Meletij Smotryc'kyj. by David FrickReview by: Howard LouthanThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 858-860Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544060 .

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858 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII / 3 (1996)

Christaine Andersson's essay on Urs Graf reveals the "private" side of a popular artist and explores his fundamentally ambivalent attitude toward women, which mirrors prevailing opinions in the first decades of the sixteenth century.

The three remaining essays treat the works of Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan (Feich- tinger), the role of women in Renaissance jurisprudence (Belloni), and the problem of female subjectivity in the works of Shakespeare (Muller).The temporal and cultural variety of these essays reflects the range of the entire volume, which is precisely why the term "Renaissance" seems too restrictive to describe the book's contents. Using Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus as a point of reference, Feichtinger demonstrates how Christine opposes what Feichtinger labels "conscious subjectivity" to the "male objectivity" typical of Christine's time. Feichtinger points out how Christine ultimately reveals that his "male objectivity" is just as subjective as her "conscious subjectivity," and she proposes that Christine should be regarded as a prototypical feminist, provided that a feminist is defined as someone who shows women how to fight social injustice and change society for the better. Belloni's analysis of legal views of women in the Renaissance suffers from an astonishing lack of specificity, due in no small part to the impossibility of making generalizations about the applicability of Roman law in different parts of Renaissance Europe. In order to give her thoughts on the subject a grounding in reality, Belloni would have done well to include a case study or two so that her readers would see for themselves how women fared under Renaissance jurispru- dence. Wolfgang Muller sets out to refute three current critical opinions about the female figures in Shakespeare's works. Muller concludes that Shakespeare criticizes reigning stereo- types about women not because he was a feminist, but primarily because the traditional hier- archical relationship of men and women is dull and thus positively undramatic on stage.

The essays in Die Frau in der Renaissance represent solid enough scholarship, but unfortu- nately time has proven to be their enemy. Nearly six years have elapsed since the conference for which these essays were written and a great deal of work on early modern women has been done since then. Perhaps these essays could have made a more substantial contribution to the late twentieth-century querelle desfemmes if the book had appeared more promptly. Linda L. Gaus ................................... University of California-Berkeley

Meletij Smotryc'kyj. David Frick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1995. 395 pp. $29.00.

Though the dramatic fall of the iron curtain in 1989 helped bring about the reunification of Europe, there still remains a great divide between east and west in the world of early modern studies. The lack of dialogue between scholars of the Germanic and Slavic lands often makes the ColdWar look like a friendly family reunion. But there was of course a very fuzzy border between east and west in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as David Frick's fascinating monograph illustrates, there are great rewards for those who work in this shadowy region. There are figures like the intriguing Maximus the Greek-a monk from MountAthos who before his long tenure in Russia came to the west and lived in Savonarola's Florence.While Maximus has long been studied by Russianists, his extensive polemical writ- ings directed against both Catholics and Protestants have received only passing attention though they offer a fascinating critique of western Christianity from an Orthodox perspec- tive.

Meletij Smotry'ckyj (c.1577-1633) is another of these borderland figures who remains virtually unknown outside a small circle of Slavic specialists. In fact Frick has produced the first comprehensive study in English on one of the most important religious leaders of east

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Book Reviews 859

central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Smotry'ckyj was a member of the Ruthenian community, the Orthodox Christians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At first a lay leader, he wrote an important grammar of Church Slavonic (1618-19) which was used into the nineteenth century. He became a monk in 1620, and three years later he was consecrated archbishop of Polack, the second most important ecclesiastical position in the Ruthenian Orthodox Church. In 1627 he covertly converted to the Uniate church, a faith that traces its origins to the orthodox bodies of eastern Europe but had established union with the Roman Catholic Church.The following year he made his conversion public and thus provoked a great controversy that has surrounded him to this day.

Frick's study is divided into two sections. He somewhat reluctantly calls the first part a microhistory. It is in essence a biographical overview of Smotry'ckyj's life. Historiographi- cally, scholars have zoomed in on two separate and distinct facets of Smotry'ckyj's career. Slavic specialists have examined his grammar while church historians have focused on his controversial conversion. Frick attempts to weave these disparate strands together and create a tapestry that presents a more comprehensive picture of this puzzling figure.The second half of the study is more topical in nature. Investigating the issues of language/culture, church/ faith, and nation/state, Frick examines how Smotry'ckyj sought to define himself in a Polish and Ruthenian context.

This second half of the study is in my mind the most fascinating part of Frick's work. It is in this context that we see Smotry'ckyj attempting to fashion an identity for himself and the Ruthenian nation that falls between east and west-as Frick says "finding a way for an Orthodox Slav to maintain his identity in the early modern West." Smotry'ckyj's own edu- cation is a clear indication of his fuzzy cultural and theological orientation. He attended the Protestant universities of Wittenberg and Leipzig, the Jesuit academy at Vilnius and the Orthodox school at Ostroh. I think Frick rightly sees Smotry'ckyj's linguistic work as an attempt to create a "late-humanist" Slavic idiom that was analogous to the way western Europe wrote and spoke Latin. In the same manner Smotry'ckyj tried to fashion a faith that charted a middle course between east and west-one that drew opprobrium from the Orthodox community and suspicion from the Catholics. Frick acknowledges the difficulty of trying to pin down Smotry'ckyj theologically. The Uniate convert was well practiced in the Renaissance art of dissimulation. It's at this point that Frick attempts to locate Smotry'ckyj in the larger European context. Drawing from the work of Perez Zagorin and others, he makes interesting comparisons with the great neo-Stoic Justus Lipsius and the neglected VermittlungstheologeGeorge Cassander. Though his comments here are more sug- gestive than substantial, this book is most useful from an early modern perspective as it brings out intriguing parallels to the more familiar religious and political dynamics of western Europe.

There are a number of caveats that should be made about this monograph. It is not easy- going for the uninitiated. The editors were wise enough to include a map of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, but it still can be heavy slogging for those unfamiliar with the Orthodox and Uniate churches.Terms like archimandrite and people like Josyf Ruc'kyj, the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev, are not exactly household names for most early modern- ists.Then there is a problem of sources-most are highly polemical in nature. Frick acknowl- edges this difficulty from the beginning and handles them with a great deal of skepticism as he cautiously puts together a puzzle that lacks a few pieces. For a non-Slavic specialist, it may seem somewhat tedious to wade through a number of the historiographical debates, and Frick's prose can at times be as convoluted as his subject matter.With that said, this is a very important book. Frick is trying to reintegrate early-seventeenth-century east central Europe

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860 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVII / 3 (1996)

into what is unfortunately a fragmented world of early modern studies. His jacket cover does him no favors, however, as it indicates that this study will be of interest to "scholars and stu- dents of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland-Lithuania, and those researching the history of the Uniate, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic Church in Eastern Europe." Don't believe everything you read! This book merits a far wider audience. Howard Louthan ............ University of Notre Dame

Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519-1530. Miriam Usher Chrisman. Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press, 1996. xiii + 228 pp. $60.00.

This ambitious monograph is based on a study of three hundred pamphlets by lay writers dating from the first decade of the German-Swiss Reformation. About one-eighth of the Reformation pamphleteers were laypersons. In the overwhelming majority, they were south Germans from Franconia, Alsace, Baden, Swabia, and the Rhenish Palatinate.

Chrisman presents the lay experience of the Reformation as distinct from that of the humanist and theologian Reformers and as diverse, filtered by the social status of the writers. She distinguishes five conflicting "classes," as she terms them, without going into the theory of class or estate analysis of early modern society.Three of these groups belonged to the social elites: lesser nobility, urban patricians and honorables, and upper civil servants and lawyers. The princes, city councillors, and wealthy merchants did not participate in the pamphlet war of the 1520s; to a considerable degree the university-educated civil servants were the salaried spokesmen of the real rulers. Chrisman's fifth grouping, composed of artisans, middle-rank- ing burghers, and popular poets, were the spokesmen of unprivileged townspeople. She assumes that they were also broadly representative of the feelings of the evangelical peasantry, since all of the pamphlets that claimed to be written by peasants originated from higher in the social spectrum, exploiting the propaganda value of speaking in the name of the tillers of the soil. Chrisman's fourth social grouping emerged from a number of pamphlets not so easily classified: "The authors were minor civil servants, school teachers, printers and tech- nicians," a floating, in-between group that had lifted itself above the commoners but lacked the education and authority of the elites.This lack of fixed social position tended toward par- ticularly imaginative, radical writings.

Besides the basic assertion of the book, that different groups of laity appropriated and transformed the Reformation message in contrasting ways, Chrisman has given her discus- sion an ingenious narrative frame that follows the lay experience of the Reformation from its beginning to its institutional consolidation at the end of the 1520s. First pamphlets from all groups, warning against the use of ecclesiastical courts and bans to suppress Luther and the other Reformers, begin the propaganda for the Reformation. Next comes an assessment of the pamphlet campaign that preceded and accompanied the Knights' Revolt of 1522 to 1523. Franz von Sickingen at the Ebernburg had by 1520 or 1521 created Germany's third evangelical community, in succession to Wittenberg and Nuremberg, and introduced such important protagonists as Martin Bucer and Johannes Oecolampadius into the Reformation scene. In the last chapters, the longing of the artisans and other town commoners for a com- munal covenant that would subdue the disorder created by the Roman clergy and the rich is contrasted to the "common good," as legislated by city secretaries and the magistrates, which suppressed the old church and organized poor relief in a manner satisfactory to the town elite. Peter Blickle's idea of a communal Reformation that joins the aspirations of the com- moners in town and rural districts provides the interpretive framework. And, as in Blickle's

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