The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany. (Reviews).

Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany. (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 211pp. $45. ISBN: 0-19-513712-4.

In her introduction Erika Rummel notes that, while much has been written on how humanism influenced the Reformation, little has been done on how the Reformation affected humanism. Her study aims to rectify this situation. She sees at work in the early Reformation a process where reformers and defenders of the old order employed humanistic philology and concepts of history, as well as humanistic pedagogy, to defend orthodoxy, while at the same time suppressing the humanistic rhetoric of doubt. She asserts that "[t]he transformation thus effected amounted to a confessionalization of humanism" (4). Her book then follows a sequence of themes and personalities that exemplify this process.

Her book develops around a successive set of vignettes that focus on the careers of various humanists whose lives demonstrate the themes and processes that represent the evolution of humanism in Germany in the era of the early Reformation. She shows in the first few chapters how the initial, mistaken assumption of an alliance between humanists and reformers eventually gave way to a recognition of the degree to which the humanist project and the aims of the reformers diverged. This led, by the mid to late 1520's, to a situation where humanists were caught between the lines, their rhetorical approach to truth rejected by defenders of the old order and reformers as an untenable skepticism. In this section she focuses discussion on Erasmus especially, as well as on Agrippa and Sebastian Castellio. The second part of the book traces the careers of humanists who, pressured by both sides to demonstrate their conformity to dogmatic truths, equivocated, withdrew, and feigned conformity (Nicodemism) in order to avoid p ossible attacks from clergy and reprisals for theological non-conformity. Her discussion here looks at, among others, Erasmus, Mutianus Rufus, Maarten van Dorp, Beatus Rhenanus, Willibald Pirckheimer, Urbanus Rhegius, and Wolfgang Capito. The final chapter shows how humanist attempts to define a basis for positing truth in a setting where theological certainty about doctrine was lacking, failed to find a fertile political setting. Finally humanism was left only with a political setting in Germany, where confessionalized religious establishments defined the uses of humanism.

Rummel's study does many things well. She demonstrates a remarkable erudition, moving nimbly through the intellectual terrain of humanism and the early Reformation. Her discussion of the situation of humanism in the early Reformation brings a unique clarity to a complicated set of personalities and relationships. She writes vividly and engagingly. The book merits a wide scholarly audience among those concerned with the intellectual history of German humanism in the early Reformation. However, the description of the book as a study of the confessionalization of humanism is somewhat misleading. One might expect to learn how intellectual affairs came to, be regulated in territories where church regiments were being harnessed by the Early Modern states, and how humanism was used as a tool in this process. In fact the period upon which Rummel focuses the majority of her book, from 1520 into the 1530's, is a period in which religion is still very much in flux, as the account she provides of numerous humanists makes clear. As a process, confessionalization does not come into full flower until the second half of the century. A more apt title for her study would be "Humanism and Confessional Religion in Reformation Germany," since it is the incompatibility of humanist notions of truth with confessional religion that her book documents. Like much that happened in the early Reformation, the response of reformers and traditionalists to humanism was improvised and lacked any clear, programmatic agenda. Rummel's work deals only incidentally with the regulation of learning, humanist or otherwise, by the state.

Rummel's work does, however, fulfill the promise of providing a view of how the religious struggle of the early Reformation confronted the revival of classical learning, and how this struggle appeared from the perspective of those whose primary loyalties lay with the values and ideals of the new learning. In this way she makes clearer than other studies of humanism and reform how humanism in Germany was changed by its encounter with the Reformation.