Abstract:

Classical Reformations: Christian Humanism Beyond Erasmus places the classical tradition at the heart of the theology, politics, and literary culture of the European Reformation. Looking beyond the Erasmian model of Christian humanism that dominates the history of the early reform movement, this book focuses instead on the defining influence of Philip Melanchthon and his generation on later phases of the Reformation. Histories of this period tend to decouple classical learning and religious reform. Yet this was not a distinction that Reformation thinkers would have recognised. Major figures such as Melanchthon, Sturm, Ascham, and Beza—no less than many of their Catholic opponents, such as Pole and Bellarmine—were scholars and university lecturers by day, as comfortable with Demosthenes as Deuteronomy. Their Greek and Latin learning actively shaped their formulation of a new Christian teaching during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The new case-studies in Classical Reformations examine the pivotal role of classical thought in Reformation education and polemic, liturgy and literature, theology, politics, and mission. As pagan tests were put to Christian ends, and sacred texts made secular, these studies propose a fundamental renegotiation of what we perceive to be ‘classical’ and ‘Christian’, attesting not only the depth of immersion in the ancient corpus endemic in this period, but also the breadth of the classical inheritance from Europe to the reaches of the Far East.