Rome Reborn
Spaeth, Robert L.
general election, insists on taking a glimpse beyond the jarring, fragmentary aesthet- faster pace, and a stronger story. Modera- of almost every issue that might conceiv- ics of most...
...The nar- redit for founding the cultivated a productive relationship with rator, who was born at the very second of Vatican Library belongs to the Library of Congress, the latter proindependence, literally becomes the voice two Renaissance popes, viding badly needed technical assistance of modern India: he has none of the calm Nicholas V (1447-55) and for cataloguing, classification, and the detachment that marks Seth's novel...
...Swerdlow, a University of Chi- though hardly all, succeeding popes...
...plates of Vatican Library items, breathin other words, to build bridges or to pre- Today the Vatican Library can only be taking in their scope of subject matter, all sent a "balanced" view...
...Pirro curia" beginning in the fifteenth century...
...How profoundly sad that the progress preserved in the Vatican Library was unjustly halted-though only tem- THE FUNDAMENTALISM PROJECT Edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby porarily-by the Galileo debacle of the early seventeenth century...
...covery...
...The Vatican Library et, gives a hint of what lies inside...
...he in- to the Library of Congress for a public exnarration represents a desperate effort to tended the library "for the common con- hibition...
...It owns almost 2 million of utmost historical importance, most of would appear to mock that possibility in books, 75,000 manuscripts-the oldest striking visual beauty...
...A particularly interesting engraving both precise erudition and attractive, read- (1578) by Etienne Duperac shows in fine able prose...
...In Whose Name...
...the world...
...Commonweal 21 May' 1993: 27...
...Family, and Education To order call 1-800-621-2736 ' In Illinois• Ricci, a man of numerous talents, "influ- Cloth $45.00 608 pages 312-568-1550 MCVisa accepted enced a whole generation of Jesuit missionaries," according to Goodman...
...papal founders as well as that of many, tion would probably command more N.M...
...1620 Cloth $45.00 688 pages Chicago, Illinois 60637 by his successor Guilio Aleni...
...Pope Sixtus treasures are simply stunning...
...Fmanuscripts of Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Pappus, Ptolemy, and others, we learn-and see-the roots of modern Waco...
...All the tion and fairness are necessary virtues in ably have a bearing on that event: religion, same, it's hard to get through A Suitable India's current crisis...
...and Indian Renaissance heyday...
...It would be cago historian of astronomy, draws to- Hankins, Harvard historian, comments in an exaggeration to claim that the Vatican gether the strands of a huge tapesty, the understatement: "The courtship between Library represents the Vatican at its best, "exact sciences of antiquity: mathematics, papal power and humanistic knowledge but the Vatican Library certainly shows astronomy, geography...
...Flemish polyphonic music...
...To some extent these failings are the result of Seth's desire to be fair, to offer a ROME REBORN from the second century A.D.-prints, balanced portrait of the nation that will re- The Vatican Library and Renaissance maps, engravings, coins, etc., etc...
...and it focuses on those aspects of century Polish missionary Michael Boym...
...A Suitable Bo r makes no effort to from a sixteenth-century codex of Francoshock its readers, or even to dazzle them...
...By the late fifteenth century, Swerdlow writes, "clearly a whole Fundamentalist movements-and those who act in their names new command of the mathematical sci- -are profoundly affecting the way we live...
...A FUNDAMENTALISMS brilliant cartographer, Ricci published THE UNIVERSITY OF AND THE STATE maps of Europe, Africa, and Asia, in- Remaking Polities, Economies, CHICAGO PRESS cluding his so-called inappamundi...
...And there is It aims instead at a vast, comprehensive a map of China drawn by the seventeenthunity...
...He might the way...
...The most fa- FUNDAMENTALISMS "Required reading for every mous of these was Matteo Ricci, an Italian student of modem world AND SOCIETY history...
...Here, amid was not at first a smooth one...
...will be believing...
...Even the drudgeries of life in a remote northern village are given their fullest possible expression...
...never quite a marriage-has had many adcombination of the highest standards of The Vatican Library's holdings pay ditional rough spots...
...Wilson Quarterly Jesuit who went to China in the 1580s and Reclaiming the Sciences, the never came back, dying in Peking in 1610...
...but they are not of law, business, changing cultural tradi- Bar without wishing for more action, a much value in a novel...
...ends, with the novel, in a terrifying vision added space, embellishments, organization, Rome Reborn presents 216 photographic of apocalypse...
...Its very form called fabulous...
...The authors, include chant, polyphony, Masses, and othall but one American scholars, display ers...
...is after different quarry...
...Sometimes it Sherr of Smith College focuses on the papal seems that every turn of a page will re- choir, "a distinct institution within the veal a yet more fascinating item...
...In "Paper Obelisks," Howard L. FUNDAMENTALISM "An invaluable work for all Goodman of Harvard University charts the seeking an understanding of the OBSERVED world's many fundamentalist incursions of Catholic missionaries, main- Cloth $40.00 896 pages ly Jesuit, into East Asia in the sixteenth movements...
...acquired the papal choir's archives in If this volume contained only the 1871...
...If A Suitable Bo v fails to achieve such Here is a page from a ninth-century vividness, that is probably because Seth parchment of Euclid's Elements in Greek...
...These intellectual and artistic make sense of those forces...
...Here is a richly illustrated page sions...
...The book makes no effort, and many more manuscripts...
...physical science...
...If Vatican policies writing, printing, and artistic illustrating, silent tribute to the humanism, with its deep had always exhibited the learning and hua combination that blends like the ingre- appreciation of ancient cultures, of its two manism of its library, its worldly reputadients of Italian cuisine...
...A former doctoral There, from the inside cover of a Latin student in economics who abandoned de- codex, is a fifthteenth-century portrait of mography for literature, Seth treats his the Duke of Urbino holding a book-percharacters with a gentle concern, and is haps by the Roman historian Livy-and unwilling to sacrifice them (or their future) conversing with the artist, Christoforo to blazing language or dramatic conclu- Landino...
...Anthony spect all the parties involved...
...But it also music in the Vatican from the fifteenth to contains eight informative, at times elegant, the nineteenth century...
...Midnight's Robert L. Spaeth the most advanced facilities in Europe for Children shuttles wildly back and forth in scholarly work...
...The scholars of The Fundamentalism Project help us understand the history, ences has been reached," accompanied by scope, sources, nature, and impact of fundamentalist movements in an "acceleration of progress in their re- major religious traditions around the world...
...In that sense Seth Vatican Library manuscripts cover the seems to have moved self-consciously spectrum from archaeology, Egyptology, 26: 21 Mar 1993 Commonweal mathematics, astronomy, geography, Among the most lavishly illustrated botany, and medicine to music, the Eastern manuscripts are the musical ones...
...That effort venience of the learned...
...the library afforded family life as its vehicle...
...Richard churches, and East Asia...
...life that hold society together rather than As arranged in this large volume, the those that tear it apart...
...Choice and seventeenth centuries...
...These essays make this coffee- detail a papal ceremony in the Sistine have added that this long courtshiptable book an exception in the genre-a Chapel...
...The World Trade Center...
...Pope like...
...He Sixtus IV (1471-84...
...we and Militance 5801 South Ellis Avenue see here Ricci's map as printed ca...
...In this essay the essays that put the manuscripts, maps, etc., types of music described and illustrated into their historical contexts...
...Rushdie leaves us, in the end, with seem a reviewer's main task is to urge readnothing more than a painfully vivid im- ers to look at the book itself since seeing pression...
...It is impossible to a country so torn by extremism and ha- mention more than a few here: it would tred...
...El tions...
...they comprise "manuscripts and exquisitely printed plates, it would make prints documenting the history of sacred the year's best coffee-table book...
...Ligorio's 1773 detailed drawing of ancient In the next century, the composer Palestrina Rome, which graces the book's dust jack- was briefly a member...
...Moderaof almost every issue that might conceiv- ics of most "postmodern" fiction...
...Earlier this year, the Vatican Library, is cursed, wounded, and finally castrated Nicholas had the idea of a public library in gratitude to its American benefactors, by the forces that were set in motion at in the Vatican and contributed some one sent a sample of its valuable manuscripts his birth, and the magical realism of his thousand Greek and Latin codices...
...time, presenting a feverish, supernatural Since the 1920s, the Vatican Library has vision of Indian life and society...
...But the farther Seth roams from his central, high-caste char- HOTBED OF SECULAR HUMANISM acters, the more his prose tends to sound like a museum-tour: dry, passionless, and analytical...
...And already "in its High dence India as its subject...
...He could not Culture Grafton, a Princeton University historian, be more different, in this respect, from Edited by Anthony Grafton says it "remains the richest collection of Salman Rushdie, whose 1980 novel Mid- Library of Congress and Yale University Western manuscripts and printed books in night's Children also takes postindepen- Press, $55, 323 pp...
...James admiration today than it does...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 10
