The Life of Juan De Valdés (To- Ronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008)
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Reviews / ERSY 29 (2009) 103–143 141 Daniel A. Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valdés (To- ronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9867-2. After years of industrious detective work in Spanish archives, Daniel Crews presents here an alternative paradigm on Juan de Valdés (d. 1541), whom historians generally portray as a religious reformer whose social circles and vernacular writings helped spur the cause of the spirituali in Italy. Born in La Mancha to a large, ambitious family of converso ancestry, Valdés witnessed his father combat the nobility and entered the University of Alcalá in perhaps its most dynamic decade, in 1526. As a young man, he associated with religious figures in Castile who practiced alumbradismo, a set of spiritual preferences that favored private communication with God, neglected Christocentrism and the sacraments, and spurned priestly intermediaries. After Valdés’s Dialogue on Christian Doctrine appeared in 1529—the only work he published in his lifetime—the Spanish Inquisition investigated its orthodoxy, which caused him to flee to Rome. Valdés was not without connections there, since his older brother Alfonso was one of Charles V’s imperial secretaries, and Juan himself soon entered imperial service as a secretary and spy. Valdés remained in Italy for the rest of his life, moving from Rome to Naples and becoming the center of a spiritual network that included such luminaries as Bernardino Ochino, Giulia Gonzaga, and Pietro Carnesecchi. After Valdés’s death, Ochino would flee to Geneva, Gonzaga would publish Valdés’s later religious writings in Venice in Italian translation, and Carnesecchi would eventually be executed by the Roman Inquisition for heresy. The fact that numerous individuals identified to some degree or other with religious reform clustered first around Valdés and later around Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone has helped to turn Valdés into one of the “fathers” of the spirituali, that ambiguous group that favored an individualized spirituality, attention to faith, the Pauline epistles, and the cura animarum. Because the usual trajectory of Italian religious history presents the spirituali as vanquished by the intransigenti, Valdés’s relatively early death seems poignant or, perhaps, fortunate. Daniel Crews’s objective is to challenge this portrait of Valdés, which he believes is too one-sided. He argues instead that Valdés should be imagined as a courtier, a diplomat, and a man whose interest in religion ebbed and flowed depending upon whether a beautiful woman was at his elbow (namely, Giulia Gonzaga). Crews structures his book chronologically, to follow Valdés’s biography; he focuses exclusively on the elites with whom Valdés interacted and the politics in which he and his contacts were entangled. A chapter on © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/027628509X12548459642308 142 Reviews / ERSY 29 (2009) 103–143 childhood and family milieu is followed by one on education at Alcalá, and then by one on Valdés’s first years in Rome, when he became a “chamberlain of honor” to Pope Clement VII and thereby entered the papal famiglia.Valdés’s assistance to three cardinals is examined in much detail, as is his job as a solicitor for Giulia Gonzaga. His sodality in Naples is explained as arising from an imperial impulse to spread the Spanish language: Crews argues that Valdés’s group only began to debate spiritual matters after Paul III deputized his reform commission in 1537 and Giulia Gonzaga became spiritually depressed and in need of consolation. Crews also asserts, persuasively, that Valdés was a major support to the Neapolitan viceroy, Don Pedro de Toledo. During the formal visitation of Toledo’s administration between 1536–1539, Valdés ran interference between the viceroy and Francisco de los Cobos, Charles V’s most powerful secretary, and managed to remain the trusted friend of both. The final chapter examines Valdés’s admittedly subtle contributions to the Diet at Regensburg (136): here, Crews maintains that his subject deliberately produced a large number of religious texts between 1538–1541 not simply to promote the vernacular but to aid Charles V’s religious colloquies in northern Europe (143). The doctrine of double justification that Valdés affirmed was endorsed at Regensburg but ultimately became irrelevant in the wake of disagreements over transubstantiation and penance. Crews concludes that this defeat “symbolized the dawn of a new era,” one in which the creative eclecticism of the Renaissance and of Valdés, who was never a systematic thinker, mattered less than doctrinal consistency (158). This work contains several provocative theses. Crews argues that Valdés changed over time in his Erasmian sympathies: an ardent supporter and correspondent of Erasmus while at Alcalá, once he was in Rome and under the tutelage of Juan Ginés de Sepulveda, Valdés never corresponded with Erasmus again. He allegedly toned down his former feelings in the interests of getting ahead with Clement VII and a curia that disliked Erasmus’s anti-monastic sentiments. Additionally, Crews highlights contradictions in Valdés’s life— the work for corrupt cardinals and simultaneous spiritual mentoring of Giulia Gonzaga—which help to disrupt an overly static portrait of a rather mysterious individual. At the same time, though, this study betrays some weaknesses that hamper its effectiveness. Crews lacks hard evidence for much of the diplomatic activity he hopes to chart: very often, he has been forced to hypothesize or extrapolate as to what Valdés might have done or might have written, because the documents simply have not been found. Yet this difficulty could have been ameliorated to a degree if Crews had provided his readers with more analysis of patronage.