Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany

This analysis of the intellectual life of German universities in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries demonstrates that humanist-scholastic relations were not the titanic struggles depicted in the humanists’ own arguments or the many modern chronicles. Eschewing neat but misleading dichotomies, the author describes the German humanists’ critique of scholasticism from the 1450s to the 1510s and the scholastics’ response. He traces the reception of humanists in Germany’s universities, including their place in the academic corporation, the “opposition” they faced, and the pace of humanist curriculum reforms, and he places the famous Reuchlin affair and other intellectual feuds in the context of humanist-scholastic relations.
After 1500 the calls of the early humanists for the reform of Latin grammar instruction and the teaching of the studia humanitatis gave way to more encompassing attacks on scholastic theology and the philolsophical offerings of the arts course. The study draws on a wide variety of sources to describe both the gradual emergence of Renaissance humanism after 1450 and its rapid triumph after 1500.
James H. Overfield is Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont, Burlington.

Originally published in 1985.

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