Les Spirituels: Philosophie et Religion chez les Jeunes Humanistes Allemands au Seizième Siècleby André SéguennyReview by: R. Emmet McLaughlinThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 537-539Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4143959 .

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Book Reviews 537

tion." The vast sweep of the essay results in some awkward transitions between topics, even as it suggests intriguing connections on a macrocultural scale.

Federica Ambrosini's essay traces the freedoms gradually obtained by women from the

High Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Particularly in the eighteenth century, women were able to avoid their two traditional destinies, marriage or the convent, by pursuing other options that had not been previously available. An upswing in literacy and growth in the larger number of charitable institutions available to support women led to a significant increase in lay spinsterhood. The strength of Ambrosini's essay lies in her frequent use of ex-

amples to illustrate larger themes of the social history of women inVenice. Robert C. Davis'

essay on "Slave Redemption in Venice, 1585-1797" is superb: entertaining, solidly re-

searched, and expertly linked to many of the larger issues in Venetian history. Davis illus- trates how slaving in the Mediterranean became big business in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and how the Venetian state and church responded to the capture of their citizens. In combining economic, social, religious, and diplomatic history, Davis illuminates an issue that was of great concern to all living within the Venetian Empire. He shows the

many problems faced by the Venetian officers charged with ransoming slaves, and the inno- vative solutions developed in response. In the 1720s the government finally admitted that it could not manage on its own, and brought in the Discalced Trinitarians, a religious order

specifically dedicated to ransoming slaves from the Muslims. The Trinitarians used econo- mies of scale and a network of contacts to bring home hundreds of slaves at one time, and

they avoided the errors previously committed by Venetian officials, such as sending the Sul- tan five hogsheads of wine.

In sum, this is an exemplary collection of essays that provides a fresh look at five hun- dred years of Venetian social and political history. Christopher Carlsmith. .............. .. University of Massachusetts-Lowell

Les Spirituels: Philosophie et Religion chez les Jeunes Humanistes Allemands au Seizieme Siecle. Andre Seguenny. Baden-Baden:Valentin Koerner, 2000. 287 pp. n.p. ISBN 3873208784. For more than twenty-five years Andre Seguenny has explored the rationalist wing of

the Radical Reformation. In this book he argues once again that the Spiritualists are best understood not as radical protestants, but as radical humanists.

Methodologically, Seguenny ignores those approaches that have dominated the writ-

ing of history in the last thirty years: social history, gender studies, and cultural history. But the book is not exactly intellectual history either, since Seguenny does not provide textual evidence for ties between the Spiritualists and other intellectual movements, or among the

Spiritualists themselves. Rather, as Seguenny admits, the book is more "doctrinal" than his- torical. He posits relationships based upon the conceptual resemblance. "We have the im-

pression that..." (e.g., 80) or something similar often prefaces important insights, arguments, or conclusions.

Seguenny maintains the standard characterization of the Spiritualists as those who ac- corded primacy to the direct action of the Spirit over other means of salvation. He insists, however, that the Spirit of the Spiritualists was not the theological one of the reformers. It was neither Trinitarian nor mediated nor an external force that inspired. Rather, the Spirit of the Spiritualists was a philosophical "Spirit," the internal faculty of speculative reason. It was the "mind" of the Neoplatonists, not the "breath" of the biblical God. According to

Seguenny, Karl Holl's failure to recognize this distinction has led to a fatal confusion of

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538 Sixteenth Century ournal XXXIII/2 (2002)

Spiritualists like Sebastian Franck with Schwiirmer like Thomas Miintzer. The bulk of the book studies four Spiritualists. The principle of selection is not clear.

While Franck and Caspar Schwenckfeld are obvious choices, and Hans Denck a not unrea- sonable one, the obscure Jorg Hauck is a puzzle. Recognized Spiritualists like Crautwald, Biinderlin, or Entfelder might have given greater credibility to the application of

Seguenny's findings to the general phenomenon of"Spiritualism." Making use of Karl

Mannheim, Seguenny argues that the first Spiritualists were part of an "intellectual genera- tion," defined as contemporaries who shared an existential or intellectual problem, itself the outcome of the efforts of earlier generations to solve their own dilemmas. Members of a

"generation" need not know each other, nor need they agree on the solutions they con- trived. But they all were part of the same discourse.

At the root of Spiritualism, according to Seguenny, was a profound disquietude con-

cerning the meaning and value of human existence combined with the conviction that nat- ural or mundane knowledge was inadequate. Spiritualism is a philosophical quest, not a

theological one, since it arises out of the human condition and only comes to terms with God under the form of the Transcendent as its ultimate goal. Seguenny denies Spiritualism any roots in Luther, whom he sees as continuing the fideistic current of medieval popular re-

ligion. He also dismisses mysticism as a source because its thorough dualism required the an- nihilation of the physical and, in some cases, the loss of individual identity. Spiritualism, by contrast, overcomes the tension between the material and spiritual by elevating the physical, by "spiritualizing" it. And far from expunging individuality, Spiritualism's psychological, so-

ciological, and ecclesiological effects created the most pure individualism seen in the West to that date. While bearing some resemblance to certain forms of Scholasticism (Aquinas mostly) with regard to ontology, the Spiritualists rejected its epistemology (dialectic).

For Seguenny the true source of Spiritualism was Humanism, particularly in its Eras- mian form. However, his efforts to squeeze all four of his examples into this Procrustean bed are often undermined by Seguenny's own skill in reading texts and his integrity in pre- senting the results. Despite his argument that neither the Spiritualists nor Erasmus found an

important role for suffering in making the new Christian, Hauck made suffering the core of the Christian message in passages redolent of Thomas Miintzer. Nor do we have any evi- dence of humanist education or interest in Hauck. Schwenckfeld too lacks such a back-

ground (he is also a generation older than the others), though the influence of the humanist Crautwald should not be discounted. Schwenckfeld's interest in Erasmus postdates most of his early Spiritualist development. The argument that Schwenckfeld broke with Luther in 1525 over the freedom of the will rather than the Eucharist, the accepted interpretation, is

very puzzling. We do have evidence for the influence of humanism upon Denck and

Franck, and Seguenny's thesis seems tailored to them, Franck especially. The number of

pages devoted to each man is telling: Franck (108), Denck (38), Schwenckfeld (37) and Hauck (13). However, even Franck is shown to have drawn on Agrippa and the Theologia Deutsch; and Franck's teaching that the world and all the human sciences were and would remain Satanic hardly reminds one of Erasmus.

Much of what Seguenny finds in the Spiritualists is also found in Erasmus, as well as in some mystics and some scholastics. It is not humanism that is the common element but rather the Neoplatonism that some humanists adopted. Aspects of Neoplatonism also ap- peared in late medieval mysticism and in Scholasticism. For all that Aquinas was a student of

Aristotle, his was the Neoplatonic Aristotle. By contrast, neither Luther nor Thomas Miintzer had much truck with that tradition.There is merit, therefore, in S~guenny's place-

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Book Reviews 539

ment of the Spiritualists in the grand narrative of Western philosophy, not in that of Protes- tant biblicistic or confessional theology. Placed in Reformation Germany, they were like Eastern liberals set adrift in the Bible Belt, encountering all the attendant incomprehension, suspicion, and hostility that one would expect. R. Emmet McLaughlin ........................ Villanova University

Well-Ordered License: On the Unity of Machiavelli's Thought. Markus Fischer.

Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000. 231 pp. n.p. ISBN 0739101080. Machiavelli's thought has long perplexed even his foremost interpreters. One of the

most divisive issues concerns whether the many apparently contradictory assumptions and conclusions contained in his writings can be located within a single unified scheme. Some scholars have argued that there is a rational unity underlying his thought, but disagree over its nature; others have argued that it is misguided to look for such a thing in the first place. Most recently, still others have suggested that the inconsistencies can largely be explained away with reference to the rhetorical nature of his works. In this insightful new volume, Markus Fischer subjects the Machiavellian corpus to a fresh assessment, breaking down his

subject's thought into its elementary components, in order to uncover its hidden coherence, and in so doing "to make sense of Machiavelli as he understood himself."

In the first half of the book, Fischer addresses Machiavelli's assumptions about the

world, human nature, and the proper ends and means of political order. Beginning with Machiavelli's belief in Renaissance astrology, he shows that Machiavelli believed that the world is structured by both necessity, the product of the regular motions of the heavenly bodies, and contingency, which is arbitrarily directed by Fortune. The former manifests it- self in recurrent patterns of historical events, from which one can derive general rules; however, the contingency of Fortune means that these rules apply usually, but not always. Consequently, Fischer describes Machiavelli as a "prudential empiricist." The ontological distinction between necessity and contingency corresponds to a psychological duality be- tween first and second natures, that is between nature and habit. In this manner, Machia- velli makes sense of the fact that human nature is both constant and malleable, and that man is capable of both wickedness and goodness. Machiavelli assumed humans to be self-seeking individuals, who could, nonetheless, be trained to become loyal subjects and law-abiding citizens by habituation. To succeed in the face of accidents (contingency), moreover, indi- viduals need to know above all when to seize an opportunity and when to desist from ac- tion. This ability to cope with contingency also defines Machiavelli's concept of virtu, by which he meant primarily the ability to succeed in political and military life. While other Renaissance writers had been heading in this direction, Machiavelli was the first to suggest that this could not be done without committing evil deeds. Breaking with the classical tra-

dition, Machiavelli took a consequentialist, rather than a teleological, approach to ethics,

believing that the generation of the political good rests on the commission of evil deeds: one does evil so that good may come. Indeed, he insisted that injustice was essential to the

good of the political order.

Having established Machiavelli's ontological, epistemological, anthropological, and ethical premises, in the second half of the book, Fischer seeks to integrate his subject's vari- ous remarks on principalities and republics into a coherent account of domestic and foreign politics. He shows how Machiavelli emphasized man's individual nature, and his inclination to anarchy, or "license," from which condition he must be coerced by a new prince who uses violence to impose the first political order. "New principalities," "hereditary principali-

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