Modem Europe
of conclusions and comparisons. The work as a
whole lacks cohesion. The study would also have
profited had Bainton not tried to cover so many
figures, but concentrated instead on persons who
were clearly "of the Reformation," and analyzed
them more fully. The desire to be culturally and
geographically inclusive can only be welcomed
and encouraged. It naturally presents problems for
the scholar trained in Central and Western Euro-
pean history.
One conclusion to be drawn from the variety of
figures presented is clear: women of all social
strata in the sixteenth century actively partici-
pated in vital aspects of the Reformation in many
and different countries, and were as heroic (for
example, during the Inquisition) and independ-
ent-minded as the men of the era-although they
did not write or teach academic theology and were
not members of the clergy. This seems to be the
unstated but well documented thesis of the book.
It gives modern historians a needed perspective:
the history of religious movements is not necessar-
ily formed just by professionals, and therefore not
just by men.
MARIANKA FOUSEK
Miami University,
Ohio
JOHN H. LANGBEIN. Torture and the Law of Proof:
Europe and England in the Ancien Regime. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. 1977- Pp. x, 229·
$16.5 0 .
This is a short, tightly written book that dis-
passionately deals with a distasteful subject. There
can be few less pleasant human activities than
torture, especially when it is inflicted by the state
as part of its judicial procedures, or to protect
national security.
On the Continent torture evolved from the
medieval ordeal. It became a necessary part of the
judicial procedures for serious crimes, when Ro-
man law demanded a high level of proof to con-
vict-usually two witnesses or a confession. Be-
cause such were often not available, suspects
against whom there was a considerable amount of
evidence, amounting to "a half proof," could be
tortured, not to make them plead guilty, but rather
to confirm or deny their guilt by revealing details
about the crime that only the perpetrator could
know.
According to the widely accepted view torture
3.S abolished in the eighteenth century in Europe
largely thanks to the influence of enlightened
writers such as Voltaire or Cesare Beccaria. John
H. Langbein disagrees with this "fairy tale," con-
vincingly showing that torture ended when it was
7°9
no longer needed. Since in the Middle Ages death
was the only means of punishing serious criminals,
a high degree of proof was necessary to prevent
mistakes-posthumous pardons and apologies
being of little consolation. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries as the state developed less
final punishments, such as the galleys, the work-
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house, or transportation, the level of proof re-
quired decreased, and so did the need for judicial
torture.
The justification for torture in England was very
different from that on the Continent. Torture
never became a regular part of the English judicial
procedure since a jury could convict a man on less
evidence than a Roman law magistrate. In Eng-
land only the Privy Councilor king could autho-
rize torture, and of the eighty-one cases from 1540
to 1640, three-quarters dealt with state crimes,
such as the Martin Marprelate investigation, the
Guy Fawkes conspiracy, or the Catholic mission-
aries Henry Garnet and Edmund Campion. As
Blackstone noted, in England the rack was "an
engine of state not of law." In this regard the
English use of torture to discover facts and accom-
plices was surprisingly modern, being similar to
that (for example) of Chile, South Africa, or even
Israel or Northern Ireland, where the state be-
lieved it was in mortal danger from external and
internal subversion. Langbein's quantitative anal-
ysis of torture cases is even more surprising: dur-
ing the supposedly enlightened reign of Queen
Elizabeth there were 63 cases of torture, as com-
pared to the three under that reputed tyrant
Charles I.
In discussing torture Langbein takes a narrowly
legal approach which enables him to explain the
origins and decline of torture on the Continent far
more convincingly than in England. To define tor-
ture in legal terms is perhaps too limited, as the
coercion of prisoners can run the whole gamut
from bullying to brainwashing.
Like all good monographs, Torture andthe Law of
Proof not only does what it sets out to do well but
points to new directions. It is a concise scholarly
work that compares two legal systems with grace-
ful ease and has provocative implications extend-
ing far beyond the sleazy world of rack, strap-
pardo, and thumb screw.
CHARLES CARLTON
North Carolina State University
GIULIANO GLiOZZI. Adamo e il nuouo mondo: La nascita
dell' antropologia come ideologia coloniale, dalle genealo-
gie bibliche alle teone raeriali (1500-1700). (Centro di
studi del pensiero filosofico del cinquecento e del
seicento in relazione ai problemi della scienza.
First Series, number 7.) Florence: La Nuova Italia
Editrice. 1977- Pp. ix, 635. L. 10,000.
710 Reviews ofBooks
Giuliano Gliozzi's volume is probably the longest
Italian contribution to the history of early Ameri-
can studies after Antonello Gerbi's La disputa del
Nuooo Mondo: Storia di una polemica, 1750-1900
(1955)-available in a revised and enlarged Eng-
lish version entitled The Dispute of the New World:
The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 ('973)-and La
natura della Indie Nove, Da Cristoforo Colombo a Con-
zalo Fernandez de Oviedo ('975). Its specific aim is to
offer a comprehensive and exhaustive picture of
the complex and variable attitudes taken by Euro-
peans toward the natives of America from the Ren-
aissance to the middle of the eighteenth century.
The book is divided into three sections, dealing
respectively with the interpretations of the newly
discovered continent founded on the Old Testa-
ment ("nuovo Mondo e Vecchio Testamento"), the dis-
putes about the age of the New World (" Antichita e
nooita del Nuooo Mondo "), and the impact of the new
scientific mentality on these problems ("Nuova sci-
enza e Nuouo Mondo"). This general frame is articu-
lated in various chapters and subchapters, confer-
ring an organic arrangement to the immense but
largely well-known body of material discussed by
the author.
The guiding principles are laid down in the in-
troduction, when Gliozzi mercilessly attacks the
scholars who have previously treated the same
topic, sparing only Sergio Landucci's I filosofi e i
seloaggi, 1580-1780 ([972) and Eugenio Garin's
masterly essay "Alia scoperta del dioerso: i selvaggi
americani e i saggi cinesi" (now included in Rinas-
cite e rioolueioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII
secolo [[975]). It is precisely this pars destruens that
appears to be the raison d'etre of the present book,
based on a rigorously Marxist approach. Indeed,
while Gerbi's The Dispute of the New World was
explicitly a commentary on a particular aspect of
Hegel's thought, this volume, in its conclusion,
appears to be a kind of gigantic footnote to Marx's
interpretation of the colonial system as set forth in
Das Kapital. Unfortunately, the controversy about
the origin of the American natives had theological,
astrological, moral, and literary implications that
work against Marx's rigidly economic pattern of
historical development. The result of this con-
tradiction is quite paradoxical: Gliozzi has written
a brilliant synthesis of previous studies (from Gil-
bert Chinard's pioneering works to Don Cameron
Allen's and Gerbi's basic contributions), a schol-
arly book which fascinates its readers like a novel
but leaves them skeptical about the interpretation
of the material he proposes.
On closer scrutiny, Gliozzi's claim to follow in
Garin's footsteps is rather questionable, since it
seems difficult to reconcile the Marxist philosophy
of history with Garin's insistence on the relevance
of the Hermetic tradition (cf. particularly Lo zodi-
aco della vita: La polemica sull'astrologia dal Trecento al
Cinquecento [1976]). Indeed, Garin's habit of ex-
plaining historical events on the basis of Renooatio
(a religious idea) and related astrological specula-
tions is more in tune with the "cultural" approach
rejected by the author than with the pan-economic
explanation advocated by Marx. Should we con-
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clude from this fact that good scholarship cannot
identify itself with any given credo? I am afraid
this is the most important truth we can learn from
this ambitious book, in which the author has sys-
tematically omitted consideration of all those "cul-
tural" circumstances that contradict his material-
istic assumptions. In view of this, we should not be
surprised by the fact that Gliozzi does not even
mention Leonardo Olschki's excellent book, Storia
letteraria delle scoperte geografiche: Studi e ricerche
(1937), which showed that the European travelers
were unable to see the reality of America, because
they constantly tended to superimpose literary
schemes on their direct experience (e.g., the night-
ingale that Columbus wrongly attributed to the
New World after the pattern of the locus amoenus, a
widespread topes in Western literature).
GUSTAVO COSTA
University of California,
Berkeley
H. JAMES JENSEN. The Muses' Concord: Literature, Mu-
sic, and the Visual Arts in theBaroque Age. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press. 1976. Pp. xv, 259.
$[2·95·
H. James Jensen has written a small book of large
scope. He writes, he says, to increase the reader's
appreciation and pleasure in the several arts of the
"baroque" through greater understanding of the
historical ideas behind these works. He avoids the
contentious problem of defining the "baroque"
and settles instead upon a flexible period running
from the sixteenth through the eighteenth cen-
turies, choosing examples more or less at random
to illustrate his arguments. Unfortunately, as he
correctly says, "this book is not a tightly organized
argument in support of a clearly defined thesis." It
is rather a mixed assortment of quotations and
allusions drawn from a wide variety of sources that
must, I fear, leave the reader somewhat at a loss.
Perhaps the author lost his own way. He was
inspired to his task, he says, by the desire to under-
stand a Dryden poem by discovering the original
ideas behind it. It seems that these ideas lay essen-
tially in two areas, "faculty psychology and the
rhetorical process." Apart from the fact that nei-
ther set of ideas is peculiar to the baroque and
cannot serve therefore to define it .except in the
most general way, Jensen seems to have forgotten