1864
Reviews of Books
are essentially competent summaries of other historians' work. Her most expansive and authoritative chapters deal with Italy, and given the genesis of this
work in her Ebrei in Europa: Dalla peste nera
all'emancipazione secolo (1992), this emphasis is understandable. Viewing a history of European Jewry over five centuries through the lens of Italy
perhaps made more sense when addressing an Italian
readership. In its English version, the Italianate focus
distorts the larger picture. The book is handsomely
produced and elegantly translated (by Andrea Grover)
and contains a useful bibliography. But it claims too
much in allegedly providing a meaningful picture of
European Jewry as a whole, and in offering new
insights based on original research.
DAVID B. RUDERMAN
University of Pennsylvania
OLE PETER GRELL, ANDREW CUNNINGHAM, and JON
ARRIZABALAGA, editors. Health Care and POOr Relief in
Counter-Reformation Europe. New York: Routledge.
1999. Pp. ix, 309.
The twelve essays and editors' introduction under
review are the product of a tightly focused conference.
Bach contributor undertook a survey of ways that
church, state, and municipalities in Italy, Iberia,
France, and Catholic Germany saw their obligations
for health care and poor relief during the sixteenth
through eighteenth centuries. Each contributor supplied substantial archival evidence and addressed, at
varying lengths, how Tridentine reforms made a difference in welfare services for the indigent. Conceived
as a project within the social history of medicine, the
contributors—too many to list here—all have considerable expertise in medical history of this pexiod. Yet
only about half of the essayists struggle to connect
ideas and practices of poor relief to the medical ideas,
innovations, and practitioners that one would find in
standard medical history. A few note that church
censorship of books and ideas, while having no direct
target in the realm of medicine, distanced the intellectual elite of southern Europe from the Cartesian,
mechanistic "conversation" transforming medical science in the north.
Most of the contributors seem to assume that the
arena of Catholic social services and health care for
the poorest Christians instead offered few opportunities for elite medical practitioners to earn money or to
conduct any medical research of interest to them.
Medicine, traditionally understood, was simply not yet
the objective of poor relief. A number of large cities
had begun consolidation of medieval hospitals into one
or two great institutions long before the Council of
Trent opened in 1543. In the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, consolidation and centralization of
hospital and welfare services was motivated by growing
numbers of mendicants and refugees, by Catholic
reform unfolding parallel to the Protestant Reformation, by intensified fear of the poor as disease carriers
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
and fuel for epidemics, and by the plans of strong
monarchs and dukes to impose fiscal, managerial
control over pious bequests and properties. With the
possible exception of the new "French" disease, epidemie typhus fever, and recurrent plagues, most of the
secular and religious reformers before Trent had no
direct interest in medicine. Neither do the authors
here make other connections between this pre-Vesalius period and Catholic welfare reform, other than to
note that some great hospitals designed wards where
medical services were important.
After Trent, the objectives of Counter Reformationists are well known: public morality, "Christianization"
of ill-taught masses, protection of female chastity, and
the use of hospitals to distribute above all else food,
doctrinal instruction, and spiritual care. This collection
of essays efficiently summarizes the emergence and
popularity of numerous service and healing orders
over the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
some of which had explicit missions among the sick.
Capuchin and Camillian monks were at their social
zenith from the 1570s to the 1650s, if selfless dedication to the plague-stricken can be seen as a "zenith."
Theatines maintained their thankless ministrations to
the pox-stricken, Antonines to those suffering from
ergotism or "fire." Followers of Saint John of God
(Brothers of Charity) were especially aggressive in
collecting alms and building hospices for the poor, and
they took a broad enough definition of their medical
mission to become renowned as lithotomists in some
parts of France. The Portuguese Mercedarians exported such models of Christian healing throughout
the world, while the Castilians may have used their
larger world as a pious laboratory to experiment with
models of Christian care that politically or economically could not be implemented easily at home. Finally,
the singular efforts of Saint Vincent de Paul in seventeenth-century France opened the way for women in
medicalized nursing, arguing that thorough "Christianization" of nonaristocratic women led a group used to
hard work and care-giving to the spiritual benefits of
sacrifice to the poor.
Beneath the surface of such particulars—far more
abundant in the volume than can be summarized
here—lies the weight of suggestion that the Counter
Reformation coincided with an almost two-century
interval of relentless economie depression. The introduction, as is typical in such efforts, synthesizes the
contributions for readers who will not pore over the
contents. But it is impossible to estimate, even with the
hints and references some contributors provide, the
extent to which Catholic Europe faced greater burdens
of abject urban and rural poverty. Certainly the authors all emphasize that there were few absolute
differences between the ways Protestants and Catholies "gazed" upon, and crafted governmental or religious or theological responses to, beggars. Certainly
the essays collectively show that all charity was local,
despite generalizations one would like to make about
themes, strategies, and perspectives. Only in a few
DECEMBER 2001
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
instances, and those quite late in the time period
covered, is there a programatic aspect to Catholic
welfare provision over a wider geographical region.
But assessment of the structural economie framework
of Catholic Europe generally—the dimension of the
problem for which Christian charity had to be invented
or reinvented—is not at issue in the volume. There will
always be poor, pathetically struggling, we must assume, and so we focus on who will serve and who will
be served.
This reviewer's hope for some editorial "epilogue,"
or some consensus by the contributors in the conference aftermath is not yet in vogue among historians. A
collection this strong, on an important topic, appears
as string of jeweled beads: each essay will carry its
individual value if separated. But unlike contemporary
collaborations in the sciences and social sciences,
assessing the nature of the string—the fundamental,
overarching, working conclusions that can be drawn
from state-of-the-art research—has not tempted most
of the participants. Some of the essays here include
delicious details of medical-career building in the great
charitable hospitals, of the uses of the poor as much as
teaching material for medical students as opportunities for the salvation of souls. The very localness of
most welfare decision making over long periods of
time; the production of pharmaceuticals by enterprising caregivers, too penurious to scrabble with the
marketplace; the protection of physicians' and surgeons' sources of income by limiting medical care in
religious institutions; the rarely questioned need to
exclude with moral justifications some ill or indigent
from the meager benefits of available care: all of these
features of early modern Christian medicine have
comfortably survived. Traditional medical history, as
contemporary medicine, chooses not to see how fundamentally these approaches and attitudes have lain
alongside the development of medicine as a science.
Social history of medicine must attempt the connection.
ANN G. CARMICHAEL
Indiana University,
Bloomington
BERNHARD ZIMMERMANN. Europe und die griechische
Trag5die: Vom kultischen Spiel zum Theater der Gegenwart. (EuroOische Geschichte.) Frankfurt a.M.:
Fischer Taschenbuch. 2000. Pp. 220. DM 23.90.
Appearing in a series on European history, this book's
primary value is to certify drama as evidenee for
history and the central place in Athenian history of
dramatic and dithyrambic poetry. Bernhard Zimmermann offers the general reader an overview of Greek
tragedy and its continuing life in European culture.
The well-arranged selected bibliography indicates
many of the special studies of this vast subject. The
book is fitted out with a moderately helpful glossary,
indexes, a chronological table, and a sketchy, unnecessary genealogical chart. The instructive style someAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1865
times results in formulations more plausible than the
evidence allows (such as the chapter on the origins of
drama). It often skips from one topic to another, with
some inconsistencies: that reproductions were not
permitted until 386 B.C. (p. 10) is modified later (pp.
40, 67, and 72) by reference to fifth-century reproductions of Aeschylus. But this relaxed organization is not
unpleasant and shows how wide the treatment of
ancient drama must be: Zimmermann's description of
what happened on each day of the City Dionysia deals
as well with the history of each activity and related
phenomena. So, for example, the description of the
first day includes an overview of the development and
importance of the dithyramb as a confirmation of the
"new democratie consciousness" of the people (p. 29).
But if dithyramb is the "real genre of the Attic people"
(p. 30), one would like further explanation as to why
poets of aristocratie mind like Pindar were employed
to compose for it.
The title's implied promise of reviewing the influence of Greek tragedy throughout the European tradition is met best in separate essays on the reception of
each of the three main tragedians and separate chapters on: the choral tradition, tragic theory, the meaning
of tragikos and tragic, and the (particularly) lineteenth-century German interest in the concepts dithyrambic and Dionysiac. But the treatment of later
European versions of Greek tragedy is very selective,
and the short list of modern titles (pp. 206-207) must
reflect the last century's especially popular interest in
the myths of Oedipus and Electra.
The author rightly points to the influence of Greek
tragedy as word, spectacle, and music on Richard
Wagner's concept of Greek tragedy as a Gesamtkunstwerk (see pp. 150 and 185). But in this intellectual
history Wagner's importance should not completely
overshadow the broadening scope of classical studies
already in progress well before his reading of Greek
tragedy in the Gustav Droysen translation in 1847 or
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1859). Philosophers like
G. W. F. Hegel and scholars like Karl Ottfried Mfiller
helped create the modern Altertumswissenschaft that is
basically represented by Zimmermann's work. This is
the comprehensive area-studies approach to antiquity
that American classicists tend to mean by "philology."
Additions and disagreements aside, this book presents
a stimulating exposition of a cornerstone of our cultural history.
Z. PHILIP AMBROSE
University of Vermont
JOHN TORPEY. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. (Cambridge Studies in
Law and History.) New York: Cambridge University
Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 211. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95.
With the world awash in refugees, immigrants, "guest
workers," travelers, and the occasional terrorist, an
interpretive study of identity papers and passports is
certainly timely—the more so since even as the admin-
DECEMBER 2001