Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge Studies in Early Mod) [Hardcover]

Thomas F. Mayer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521371880 | ISBN-13: 978-0521371889 | Publication Date: December 28, 2000

This is the first biography in ninety years of Reginald Pole (1500SH1558), one of the most important international figures of the sixteenth century. Pole's career is followed as protégé and then harshest critic of Henry VIII, as cardinal and papal diplomat, legate of Viterbo, a nearly successful candidate for pope, and finally as legate to England, archbishop of Canterbury, architect of the English Counter-Reformation, and victim of both Pope Paul IV and of himself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This study is a major contribution to early modern religious studies." Religious Studies Review

"Whatever ill luck the cardinal experienced, he has been truly fortunate in his biographer." Journal of Modern History

"Thomas Mayer has spent the better part of twenty-five years studying Reginald Pole, and it shows...Mayer's work will be considered the standard on this English cardinal for many years to come...Mayer's work on Pole has forever changed the way this English prelate can be viewed by students of early-modern Europe. Mayer has accomplished what Simoncelli feared might never be done, and he has done it well." William V. Hudon, The Catholicc Historical Review

"This biography is concerned with drawing the links that lie below the suface...setting Pole's life in the nest of his relationships with people like Contarini, Morone, Bembo, Carafa and Vittoria Colonna. An astonishing amount of work has gone into tracing those networks, and the density of the narrative can be dizzying at times. However, it provides a remarkable richness of context, and allows Mayer to draw a character of formidable complexity." H-Net Review

"Mayer's research is wide-ranging, the results of which present much new data for Reformation research, and his analysis is balanced and insightful. His forthcoming edition of Pole's correspondence...should be eagerly awaited." Albion

"Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet is an important book and will remain essential reading for students of sixteenth- century ecclesiastical and political history for generations to come. Well illustrated and lucidly written, the work brings together the Italian and English portions of the cardinal's life on the basis of extensive archival research and in doing so sets a new standard of completeness in critical biography." Renaissance and Reformation

"It is a stunning scholarly achievement....It is hard to imagine that this century will see its equal for scholarship or that undiscovered documents exist that might substantially alter Mayer's interpretations. He deserves our admiration and gratitude for this prodigious accomplishment." The Historian

"[An] ambitious and superbly researched study of one of early modern Europe's most intriguing failures..." Sixteenth Century Journal

Book Description

This is the first biography in ninety years of Reginald Pole (1500SH1558), one of the most important international figures of the sixteenth century, and the first ever to give equal attention to all phases of his career. Pole's career is followed as protégé and then harshest critic of Henry VIII, as cardinal and papal diplomat, legate of Viterbo, a nearly successful candidate for pope, and finally as legate to England, archbishop of Canterbury, architect of the English Counter-Reformation, and victim of both pope Paul IV and of himself.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 488 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (December 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521371880
• ISBN-13: 978-0521371889
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,333,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Church Reformer Too "Playful" Not To Fail, October 25, 2010

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Paperback)

Readers with at least a moderate interest in Tudor England may have heard a bit about Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500 - 1558). He was the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and the Papal plenipotentiary empowered to receive England back into union with the papacy during the brief reign (1553 -1558) of Queen Mary Tudor.

If that is all you know about Reginald Tudor, you do not repeat NOT want to begin your first serious study of Reginald Pole, "last of the Plantagenets," with Professor Thomas F. Mayer's REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET. I recommend instead that you first tackle Anna Whitelock - MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN, followed by Eamon Duffy - FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. Even then you may find Mayer's book far beyond Whitelock and Duffy in barely inter-related minutiae, incoherent, not so much a biography as a collection of hyper-scholarly, anti-popular essays loosely draped around Reginald Pole.

Mayer's book of essays (I am loath to call it a biography) could conceivably be edited into something approaching popular utility and attractiveness if it simply began with a 2 - 6 page condensed, chronological overview of this great English churchman. And also if it did not bounce around from one year to another without being clear about which page is about which year.

Yet Professor Mayer does insist that REGINALD POLE is biography -- sui generis -- the last in a string of biographies extending over nearly half a millennium.

Shortly after Pole died, Roman Catholic biographers portrayed him as a Saint, Protestants as a heretic-burning zealot -- with the possible exception of John Foxe. Next came centuries of slumbering, unoriginal regurgitating of ancient images, with little digging for new facts. Even in England, Pole was not much noticed as recently as 1950.

Then from the late 1970s until 2000 (when PRINCE AND PROPHET was first issued), the Cardinal and his poetic, literary and theological circles have been much attended to by scholars in Italy -- primarily as a reformer of the Italian Catholic Church and as an early opponent of Machiavelli. And also as a man who came within one vote of being elected Pope. Scholars from various nations are even now feverishly scouring Italian archives, unearthing "a staggering amount of ancillary material" (Introduction, p. 2).

Like many Renaissance figures (Saint Sir Thomas More comes to mind), Reginald Pole lived both a real biological life and a literary and rhetorical life (i. e., one as written by himself and contemporaries who noticed him). The container (words) is not, of course, the contained (the life).

In REGINALD POLE Professor Mayer claims to give equal weight both to texts and to his subject's biological life beyond the texts. We will be shown Pole in terms of both what he did and in what he and others claimed that he did.

Mayer, in addition, lists numerous scholars whose ideas he borrows and speculatively applies. Thus, we see Pole as rhetorician and debater, who in early life was far more consistently "playful" and less serious than he became towards the end when accused of heresy and persecuted by arguably insane Pope Paul IV (Carafa). Pole is also said to have loved acting many parts, but to have had a poor sense of timing. With Henry VIII and Paul IV, for example, Reginald Pole remained too playful for too long.

A greater man than the Cardinal would have stood up more forcefully to crises. Pole, however, to avoid controversy and the power struggles that change history, withdrew to monasteries or into small circles of friends, including religious women, to pray and to write, write, write.

Reginald Pole was very effective in small face-to-face settings. He converted or saved the faith of important people, men and women, by slow, patient listening and counseling. These aristocratic people skills made him indispensable to Queen Mary Tudor in her briefly successful effort to return England to union with Rome. Curiously, Pole never seriously engaged Mary's anticipated successor, her Protestant half-sister Princess Elizabeth, in religious dialog. Elizabeth herself complained of this. In my opinion, this failure to use his people skills and kindly, moderate religious insights with Princess Elizabeth may have been Pole's greatest single mistake. Thomas Mayer alludes in passing to it. I hope that Mayer and other scholars will probe this non-intervention with Elizabeth more at length.

Mayer admits "... this is not the definitive life of Reginald Pole." It is closer to completeness than other biographies, however, simply because it incorporates a huge amount of newly dug out facts and applies recent scholarly conceptualizations and hypotheses. But Mayer eschews "teleological" biography.

That is, Mayer's ideal biography (following Paul Valery) is not created by writing as if he knew how Pole's life and career end. Rather it is never to write about events or decisions even one second later than what Pole and those who described him knew at any one given moment. (Introduction pp. 11f). Because Pole was both a master of words, and playful by nature, given to word games, this biography is nearly impossible to write, asserts Thomas Mayer. Indeed, it could only be written just the way Mayer writes it. For Pole, being both the man and the writer, necessitates the writing of just such a biography! (Conclusion, pp.440 ff).

There are many, many provocative scholarly nuggets scattered in disordered fashion throughout REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET. My recommendation to most readers is "don't go there!" Unless, of course, you want and are willing to then spend 20 years immersed in Reginald Pole, as the book's author had been when he strung together this confusing but far from valueless bunch of essays.

-OOO-