Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples fell under the suspicious attention of the Sorbonne in 1514 when he was implicated in the defense of Johannes Reuchlin before that body. Under the assiduous promotion of its Syndic, Natalis Beda, suspicion was soon transformed into an overt attack on Lefèvre's orthodoxy. In 1520 a turning point was reached. Whereas, before, he had been attacked because of deviations arising chiefly out of his own individual approach to the Bible, in this new stage he was to be charged with Lutheranism. It is the purpose of this article to examine these later charges, the grounds alleged in justifying them, and how they came to be preferred. It will be necessary at the same time to examine, or rather reexamine, the words of Lefèvre which evoked them.

Now that the tremendous influence of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) upon natural philosophy and religious thought has come to be more fully appreciated, the question of Boehme's relation to Luther's theology has come once again to be the subject of a lively scholarly discussion. This study proposes to compare the position of Luther and Boehme on certain key theological concepts and propositions as they are denned in the Genesis commentaries of the two men. This limited and concrete study may shed light upon the larger question of the relation of their theologies as a whole and the nature of the dependence of Boehme on Luther as mediated by seventeenth-century orthodoxy.

In his early years, Martin Luther read and critically annotated the sermons of the German mystical theologian, Johannes Tauler O.P. (*1360). This occurred between early 1515 and mid-1516—a crucial if not the most critical period in the development of the young Luther. The copy of Tauler's sermons used by Luther was the personal copy of his friend Johannes Lang. It was published by Hannsen Otmar in Augsburg in 1508.