Donald D. Smeeton, Lollard Themes in the Reformation Theology of William Tyndale. Volume VI, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies. Kirksville, MO : Sixteenth Century Journal, 1986. 285 pp.$ 30.00. James D. Tracy, ed., Luther and the Modern State in Germany. Volume VII, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies. Kirksville, MO : Sixteenth Century Journal, 1986. 108 pp. $ 25.00
This chapter investigates the concept and theological use of philosophy in Scotland after John Mair. Until the 1570s, philosophy in Scotland was in the tradition of scholasticism. After the Reformation, Melville’s university reform changed the philosophical landscape. Across Europe, the first generation of the Reformers had taught that scholasticism and Aristotle were not necessary for the Christian faith, and philosophers and theologians alike had to rethink the traditional scholasticism of Catholic legacy. This intellectual change is traced here with a focus on the role, scope, and autonomy of philosophy with respect to theology. After the dismissal of Aristotelo-scholasticism, both scholasticism and Aristotelianism survived in the universities in new forms adapted to Reformation theology. Aristotle in particular, regarded as the personification of unassisted natural reason, retained his importance. The status of Aristotle is a good indicator of the prevailing concept of philosophy.
This chapter examines the dominance of Lutheran orthodoxy in Leipzig from the beginning of the German Reformation to the nineteenth century. Lutheran orthodoxy was an older, more Catholic form of Lutheranism that was closer to Luther’s earliest teachings. Saxony was divided between Albertine Saxony (Catholic) and Ernestine Saxony (Lutheran). Because it was an important Catholic city, Leipzig’s adoption of Lutheranism in 1539 retained all aspects of Catholic liturgy that were not in direct conflict with Reformation theology. In 1697, the conversion of Elector Friedrich August I created a situation of a Catholic monarch in Dresden ruling over the Reformation stronghold of Saxony. This paradox would influence church theology and music for centuries, including the retention of a sixteenth-century liturgy that resembled the Catholic liturgy, along with corresponding music. Pietism and rationalism were also threats to Lutheran orthodoxy. Church Superintendent Johann Georg Rosenmüller would modernize the liturgy beginning in 1785.
Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.
Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the Howards are usually described as religiously ‘conservative’, resisting the reformist impulse of the Reformation while conforming to the royal supremacy over the Church. The women of the family have played little part in this characterization, yet they too lived through the earliest stages of the Reformation. This chapter shows that what we see is not a family following the lead of its patriarch in religious matters at this early stage of the Reformation, but that this did not stop them maintaining strong kinship relations across the shifting religious spectrum.
This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Christological debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the ascription of divine and human predicates to the person of the incarnate Son of God (the communicatio idiomatum). It does so by close attention to the arguments deployed by the protagonists in the discussion, and to the theologians’ metaphysical and semantic assumptions, explicit and implicit. It traces the central contours of the Christological debates, from the discussion between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s to the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586. The book shows that Luther’s Christology is thoroughly Medieval, and that innovations usually associated with Luther—in particular, that Christ’s human nature comes to share in divine attributes—should be ascribed instead to his younger contemporary Johannes Brenz. The discussion is highly sensitive to the differences between the various Luther groups—followers of Brenz, and the different factions aligned in varying ways with Melanchthon—and to the differences between all of these and the Reformed theologians. And by locating the Christological discussions in their immediate Medieval background, the book also provides a comprehensive account of the continuities and discontinuities between the two eras. In these ways, it is shown that the standard interpretations of the Reformation debates on the matter are almost wholly mistaken.
Abstract
The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.
Sixteenth-Century Philosophy and Theology after John Mair