Notes on the Reformation, Humanism, and the Study of Hebrew in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Theodore Bibliander (1505-64)

2007 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hagit Amirav ◽  
Hans-Martin Kirn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Universal Salvation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Theological School ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Annotated Translation

AbstractTheodor Buchmann, better known as eodore Bibliander (1505-64), was Zwingli's immediate successor to the chair of Professor of Old Testament at the theological school in Zurich. An ardent orientalist, who was the first to edit a Latin translation of the Koran and a professed Hebraist, Bibliander could boast a well-articulated theology based on and around the knowledge of languages in general and of Hebrew in particular. In light of the contemporary prevalent notions of harmonia linguarum and concordia mundi, Bibliander sought to promote the study of Hebrew as an essential means to achieving a universal salvation. His treatise, De ratione omnium linguarum et literarum (Zurich, 1548), dedicated to the exposition of the said universalist theology, is the subject of this article. A full annotated translation of the De ratione communi is due to appear in the new series Corpus Reformatorum Minorum (Droz, Geneva).

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.

IV. John Lingard and the Simancas Archives

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Edwin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
English History ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Source Materials

John Lingard (1771–1851) was the first English historian to attempt to look at the history of England in the sixteenth century from an international point of view. He was unconvinced by the story of the Reformation in England as found in the works of previous historians such as Burnet and Hume, and believed that new light needed to be thrown on the subject. One way of doing this was to look at English history from the outside, so to speak, and Lingard held it to be a duty of the historian ‘to contrast foreign with native authorities, to hold the balance between them with an equal hand, and, forgetting that he is an Englishman, to judge impartially as a citizen of the world’. In pursuit of this ideal Lingard can be said to have given a new dimension to the source materials for English history. As parish priest in the small village of Hornby, near Lancaster, Lingard had few opportunities for travel. But he made good use of his various friends and former pupils at Douai and Ushaw colleges who were settled now in various parts of Europe. It was with the help of these friends that Lingard made contacts with and gained valuable information from archives in France, Italy and Spain. We shall concern ourselves here only with the story of Lingard's contacts with the great Spanish State Archives at Simancas.

Moses and the Magistrate: a Study in the rise of Protestant Legalism

1975 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. D. L. Avis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil Laws ◽  
The Church

‘It is now disputed at every table’, declared Whitgift in 1574, ‘whether the magistrate be of necessity bound to the judicials of Moses’. Edwin Sandys told Bullinger of Zürich in the previous year that it was being maintained, to the great trouble of the Church, that ‘The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them’. Though often neglected by historians as an important factor in the Reformation, the question of the validity of the Old Testament judicial (as opposed to moral or ceremonial) law frequently arises in the writings of the Reformers, and their various answers made no slight impact on the course of events. It bears directly on Henry VIII's divorce and the bigamy of Philip of Hesse; the treatment of heresy and the possibility of toleration; the persecution of witches; usury and iconoclasm; Sabbatarianism and the rise of the ‘puritan’ view of the Bible as a book of precedents, and the corresponding shift to legalism in Protestant theology. The question is also of fundamental relevance to the thought of the Reformers on natural law, the godly prince and magistrate, and the so-called ‘third use of the law’. This article is an attempt to survey, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the various interpretations of the Mosaic penal and civil laws, with particular reference to the development of legalistic tendencies after Luther.

Recent Sources of Information on the Anabaptists in the Netherlands

1917 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Henry Elias Dosker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Northeastern Germany

The subject is not of my own choosing. It was assigned to me by our Secretary, when he invited me last summer to write a paper for this meeting of the Society. The raeson for this request lies in the fact that, for the last dozen years, much of my spare time has been spent in special work on this engrossing subject, which is shrouded in much mystery. But we all know something about the great Anabaptist movement, which paralleled the history of the Reformation. We have all touched these Anabaptists in their life and labors, in the sixteenth century, in all Europe, but especially in Switzerland, upper Germany, and Holland. Crushed and practically wiped out everywhere else, they rooted themselves deeply in the soil of northeastern Germany and above all in the Low Countries. And thence, whenever persecution overwhelmed them, they crossed the channel and moved to England, where their history is closely interwoven with that of the Nonconformists in general and especially with the nascent history of the English Baptists.

Hurrell Froude and the Reformers

1970 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
William Cobbett ◽  
The Church

‘No portion of our annals’, Macaulay wrote in 1828, ‘has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation’. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when polemicists turned to history more often than to philosophy or theology, the Reformation was the subject most littered with the pamphlets of partisan debate. Macaulay could have cited numerous examples. Joseph Milner's popular History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) set the Reformation in sharp contrast to the ‘Dark Ages’ when only occasional gleams of evangelical light could be detected, thus providing the Evangelical party with a historic lineage; Robert Sou they, in his Book of the Church (1824), presented a lightly-veiled argument for the retention of the existing order of Church and State as established in the sixteenth century; and in 1824 William Cobbett began the first of his sixteen weekly instalments on a history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, in order to call attention to the plight of labourers in the British Isles. In the history of the Reformation, duly manipulated (‘rightly interpreted’), men found precedents for their own positions and refutation of their opponents' arguments.

Johann Heinrich Alsted and English Millennialism

1969 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Clouse
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Christian Thought

At the twelfth International Congress of the Historical Sciences there were a number of papers read on the subject of religious tolerance and heresies in modern times. Among these there were two which are of particular relevance to anyone interested in the religious thought of the Reformation Era. Professors Martin Schmidt and Gerhard Schilfert, the authors, were especially concerned with English Puritanism and its relations with continental radical ferment. Schmidt analyzed the work of Hermann Weingarten, who believed that England's century of Reformation was the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth and that it was during the struggle against the Stuarts that the history of the English church became a record of new intellectual and religious movements. Hence, the chiliastic Independents of the English Interregnum were analagous to the Anabaptists of continental fame in the early sixteenth century. In fact, during the unrest of the English Puritan Revolution, German influences presumably transmitted from the Netherlands were willingly accepted. Among the writers involved in this process were Jakob Böhme and Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil. From these sources came the belief in the second coming of Christ which formed the unifying bond for all shades of English revolutionary Christian thought. Cromwell, himself, was deeply affected by chiliastic thought, but when he assumed political responsibility, he had to act in a more rational way. Finally the enthusiasm of the Fifth Monarchists and the Levellers subsided into the quiet mysticism of the Quakers and the natural rights position of the Age of Reason.

The Synoptic Problem in Sixteenth-Century Protestantism

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL STRICKLAND
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Synoptic Problem ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject

This article examines early Protestant discussion of the historic puzzle in New Testament study known as the Synoptic Problem, which deals with the potential literary relationship between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The subject was addressed by John Calvin, pioneer Reformer, and by the early Lutheran Martin Chemnitz. Calvin made a puissant contribution by constructing the first three-column Gospel harmony. Chemnitz contributed nascent redaction-critical assessments of Matthew's use of Mark. Thus, far from simply being a concern to post-Enlightenment critics (as is often assumed), interest in the Gospel sources was present from the earliest days of the Reformation.

The Coming of the Reformation to Edinburgh

1973 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-44
Author(s):  
W. Stanford Reid
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Strategic Position

That towns and townspeople played an important part in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century is obvious even to those with a superficial knowledge of the movement. In the case of Scotland, however, this has not always been recognized as true since many writers on the subject have believed that the movement was primarily baronial in character. Yet as one looks closely into the Scottish Reformation the names of Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee and Edinburgh fill important places in the story of the rise of Scottish Protestantism. Edinburgh in particular held a strategic position as Knox, recently appointed minister of St. Giles, recognized in 1561. When Thomas Randolph reported to Sir William Cecil on the appointment of superintendents he stated: “Mr. Knox thinks his state honorable enough if God give him strength to persist in that vocation that he hath placed him in, and will receive no other.” To understand the Scottish Reformation, therefore, it is necessary to see what happened in the principal burgh of the country.

The Reformation and the Ten Commandments

1989 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-266
Author(s):  
David C. Steinmetz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Ten Commandments ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church

Disagreement in the sixteenth century on the meaning of the First Commandment prompted dissension over such related issues as the nature of the Lord's Supper, the authority of the Old Testament for the church and the pace of ecclesiastical reform—issues that are still in dispute.

Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Wilhelm Zimmermann (1807–1878) and the Dilemma of Muntzer Historiography

1974 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-182
Author(s):  
Abraham Friesen
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Mutual Support ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Philipp Melanchthon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Marxist Interpretation

“Lies always limp arid are easily caught. It is difficult for them to escape the verdict of a keen, quick intellect.”Thus wrote Petrarch to Emperor Charles IV regarding the authenticity of a document which purported to exempt ”Austria” from imperial jurisdiction. But even Petrarch with his “keen, quick intellect” might have had difficulty in detecting another besetting sin of his day—but by no means only of his day—plagiarism. For by its very nature plagiarism tends to remain silent whereas one lie, as Marc Bloch once observed, “drags in its train many others, summoned to lend it a semblance of mutual support.” A keen, quick intellect, then, though very helpful, may not always be enough to detect a plagiarism; a thorough familiarity with the sources and the secondary literature on the subject in question as well as a great deal of painstaking correlation may also be necessary once suspicion has been aroused. The investigator may also need a “little bit o' luck” as the song of My Fair Lady would have it. What follows has something to do with both lies and plagiarism. Considerably more important, it revolves around two pivotal interpretations of the sixteenth-century religious radical and social revolutionary, Thomas Müntzer, the erstwhile scapegoat of the Reformation era but since rehabilitated by Wilhelm Zimmermann and now the hero of the Marxist interpretation of the Reformation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document