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The Pier Luigi Farnese Scandal: An English Report

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

George B. Parks
George B. Parks*
Affiliation:
Queens College City University of New York
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Extract

Though a discredited scandal might best be forgotten, its reverberations may still have meaning. In 1537 England was cut off by the break with the Roman church from its Italian contacts outside of Venice; yet a scandal which was the talk of Rome and Florence in hat and following years not only made its speedy way to England but was soon recorded in print there.

Cosimo Gheri, Bishop of Fano, died in Fano of an apparent long standing malaria or other fever in September 1537. A young man of twenty-four, he owed his bishopric to his late uncle, his predecessor as bishop. He was praised for both learning and devotion and was well known from his recent student days at Padua to many of new eminence in the church—Contarini, Cortese, Sadoleto, Pole, Cervini. A laudatory account of him was written on January 1, 1538, for Venetian friends by his fellow-student Ludovico Bcccadelli, then in the famiglia of Cardinal Contarini in Rome, and his good works in the short year of his incumbency at Fano have been recorded by the local historian.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1962 , pp. 193 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1962

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References

1 Bartocetti, Vittorio “in Studia Picena II (1927), 153–208 Google Scholar, which includes the text of Beccadelli biography from MS.

2 Raffaello Massignan, ‘Pier Luigi Farnese e il Vescovo di Fano', in Atti e Memorie della R. Deputazione di Storia Palria per le Provincie delle Marchie, n.s., 11 (fasc. iii, 1905), 294-304; this letter is noted at page 254.

3 Ferrai, L. A., Studii Storici (Padova, 1892), p. 86 Google Scholar, giving the text of the letter from Archivio Mediceo.

4 P. Esquillus, Wonderful newes of the death of Paule the iii Last bishop of Rome ...Englyshed by W. B. Londoner. [1553]: STC 10532. I have conjectured that the translator was William Barker, just returned from study and travel in Italy (Papers Bibliographical Society of America, II [1957], 134-135). The original was the Epistola de morte Pauli III (1549).

5 E. Gordon Zecveld first analyzed Moryson's propagandist role in Foundations of Tudor Policy (1948), chs.vii.ix.

6 Liber xvi, ch. xvi.

7 The chronology is given in the Bartocetti article, which prints the Fano civic documents- The bishop's own letters, which are the best indication of his state of mind, are fussed by Massignan.

8 Segni, Bernardo, Istorie Fiorentine dall'anno MDXXVII al MDLV, ed. Gargani, G. (Firenze, 1857), p. 454.Google Scholar

9 Letters and Papers of Henry the Eighth, XI, no. 1131.

10 Ibid., XII ii, no. 1122: Nov. 24, 1537.

11 Ibid., XII ii, p. 396: the letter is torn, and the word “morto” is supplied.

12 Ibid., XIII ii, no. 598.

13 Ibid., XIII ii, no.693: verbatim in state papers, VIII, 80.

14 Letter and Papers, XIII ii, no. 639.

15 Ibid., XIII ii no. 847.

16 I have studied the dangers to Pole in an article in Catholic Historical Review, XLVI (1960), 299-317.