4

[Fortsetzung von S. 3]

Seripando, Reginald Pole, Gian Pietro Carafa, Giovanni Morone, and Gasparo Contarini. He dominated the important, but ultimately unsuccessful, reform commission set up by Pope Julius III in 1550. He was a classical scholar, a mathematician, a translater, and a manuscript collector. On April 9, 1555, after a short conclave, hes colleagues in the College of Cardinals elected him pope, Marcellus II, but he died three weeks after the election. [En 2] Cervini was a multi-faceted, complex man anda study of his live provides important insights into the equally complex and multi-faceted world of the Tridentine reform, as well as into the way he and that reform have been assessed by historians over the years.

Cervini's high reputation during his life endured after his death in a tradition that rapidly became hagiographical. [En 3] Antonio Cicarelli and Onofrio Panvinio, the sixteenth-century editor and continuator of Platina's semi-official History of the Popes, praised Cervini as a reform-minded man with a "grave and industrious nature." Panvinio particularly commended his desire to  see more diligent pastors among the clergy and to purge the papal curia of "obscene and infamous persons. [En 4] […]