Content area
Full text
Erika Ruin niel. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance & Reformation. Harvard UP, 1995, 249 pp., ISBN 0-674-42250-3, $45, £28.50
Best known for her work on Erasmus, Erika Rummel has contributed a significant new interpretation concerning the relationship between humanism and scholasticism. She views the conflicts of the humanists and scholastics over rhetoric and dialectic as a replaying of the ancient Platonic dispute over rhetoric and philosophy. There was, however, a major difference in the playing out of this dispute during the Renaissance and Reformation : the new context of Christian theology and of Church authority. Rummel treats the humanist-scholastic debate as a complex and evolving historical process that spanned some 200 years, an increasingly intense and heated dispute that involved several shifts or permutations. This ongoing "debate" developed first in late fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italy, moved to the north during the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and culminated in the bitter theological disputes of the Reformation.
The author is very critical of recent revisionists, including Lewis Spitz, Winfried Trusen, and especially James Overfield, all of whom, in her view, have underestimated the degree of conflict between the humanists and scholastics. These historians, she states, have inappropriately extended the views of Paul Oskar Kristeller, who was attempting to counter the notion that humanism was another philosophy succeeding that of scholasticism. The recent tendency of those historians to emphasize a certain peaceful co-existence among humanists and scholastics in the north may be the result, she suggests, of an unwarranted transposition of the earlier Renaissance phase of the debate, which was unfocused and latitudinarian, into the later northern phases of the dispute, which were marked by real conflicts in theology and methodology. She cites the work of Laetitia Boehm and Charles Xauert as pointing in the right direction : there was both an Italian and a German phase, along with much evidence of the humanists' distaste of scholasticism. At the same time, Rummel avoids the extreme position of Ludwig Geiger, D.F. Strauss, and other older historians who had overly exaggerated the conflict between humanism and scholasticism - the position that Overfield was trying to correct. Rather she takes a middle stand between the older (mainly nineteenth-century) and recent revisionist historiography by calling for a more nuanced,...