Clustered around the episcopal center of Clermont, in that least accessible French province of Auvergne, a series of romanesque churches built between the end of the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries harbor sculptured capitals which repeatedly treat the themes of avarice and usury. Although the virtues and vices provided a popular and graphic subject for sculptors throughout France during this period, only in Auvergne do we discover such a specific emphasis on the sins of avarice and usury. In some cases the subject is treated to the exclusion of all others, and every example has been placed in a predominant and highly visible location within the church.

In late 1433, after two years of intrigue and negotiations, Pope Eugenius IV agreed to acknowledge the legitimate existence of the Council of Basel. The recently crowned Emperor Sigismund had gone to Basel, and numberous clerics, including many cardinals, had abandoned the curia for the council. An obstreperous duke of Milan threatened the papal states “in the name of the holy synod,” and in May 1434 the populace of Rome rebelled, foreing the pope to flee down the Tiber.

Since 1984, the year of his death, a veritable cottage industry of criticism has appeared to decipher, decode, and demolish Michel Foucault. Despite the polemics, ambiguities, and, at times, the impenetrability of his prose, Foucault and his critics do agree that one of the central concerns of his work, particularly his early work, was an analysis of power and how such institutions as police, prisons, and churches reflect the power structures of society.

In the years since the civil rights and black power movements cooperative black religious organizations have become a familiar feature of the religious landscape in America. Among these interdenominational bodies, in addition to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, may be noted the now defunct National Conference of Black Churchmen, the Black Theology Project, Partners in Ecumenism, and the Congress of National Black Churches. Little noted, however, is a precursor of these organizations which functioned for two decades prior to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The idea for this massive work (3 vols. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988], xv + 492, 414, and 692 pp.) originated in a course on Renaissance humanism at Barnard College and Columbia University in the spring semester of 1979, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and taught by the editor of the work, Professor Albert Rabil, Jr., with Professor Maristella Lorch. They agreed that recent scholarship concerned with Renaissance humanism made a new “synthesis” desirable, but that the sheer quantity of this new work put such a project beyond the competence of any individual scholar. The three volumes under review consist, therefore, of forty-one essays, mostly written specifically for them, by almost the same number of specialists. These essays were then organized into three volumes entitled, respectively, Humanism in Italy, humanism beyond Italy, and Humanism and the Disciplines.