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(More customer reviews)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.
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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.
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