Francisco de Osuna's “Norte de los estados” in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Dana Bultman, ed. Foundations. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019. xii + 346 pp. $79.

Abstract

Chronica. In the first section, the focus is on Bruno’s activities to establish the Carthusian order (40–73). The second section (73–95) deals with details of the history of the Carthusian order that can be connected to Bruno’s deeds and his afterlife, especially with the process of canonization and the question of whether Bruno may be venerated as a saint even if he was not canonized. Readers expecting Heinrich Arnoldi to have gathered information on how the order was organized and who was responsible for the development after Bruno’s death will be disappointed. In the footnotes, Galle offers valuable information on unusual terms, on Heinrich Arnoldi’s sources, and on historical contexts relevant for the Carthusian order. Broader contexts are only now and again explained. The fact that Heinrich Arnoldi assumes that Bruno had studied at a fully developed university with four faculties, for example, is passed over without comment. This may be misleading for younger readers who do not yet know that the institution Heinrich Arnoldi had in mind did not exist in the eleventh century. At the same time, this episode indicates that Heinrich Arnoldi was obviously more interested in situating Bruno in the intellectual and spiritual life of the fifteenth century than in reconstructing the historical contexts he lived in (Galle’s comments on page 58 concerning Bruno’s role in the bishopric of Reims reinforce this impression). Therefore, it would be helpful if this edition of Heinrich Arnoldi’s life of Bruno of Cologne would attract attention within research on the réécriture of saints’ lives and its relevance for the spiritual life of monastic convents.