The intellectual origins of the European Reformation (review)

Short notices 309 written and lucid vantage point from which to view a very broad, very difficult, and very complex field. Mark Pegg Department of History Princeton University McGrath, Alister, The intellectual origins of the European Reformation, Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Blackwell, 1993; rpt; paper; pp. viii, 223; R.R.P. AUS$45.00. [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. The paperback edition of Alister McGrath's Intellectual origins, first published in 1987, should be most welcome by scholars and teachers of Reformation history. While it is a more complex and sophisticated work than McGrath's earlier Reformation thought (1988), Intellectual origins shares many of the virtues of that earlier volume. McGrath writes with an almost preternatural clarity, and has a knack for succincdy and precisely summarizing complex theological arguments and positions. Reformation thought was an introductory student text. This latest book is not. Nonetheless, it is a work that should be accessible to advanced undergraduates. McGrath begins by telling us that the wrong way to approach his subject is by searching for the 'forerunners of the Reformation'. Instead, it, is necessary to relate the whole complex of Reformation ideas to the whole complex of late-medieval and Renaissance ideas. Early chapters in the book therefore examine the continuities and discontinuities between Reformation thought and its intellectual antecedents: scholastic theology and Renaissance humanism. In later chapters, McGrath focuses on 'sources and methods', searching for the origins of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, of Protestant Biblical hermeneutics, and of the Protestant attitudes to patristic authority. A final chapter oudines the continuing influence of Renaissance methodological concerns on later sixteenth-century Reformed Protestantism. McGrath's general conclusions, that the Lutheran, Wittenberg Reformation can be seen primarily as a development within late medieval scholasticism, while the Zwinglian-Reformed Reformation had its roots more in Renaissance humanism, are interesting. They are, perhaps, valuable above all for the definitional precision that enables McGntth to ajnve « them. But much more valuable is the sheer sophistication of McGrath s way of doing things. H e rightly emphasizes the heterogeneity not only of 310 Short notices scholasticism and humanism, but also of the Reformation itself. W e are warned of the danger that lies in dunking diat die Reformation can be identified with any single doctrine or set of doctrines. Thus the contrast between the Lutheran and Reformed Reformations is here drawn very sharply, something that enables McGrath to relate diem to very different intellectual contexts. Finally, sophistication is achieved above all by the fact that McGrath really does mean 'origins' and not 'causes'. He is well aware that out of the complexities of late-medieval and Renaissance religion many things could have emerged and did so. To talk of causes would be to oversimplify, to render trite and misleading die connections between the Reformation and its pasts. 'The quest for die intellectual origins of the Reformation thus concerns not die identification of a single factor, nor even a group of factors, which may be said to have caused the movement, but rather concerns the unfolding of a complex matrix of creatively interacting intellectual currents' (p. 197). Intellectual origins harmonizes with much recent Reformation scholarship that stresses botii the intellectual and spiritual vitality of late medieval religion and the continuities between medieval and Reformation religion. It deserves a wide readership. From it we can gain much insight into what is involved in constructing a truly historical understanding of Reformation history, free from die confessional blinkers of the past. Glenn Burgess Department of History University of Canterbury Terry, Patricia, trans., The honeysuckle and the hazel tree: medieval st of men and women, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press,. 1995; cloth and paper; pp. x, 281; R.R.P. US$35.00 (cloth), $13.00 (paper) This book contains translations into English verse of eight well-known medieval French poems about love: the tale of Philomena attributed to Chrehen de Troyes,fivelays of Marie de France (The nightingale, The two lovers, Honeysuckle, Lanval, and Eliduc), Jean Renart's lay The reflection, and the anonymous tale of The chatelaine of Vergi. A previous collection by Terry, Lays of courtly love (1963), contained earlier versions of diese translations, except for...