A Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders
In 1987, Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young  University, and Eddy Put, senior assistant at the Belgian National Archives,  struck gold. In a dusty Belgian archive, they found a detailed daybook kept by  Mathias Hovius, who served as archbishop of Mechelen (part of modern Belgium)  from 1596 to 1620. Harline and Put spent the next 13 years turning that daybook  intoA Bishop's Tale: Mathias Hovius Among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century  Flanders, an extraordinary work of historical biography.It would be difficult to overstate the pleasures of this book. Its historical  method is unusually accessible and sophisticated. ("In seeking to understand a  world long past, we found it highly illuminating to begin with a single human  being rather than a large abstraction such as 'society.'") Its style is  straightforward and novelistic, with a wealth of detail that humanizes its  exotic subjects. (For instance, the archbishop had "no protruding hairs on his  upper lip, lest while celebrating Mass he obstruct the blood of Christ.") Even  individual sentences often display a stunning, wide-angled perspective on  individual events. (An explosion "sent stones rocketing up to two miles away,  flattened houses, damaged churches, killed 300 people, wounded 150, and  decapitated fish in the river.") And its characters--monks, nuns, millers,  peasants, saints, who incidentally illustrate major themes of the Reformation-- are vital and ribald and doomed and striving. Harline and Put say they chose to  write about the Reformation because of "its massive rupturing of a seemingly  eternal premise of Christianity: that it was one." In an afterword, Harline and  Put explain that "Never before had there been such widespread teaching,  preaching, and fighting over souls, or such excellent preservation on paper of  these efforts. Rich documents are often the fruit of zeal." The authors' own  zeal to show readers the world of this bishop has created a very rich book about  Reformation Christianity.--Michael Joseph Gross