This chapter offers a brief survey of general and narrow senses of “nominalism” in historical writing. It argues that nominalism should be strictly understood as a subcategory within the larger context of a style of argument best characterized as “terminism,” an approach that dominated the Liberal Arts in late medieval schools. It explains why terminism was more inclusive of a variety of doctrines than nominalism in its proper sense. It concludes by considering early reactions to Ockham.

This concluding chapter describes the inevitability of ambiguity among everyone affected by the Reformation. It reviews historiographical trends of research since the 1970s in intellectual and social history. Comparing these trends to the benefits and shortcomings of the “confessionalization thesis,” it argues for reconsideration of the idea of third forces, adapting a concept suggested by the Austrian medievalist and public intellectual Friedrich Heer and the French Renaissance historian Thierry Wanegffelen. It finally explains how the power of third forces describes the specific hybridity of the Reformation.

This chapter examines the extraordinary case of Ruprecht von Mosheim, author of a neglected proposal to reject papal and Lutheran arguments in favor of the middle position of "a third German." Discussed and dismissed by Johannes Eck, the Archduke Ferdinand, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and other reformers, Mosheim reflects uncertainties that also gripped so-called Erasmians, such as Nikolaus Ellenbog.

Ockham is often described as the origin of the via moderna, “a current way” in competition with the via antiqua, “an old way.” These terms are often used to structure late medieval intellectual history around a new “nominalism” and a reactionary “realism.” But they are misleading. The “conflict of the ways” (Wegestreit in German historiography) only took definite shape two generations after Ockham’s death. It was prompted not by “nominalism” but by an aggressive, “hyper-realism” taught by John Wyclif. Another related but separate and equally important tension was also at play, between the analytical pedagogy encouraged by a prevalent terminism and a more expository commentary style. This changes the way we must see the force of the “conflict of the ways” in intellectual life. It becomes an illustration of a central quality in all knowledge production: the ludic culture of the schools. Luther, rather than being a nominalist, provides eloquent testimony to scholastic playfulness, an essential quality of a long, hybrid Reformation.

This chapter views the relationship of humanism to medieval school traditions through the prism of Erasmus, the most outspoken and influential critic of the schools among those who embraced the “new learning” in the early sixteenth century. On close examination, the case of Erasmus suggests a less dichotomous view of intellectual change than polemical rhetoric can imply. The choice between humanism and scholasticism was not absolute. Erasmus illustrates how the new learning aggregated itself to old methods and traditions in theology, without necessarily replacing them.

Allegory is an undeniably central feature of Renaissance literature. But it is often reduced to a Catholic or an anti-Catholic cliché. Too often, the entanglement of Catholic and Protestant interpretation and the survival of theological interests in biblical study are quickly downplayed. To document the continued importance of figurative reading in early-modern bible scholarship, this chapter views allegory broadly, as a manner of figurative reading evident in the way theologians practiced interpretation. It draws widely from a great variety of materials, roaming across the vast landscape of post-Reformation bible scholarship to suggest that the trouble with allegory was this: not that allegory exists, but that it must exist, it could never be overcome, and its division from the literal always remained fluid and tenuous. Biblical allegory becomes an expression of yet another “third force” in early modern religion, because the bible evaded a simple assertion of literalism and because it eluded confessional boundaries among the very people who helped create and police them.

Barbara von Fuchstein struggled to recover property lost to her cousin Ulrich Schweikert during the Peasants’ War. Her tenacity in the sequel to armed conflict illustrates the responses of ordinary lay women to the challenges posed by Reformation events. She shows the capacity of a lay woman to navigate a system of property transfer that privileged men, after she was swept into the ferment of German lay spiritualities appearing in the mid-1520s. And she illustrates the flux of religious identities at ground level in the early Reformation, among people whose interest in religious debate was secondary to, perhaps inseparable from, family business. If we wish to understand the Reformation not only among its principal protagonists, who were in most instances clerical partisans in the debate over Luther and the papacy, the saints, and the Mass, but also among ordinary people, we must pay close attention to people like Barbara, who were deeply affected by the Luther affair without choosing to participate in it.

Death investigation was a central aspect of forensic medicine. However, doctors struggled with uncertainty in defining and evaluating signs of death, at the same time as popular fears of premature burial abounded. Moreover, they faced considerable difficulties in distinguishing between homicides, suicides, and natural or accidental deaths and in determining the cause of death. Anxiety about insufficiently trained and incompetent practitioners who performed medicolegal duties that exceeded the limits of their knowledge and skills fueled demands for medicolegal reform. As medicolegal expertise played a more and more decisive role in criminal investigations and prosecutions, flawed forensic expertise became an increasingly salient problem that sparked ongoing debates about possible structural solutions.