Robert Brentano (1926–2002)

I had to read this for a graduate history seminar. The information he provides discussing the differences in church organization between the areas that would one day become Italy and England was very useful and interesting. My only complaint is his writing style. Specifically, he is one of those historians that thinks he has to write "beautiful" literature. As a result, in my opinion, half of the book is fluff with unneeded detail and the over use of metaphor. Still, many readers enjoy this style and the book is considered a classic. Very good overall despite these factors.… (meer)

Brentano’s study springs from the impulse to comprehend the Church of the thirteenth century by comparing its institutions (and lack thereof) in England and Italy; and to do so not by dressing up this history in the neat and simple garments of what he understood to be the fashion of historical writing in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, but by allowing the tensions of the history to come through into his writing of it. He gives a portrait of contrasts, triggered, he admits, by a first chapter in which the connections between England and Italy—in the form of the papal curia and the business conducted there through proctors—already belie any notions of a unified, international church.

The Church in England: a simple structure of two metropolitans and the reasonable number of suffragans beneath them, the dioceses neatly divided into archdeaconries—a consistent, reliable ecclesiastical hierarchy. A church of bishops engaged primarily in the practical and organized pastoral care of souls, a mission defining and defined by the great bishop-scholar-saints Langton and Grosseteste. A church of uniformity and diligence in ecclesiastical governance and a strong impulse to establish a tradition of record-keeping and registers. A church that models, especially in contrast to Italy, the reforms embodied by Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council.

The Church in Italy, by contrast: a myriad of metropolitcal and extraordinary sees, rooted in the distant past of the Church’s earliest days, some ruling over a handful or even a single suffragan diocese, others sprawling across the map in an awkward geopolitical puzzle. A church in which bishops seem hardly interested in pastoral work—and where the “seeming” of it all is, for the historian, the important point: a church in which the impulse to produce notarial instruments is guided by the momentary financial and political needs of the bishop or his chapter, and thus a church in which documentation is sporadic, nonuniform, even sui generis. The portraits of these bishops—when we can glimpse anything beyond their names—are fragmented and, perhaps, even illusory. A church, in contrast with England, of disorder, even chaos, where the saints abhor the prospect of ecclesiastical administration as the surest road to perdition.

Two principal factors inform Brentano's approach. The first is his training in and deep passion for archival research. The ground of his entire portrait of these Two Churches is diplomatic: the careful registers and rolls of the English bishops; and the ad hoc, fragmentary, yet fascinating and almost fantastical records of proctors and notaries, bishops and abbots, chancellors and chapters, scattered across the Italian peninsula in archives great and small. In his interpretive essay appended to the new edition, Brentano speaks with relish of his fondness for diplomatic; of his extraordinary impromptu work in the archives of the Archbishopric of Amalfi during a Fulbright-driven iter Italicum; of his preference to the last for the original documents themselves to their printed editions; of the window into the past the dusty boxes of parchment provide. And it is this impetus for archival work that seems to prompt, at its root, the entire contrast of the Two Churches he sketches. In the English dioceses, the Bishops and their officials keep detailed and continuous registers from early in the thirteenth century, from which Brentano can cull a meticulous portrait of their organized governance and pastoral work. His portrait of the Italian church, by contrast, is prompted by the disorderly fragmentation of its documents: prelates scattered across the landscape, their organization and governance of the church as spontaneous and momentary as their impromptu records.

The second aspect is his own method of responding to these records and the images he culls from them. Brentano’s image of these thirteenth-century churches is vividly personal, his portraits intimately lyrical. His fascination with the personalities of St. Francis and Grosseteste fuels his intellectual curiosity: these men, so extraordinary and complex, are the heroes of his thirteenth century. How did their churches respond to them? It is the personal detail and organizational pragmatism of the English bishops that he finds so appealing; it is the utter lack of this detail that he finds so frustrating in the remnants of the Italian church. Conversely, he is personally drawn by the enthusiasm of St. Francis—so much so that his desire to find that enthusiasm reflected in the men of the Italian church runs deep, perhaps even too deep, as in his strained reading of Federigo Visconti’s grand and practically imperial visitation, complete “with peacock feathers on” (p. 202), as somehow fundamentally prompted by Federigo’s personal experiences of Francis. It is the personal portrait that speaks most compellingly to Brentano, whether it is of the greedy proctors at the papal curia or the bewildered and disoriented English clerics sent to negotiate with them. The symbolism of the meeting in Abruzzi between the angelic Celestine V and Archbishop Winchelsey of Canterbury, the latter desperately trying to remain solvent while waiting amongst the wolves of the curia during the interregnum, is too potent for Brentano not to be dazzled by it. For all of the intricate, detailed, and finely competent archival work that went into, for example, Chapter 2—archival work in which Brentano seems to glory—it is in his psychological portraits of Matthew Paris and Salimbene that he seems to find the greatest reward for his hard work.

Personality drives and frustrates Brentano’s narrative: his personal connection to its landscape (writing of the Augustan Hermits while overlooking Santa Maria dell Popolo, or of the chickens now roosting in Santa Croce del Chienti) and to its people pulls his narrative along, breathless and sharp, critical and yet enthusiastic. His admiration for the ordered governance of the English Church and for the nearly anarchic enthusiasm of St. Francis both impels his work and complicates it. Two Churches is not only a portrait of the English and Italian churches of the thirteenth century; it is also a portrait of Robert Brentano, his love for Lincoln and Città di Castello, his admiration of Grosseteste and Francis, his frustration and yearning to understand these men in their time and in ours.… (meer)