The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation.

Looking back from the rise of modern science, which introduced a new method for establishing truth (to which Rummel alludes in her concluding sentence), it appears that the debate between scholastics and humanists is one between siblings or at least kissing cousins. Kristeller, indeed, has said the two were more like departments in a university fighting over the allocation of resources than they were fundamentally opposed philosophies. Rummel, while conceding this point, discovers, in the actual encounters between humanists and scholastics during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, differences in approach that made them increasingly deadly enemies, in large part because of the religious struggle which ensued as a result of the Reformation. Rummel had earlier entered these waters in Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, 2 volumes (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1989), but in this volume she casts her net wider both in time and geography. She does so with the conceptual clarity and mastery of sources that characterized her earlier work, resulting in a genuine contribution to the larger discussion of the relation of humanists to scholastics.

The longer debate between philosophers and rhetoricians Rummel traces back to Plato and Lucian. In the Sophist Plato castigates two kinds of sophists, pseudo-dialecticians and blustering rhetoricians, while recognizing that there are legitimate practitioners of both dialectic and rhetoric. In the Renaissance debate both sides labeled their antagonists with the charge of sophism - mental gymnastics on the one side, artful trickery on the other. Lucian, whose dialogues were published by humanists (Agricola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, More, and others), supplied many images with which humanists condemned scholastics as sophists; scholastics in turn characterized Lucian as an "atheist," a reproach against him apparently unknown in antiquity (27).

The debate among Italian humanists - beginning with Petrarch's On His Own Ignorance (1368) and including Salutati's confrontation with Giovanni Dominici, Bruni's Dialogues as well as his debate with Alonso da Cartagena over Bruni's translation of Aristotle's Ethics, and the exchange of letters between Ermolao Barbaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - was "epideictic" in two senses: carried on as a means of displaying the skills of the author, and methodologically executed in such a way that the authors could establish a distance between themselves and what they were saying, that is, maintain civility and keep open alternatives. This characterization applies as well to Erasmus's Antibarbarians (written by 1494, published 1520), which reflects the fact that the debate had moved from Italy to northern Europe. Rummel concludes that the debate to this point was unfocused in two respects: the protagonists were not sure who the enemy was, and (probably as a consequence) authors argued on both sides of the question. But as the debate moved out of Italy and to the north, especially after the Reformation, the sides became clearly differentiated, the protagonists less charitable; the preferred medium was no longer epistles and dialogues but satires and polemics. Humanists were charged with heterodoxy and not only (or primarily) with frivolity and lack of respect for Christian tradition; defenders of the old Church were outraged by humanist critiques of the received text of the Bible. Humanists in turn defended the link between theology and grammar (philology had been absent from Petrarch's earlier polemic against the scholastics). Four areas of contention emerged between humanists (Valla, Lefevre, Erasmus, Nebrija and others) and scholastics (Cousturier, Be-da, Titelmans, Pio): the status of the Vulgate text, how to deal with variants of that text, the inspiration of the biblical writers, and new translations of the Bible.

Although it would seem that the Protestant reformers, with their call ad fontes, would be allied with the humanists, Rummel documents their ambiguous and fluctuating relationship. She particularly focuses on the biographies of Erasmus and Melanchthon to demonstrate ambiguities and interconnections. In her final chapter, she examines the limited extent to which humanists sought to modify Aristotelian logic, their affirmation of a necessary relationship between logic and rhetoric, their critique of the relation of the syllogism to the search for truth, and the superiority of common language to the corruption of dialectic. Each issue is explored with particular reference to Valla, Agricola, Ramus, Nizolius, Vives, and Melanchthon.

Rummel is one among a few historians who are throwing a clearer light on issues related both to the Renaissance and the Reformation, on which indeed there is a continuing need for light to be shed.

ALBERT RABIL, JR. State University of New York, Old Westbury