Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance

n I667 Pierre Mussard, a Protestant minister and savant from Geneva, published a pamphlet entitled "Conformites des ceremonies modernes avec les anciennes. Oh l'on prouve par des Autorites incontestables, que les Cdrdmonies de l'Eglise Romaine sont empruntees des Payens."' One chapter of this pamphlet, dealing with the Roman Catholic Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, is an effort to prove that its essential features were derived from pagan models. As Bayle at the time was teaching that many pagan errors could be traced in Christian ceremonies,2 the subject was topical and the book aroused a certain interest; it was reprinted several times in Holland and translated into German. Mussard approached his subject as a militant Protestant launching his attack on the same lines on which the fathers of the Reformation had launched it.3 But he nevertheless took over arguments from Italian and French humanists, who had dealt with the question without theological parti pris. In I556 Du Choul, the historian of Roman religion, had ended a treatise with the remarkable statement: "Et si nous regardons curieusement, nous congnoistrons que plusieurs institutions de nostre religion ont est6 prinses et translat6es des cerimonies Aegyptienes, et des Gentils... que noz prebstres vsurpent en noz mysteres, et referent a vn seul Dieu IESUS CHRIST...",4 and still earlier, Italian humanists, Alessandro Alessandri5 and Polidoro Virgilio,6 in studying the liturgical rites of the ancients, had observed sine ira et studio that the bloodless sacrifice was first introduced by Numa Pompilius, that the Egyptians had appeased their gods with a host of bread, and "ite missa est" was of pagan origin. The humanists were the first to deal as historians with the problem Mussard discussed in the Conformitis. It is with this problem that we shall deal in the following essay. i. Pagan Sacrifice in Mediceval Art and Drama