Italian Humanism in the Early Reformation: Agostino Steuco (1497-1548). (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

This dissertation presents a study of humanist Counter-Reformation scholarship and thought in pre-Tridentine Italy. This work examines how the Italian humanist Agostino Steuco used his training as a humanist scholar to defend the Catholic Church, its institutions and religious practices, against the criticisms and attacks of the northern reformers in the early Reformation era. This study also demonstrates that the reaction of a number of Italian humanists towards Luther and the Lutheran movement, as well as Italian humanist hostility towards Erasmus, was based to a great extent upon the threat to the moral and social condition of mankind that many Italian humanists believed lie in the reformers' attacks upon religious rituals and ceremonies. Investigating Steuco's scholarship, it is shown how he applied the canons of humanist Biblical scholarship first developed in the New Testament studies of Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus of Rotterdam, to his own critical examination of the Vulgate Latin text of the Old Testament in his Veteris Testamenti ad Hebraicam veritatem recognitio (1529). This analysis also reveals the polemical nature of Steuco's Old Testament exegesis, by showing how he repeatedly used his textual criticisms and annotations to reply to the critical issues raised by the scholarship of Erasmus and Valla, concerning the reliability of Jerome's Latin translation of the Vulgate text and concerning Jerome's capabilities as a Biblical scholar and translator. An analysis of Steuco's Pro religione christiana adversus Lutheranos (1530), demonstrates how Steuco used his skills as a humanist textual scholar, philologist, linguist and historian to defend papal claims to supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs and the validity of contemporary Catholic rituals and religious practices against the historical, textual and scholarly criticisms of the reformers. In analyzing this treatise it is shown that as a humanist, Steuco had a deep concern for the social as well as for the religious consequences of Luther's doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Steuco here stresses his belief that religious rituals and ceremonies perform a social as well as a religious function. Without the civilizing and mollifying effect of religious ceremonies and rituals upon men, Steuco believed, sixteenth century society would be destroyed.