Henri Estienne, érudit, novateur, polémiste: Étude sur Ad Senecae lectionem Proodopoeiae (review)
better case. They were different in many ways, and they did not share the same religious sensibility or concept of religious reform, but they were soulmates from the time they first met. The Italians provide better examples. Pietro Bembo, Michelangelo Buonarroti (the artist), Reginald Pole (an exiled cousin of King Henry VIII but in intellectual and spiritual matters close to the Italian spirituali), and Vittoria Colonna constitute a defensible grouping for this study. Bembo, Michelangelo, and Colonna were the leading lyric poets of their generation. The other Italian figures who receive attention as learned spirituali here are Gasparo Contarini and Jacopo Sadoleto. Of the individuals studied, those who made sustained efforts to address general problems of spiritual and institutional reform, rather than just to seek personal fulfillment, were Erasmus, who had no intimate emotional link with any of this group except More, and three of the Italians: Contarini, Pole, and Sadoleto were major figures in the efforts of Pope Paul III to assert papal leadership and calm the religious upheaval. All three were made cardinals in 1535 and 1536; all were appointed to the reform commission that prepared the famous document that analyzed the failings of the Curia and proposed a serious and costly scheme of reforms. Colet was a genuine Catholic reformer, but only within a narrow scope. Bembo, also a cardinal, played a generally reformist role in curial politics but was primarily engaged in his literary work. For the others, the goal for spiritual friendships was their own personal fulfillment. They may have talked about general reform, but they did little or nothing to address this need. Essentially, they were interested in the religious and intellectual life of privileged and spiritually enlightened individuals like themselves, and they had little to say to the rest of society. Even Marguerite — who should not be identified here as “a French queen” (7), a title she never held — was concerned mainly with her own longing for spiritual security. She served as patron and protector of some French evangelicals who eventually played a more active role in religious reform, but she avoided actions that truly addressed the hard issues of French religious life. CHARLES G. NAUERT University of Missouri-Columbia