Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation (review)

In the years soon after Martin Luther burst onto the international scene in 1517, the influence of his friend and associate Philip Melanchthon became also profound in England, as elsewhere in Europe. Noted for his erudition in the learned tongues — his relative, the great classical scholar Johannes Reuchlin, bestowed Melanchthon on him as the Greek translation of his birth-name Schwartzerd, or "black earth" — Melanchthon's best known work was the Loci theologici. Building on Erasmus's suggestion that lists of loci communes be built from reading material, Melanchthon raised the art to exquisite new heights of importance, when he applied the authority of scripture to the biblical text itself. He began first with his notes from the lectures he delivered at the University of Wittenberg. Eventually, he dealt with some of the most vital of the Christian tenets, including the nature of grace, the means of salvation, and the sacraments. He was among the theologians who worked on the Augsburg Confession in 1530, and he contributed to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Over many years, Melanchthon sent a torrent of words to the post and the printing press. The nineteenth-century edition of his collected works runs to twenty-eight tomes in the Corpus Reformatorum, and volume 7 of his Briefwechsel — a model of painstaking scholarship — appeared in 2006, bringing his correspondence, so far, up to the year 1537. Melanchthon continued to edit and refine the Loci until shortly before his death in 1560. The Loci theologici was a great landmark that has shaped the Protestant tradition.

In England by 1524, Melanchthon's opinions were almost as notorious as Luther's. At Cambridge, Hugh Latimer preached against his opinions that year, not long before he was persuaded by Thomas Bilney to incline his ear toward what Melanchthon and other evangelicals meant. Fresh work on Melanchthon's influence in England is welcome, though John Schofield's Philip Melanchthon and the English Reformation drastically oversimplifies the nature of events and the intentions of those who were involved. Recent work by Patrick Collinson, Brian Cummings, Eamon Duffy, Felicity Heal, Eric Ives, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Andrew Pettegree, and J. J. Scarisbrick, to name only a few, have established many of the essential markers for the Reformation: in thought and action, in Europe generally, and for England under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I.

This is a well-trodden field, so it comes as something of a surprise to read here that it is an "often-overlooked aspect of Henry's divorce crisis" that the king "was also receiving advice on religion from theologians across Europe," and that only "gradually" did Henry become accustomed to making up his own mind on theological matters (59). Overlooked? Is this really the case? On the contrary, this topic has been one of the most assiduously studied and best-documented aspects of sixteenth-century English history. Can the political dimensions of the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn be summarized so simply as to suggest that she was safe as long as she was "Henry's true love" (68)? Many recent studies have demonstrated how difficult and contested doctrinal and political change in England actually was, so it is not convincing here when the author ascribes the Reformation mainly to Thomas Cromwell, or to the king, as in the making of the Act of the Six Articles of 1539: "But this was Henry's article, Henry's act, and Henry's theology" (120). If that was the case, then much more should have been made of Melanchthon's stunning rebukes to Henry in protest of the Six Articles — an international sensation at the time whose ramifications in England are still not completely understood.

Terminology causes Schofield difficulties. In his magisterial biography of Henry VIII, Scarisbrick suggests that historians could not accurately refer to Catholicism without the pope, for real movement away from traditional orthodoxy had been made during Henry's reign...