with the Bohemian Brethren, but explained that the image quickly served the literary and polemical purposes first of these and other Bohemian radicals, and later of protestants like Luther and Melanchthon. Luther alluded to Bohemian contacts in some of his letters, notably in 1521 to Georg Spalatin, when he described a Bohemian text with content similar to the monster illustration. It was Melanchthon, Buck argued, who worked in the long-developing concept of a papal Antichrist. It was woven from a tenth century biographical description of the Antichrist by Abbot Adso, from twelfth and thirteenth century Joachite apocalypticism, from fourteenth century fraticelli papal criticism, and from fifteenth century articulations of contemporary Roman corruption. This development culminated, for Buck, in the so-called Anatomy of the Antichrist, attributed to Johan Hus and his followers by Ulrich von Hutten, in the early sixteenth century. At that point, Buck explained, Luther and Melanchthon appropriated the Roman monster and transformed it into what Melanchthon called the “pope-ass,” bringing together this long tradition, plus their own views, to create an epitome of early Reformation polemics.
By 1523, when Melanchthon first published The Pope-Ass Explained, he was, as Buck indicated, Luther's partner. The pamphlet itself made that clear, as it appeared in tandem with Luther's The Monkcalf Found at Freiberg in Meissen. Luther had, of course, expressed the idea that the papacy was the embodiment of Antichrist in his treatises from 1519–1520. Buck explained these connections, presenting a thorough iconographic analysis of the image, and connecting it not simply to key protestant texts—like Luther's writings on papal and secular authority, plus Melanchthon's Loci communes—but also to events in the history of the Reformation.
Melanchthon's contextualized interpretation of the monster, Buck argued, had a profound effect upon polemical discourse in the Reformation. It was a bestseller, after all, going through fourteen separate printings in German between 1523 and 1549. The image of the monster may have had an impact on increasing use of asinine and scatological imagery in mid-century polemical tracts—like the 1545 Against the Roman papacy—of Luther. The Roman monster, Buck, pointed out, appeared in the polemics of both the Elizabethan Reformation and the French Wars of Religion. John Barthlet used the monster image when composing Pedegrewe of Heretiques, arguing that Catholicism was historically filled with heresy and sectarian divisiveness. In France, Arnaud Sorbin flipped the coin, creating an anti-Huguenot counter-interpretation of the monster, published in 1570. He contrasted protestant sectarianism with Catholic unity. The monster image later reemerged, Buck showed, in England as a response to Catholic resurgence, and also in “alarum literature” concerning the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the mutiny of the Spanish army in Flanders (208). Contemporary authors sometimes insisted that God allowed Catholic success as punishment for protestant complacency and immorality. Apparently demonic iconography, as well as scripture—like statistics in the modern world—can be used to demonstrate most anything an interpreter likes. Buck then concluded that the original power of the image as a figure of the papal Antichrist had been undermined by the end of the seventh decade of the century.
Some readers and critics may quibble with editorial choices, like the distracting way the monster sometimes disappears amid explanation of basic Reformation texts. In the end, Buck's insight that Melanchthon's interpretation of the monster image succeeded because he drew upon late medieval ideas about Antichrist, and put it to polemical use, stands. Buck produced a fine work: a significant contribution to the literature on Reformation polemics.
