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‘Aristoteles philosophorum, ne Platone quidem iuxta M. Tullium excepto, citra controversiam omnium doctissimus’ — so Erasmus, in the preface to the 1531 Basle edition of Aristotle, informs his dedicatee John More — ‘dicere solet, liberalium disciplinarum radices quidem subamaras esse, fructus vero dulcissimos. Quod idem rectius, utpote poeta, significare videtur Homerus quum, depingens Moly, herbarum praestantissimam et adversus omne maleficiorum genus efficacissimam, ait eam radice nigra esse, sed flore lacteo candidoque’. The assertion that Homer said the same thing as the Philosopher rectius, utpote poeta, must have caused many a reader to cudgel his brains in vain since the first edition. This chapter argues that what Erasmus meant has been rendered unrecognizable by a misprinted letter: tectius, utpote poeta. Cf. Ratio verae theolog. LB v p. 85 F ‘quod alibi dictum est tectius, alibi dilucidius refertur' and Adag. 1701 (ASD II 4 p. 151. 12) ‘Eodem allusisse videtur [Plato], licet tectius, libro tertio [Legum]’.

This chapter argues that the Bible in the West ceased to function as catholic scripture in the period following the Reformation and that, as a result, biblical scholars like Louis Cappel and Brian Walton turned increasingly toward the Bible as a text to rehabilitate it. Schisms, religious wars, and the manifold effects of confessionalization created a fragmented religious environment that yielded modes of scholarship aimed at exploiting, reinforcing, or repairing this fragmentation. Yet these efforts all assumed an inert textual Bible that needed to be reactivated and reintegrated into specific cultural and religious programs. Beginning with figues like Erasmus, biblical scholarship of the early modern period operated on a Bible that was moving from ‘scripture’ to ‘text.’ The textualization of the Bible and the decline of its cultural and religious authority prepared the way for a new mode of academic criticism based on the unifying power of the state.

The Wittenberg Unrest of 1521–2 caused Melanchthon to emphasize civil freedom, although he still maintained the spiritual bondage of the will. This new emphasis occurred in tandem with the development of Luther's political theology of various dualities in reality. Meanwhile, Melanchthon strongly sided with Luther in his dispute with Erasmus over the freedom of the will.

An analysis of a controversy in Saxony over the 1523 canonization of the eleventh‐century bishop, Benno of Meissen, introduces the reader to the engagement of early German humanists in hagiographical projects, the interest in and critique of such humanist works by fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century contemporaries, and the causes of this literature's preterition and misapprehension by historians since the nineteenth century. The Introduction argues that the amount and qualities of the literature belie conventional generalizations, drawn from simplistic and inaccurate interpretations of Erasmus or Luther and his circle, about a negative humanist stance towards traditional Christian devotions like the cult of the saints. The Introduction instead proposes that the humanist engagement in the cult of the saints was coherent and outlines the strategic ways that these authors transformed writings about the saints into a literature for religious and cultural reforms that German humanists promoted through much else of their activity.

Philipp Melanchthon's understanding of the will's role in justification changed over time. This book traces the evolution of that change throughout the course of Melanchthon's theological career, 1519–60. It is proposed that the reason for Melanchthon's change was neither the persuasiveness of Erasmus, nor the influence of philosophical metaphysics, but rather the internal dynamics of his own theology when played out in a pastoral context.

This chapter presents the theological context in which Melanchthon operated. The soteriologies of nine major figures in the western Christian tradition are given, with an emphasis on their understandings of the will's role in justification. Included are Augustine, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Gabriel Biel, Johann von Staupitz, and Desiderius Erasmus.

Melanchthon began with predestinarian determinism, moved to temporal freedom coupled with spiritual bondage, and ended up with limited temporal and spiritual freedom. This spiritual freedom came in the form of free choice in whether or not to choose faith in Christ, once the individual had heard the Spirit‐illumined Word of God. Predestination was corporate rather than individual. This slow evolution of Melanchthon's theology occurred as a result of his pastoral concern for the effects of doctrine, coupled with an aversion to paradox that flowed from his view that Scripture should be subject to the classical rules of rhetoric. As Arminius would later be a response to Calvinism, so Melanchthon was a response to Luther. While Luther (and Calvin) propounded a bound will in combination with justification by the imputed merits of Christ, Melanchthon argued for a (limited) free will in combination with justification by the imputed merits of Christ. This was his innovation—evangelical (not Roman Catholic) free will.

This chapter argues that early modern pedagogical authorities and commentators find in Virgil's Eclogues several close engagements with the vocabulary of teaching. These authorities and commentators, in turn, wring from Virgil's words a series of complex statements about repetition, dialogue, echo, and instruction. This chapter argues that they locate in pastoral and pedagogical dialogue an erotics of the voice, a responsiveness of one voice to another as of one body to another. In addition to offering an extended treatment of the collection's pedagogical diction and a detailed examination of the Sixth Eclogue, the chapter discusses texts by Erasmus, the Spanish humanist, teacher, and commentator Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), late antique and early modern grammar books, schoolroom dialogues by the humanist grammar-school teacher Maturin Cordier, and translations of the Eclogues by Abraham Fleming, John Brinsley, and William Lisle (c.1569–1637). The chapter concludes by reading one of the most vexatious aspects of Milton's Lycidas (what Stanley Fish calls its studied hesitation ‘between monologue, dialogue, and something that is not quite either’) as a record of Milton's own conversation with the pedagogical subplot of Virgil's Eclogues.

The contemplative heaven of Dante soon gave way to heavens that allowed a greater variety of human and sensuous pleasures. Voyagers tried to rediscover the earthly paradise. The chapter examines the humanist heaven of the Renaissance humanist, Lorenzo Valla, which vigorously insists on the need for individual, human delights, and the intellectual heavenly pleasures of Erasmus. Luther's earthy, if philosophically unsophisticated, vision of the next life is evoked, as is the attempt by St. Francis de Sales to charm his readers into heaven.

Gellius was a model showing humanists how to accumulate information by note-taking, how to present it in an elegant and interesting way (especially through dialogues in vivid settings presented as reminiscences), but also how to put down a rival in their quarrels. He also encouraged the collection of fragments, the search for hidden meanings (whence his popularity as a source of mottoes), textual criticism, and the comparison of Latin texts with their Greek counterparts. The examples of Angelo Decembrio, Poliziano, Pietro Crinito, Erasmus, and Caelius Rhodiginus are considered, as are the reminiscences of Henri Estienne, the Collegium Gellianum at Leipzig, and the circle of J. A. Fabricius. Even in the age of the Scientific Revolution, his account of Archytas' artificial dove inspired Athanasius Kircher and Gaspar Schott to imagine how it might have been made.

This chapter provides a concise survey of scholarship on ancient Greek accentuation from antiquity to the present. Topics included are the role of the ancient grammarians in making the first generalizations about the data at their disposal; the subsequent transmission of Hellenistic doctrine on the accent; views on ancient Greek accentuation arising from discussion of ancient Greek pronunciation beginning with Erasmus, Voss, Hennin, and others; modern collectors of data (especially Göttling and Chandler); the contribution of Indo-European linguistics and the development of a historical perspective on Greek accentuation; attempts to formulate the law of limitation; and treatments of Greek accentuation in generative phonology. Generative phonology concepts that will reappear in later chapters are explained.

The introduction to this text describes the tradition of Good Friday preaching, and traces the development of several devotional topoi, notably the figure of Christ the lover‐knight and the relationship of the “book of the cross” image to the medieval Charters of Christ. It compares John Fisher's emphasis on the crucifix with remarks made in the Paraclesis of Erasmus.

The dominant reference point in religious warfare in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was the Turk, and this chapter argues that ‘Turkishness’ was a multifaceted and changing identity. For many the essential enemy was the Ottoman Turks, whose aggression and brutality were widely disseminated. Their activities and plans were subjected to numerous prophetic and apocalyptic readings. Many contemporaries described their Christian opponents as Turks or ‘worse than Turks’, a practice that demonstrated both the potency of the Turkish image and the internal divisions which plagued the Christian world. For Erasmus and other moral reformers the Turk resided within each Christian, and Christian sinfulness was fully as fatal to the common defence of Europe as political rivalries. It was the achievement of Thomas More to synthesize these three images in a number of works that he wrote in the late 1520s and early 1530s.

The tendency to sanctify warfare was criticized for a number of reasons. First there was the issue of human agency, the perception that placing God's work in the hands of his sinful creation all too often led to defeat because the advocates of the holy cause fought for the wrong reasons. In the case of Tabor the theme was developed by Nicholas of Pelhřimov. His contemporary Peter Chelčický voiced a more thoroughgoing condemnation of the use of violence for religious purposes, a line of argument that was eloquently reiterated a century later by Erasmus and the pacifist Anabaptists. Overseas discoveries created opportunities for conversion that spawned lively debate about whether the use of force to win souls could be legitimate.

The scholarly movement of going ‘back to the sources’ challenged the authority of the Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate. Erasmus's New Testament created great interest and controversy, helping to make him the most celebrated scholar in Europe, while the revival of the study of Hebrew led in Germany to the violent pamphlet war sparked off by the work of Johannes Reuchlin. The translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages became a principal Protestant demand, but it was a formidable task, made difficult by the variety of spoken dialects. But Luther in his constantly revised translation created ‘the first true work of art in the history of German prose’. The sixteenth century also produced a marvellous series of illustrated Bibles, which were widely used despite the high cost.

Humanist scholarship undoubtedly played a major role in the origins of the Reformation, but scholars themselves were divided between conservatives and reformers. The dominant figure of Erasmus led the way towards reform of the Church, expressing many of the same criticisms as Luther within a framework of pious Catholicism, but rejected the conclusions of the Reformers, especially over the vexed question of free will. The Catholic Church ended up condemning Erasmus, but Luther was equally hostile. His reputation, however, remained intact in Basel, Holland, especially Rotterdam, and among the moderate Lutherans associated with Philip Melanchthon.