The Case against Johann Reuchlin: Religious and Social Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany.

Erika Rummel. The Case against Johann Reuchlin: Religious and Social Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany.

Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002. xvi + 174 pp. index. illus. chron. bibl. $50 (cl), $22.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8020-3651-1 (cl), 0-8020-8484-2 (pbk).

Erika Rummel has given the world of Renaissance scholarship a series of distinguished studies of Northern European humanism, viewed in its relationship both to the traditional Scholastic learning of the universities and to the Reformation. The present book addresses a more general readership and should be particularly helpful to students of history who would benefit from close consideration of the leading example of public controversy on the eve of the Reformation, the conflict (1509-21) between the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin and the theologians of the University of Cologne. This book makes no claim to constitute a major contribution to learning, but it does something else that is also important: it presents in five brief chapters a lucid and thought-provoking analysis of this famous controversy and then offers more than a dozen original sources that enable the reader to gain a direct insight into the many issues involved in the Reuchlin case. Most of the documents appear in Rummel's own English translations from the original Latin or German.

Rummel's stimulating analysis of the incident shows that many diverse interests and many perspectives influenced how contemporaries understood the controversy. She not only exposes readers to the broader ramifications of the case but also raises general issues of historical interpretation that both neophytes and experienced historians need to keep in mind. The interpretive chapters show how, from the time of the conflict itself right down to recent times, the Reuchlin case has been viewed from various perspectives: as an expression of the pervasive anti-Semitism in the world of sixteenth-century Europe; as a clash of rival intellectual systems, pitting humanists against entrenched academic and clerical authorities; and as a prelude to the Protestant Reformation, since the incident discredited the theological guardians of orthodoxy right at the beginning of the religious crisis. The book invites readers to reflect on the place of anti-Semitism in the life of sixteenth-century Europe, on the nature of reformist humanism and its efforts to transform the traditional higher culture, and on the complex relationship between the humanists and the incipient Lutheran movement. The documentary appendix (constituting two-thirds of the entire volume) is well-chosen, and each document has a succinct and informative headnote that prepares the reader to understand what follows.

Rummel's introduction makes clear her own position on some of the issues raised by the Reuchlin affair. She shows that although for Reuchlin's initial antagonist, Johann Pfefferkorn, the essential issue was his attack on German Jewry, Reuchlin himself from the outset was motivated primarily by concern for the preservation of valuable Jewish texts needed for deeper understanding of both Jewish and Christian religion. She might have emphasized even more than she does the effect of the controversy on the growing solidarity of the German humanist community, which did not begin with the Reuchlin case but was fostered by what the humanists perceived (or chose to perceive) as a direct attack on all of them. She shows that Luther himself was keenly aware of the usefulness of the Reuchlin affair in maintaining the groundswell of sympathy that had greeted his own earliest pronouncements on religion, though she may overplay somewhat the deliberateness with which he exploited the situation. She herself cites an important letter to Georg Spalatin written in 1514 in which Luther, long before he ever dreamed of leading a religious movement, expressed his own solidarity with Reuchlin's humanist work and successfully urged the government of Electoral Saxony to back the scholar against his antagonists. She might also have explored how Reuchlin's background as a lawyer influenced his understanding of the issues. In general, however, the book succeeds admirably in conveying a sense of the complexity of the reactions to this most famous of the pre-Reformation controversies.

CHARLES G. NAUERT

University of Missouri, Columbia