Thomas F. Mayer
REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 2007. 488 pages. ISBN-10: 0521038693 (1) biblio.com Would you recommend this book to other readers? * * Probably not. review: I am not in a position to evaluate how indispensable REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET is to specialist scholars. But for general readers with some knowledge of English, especially Tudor, history, this packed 468-page book leaves much to be desired. Reginald Pole (1500 - 1558) is a towering figure in Tudor history, Roman Catholic and Counter-Reformation history and in papal politics in Italy. He deserves to better known. But PRINCE AND PROPHET seems to assume that anyone who opens the book will already have read a dozen or more specialist treatments of Pole. And that is highly unlikely, in my opinion. If better edited, REGINALD POLE by Professor Thomas F. Mayer, would be far more accessible to general readers. Needed are -- (1) very early in in the text, a
concise 5 - 10 page biographic overview of Pole, the last Royal
Plantagenet, a man with a better hereditary right to be king than Tudor
founder Henry VII;
-- (2) some indication on virtually every page what year is being treated (I was often guessing); -- (3) colored rather than the numerous black and white photographs of buildings, portraits, medals, etc.; -- (4) at least three maps of key 16th Century places: England, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. Even non-scholars can, after what should have been editorially avoidable effort, find speculative nuggets worth pondering. These include -- (1) Cardinal Pole missed opportunities
for greatness that a he-man would have surely seized - to be a prop of
Henry VIII's regime, to become Pope during an election he was winning,
and more;
-- (2) Pole may not have been an active homosexual, but his tendencies to avoid conflict, to react rather than take charge, to retire from public pressures into small intimate groups and other related quirks might be explained as a matter of sexual inclination; -- (3) Pole was the first contemporary seriously to analyze and attack the ideas of Machiavelli; -- (4) during only 30 months on the ground (1556 - 1558) the Cardinal received Queen Mary Tudor's England back into union with the papacy. Some scholars think he could have done more. To this day he remains the last Roman Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, in whose cathedral he lies buried. -- (5) Reginald Pole was by all accounts a saintly man of prayer. But he was also a princely elitist and his mystical, verging on Protestantism, personal version of Catholicism was too peculiarly his own to become a teachable model. Be forewarned: REGINALD POLE is a very demanding read. Fortunately, from the time Pole leaves Italy for England, the narrative and speculations become easier to follow. But before 1553 or thereabouts, detail is mind-numbing and it is often unclear what year is being presented. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/review.php?work=37553156 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 10/24/2010 name of review: Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500 - 1558) - Last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury rating: * * * (average) review: Any secular reader intent to understand the English Tudor Dynasty will encounter Cardinal Reginald Pole. Any religious reader curious about England's oscillating between obedience to the Pope and national independence will find Reginald Pole close to the center of history's ever turning axle.Professor Thomas F. Mayer's year 2000 book, REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET is a biography, in my opinion a largely dreadful one. Mayer himself admits, "this is
not the definitive life of Reginald Pole, it may come closer than its
predecessors..." (Introduction, p. 11).
Mayer's POLE is unnecessarily difficult. It could be easily improved if, early on, its text provided a five to ten page overview of this last Plantagenet Prince's life from birth to death. But this would be, in Mayer's words, to write "teleological" history. With Paul Valery, Thomas Mayer's ideal biography is to write as if you don't know what the very next second will bring to the hero's life. There is, in consequence of this ideological biographing, little of unity or coherence in Mayer's POLE. It is even often hard to be sure, without much turning the pages back, what year is being written about. The most charitable thing I can say about this book is that it is not meant for the general reader. The author, who has spent thousands of hours immersed in his subject's life and works, is busily digging through archives, discovering new letters in Italy, Flanders and England and rushing them and his speculations into print. I think he leaves to other more popular writers the task of cleaning up his creative mess. Do not therefore tackle Mayer before you have read a better writer who generously showcases some of Mayer's striking insights. One historian who comes to mind is Eamon Duffy. Read his 2009 FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. First grasp Reginald Pole, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a man with a better royal genealogy than Henry Tudor, founder of a dynasty. See Pole and Queen Mary working tirelessly together to restore England to a Christendom united by Rome. Study Mary's burnings and creation of Protestant martyrs. Then and only then turn to Thomas Mayer. It will not be an easy read. But there are nuggets scattered hither and yon within a very messy Ali Baba's cave. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/Reviews/d/Thomas_A_Mayer_ REGINALD_POLE_PRINCE_AND_PROPHET-1654892. html?cid=74&rid=191861#rid_191861 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 10/24/2010 title of review: A deliberately incoherent biography? rating: * * review: Posted 10/24/2010: In recent months I have read two better than average studies of the Catholic restoration in England under Queen Mary Tudor. Both books I identify on this URL as personal favorites. They are Anna Whitelock's MARY TUDOR and Eamon Duffy's FIRES OF FAITH. Indeed, certain nuggets mentioned by Duffy caused me to buy the 2007 digital reprint of Thomas F. Mayer's year 2000 REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET. I did not suspect what a deliberately difficult text I would find "on first looking into Mayer's POLE" -- to borrow a phrase from John Keats. I consider Mayer's POLE a perfectly dreadful biography. And its dreadfulness (at least for the normally educated reader curious about Queen's Mary's Roman Catholic Restoration) is deliberate and explicit. In his Introduction, Professor Mayer's tells us that he will not write "as if" he knew Pole's life from beginning (in 1500) to end (in 1558). Mayer accepts in large measure that both history and biography are fiction. And ... "the
particular kind of fiction I prefer is not the teleological variety
that makes for definitive work. Instead I aspire to meet the challenge
thrown down by Paul Valery: ' ... a biography ... (attempting) at each
instant of it to know as little of the following moment as the hero of
the work knew himself at the corresponding instant of his career'"
(p. 11f).
Consistent with this methodological program, Thomas Mayer does not deign to provide even a two - five page chronological overview of the fascinating life of the great Englishman who was the last Plantagenet prince, a co-convenor of the Council of Trent, a Papal plenipotentiary for bringing Tudor England back to union with Rome and the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. Mayer is also at no pains, often page after page, to make it clear which year's events he is describing. Ideally, Mayer should limit himself to digging out as many contemporary documents as he can giving Cardinal Pole's views of what he thinks he is doing and similar views of people interacting with Pole. There should be minimal commentary and no speculation. It should be all raw intelligence, freshly gathered. The author would then rely on writers like Whitefield and Duffy to tidy up his Ali Baba's cave of strewn about information. For better or for worse, however, tireless archive searcher and digger up of previously ignored lore, Thomas Mayer does comment. He does speculate. And some of this can provoke discussions among readers patient enough to read REGINALD POLE to its end. Thus, Pole was unusually passive for such a high-born prince. Whenever the pressures of public life hemmed him in, he retired, if at all possible, to life among a small circle of close friends, or to a monastery. In this he resembled the 19th Century English Cardinal John Henry Newman and not Newman's take charge ecclesiastical rival, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning. One way to explain this passivity, this dislike of confrontation is Mayer's speculation that Pole was a latent homosexual (though, as Mayer stresses, the term did not exist in the 16th Century). This trait would also explain why, when the cardinals were ready to acclaim Pole Pope, he would not let them. Professor Mayer showcases his strengths as a shrewd observer and unearther of facts about Reginald Pole that other scholars were either too lazy or too ideological or both to search for. But he is an incoherent biographer for normal readers. -OOO- recommended reading: -- Eamon Duffy - FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR -- Anna Whitelock - MARY TUDOR: PRINCESS, BASTARD, QUEEN http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/ review.aspx?reviewid=1468721 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (4) amazon.com 10/25/2010 title of review: A Church Reformer Too "Playful" Not To Fail rating: * * * review: 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. -OOO- tags: thomas f mayer, cardinal reginald pole, queen mary tudor, catholic restoration in england http://www.amazon.com/Reginald-Pole-Thomas-F-Mayer/ dp/0521038693/ref=sr_1_1s=books&ie=UTF8&qid =1287147389&sr=1-1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 10/25/2010 Review Title: Cardinal Reginald Pole "Biography" - Too Difficult for Me REGINALD POLE: PRINCE AND PROPHET is a deliberately, needlessly difficult book. It claims to be biography. In my opinion, it is, however, a string of very long essays, loosely tossed in the direction of the life and writings of the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. I miss a 2 - 6 page overview of the subject's "biological" life from birth to death. I read page after page often without being able to figure out what year is being described. Book's author, Professor Thomas F. Mayer, wrote PRINCE AND PROPHET after twenty years immersion in and much monographic writing and research about "the last Plantagenet," Reginald Pole (1500 - 1558). In both his Introduction and in his Conclusion, Mayer defends his book as biography sui generis. This is biography as Paul Valerie would have biography, never straying into "teleology," i e. acting as if you knew how your subject's biological life turned out. You never portray him, in 1536 or 1554 or any other year, month and day as if he or any of his contemporaries who described him had a clue about "what is coming next." To me, such "biographizing" means limiting an author to rooting around in Italian and other archives for as much unrelated detail as he can unearth and then throwing it helter skelter in the direction of Cardinal Pole. Ideally, that is: produce raw intelligence, with no spin, no interpretation, no selection, no hypothesizing. Needless to say, neither Paul Valery nor Thomas Mayer writes ideal, non-teleological biography, though Mayer professes to do so, and indeed to have created a more nearly "definitive" biography than any predecessor of the preceding 450 years, of Pole, a man who missed being elected Pope by one vote. Professor Mayer blames his subject for "necessitating" the peculiar biographic form Mayer chooses and no other (i.e., inter alia strung together, often incoherent, highly selective aspects of one man's real biological life). Why necessitating? -- Because Reginald Pole, great grandson
of a King, spent so much time in Italy in youth and middle age.
-- Because Reginald Pole wrote and wrote and wrote - endlessly - and you have to give equal time both to the biological life and to the writings (much still unavailable in English) of Pole and his contemporary observers. -- Because Reginald Pole was a consummate rhetorician who was "playful" and loved to wear many masks (personae) depending on whether he was writing comedy, tragi-comedy or tragedy. -- Because Reginald Pole seemed a pro-Protestant Catholic to the Roman Inquisition, while also being a serious experience-rooted theologian and insightful mystic and physician of souls. A "normal" "teleological" biography, Professor Mayer implies, simply could not do justice to such a Renaissance, Counter-Reformation man, to Queen Mary Tudor's closest advisor. To a man about whom England's Catholic Queen's Protestant half-sister Princess Elizabeth complained that the Cardinal paid her no attention. (This failure by such a "people person," so effective a communicator in small circles even to approach Princess Elizabeth strikes me as Pole's greatest single mistake, if his goal was to keep England Catholic.) Eamon Duffy's book FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR proves that you can write extensively about Cardinal Pole without risking incoherence. Duffy himself draws on Mayer. Indeed, the reason I read Mayer is because Duffy had flagged a couple of Mayer's thought-provoking slants on Pole. For most readers of this review my recommendation is: don't read PRINCE AND PROPHET unless you have an unquenchable, not-to-be-denied interest in Reginald Pole, especially in his years in Italy, in his refusal to be acclaimed Pope, his chameleonlike but attractive theology and in details of his work in England including contributions to the architecture of Lambeth Palace, home of the archbishops of Canterbury. Far too much work is required of you by Professor Mayer to unearth too few nuggets, unless you are a life-long professional scholar of the Tudor era. Here are some items that remain with me from PRINCE AND PROPHET: -- Reginald Pole was only ordained a priest just before, in his mid-50s, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. (Curiously, this is not probed by Professor Mayer, for all its unusualness). -- Pole had a better genealogical claim to be King of England than did Henry VII, founder of the Tudor Dynasty. -- Although Pole was an official co-convenor of the Council of Trent (1545 - 1563), his theological spirit was freer than the emergent Council statutes that created the Catholic Counter-Reformation. On the other hand, Pole's renewal of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and innovations in seminaries for clergy in England caught on at Trent and throughout Europe and the entire Roman Catholic world. Pole was a man of peace, non-combative. To have put his stamp on history forever, Pole would have had to be much more aggressively "manly," according to Mayer. Instead, when faced by crises, Reginald Pole, whenever he could, fled to monasteries to pray or back into small circles of friends to meditate and write. Mayer speculates that Pole was a latent or non-practicing homosexual. This would, Mayer argues, explain his detachment and his passivity -- both being out of character with his high princely birth and the needs of England, Europe and the Church. Contrast Pole with his youthful patron Henry VIII in this respect. Bottom line: to whom would I recommend PRINCE AND PROPHET? I am no Reginald Pole scholar. I just might call the book to the attention of a mighty historian of England like Frank M. Turner with a warning that it is internally weak on coherence. But for the ordinary well read "lay" reader, I cannot recommend this book. You can google on the internet and find as much as you probably want or need about the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. I do not say avoid PRINCE AND PROPHET because it is hard reading, but because it is ill conceived and incoherently presented. I have never, for instance, read an easy book by Professor Turner. But I happily turn from one hard Turner book to the next, e. g. to the recent edition of John Henry Newman's APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA. By contrast, I do not plan to read another word on any subject by Thomas F. Mayer. I have, I admit, found two prima facie attractive books in Mayer's PRINCE AND PROPHET that I have sent off for. But read more words by Professor Mayer on any subject? Thank you, no! -OOO- Pros: Important sources and trends in global Reginald Pole scholarship. Speculations on subject's passivity in crises. Cons: Incoherent. Not comprehensive biography, but a string of long essays. Assumes too much advance knowledge. The Bottom Line: Have you digested scholarly books on Cardinal Pole? No? Then avoid incoherent PRINCE AND PROPHET. For discussion: why didn't Pole cultivate Princess Elizabeth? Might latent homosexuality explain passivity during crises? Overall Product Rating: Average Recommended: No! http://www.epinions.com/review/Reginald_Pole_Prince _and_Prophet_epi/content_528977858180 =---=-=-=-=-=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/mayer_pole.html =-=-=-=--=-=--==-=-= file: mayer_pole |