That Czech nationalism was the mainspring of the Hussite movement has long been an article of faith among those concerning themselves with the history of that protean wave of reform which swept over Central Europe a full century before the Protestant Reformation. It is not the intent of this paper to quarrel with this fundamental assumption. The assumption has, however, a corollary, namely that because the Hussites were prima facie Czech nationalists and that because this nationalism was patently anti-German, Hussitism could not by definition and consequently did not take root in the Germanic lands bordering upon Bohemia. An attempt will be made here to examine this a priori position in the light of some empirical researches into the history of the Lands of the Austrian Crown in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Scholarly opinion is generally agreed that the order of Cluny reached its apogee during the abbacy of St. Hugh, who ruled from 1049 to 1109, and began its decline as a result of the misrule of his successor, Pontius of Melgueil, abbot from 1109 to 1122. The rule of Pontius' successor, Peter the Venerable (1122–1157), is generally regarded as an attempt to realize two aims: justification of Cluniac monasticism before the criticism of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and reparation of the damage done to the spiritual life at Cluny by Pontius. It is the purpose of this article to subject the accepted view of Pontius' career to scrutiny and to present an alternative interpretation of the known facts. This alternative view will be based upon the demonstration that the available evidence concerning Pontius' disgrace and condemnation can be properly understood only if it is set into the context of events which transpired in the Roman Curia from 1112 to 1130.3

At the end of the Middle Ages, the moral prestige of the old papal church was severely shaken in all the countries of Europe. Open criticism of its moral shortcomings and its organizational defects had been going on for centuries. To the diverse splinter-movements of heretical sects (which were never wholly suppressed) had been recently added the great reform movements of the Wyclifites and the Hussites. But even they had brought about no lasting and widespread upheaval. Ultimately the old hierarchy had always prevailed. Why then did the Germans, a people slow to be aroused, fond of order, and faithful to the church, take it upon themselves to carry out the most prodigious revolution in the church? And why did only their revolt against the papal church have such vast and enduring consequences?

From the end of 1494 to the spring of 1498 Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara was a prophet with honor in his adopted country. The Florentines believed in his divine mandate and in his message that the French invader, Charles VIII, was the instrument of God, come to punish the corrupt Church and the sinful Italians and to institute a universal reform. Believing, as he told them, that Florence was divinely chosen to lead the way, the Florentines gave Savonarola the opportunity—rare for prophets— of translating his vision into a practical program. From the pulpit Savonarola taught the first city of the Renaissance how to become the first city of the New Age. Florence, reformed by the friar and his followers, was to be the center from which the spiritual light would illuminate the world.

It appears to me that the strength of Professor Weinstein's inquiry is predicated upon the concreteness of his approach and his unwillingness to take refuge in those abstractions which are not infrequently found in the realm of Medieval and Renaissance studies. Therefore, the hypothesis that he advances stems from data, rather than from an unverifiable assumption about the nature of man or of thought in the Quattrocento. Another quality which is evident in his paper is his commitment to a type of research which is essentially an adventure. This figure of speech is intended to suggest that he is trying to isolate and then delineate a problem. In this instance, the unknown quantity is the boundary line that separates the historical from the a-historical. As a result of his search, he is compelled to modify the interpretations of Garin and Cantimori. His explanation is based upon the decisive role that historical circumstance and Florentine tradition (possibly two facets of a single entity) played in forging the prophetic message of Savonarola. Therefore, he locates the center of gravity of the Dominican's teachings “in tempore,” rather than in the a-historical “world of ideas.” For Professor Weinstein, the boundaries of Savonarola's prophecies are generated by “the fervor of daily events.” Not only does this view appear to be valid, for the reasons advanced by the speaker, but there are also factors that are peripheral to his central argument which lend it further authenticity.

The approaching four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the 1559 edition of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion has aroused in Spanish-speaking circles a desire to make more generally available the translation made by Cipriano de Valera in 1597. This labor of love has been undertaken by Professor B. Foster Stockwell in Buenos Aires and his facsimile reproduction of the Spanish translation of the Institutes is being published by La Aurora press.

It seems to me that much can be learned by comparative studies of the histories of the several European countries, and that this is particularly true of their political histories during the sixteenth century. A stimulating start in this direction was made by H. G. Koenigsberger in an article in The Journal of Modern History, titled “The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century.” I would like to propose a further exploration of some of the interesting leads presented by Mr. Koenigsberger. For the present, however, I shall avoid attempting to survey the whole field he opens up for us. I shall limit myself to a study of the revolutionary Calvinist parties, and devote most of my attention to the period of their formation.

Of the many lost causes in history, one of the most dramatic was the struggle for power and religious rights waged by the French Huguenots in the sixteenth century; and, as lost causes are wont to do, this one inspired poets, writers, musicians and artists for at least two centuries to depict in graphic detail the courageous men who led a zealous minority through miraculous victories, but finally into inevitable defeat. Less dramatic than the heroic period of Huguenot history, and therefore neglected by poets, and also by historians, but no less important—and more significant in the story of the development of religious toleration—is the struggle of the French Protestants in the eighteenth century to secure civil and religious rights.

In the early years of the eighteenth century the fear of French power fused into alliance nations and individuals who under other circumstances would have stood suspiciously apart. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713) the Protestant Circle of Princes fought for and with a Roman Catholic emperor; England recognized a would-be king of Spain, Charles III, and repudiated the would-be king of England, James III; Dutchmen and Englishmen accepted one another's aid, gracelessly, but to some purpose. Monarchs at the time, and historians later on, insisted that the war was not one of religion; nevertheless, a vast number of men then living viewed it as such.

The greatest possibility for establishing concord between Protestantism and Rome during the Reformation occurred during the colloquy of Ratisbon of 1541. Along with Charles V one of the chief actors in the attempt to bring about such a concerd at the diet and its accompanying theological colloquy was Cardinal Contarini. He had been appointed papal legate by Paul III. Although Contarini's theological position on the question of justification was of crucial importance, the conflicting political forces represented at Ratisbon also helped to delineate the role he played there and its tragic denouement. In fact religious and political interests were so interwoven at Ratisbon that it is often hard to tell which came first. Whichever interests came first at any particular point, Contarini was, however, well equipped to deal with them, for he was both an experienced diplomat and a learned theologian.

Some of the comparative ideas that Mr. Kingdon has dealt with in the foregoing article are elaborations of views that he suggested in his recent monograph, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion, 1555–1563. In a recent review of this book by Sir John Neale the author is praised for claiming that the “highly-organized subversive conspiracy from Geneva,” which was so important in the French wars of religion, “has a bearing on Dutch and English, not to mention Scottish, history.” What is more, Neale indicates that he “certainly finds it illuminating for an appreciation of the Puritan Classical movement in Elizabethan history.” It might be worth-while, therefore, to extend the discussion by briefly examining Mr. Kingdon's criteria for “revolutionary Calvinist parties” in connection with England in the age of Elizabeth and, later, with the period of the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Those criteria include a synodical organization, noble leadership, and a resistance theory.

Anabaptism was a religious movement of the little people of village and town, affecting in the end almost the whole area of the Germanic dialects from the Tyrol to Flanders, from Alsace to Prussia. Anabaptism, for all its, or perhaps precisely because of its, dissociation from principality and privilege, was more exclusively a Germanic movement than even Lutheranism; for the latter could at least go beyond the Germanic dialects to express itself in a Scandinavian or Slavic tongue; and, of course, Anabaptism was far less international than the Reformed movement. The linguistic containment of Anabaptism is all the more remarkable for the reason that in principle Anabaptism was much more world-minded and mission-minded—because of the seriousness with which it took the great commission— than any variety of the Magisterial Reformation. Yet when it moved beyond the deeply sinused speech frontier to the East, for example, it did so in ethnically and linguistically closed colonies in Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere. Documents from the pens of Anabaptists in French, a Scandinavian tongue, Polish, Czech, or Italian, surviving from the Reformation Era, could be held between two fingers; while the surviving Anabaptist writings in the international language of the Humanists and the Reformers are even fewer. (In contrast, a good deal of the surviving literary corpus of the Spiritualists like Schwenckfeld and especially of the Evangelical Rationalists is in Latin, as well as in the Romance and Slavic tongues and Hungarian.) The little people of Anabaptism were not without recruits and even leadership from former priests and monks with their Latin and an occasional patrician with his Humanist training, but the lingua franca of Anabaptism was German, although progressive modification in idiom was necessary as the radical evangelical gospel was proclaimed by preacher or epistle from North to South.

In a current issue of The Library of Christian Classics1 the present reporter distinguished between a “radical Reformation” and the “magisterial Reformation” of the normative Protestant Reformers, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, and their associates. Common to all groupings within this Radical Reformation was the unwillingness to depend upon or tarry for the magistracy to reform the Church in root and branch, be the magistrate emperor, king, prince, or collectively the town council.

I should like to call attention once again to the old home truth that ideas, while they may not be completely independent of their environment, are still possessed of a heredity of their own that can and often does transform the material circumstances of man and affect the course of history. the course of history. I have chosen for purposes of illustration the covenant or federal theological conception, which worked a powerful influence in Scottish society during the early decades of the seventeenth century and which, in turn, was peculiarly influenced and reshaped by that society until it evolved into a symbol for the revolution which terminated in the overthrow of the monarchy of Charles I. In brief, it is my conviction that this rebellion against Charles and his government was primarily and mainly, though not solely, the result of a religious ferment that had been brewing for forty years.

It has been observed that in America the preachers act like politicians and the politicians talk like preachers. Recent developments in American politics have given renewed support to this observation. There are a number of possible explanations as to why the American public is so concerned, at this particular time in history, to appear as a godly people and nation. However, the question that immediately presents itself to the historian is why the American public so quickly responds to the religious motif in political life.

Just after the turn of the nineteenth century, the Rev. Samuel Miller, then a Presbyterian minister in New York but soon to become a professor of ecclesiastical history at the newly-founded Princeton Theological Seminary, published his ambitious Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century. He remarks in due course that “it would be improper to pass in silence the celebrated IMMANUEL KANT, Professor at Koeningsberg, in Prussia.” He then goes on to comment on the “extravagant panegyrics” of Kant's disciples, but having heard “that the acutest understanding cannot tolerably comprehend [this profound and extensive system] by less than a twelve-month's study,” he satisfied himself with a brief second-hand report. The incident might be considered an accurate commentary on the state of “Continental influence on American Christian thought” in 1803.

It has become a truism of historical thought that some degree or kind of positive relationship exists between the ideology of Protestantism and the psychology of early capitalists. Statements of the nature of this relationship have varied, however, and have been often based upon inadequate sampling of the relevant literature or inexact analysis of Protestant social theory.