Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/626

 6 1 6 Reviews of Books corruption of Italian morals in the fifteenth century to the lack of relig- ious faith in the fourteenth have committed a double error, psycho- logical and historical; for they have failed on the one hand to realize that moral corruption is not the effect of incredulity but its cause, and on the other hand they have neglected, under the conviction of their own assumptions, that thorough investigation of the contemporary chronicles which would have proved to them conclusively the conserva- tive spirit prevailing in Italy in the days of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio. Such originality of "thought as there was in Italy led rather to the scientific triumphs of Galileo and Vico than to any development of the metaphysical speculation on which free thought is founded. The author maintains his thesis in a very broad treatment of the social, religious, and literary conditions in Italy in the fourteenth cen- tury. He shows how, a priori, little interest in heresy could be ex- pected in a society still largely feudal, and wholly medieval in the immediacy of its violences and its attachments; how the life of people from a Visconti to the meanest serf was bound up inseparably with the church — the general clearing-house for all business of state as well as the house of worship for all people. He analyzes the literature of the Babylonian Captivity and finds that M. Deprez was near the truth in maintaining that the French kings were pretty weak jailers in the days of Crecy and Poitiers ; even that during the Babylonian Captivity " le veritable prisonnier avait ete le monarque f ranqais ". He examines the writings of Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, Sacchetti, Salutati, and the lesser chroniclers, and finds them on the whole naive, conservative, and deeply religious. We have as little cause to regard Italy in the fourteenth century as a nation of schismatics or heretics from the occasional satires of Petrarch or Boccacio as we have to imagine France unbelieving in the days of Tartiiffc, or Rome " antimilitariste " in the days of the Miles Gloriosus. M. Dejob's book shows a mastery of the literary sources of the fourteenth century in Italy. Whether he has made the most scholarly use of his sources is open to grave doubt. He holds a brief for ortho- doxy. While refusing to allow great significance to Petrarch's state- ment that the loss of good manuscripts has caused more harm than commerce with demons, he attributes universal assent to the praise of the clergy by the chronicler de Mussi, reported by Muratori : " Nisi clerici castis exemplis nos instruerent jugiter ambitioni et deliciis nostris modus non esset." While a Farinata is no argument for Italy at large, a Saint Catharine of Siena is typical. And, as for the main thesis of the book, that heresy in Italy followed moral corruption, it is hard to see how moral corruption could have gained the momentum necessary to disturb the church unless the faith of Italy had been very much weakened by the skepticism of the latest Hohenstaufcns and the sectaries of Joachim and Dolcino. The author seems to have missed something of the birthright of lucidity of style which we are accustomed to look for in every French