Humanists and Reformers portrays in a single, expansive volume two great traditions in human history: the Italian Renaissance and the age of the Reformation. / Bard Thompson provides a fascinating survey of these important historical periods under pressure of their own cultural, social, and spiritual experiences, exploring the bonds that held Humanists and Reformers together and the estrangements that drove them apart. / Writing for students and general readers, Thompson offers a comprehensive account of all the major figures of the Renaissance and the Reformation, probing their thoughts, aspirations, and differences. / Accentuating the text are illustrations that provide a stunning panorama of the personalities, art, and architecture of these key historical periods.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare’s plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the ”primal crime,” with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590’s how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national ”comedy of errors,” of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.

The Reformation of the 16th century has always been seen as one of the pivotal events in European history. Lord Acton, the famous 19th-century British historian, compared the importance of Martin Luther's speech at the diet at Worms in 1521 with Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1813. Lord Acton's may or may not be an extravagant claim, but it is certainly true that the events of the 16th and 17th centuries, now called the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, changed forever the religious and political history of the West. The Historical Dictionary of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation provides a one-volume, balanced, alternative to the overwhelming amounts of literature on the events of the time and the theological and political debates that spawned those events.

The Bible was the essence of virtually every aspect of the life of the early churches. The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation explores a wide array of themes related to the reception, canonization, interpretation, uses, and legacies of the Bible in early Christianity. Each section contains overviews and cutting-edge scholarship that expands understanding of the field. Part One examines the material text transmitted, translated, and invested with authority, and the very conceptualization of sacred Scripture as God's word for the church. Part Two looks at the culture and disciplines or science of interpretation in representative exegetical traditions. Part Three addresses the diverse literary and non-literary modes of interpretation, while Part Four canvasses the communal background and foreground of early Christian interpretation, where the Bible was paramount in shaping normative Christian identity. Part Five assesses the determinative role of the Bible in major developments and theological controversies in the life of the churches. Part Six returns to interpretation proper and samples how certain abiding motifs from within scriptural revelation were treated by major Christian expositors. The overall history of biblical interpretation has itself now become the subject of a growing scholarship and the final part skilfully examines how early Christian exegesis was retrieved and critically evaluated in later periods of church history. Taken together, the chapters provide nuanced paths of introduction for students and scholars from a wide spectrum of academic fields, including classics, biblical studies, the general history of interpretation, the social and cultural history of late ancient and early medieval Christianity, historical theology, and systematic and contextual theology. Readers will be oriented to the major resources for, and issues in, the critical study of early Christian biblical interpretation.

The volume contains studies by eleven distinguished scholars, concerning changes in ethical and religious consciousness during this important era of Western culture — themes consonant with the scholarship of Charles Trinkaus. It begins with three general essays: the Renaissance discovery of human creativity (William Bouwsma), the Renaissance and Western pragmatism (Jerry Bentley), and the new philosophical perspective (F. Edward Cranz). The remaining contributors deal with similar issues in Petrarch (Ronald Witt), Nicholas of Cusa (Morimichi Watanabe), Lorenzo Valla (Salvatore Camporeale), Marsilio Ficino (Michael Allen and Brian Copenhaver), Savonarola (Donald Weinstein), Battista Carioni (Paul Grendler), and Calvin (Heiko Oberman). The volume opens with a tribute to Trinkaus by Paul Oskar Kristeller and concludes with bibliographies of Trinkaus's publications and of works on Valla in English (Pauline Watts and Thomas Izbicki). Publications by Charles Trinkaus: • Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print)

John Merbecke (c.1505-c.1585) is most famous as the composer of the first musical setting of the English liturgy, The Booke of Common Praier Noted (BCPN), published in 1550. Not only was Merbecke a pioneer in setting English prose to music but also the compiler of the first Concordance of the whole English Bible (1550) and of the first English encyclopaedia of biblical and theological studies, A Booke of Notes and Common Places (1581). By situating Merbecke and his work within a broader intellectual and religio-cultural context of Tudor England, this book challenges the existing studies of Merbecke based on the narrow theological approach to the Reformation. Furthermore, it suggests a re-thinking of the prevailing interpretative framework of Reformation musical history. On the basis of the new contextual study of Merbecke, this book seeks to re-interpret his work, particularly BCPN, in the light of humanist rhetoric. It sees Merbecke as embodying the ideal of the 'Christian-musical orator', demonstrating that BCPN is an Anglican epitome of the Erasmian synthesis of eloquence, theology and music. The book thus depicts Merbecke as a humanist reformer, through re-evaluation of his contributions to the developments of vernacular music and literature in early modern England. As such it will be of interest, not only to church musicians, but also to historians of the Reformation and students of wider Tudor culture.

The author contends that the traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the 16th-century. Margo Todd reveals the puritans to be the heirs to a complex intellectual legacy.

This is the third and final volume of a set of studies on the development of humanism in the northern Netherlands and the adjoining parts of Germany between 1469, when, in the oldest letters preserved of Rudolph Agricola and Rudolph von Langen, first mention is made of a group of early humanist scholars at the Adwert monastery near Groningen, and 1625, when the humanist Ubbo Emmius died, who was the first rector of the university of Groningen. The earlier two volumes are Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444-1485) (1988) and Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) and Northern Humanism (1993). This last volume has papers on Regnerus Praedinius (1510-1559), Alexander Hegius (ca.1433-1498), Alexander Candidus ( 1555), Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489), the Bremen Gymnasium Illustre between 1560-1630, humanist commentaries on Boethius, scholasticism and humanism, humanism and philosophy, Agricola Latinus, Ubbo Emmius's 'art of description', Agricola's dialectics at Louvain, Agricola on deliberative speech, humanism and reformation, Erasmus and geography, Agricola in Pavia, Dutch students at Italian universities (1425-1575), relations between Heidelberg and the Low Countries in the late 16th century, the Modern Devotion and humanism.Many of the papers were originally presented at a conference in 1996, but they have been extensively rewritten and edited, and a number of new pieces have been included. An updated bibliography in this volume makes the three volumes together an indispensable tool for scholars of philology, literature, history, philosophy and theology of the period.Contributors include: F. Akkerman, J.C. Bedaux, C.P.M. Burger, C.M.A. Caspers, T. Elsmann, M. Goris, M.J.F.M. Hoenen, P. Kooiman, H.A. Krop, Z.R.W.M. von Martels, L.W. Nauta, J. Papy, M. van der Poel, E. Rummel, R.J. Schoeck, A. Sottili, A. Tervoort, A.E. Walter, and A.G. Weiler.