The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation

by Erika Rummel

In the last half of the fifteenth century, the classic Platonic debate over the respective merits of rhetoric and philosophy was replayed in the debate between humanists and scholastics over philology and dialectic. The intense dispute between representatives of the two camps fueled many of the most important intellectual developments of the Renaissance and Reformation. Erika Rummel delves into the extensive primary sources of the times, bringing the issues and their continuing legacy to light and making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the intellectual climate of early modern Europe. Rummel demonstrates how the passionately fought issue of the period changed focus as humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus applied philological skills to Scripture. The controversy over form versus content entered a new phase, pitting humanists trained as philologists against scholastic theologians trained as dialecticians. Rummel shows us the framework for the debate still intact as the medium/message dichotomy, and traces its development into quarrels over qualification and entitlement in the academy, as theologians and humanists disputed the intellectual and territorial boundaries of their respective disciplines. Finally, in the first half of the sixteenth century we see the controversy entering the sphere of doctrinal dispute. The question of authority became centered not only on professional competence but also on the more explosive issues of faith and Christian teaching. This in-depth study will reclaim the attention of those who believe these debates were merely personal and episodic; Rummel's innovative research provides ample evidence that the polemics of the age arose from a fundamental conflict over methodology and the freedom to pursue research.

Genres: History, Renaissance, Nonfiction

249 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1995

About the author

Erika Rummel has taught history at University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo. She divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles and has lived in villages in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria. The author of more than a dozen books of non-fiction, she has written extensively on social history. She is also the author of two novels, Playing Naomi and Head Games. She was awarded the Random House Creative Writing Award, 2011, for an excerpt of The Effects of Isolation on the Brain.

Reviews

[Katie]

No time for a proper review, but this is a solid book about the development of the intellectual debate between humanism and scholasticism that took place from the 14th to 16th century (and, in historiography, up the the present day). Rummel suggests that the debate took place in three stages. First, in the 14th and most of the 15th century, the issue was largely parried about in Italy, and it was a rather good-natured debate. Each side would make fun of the other, and there were genuine disagreements on methodology, but the debates frequently considered both sides of the affair and things rarely got ugly.

Things took a turn for the worse in the late 15th and 16th centuries when the debate moved northward and entered into the universities. Unsurprisingly, the universities took this intellectual debate and turned it into a deeply personal turf war, and polarized each side of the debate. When someone like Erasmus tried to remain a moderate, he tended to be a bit resented by either side. This stage also marked the point at which textual criticism of the Bible - and the humanists' right to take part in it - came to the forefront.

Finally the issue got partially subsumed in the Reformation, with scholastics generally lumped with the Catholics and the humanists with the Reformers. Rummel emphasizes that this was a vast oversimplification, and that there were humanists and scholastics on either side. "The Reformation was fundamentally about doctrine," she writes, "not about methodology."

The book is probably slightly longer than it needs to be, and gets a bit repetitive in several chapters. Still, it's a good introduction to the debate and its participants, and it's relatively fair to both sides.

[C. A.]

Rummel writes a scholarly and riveting history of disputes between humanism and scholasticism, starting with Petrarque and ending with Nizolius.
However, on several occasions she shows a slight biais in favor of humanism over against scholasticism.

[Joel Zartman]

Hard, sometimes, to see the forest for the trees. But it is an interesting and important question, that of the relationship between Humanism and Scholasticism and then what happens as the Reformation proceeds.