19 - Christian Ecumenical Efforts

Summary

The search for the truth and establishment of consensus through the exchange of viewpoints was a common means of reaching understanding in the early modern period.¹ The roots of this process lay in the way in which academic disputations were conducted in the medieval university. It followed firmly established rules, rhetorical models, and techniques. These standard forms of communication were carried over onto a nonacademic, public plane in early modern decision making and formation of public opinion. There the forms of the medieval academic disputation and judicial structures for negotiations blended with each other. The religious divisions that proceeded from the Reformation and the medieval church’s inability to reform provided the impetus for this development. The struggle for correct doctrine, which employed the form of the disputation with theses and antitheses, moved ever more out of the academic realm. That certainly did not end the culture of disputation at the university, within learned circles, however. Instead, a form of exchange, discussion, and dialogue in the vernacular took its place alongside it in the forum of the nonacademic public.