TRENT, COUNCIL OF

TRENT, COUNCIL OF . Also known as the nineteenth general council of the Roman Catholic Church, this council opened on December 13, 1545, and closed on December 4, 1563, after twenty-five formal sessions. The road to Trent, long and tortuous, passed through Constance, Basel, and Pisa. The cry for a sweeping reform of the church from top to bottom—"reformatio capitis et membrorum"—had been raised one hundred years before Luther posted his theses. It continued to ring out through the fifteenth century, accompanied more often than not by the insistence that serious reform could be achieved only within the framework of a general council. Basic to this coupling of reform and council was the widespread conviction that the papacy was incapable of or unwilling to put right the tangle of abuses that threatened to smother the ecclesiastical life of Christendom. Indeed, it was argued by many that the popes' chronic misuse of their dispensing powers, particularly with regard to the appointment to benefices, was the root cause of those abuses.

The demand for a council became the standard rhetoric not only of churchmen but also of princes and statesmen. Conciliar preeminence assumed doctrinal status in many of the best universities in Europe and found its way into a thousand pamphlets, treatises, and broadsides. Preachers thundered the message from their pulpits, and echoes were heard in busy chancelleries no less than in silent Carthusian charterhouses. No pope could be elected until he had assured the cardinals in conclave that he would summon a council within a year or two of his coronation.

Such were the shock waves loosed at the Council of Constance (1414–1418). The questions addressed there were at once constitutional, procedural, and moral. With whom or what lies ultimate authority within the church? The monarchical concept of the papal primacy had taken its classical form in the days of Gregory VII (d. 1085), had pressed its brief even further under the great lawyer popes of the thirteenth century (e.g., Innocent III, d. 1216, and Clement IV, d. 1268) and, scarcely checked by the extravagances of Boniface VIII (d. 1303), had reached a kind of practical hegemony, at least in fiscal affairs, at Avignon (1305–1376). But the protracted scandal of the Western Schism (1378–1417), when two and then three rival "popes" competed for the allegiance of Christendom, brought the notion of papal monarchy into severe disrepute, just as the solution of the crisis by a general council convened at Constance under the aegis of the German emperor enhanced the idea of conciliar superiority. The council's deposition of the three squabbling claimants, its election of a successor (Martin V, 1417–1431), and its solemn decree, Sacrosancta, all combined to stake out a constitutional position: a general council, representative of the emperor and other Christian princes, the learned elite of the universities, the experts in canon law, and the college of bishops, acted for the whole church, of which the pope was a functionary, albeit an exalted functionary.

The decree Frequens, which called for such a council to be held every ten years, concerned itself with the procedural problem. Frequens presumed the doctrine of Sacrosancta. Since final and decisive authority belonged to the council, the pope's position was that of chief executive or prime minister responsible to the council, which therefore had to meet frequently. The conciliar movement of the fifteenth century based itself on these grounds. Due partly to the temper of the time, that movement did not succeed. The secular counterparts of the aristocratic ecclesiastical assemblage the conciliarists had in mind were in retreat everywhere in Europe and, in most places, on the eve of dissolution. Ambitious dynasts were in the process of bringing the powers to tax, to maintain military establishments, and to appoint government personnel under their own bureaucratic control, and thus reducing and even eliminating the prerogatives of the great medieval parliaments. It was unlikely that the church, the first great Western institution to adopt this centralizing model, would have reversed direction in favor of a polity that was demonstrably anachronistic.

But there were other, more proximate causes for the collapse of the movement, not least the tendency of the conciliarists to quarrel among themselves. The popes, for their part, ignored the doctrine of Sacrosancta and evaded the provisions of Frequens. A council was indeed convoked at Basel in 1431, but it soon fell out with the pope, who withdrew from it and convened a more tame assembly under his own presidency at Florence. The rump council continued to meet at Basel until 1449, when it broke up into bitterly contending factions. After that, conciliar rhetoric sounded increasingly hollow, especially when engaged in by secular rulers who routinely invoked the threat of a council as a device to influence papal policy in Italy. So the conciliar movement died a lingering death, its last gasp coming at Pisa in 1511, when the king of France, in league with a dissident minority of the college of cardinals, summoned a council whose declared purpose was to strip the pope, the king's bitterest political enemy, of his office. This conciliabulum did not survive the French military reverses of the following year.

The effective end of the movement, however, did not put a quietus to the theory. The teaching of Sacrosancta continued to flourish in university circles, notably at the Sorbonne. Nor did those who rejected Sacrosancta necessarily repudiate Frequens as well. The two decrees had doubtlessly been wedded in the minds of the fathers of Constance, but as the century wore on a distinction between them was often drawn by those who, while not prepared to admit the constitutional superiority of the council, nevertheless believed that only a council could bring about meaningful reform.

The moral issue raised at Constance went unresolved for a hundred years. There had occurred a kind of spontaneous reform of the members in some places—the Devotio Moderna in the Netherlands, a florescence of mysticism in England and Germany, an evangelical revival in northern Italy, a dedication among the educated classes everywhere to the scholarly endeavors of Christian humanism. But these were hardly more than specks upon a dark sea of clerical illiteracy, popular superstition, jobbery, and pastoral neglect. The belief was almost universal that such abuses perdured because the Curia Romana, the pope's own administration, permitted and even encouraged them. Curial fees, taxes, and charges proliferated, most of them designed to allow what traditional law and common sense declared to be perilous to the life of the church. The members would never be properly reformed, it was said, unless the head were reformed too.

The Renaissance popes, whose lifestyles and political ambitions were hardly calculated to inspire confidence, stubbornly refused to put their houses in order or to permit any other organ of the church to do so. They tried to keep to the high ground of constitutional theory. The papal primacy, they argued, was a datum of divine revelation that they were pledged to defend as they had received it. They also declined to have any outside agency oversee and most likely interfere with the workings of their own court, the central bureaucracy of the church. Reform of the Curia, they proclaimed, was the business solely of the supreme pontiff.

Whatever the theoretical value of this argument, the trouble with it was that the supreme pontiffs, themselves products of the curial system, were clearly not prepared to go beyond platitudes and gestures in correcting the colossal financial chicanery that corrupted the various papal departments and that reached a stunning climax in the election and pontificate of Alexander VI (r. 1492–1503). Since Constance, the conviction that everything was for sale in Rome—offices, judgments, indulgences, dispensations from the law—had grown, not lessened, and the poison of simony seeped down through the whole body of the church. Julius II did indeed summon a council in 1512, largely as a counter to the French-sponsored gathering at Pisa, but the meanderings of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517) produced reform decrees that were no better than scraps of paper and that served merely to confirm the cynical mistrust of the papacy's moral resolution.

The popes' highest card in this game of stalemate was the reluctance of even fervent conciliarists—aside from a handful of academics—to challenge the doctrine of the Petrine office. But the year that saw the conclusion of the futile Fifth Lateran Council was also the year of the ninety-five theses. By 1520, Luther declared himself ready to jettison the papacy if that institution obstructed the full flowering of the gospel as he understood it. And Luther soon proved he was no effete intellectual but the leader of a potentially vast popular movement. Over the next decade the character of the debate about a council was drastically altered. As early as 1523, the German estates, gathered in the Diet of Nuremberg, called for "a free Christian council in German lands." Here was conciliarism with a new twist. Now, besides the old clamor for a council to reform ecclesiastical abuses, there came the demand from a growing constituency in northern Europe for a reform of dogma as well.

The Council of Paul III

The pope who had to contend with this new situation, Clement VII (r. 1523–1534), avoided it as best he could, and though he paid lip service to the conciliar idea, he was as obstructive as his predecessors had been. His successor was cut from a different cloth. Alessandro Farnese, who upon his election assumed the name Paul III (r. 1534–1549), had long been a champion within the Curia of a reform council, and he had carefully distanced himself from Clement VII's duplicitous policy in this regard. Not that Farnese had the credentials of a reformer. His youthful career—Alexander VI had made him a cardinal when he was twenty-six—had revealed many of the more seamy features of the Renaissance papal court. In his middle years he had undergone something of a religious conversion, which, though it did not eradicate all the bad habits of his past, led him at least to a greater earnestness and gravity of purpose. Never a moral zealot himself, he signaled his good intentions by promoting men of genuine probity and even holiness to high ranks and, most of all, by immediately moving to fulfill his pledge to summon a general council.

From the beginning of Paul III's initiative, everything seemed to work at cross-purposes. For a council to succeed, both great Catholic sovereigns—the German emperor and the king of France—had to support it, but they were bitterly at odds with each other. The emperor, Charles V, pressed for a council of reconciliation to bring peace to Germany, which meant a council to correct abuses, to satisfy the gravamina of the German estates against the Curia, with as little attention as possible paid to divisive doctrinal issues. Francis I wanted no council at all, because religious unrest in Germany, which discomfited his Habsburg rival, was much to his liking. Had Paul III had his way, he would have preferred a council over which he could keep careful watch, a kind of "Sixth Lateran," which would emphasize doctrine and, with a preponderance of bishops from the Papal States in attendance, protect the prerogatives of the Curia. But he knew he had no chance for that, and so he proposed what appeared to be the next best scenario. Mantua was a petty Italian city-state whose duke was vassal to the emperor; on June 2, 1536, the pope, ignoring the unanimous advice of his cardinals, summoned a general council to convene at Mantua the following May and ordered all the bishops, abbots, and other prelates of the whole world to appear there.

Immediately obstacles sprang up all around him. The duke of Mantua demanded a large papal army to garrison the town. The Protestants promptly declined to attend because of the presence of this hostile force, and then, when security arrangements were altered to meet their objections, they refused anyway. The king of France also refused to participate or to allow any French prelates to do so. The emperor, pointing out how Francis I had connived with the Lutheran princes and even with the Turks, urged Paul III to join him in an assault upon the French and thus guarantee a successful council. The war duly broke out in 1536, but without the pope, who shrank from a step that might have provoked Francis into following the schismatic example of Henry VIII and that at the same time might have contributed to eliminating the only check upon Habsburg power, which he feared as much as the French king did. Instead, the pope postponed the Mantuan council twice, then translated it to Vicenza, postponed it again, and finally, in 1539, suspended it altogether.

The failure was more than a disappointment. It tended to sustain the view—not only among Protestants—that this pope was no more serious about reform than his predecessors had been. Paul III did not help his cause much by the simultaneous campaign he was carrying on—in the best Renaissance style of his first mentor, Alexander VI—to make a ruling dynasty of his children and grandchildren. The Farnese did indeed become dukes of Parma, but only at the cost of diminishing further the pope's limited fund of goodwill. Even so, whatever Paul III's flaws of character, lack of persistence was not one of them. The intricate diplomacy involved in the conciliar enterprise never really ceased, even when the distrustful emperor turned to another tack and urged a conference of leading theologians, Protestant and Catholic, who could discuss all the religious discontents and find solutions to them. The pope cooperated in this venture, but the distinguished participants in the Colloquy of Ratisbon, which occupied most of the summer of 1541, failed to reach a meeting of minds. Any hope of religious reunion was fast slipping away.

The pope responded by returning to his conciliar project. With the assent of the somewhat chastened emperor, he formally announced the opening of a general council for November 1, 1542. The site this time was Trent, a small italianized town northwest of Venice that was nevertheless an imperial free city and thus juridically "in German lands." But the earlier pattern of delay, postponement, and obstructiveness by Francis I and outright rejection by the Protestants, quarrels between pope and emperor, and intermittent warfare between France and the empire was bitterly repeated. Not until December 13, 1545, did Paul III's council finally begin in the Cathedral of Saint Vigilius in Trent. The process had consumed eleven years and had produced only thirty-four voting participants. It was no wonder the mood was somber throughout the Mass of the Holy Ghost and the formal reading of the bull of convocation, which reminded the fathers that their solemn task was to heal the confessional split, to reform those abuses that sullied Christ's body, and to promote amity among Christian princes.

Those princes, though their influence over the council was enormous, did not participate directly in its decision making, nor did anyone else outside the higher clergy. In its procedure Trent was more akin to the papal councils of the high Middle Ages than to Constance or Basel. Franchise belonged only to the "fathers" of the council, that is, to the bishops present—not their proctors—and to the generals of the mendicant orders. The presiding officers were the legates appointed by the pope. They were empowered to set the agenda, although each bishop was free to request inclusion of any proposal he pleased. This arrangement met with few serious difficulties once the basic compromise between the pope's and the emperor's positions was accepted: that matters of dogma and matters of reform would be treated simultaneously.

The work schedule followed a consistent pattern. It began with a "particular congregation," at which theologians and canonists would discuss the draft of a particular decree. The fathers formed the audience for these technical expositions. Then, meeting alone in a "general congregation," they debated the matter themselves until they reached agreement upon a final text. A "session" was a public meeting at which that text was read out, formally voted upon, and promulgated at the council's decree. Since it was thought to have a liturgical as well as a juridical significance, a session was always convened in the cathedral or some other church. Between 1545 and 1563 the Council of Trent held twenty-five sessions, of which seventeen were substantive in the sense that they were occasions for the proclamation of doctrinal definitions and reform legislation, while the rest were ceremonial affairs.

The first particular congregation met on February 20, 1546, to examine Luther's assertion of sola scriptura. On April 8, at the fourth session, the council declared that apostolic traditions, "which have come from the mouth of Christ or by the direction of the Holy Spirit and have been passed down to our own times," deserve to be accepted by believers "with as much reverence [pari pietatis ac reverentia]" as scripture itself. The fifth session, on June 17, renewed earlier conciliar legislation setting up structures for the theological training of the parochial clergy and placed upon bishops and pastors a stern obligation to preach to their flocks every Sunday and holy day. On the dogmatic side this session issued six "canons," terse condemnatory statements on the Pelagian as well as the Lutheran view of original sin.

Then began the most protracted debate of the council, devoted to the central Lutheran doctrine of justification. The first draft of a decree on this controversial subject was submitted to the fathers on July 28 and promptly rejected. For the next seven months the arguments raged through forty-four particular and sixty-one general congregations, until finally an acceptable text was hammered out and promulgated at the sixth session, on January 13, 1547. There was nearly unanimous assent to the sixteen chapters of the decree and the thirty-three canons, which repudiated Luther's view of justification by faith alone. But there was no such unanimity when the next great issue of reform was introduced. The fathers and their theologians wrangled through the succeeding months over the requirement that bishops reside in their dioceses. When the proposed decree was presented the first time, only twenty-eight fathers out of a total grown by early 1547 to sixty indicated their agreement by voting placet. The divisions over the matter were so deep that it had to be set aside for later consideration. The seventh session, on March 3, 1547, therefore contented itself with asserting a bishop's right to supervise parishes in his diocese administered by members of religious orders. The dogmatic decrees of the same session defined the nature of the sacraments, fixed their number at seven, and asserted their effective spiritual power (ex opere operato). The doctrine of baptism and confirmation was also treated in detail.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this intellectual labor, various discontents revealed themselves. Trent was a small town with limited accommodations. Its location made it a difficult place to supply with provisions, and its climate was harsher than the southerners in attendance were accustomed to. Many of the fathers complained of the discomfort in which they were forced to live. During the summer of 1546, fighting between the emperor and the Smalcald League surged close enough to the city that dissolution of the council was seriously contemplated. This danger passed away, only to be replaced by a typhus epidemic that broke out in the vicinity early in 1547 and that caused the council to translate its deliberations to Bologna (eighth session, March 11, 1547). The emperor was furious at what he considered the pope's maneuver to bring the council under his direct control by removing it to a city in the Papal States. Fourteen imperialist bishops remained in Trent, but the majority of the fathers went dutifully off to Bologna, where they labored through intense debate in both particular and general congregations on the rest of the sacraments, the sacrificial character of the Mass, purgatory, veneration of the saints, and monastic vows—all doctrinal issues raised by the Protestant reformers. But Paul III allowed no formal sessions or decrees, lest he push the angry emperor too far. The significance of the Bologna phase of the council, until its suspension on February 16, 1548, proved to be the use to which its work was put when the council assembled again at Trent three years later.

The Council of Julius III

Giovanni Maria del Monte, who had been senior legate during the first phase of the council, was elected pope in February 1550 and took the name Julius III. Immediately he came under pressure from the emperor to reconvene the council and, specifically, to get on with the business of reform. The new pope faced many of the same political problems as his predecessor, and it was in the teeth of strong resistance from the German Protestant princes and the new king of France, Henry II, that the council reopened at Trent on May 1, 1551. The fifty or so fathers did little serious work before the end of the summer, but thanks to the deliberations at Bologna they were ready at the thirteenth session, on October 11, to issue a decree on the Eucharist that in eight expository chapters and eleven canons reasserted the traditional dogma of the real presence as well as the mechanism of transubstantiation. Six weeks later, at the fourteenth session, the sacraments of penance and extreme unction received doctrinal definition. The landmark character of these dogmatic decisions, however, was not matched by the reform legislation passed in the thirteenth and fourteenth sessions. Directives about rights and duties of bishops with regard to their clergy, and regulations governing procedures in ecclesiastical courts, did not, as the council's critics were quick to point out, strike at the roots of the accumulated abuses.

At the beginning of 1552 a faint flicker of hope for reunion flared up and then quickly died out. On January 15, ambassadors and theologians from several Protestant states, having come to Trent under a safe-conduct, appeared at the council's fifteenth session. But their brief presence only served to demonstrate that the confessional divisions could no longer be healed or that at any rate a council managed by the pope and already committed to traditio no less than to scriptura as a font of revelation could never be an instrument of reconciliation.

So the fathers returned wearily to their own debates, now treating of the sacrament of orders and the sacrifice of the Mass. The congregations dragged on inconclusively into the spring, as the emperor went to war yet again with the German princes allied with France. This time he was badly defeated, and when he fled to nearby Innsbruck the fathers at Trent decided it was too risky to remain there. They used the sixteenth session, April 28, 1552, to adjourn the council sine die. Julius III, at heart an indolent and self-indulgent man, made no effort through the rest of his pontificate to revive it. His successor, Paul IV (1555–1559), was fiercely determined to effect reform, but he had no patience for conciliar ways and preferred instead to impose doctrinal and moral purity by liberal use of the inquisition, of which he had once been head. This policy was an utter failure, as indeed was Paul IV's whole reign, and when the cardinals entered the conclave of 1559 the scandal of an unfinished council cast a long shadow over it.

The Council of Pius IV

The conclave of 1559 lasted more than three months, and the pope who emerged from it, Pius IV (Giovanni Angelo de' Medici), was committed to bringing the Council of Trent to a satisfactory conclusion. The obstacles he encountered in persuading the Catholic powers to take up the conciliar enterprise once again were different but hardly less daunting than those Paul III and Julius III had had to face. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (1559) had indeed removed for the time being the threat of war that had so plagued the earlier stages of the council. But the Catholic monarchs—three of them, now that Charles V had departed the scene and had divided the Habsburg territories between his brother, Ferdinand I, and his son, Philip II of Spain—were deeply at odds over the crucial problem of whether the council Pius IV formally convoked (November 29, 1560) was to be a continuation of the former one or an entirely new undertaking. France, now troubled as Germany had been for a generation by a growing and aggressive Protestant faction, joined the imperialists in demanding a new council unencumbered by any decisions arrived at earlier. The king of Spain conversely insisted that the work begun before be allowed to run its course. The pope agreed with this view, though he dared not say so publicly. Instead he adopted a policy of studied ambiguity, confident that once an assembly had been lured back to its original site the problem would solve itself. After months of the most convoluted diplomacy, this tactic succeeded. On January 18, 1562, some 113 fathers gathered at Trent—their number would ultimately swell to 277—and implicitly accepted continuation by deciding to resume deliberations at the point at which they had been suspended ten years before.

By March the council had returned to the discussion of episcopal residence and found itself mired once again in argument. Everyone agreed that bishops should reside in their dioceses and that their widespread failure to do so was a fundamental cause of corruption in the church. But was the requirement one of divine law or ecclesiastical law? This seemingly abstract question had vast implications, because if residence were an obligation jure divino, it could mean that bishops exercised their office independently of the pope. A vote on April 20, revealed that the fathers were divided almost evenly on the subject. Tempers ran so high that the legates managed to calm the situation only by postponing discussion of the question until a later date. Dogmatic deliberations meanwhile continued, and at the twenty-first session (July 16, 1562) the council defined the sacrificial character of the Mass and the whole presence of Christ in each of the eucharistic species of bread and wine. The disciplinary decision as to whether the laity should be allowed to share the chalice—something taken seriously by the emperor and by Germans generally—was referred to the pope for implementation after the council.

Next on the agenda came discussion of the sacrament of orders, which involved once more the thorny issue of episcopal residence. By autumn the council had reached an impasse. No formulation, however ingenious, could budge the determination of either side. The winter of 1563 arrived, and then the spring, and still no resolution was in sight. The conciliar machinery ground to a halt, and after ten months of wrangling, the breakup of the council appeared imminent. Then, in early March, the senior legate suddenly died, and Pius IV replaced him with Giovanni Cardinal Morone. This proved to be the decisive intervention.

Morone, the ablest papal diplomat of the century, recognized that behind the arguments advanced by the proponents of jus divinum lurked the conviction that the papacy intended no real reform. He moved swiftly to defuse this radical mistrust, especially in the minds of the emperor and the king of Spain, by guaranteeing that a sweeping reform schema, blessed in advance by the pope, would be proposed to the council in short order. Employing a variety of formal and informal commissions, and playing skillfully upon the vanity of the heretofore unpredictable French delegation, Morone put the council back to work again. When the emperor expressed misgivings, Morone went off to Innsbruck to reassure him; when the pope hesitated to support his program, Morone threatened to resign. At the twenty-third session, on July 15, 1563, the council approved his first package of reform legislation. Perhaps its most important provision was the directive to establish a system of seminaries to provide intellectual and moral training for the parochial clergy. As for the conciliar crisis at hand, Morone evaded the insoluble problem by ignoring it. "It is a divine precept that the pastor know his flock," the decree began, but, though strictly obliging bishops to reside, it did not try to define the basis of that obligation. Moreover, cardinals were explicitly included in the requirement, and thus was struck down one of the worst and most resented of the abuses, the accumulation of benefices by officers of the Curia.

The logjam broken, there followed a hectic summer and autumn of congregations dealing with a flood of reform ideas. The whole clerical estate was refashioned during these months. Morone moved easily through all the factions, the pope's man indeed but the council's man too, always urging accommodation, compromise, the practical attainment of the goal of restoring spiritual primacy to the workings of the church. Special emphasis was placed upon eliminating the chaos in ecclesiastical administration which had opened the door to so many abuses. Morone spared little time for theoretical discussion; the question of indulgences, for example, which had occasioned the Lutheran reformation, was settled not in a dogmatic decree but in a reform decree. This also was the case with the veneration of the saints and relics. The council indeed defined the sacramentality and the indissolubility of matrimony, but it was even more intent on suppression of clandestine marriages. Statistically the achievement was prodigious: three times as much reform legislation was passed by the council during Morone's brief legateship than in all the sessions before him combined.

By the twenty-fourth session, on November 11, 1563, the end was finally in sight. The last session, at which all the conciliar decrees since 1545 were to be formally promulgated, was scheduled for December 9. However, news from Rome that Pius IV was severely ill led Morone to move the date forward. Therefore, the twenty-fifth session was held on December 3 and 4, 1563, when each of the 229 fathers gave his placet to all the work the council had done over its eighteen years of life. A Te Deum was sung, and tearful fathers embraced one another, in many cases embracing those with whom they had often violently disagreed.

See Also

Boniface VIII; Gregory VII; Innocent III; Luther, Martin; Papacy; Reformation.

Bibliography

The official collection of Tridentine decrees is Canones et decreta, Concilii Tridentini (Rome, 1564), many times reprinted, now to be found most conveniently in the volume edited by Giuseppe Alberigo and others, Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta (Bologna, 1972). Relevant documents can be found in Concilium Tridentinum: Diariorum, actorum, epistularum, tractatuum; Nova collectio, 13 vols. (Freiburg, 1901–1967), an immense deposit and an indispensable tool of research.

The two classic studies are Paolo Sarpi's L'istoria del Concilio Tridentino (1619), 3 vols., edited by Giovanni Gambarin (Bari, 1935); and Sforza Pallavicino's Storia del Concilio de Trento (1656–1657), 3 vols., edited by Mario Scotti (Turin, 1968). The polemical camps trace themselves back to either Pallavicino, a defender of the council, or to Sarpi, an attacker of it.

The definitive history of the council has now been written: Hubert Jedin's Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 4 vols. in 5 (Freiburg, 1949–1975), the first two volumes of which have been translated into English by Ernest Graf as A History of the Council of Trent (London, 1957–1960). Jedin also published many monographs on Trent, including Girolamo Seripando, 2 vols. (Würzburg, 1937), translated into English (but without the full scholarly apparatus) as Papal Legate at the Council of Trent, Cardinal Seripando (Saint Louis, 1947); and Krisis und Abschluss des Trienter Konzils, 1562–63 (Freiburg, 1964), badly translated as Crisis and Closure of the Council of Trent: A Retrospective View from the Second Vatican Council (London, 1967).

A useful survey of ecclesiastical history during the time the council was sitting is Leon Cristiani's L'église à l'époque du Concile de Trente, "Histoire de l'église," no. 17 (Paris, 1948). Special studies of note include Il Concilio di Trento e la Riforma Tridentina, 2 vols. (Rome, 1965), a collection of distinguished essays by a panel of international scholars; Dermot Fenlon's Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy (Cambridge, U.K., 1972), on Italian humanism and its import upon reform; James A. O'Donohoe's Tridentine Seminary Legislation: Its Sources and Its Formation (Louvain, 1957); and Wolfgang P. Fischer's Frankreich und die Wiedereröffnung des Konzils von Trient, 1559–1562 (Münster, 1973), on the resumption of the council after the death of Paul IV. On the diplomacy during those crucial few years, H. Outram Evennett's The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Council of Trent (Cambridge, U.K., 1930) is still useful, as is Gustave Constant's La légation du Cardinal Morone prés l'empereur et le concile de Trente, avril–décembre, 1563 (Paris, 1922), a collection of documents and commentary. The best analysis of the council of Pius IV is Robert Trisco's "Reforming the Roman Curia: Emperor Ferdinand I and the Council of Trent," in Reform and Authority in the Medieval and Reformation Church, edited by Guy F. Lytle (Washington, D.C., 1981).

Marvin R. O'Connell (1987)