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Although the Reformation split the Latin-speaking world into a host of competing churches and ecclesial communities, the filioque was not among those issued challenged by the Protestant critique and remained a central part of the reformers’ faith. Orthodox Confessions of the period continued to reject the filioque, just as Roman Catholic documents of the era made clear that acceptance of the Florentine decrees were a non-negotiable condition for future reconciliation. However a new period of rapprochement started in 1874 with the consultations at Bonn, when for the first time in centuries polemics were replaced by genuine dialogue. If not itself a period of great ecumenical achievement, the nineteenth century nevertheless paved the way for what was to come, and allowed the twentieth century to become a time of immense progress on the road to unity.

The introduction establishes the importance of the assertion by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70–c.130 CE) that the freedman and grammarian Quintus Caecilius Epirota (first century BCE) had started teaching Virgil's poetry at Rome in 26 BCE. If Suetonius is correct, Virgil would have spent the last years of his life knowing that he had written (and, in the Aeneid, was still writing) schoolbooks. Against the backdrop of this inaugural scene of Virgilian instruction, the introduction surveys late antique, medieval, and Renaissance interest in Virgil's own educational profile, arguing that this interest is in part generated by enigmatic moments in the poems themselves. However strange the forms the ascription will assume, the mixed voices of the Virgilian tradition are not wrong when they ascribe to Virgil canny, intense, and even theoretically adventurous meditations on instruction. Biographers, commentators, and schoolmasters perceive in Virgil's poems more than a simple aspiration to teach readers. They also locate in ‘the book of Maro’ a series of close studies of pedagogical diction (in the Eclogues), of the unfathomable currents that connect poetry to precept and action (in the Georgics), and of the counterintuitive relationship between mastery and forgetting (in the Aeneid).

Amsdorf was one of Martin Luther's closest friends over many years and taught with Luther on the university faculty in Wittenberg. Although he served briefly as the bishop of Naumburg and played an important role in the reform of the city of Goslar, he is remembered primarily as a leader of the Gnesio‐Lutherans, who opposed Melanchthon on the role of good works in justification and the usefulness of philosophy in theology. He also opposed the acceptance of the Leipzig Interim by the adiaphorists, Melanchthon and Bugenhagen.

Politics made it essential for Reformers to provide justifications for war and resistance in certain circumstances against the rulers of the state. The pacifism of Erasmus and Luther's early condemnation of rebellion during the social unrest of the 1520s gradually gave way to a theory of a right of resistance, not by the people but by responsible magistrates. The War of the Schmalkand League forced both Luther and Melanchthon to rethink their ideas. Luther's death in 1546 and Melanchthon's in 1560 created posthumous images and reputation for the Reformers, and the first biographies of Luther created Protestant and Catholic images of him that were to last for centuries. At the same time, the appeal of both sides to history stimulated historical scholarship, including the collection and publication of ancient documents.

Andreas Osiander was one of the leading figures in the establishment of the Lutheran Reformation in the city of Nuremberg, though he left during the Leipzig Interim to move first to Breslau and finally to Königsberg in East Prussia. He is best known for his attack on Melanchthon's understanding of forensic justification and his acceptance of a supralapsarian Christology. Justification rested in Osiander's view on union with Christ and the actual transformation of the believer that occurs through such a union.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘common places’, which are also called loci communes and defined as general notions that are appropriate to the various disciplines of inquiry. One literary work that is included in the discussion in this chapter is Melanchthon's De rhetorica libri tres, his first book on the rhetoric of argument.

Not the study of antiquity in isolation but the ideal of a seamless unity of classicism and Christianity is what made Johannes Reuchlin's humanist perspective compelling to the scholars and students of his time. Although well-known as the founder of Christian Hebrew studies, Reuchlin also emerges as a harbinger of the recovery of Greek language, literature, early Christian writings, and biblical philology. This chapter defines Renaissance humanism (the studia humanitatis) and traces Reuchlin's contributions to the movement, in particular, to the evolution of Christian humanism. His contributions to early printing and the career of Philipp Melanchthon are also assessed.

In Continental Protestantism, the history of the Church acquired vital explanatory importance for the theological justification of the movement. Protestant thought argued that for 1,000 years before the Reformation the Catholic Church had erred more and more seriously from correct belief and practice. However, the first experiments in writing ecclesiastical history were heavily influenced by northern Renaissance humanism. A tension developed between human, pragmatic explanations for religious behaviour and doctrinal or apocalyptic explanations of Church history. This chapter analyses that tension through the writings of humanist-educated Protestant historians such as Joachim Vadian, Heinrich Bullinger, Philipp Melanchthon, and Caspar Peucer. Over the sixteenth century, humanist influence dissipated, as even Renaissance-trained scholars adopted dogmatic arguments; however, it did not entirely disappear. The chapter concludes by comparing humanist-inspired Church histories with doctrinally based histories written within Lutheran orthodoxy, such as the Magdeburg Centuries and the Epitome of Lucas Osiander the Elder.

This chapter explores early modern theories and representations of the cognitive connectedness of brain and body – a connectedness effected by fluid processes of emotion, sensation, and intellection that found coherent expression in disparate early modern literary forms and disciplines, from imaginative narratives by Spenser to theological/philosophical and medical texts by Melanchthon, Lemnius, and Thomas Wright. Rooted in versions of Galenism, wherein conceptual ‘piercings’ afforded perceptions of embodiment as extended and in dynamic, enactive engagement with others – including imagined characters and readers. The metaphor facilitated models of reciprocal exchanges of emotion from one literary character to another, from imaginative texts to readers, from the deity to its creatures, and from the world to the body and brain. An idea of affective penetration that early moderns represented by the pierced body helped shape systemic versions of what we today call embodied, enactive and extended affectivity.

Nicolaus Copernicus first formulated his new arrangement of the heavens amid the intellectual skepticism and political insecurity of the late fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century prognosticatory culture of the northern Italian university towns. Both the Roman Catholic Church and the German Protestant reform movement were obsessed with world-historical biblical prophecies; but for the Lutherans there was a uniquely urgent sense of imminent crisis and belief in an apocalyptic end of the world. On the eve of the Council of Trent, Copernicus's hypotheses quickly became the occasion for discussion and engagement among students of the heavens at Lutheran Wittenberg. The question was no longer merely about whether prognostication of natural events could be accommodated to a Bible-governed narrative, but rather it was about what relevance the Bible had for conflicting hypotheses of celestial order in theoretical astronomy. This chapter explores astrology during the time of Copernicus, along with the concept of the end of the world, the views of Philipp Melanchthon, Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio Prima, Andreas Osiander's advice on the publication of De Revolutionibus, and the link between the Holy Scripture and celestial order.

Nicolaus Copernicus's reputation as a learned astronomer was established very quickly in the two decades after the appearance of the Narratio and De Revolutionibus. But De Revolutionibus was not the only resource for disseminating Copernicus's views. After Erasmus Reinhold's Prutenic Tables appeared in 1551, Copernicus's renown within the literature of the heavens became firmly anchored to the domain of practical astronomy, even among constituencies unfamiliar directly with De Revolutionibus itself. From the perspective of the historical agents, there is a simple explanation for this state of affairs: the dominant preoccupation of those who possessed techniques of celestial investigation was the making of knowledge about the future. And in the mid-sixteenth century, those concerns and competences were most powerfully located in the circle of students and scholars gathered around Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg. The dominant figures in this Wittenberg movement were Reinhold, Caspar Peucer, and Georg Joachim Rheticus. One significant force shaping the political space of the Melanchthon group was the patronage of the territorial prince, Albrecht Hohenzollern, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and duke of Prussia.

Nicolaus Copernicus's name became associated with an optimistic and safe view of prognosticatory practice, especially through the Prutenic Tables. As a resource of astrological forecast, the Wittenberg articulation of Copernican-based tables and mechanisms marked the special confidence of the Melanchthonian wing of the Protestant movement in decoding the divine plan through its manifestations in nature. Philipp Melanchthon and his son-in-law Caspar Peucer allowed the greatest latitude for different kinds of divination; but Martin Luther was much more wary than Melanchthon about any sort of prophecy that was not exclusively based on the Bible and other sacred texts. This chapter explores the boundary between divine and demonic divination—the perilous divide on which hardy mid-century defenders of astrology's credibility balanced their goals. It also focuses on Giuliano Ristori of Prato (1492–1556) and his prognostication of the early death of Alessandro, illegitimate son of Lorenzo de'Medici the Younger, soon to become ruler of the Florentine Republic (1530); John Dee's contacts with Gemma Frisius and other Louvain mathematical practitioners of the 1540s; and Jofrancus Offusius's novel effort to contain the Piconian challenge.

There are only two substantial eyewitness accounts of the life of Martin Luther. Best known is a 9,000-word Latin memoir by Philip Melanchthon published in Latin at Heidelberg in 1548, two years after the Reformer's death. But the other substantial vita of Luther—at 175,000 words by far the longest and most detailed eyewitness account of the Reformer—has never been published in English. Recorded contemporaneously over the first twenty-five years of the Reformation by Luther's lifelong antagonist Johannes Cochlaeus, the Commentaria de Actis et Scriptis Martini Lutheri was published in Latin at Mainz in 1549. This chapter introduces this confrontation between Melanchthon's vita and Cochlaeus's Commentary read against each other, the rival texts rekindle the colossal crossfire of faith-against-faith that animated and illuminated the Reformation.

If Luther remains a figure of heroic proportions, it is due as much to the work of his admirers as to his own efforts. And Philip Melanchthon, Luther's closest colleague, was so successful in creating a legendary Luther that his own role in Reformation history has been regarded as less substantial and influential than it actually was. After being called to Wittenberg, Melanchton showed potential to make it a center for humanism. Later, the ninety-five issues that Martin Luther listed as debatable struck at the heart of Catholic practice. They also served as articles in an indictment of traditional ecclesiastical authority. Within a year Luther would become the pole around which Western Christendom would orientate itself. Within three years Luther himself would be condemned and excommunicated by the Roman church; and before his death the dividing lines that demarcate the Western confessions to this day would be firmly in place.