The natural habitat of intellectual history

The history of tolerance and toleration is one of the last preserves still firmly in the grasp of the intellectual historians. In their saga the sixteenth century plays a pivotal role, and in their ranks the Protestant Reformation was long the uncontested avant-garde, battling for individual liberty and public tolerance. When the Jesuit scholar Joseph Lecler published his impressive and widely hailed Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme in 1955, the confession of some key players had changed but the perimeters of the intellectual playing field remained fixed. His saga has a new beginning and a fresh ending: the curve of progress is now traced from the scholastic debate about the rights of the erring conscience to the climate of toleration in Catholic Poland. Notwithstanding his awareness of the importance of political realities, Lecler concentrated on tracts and treatises, on publishers and printers. The ensuing critique of Lecler refocused on the creative triangle Basle–London–Amsterdam and turned with vigour to the new climate of scepticism emerging in the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth. However, as in the case of Lecler and his predecessors, the debate continued to be a discourse in intellectual history.

In the English-speaking world, Henry Kamen raised his independent voice. Though granting that the Reformation brought greater religious liberty, he insisted that it did so ‘despite the reformers’ and merely ‘as a concomitant of free trade’. This intriguing observation evolves into a general thesis: in Protestant countries ‘toleration tended to increase in proportion to the decrease of dogmatic belief’.

‘In that same year of our Saviour 1477, thanks to the initiative of the renowned Count Eberhard of Württemberg and Montbéliard and his illustrious mother, Lady Mechthild, a university was established with papal approval in the city of Tübingen in the diocese of Constance, located in the ecclesiastical province of Mainz…’ With this matter-of-fact notice Johannes Vergenhans (Nauclerus) recorded the founding of the University of Tübingen in his account of world history. That the event found mention at all in a broadly conceived history of humanity may well be ascribed to local pride, while the modesty of the university's first rector may be responsible for the chronicler's silence regarding his own role in the school's planning and preparation. In contrast, Nicholas Baselius, a monk of Hirsau and the editor of Vergenhans' chronicle, concluded his supplement for the years 1500–13 with a proclamation of the rebirth of Germany; a rebirth furthered from the outset by Tübingen professors and students and transmitted in a golden chain fashioned link by link in the minds of men such as Johannes Reuchlin, Gabriel Biel, Wendelin Steinbach and Johannes Eck.

To attribute this pompous assessment of Tubingen's significance for the history of ideas to mere provincial chauvinism would be too simple, since nearly the same judgment appears in a contemporary comparative account of European university history: ‘Tübingen was one of the earliest universities to welcome first the new learning and then the Reformation. It numbers Reuchlin among its teachers and Melanchthon and Eck among its students.’

Gabriel Biel died on 7 December 1495 as prior of an experimental house of the Brethren of the Common Life, St Peter's at the Hermitage, near Tübingen. Like the university which Biel served from 1485 to ca. 1490, St Peter's had been founded on the initiative and with the healthy support of Count Eberhard im Bart of Württemberg. In a previous study we examined the late medieval system of theology and philosophy known as nominalism, especially as exemplified in the life and works of Biel, and concluded with some remarks on the catholicity of that much maligned theology. In the following pages we shall pursue the legacy of Gabriel Biel and the adherents of his via moderna as they walked and warred with the via antiqua amid the tempests that would eventually transform a catholic Europe into three separate ‘confessions’ plus an assortment of left-wing splinter groups.

The centrality of the university to any understanding of this period is as unquestionable as it is ill-defined. Early parochial chronicles portray the university itself as the mainstream, the source of a supposed ‘golden era’ in which the evils of a disintegrating society would be abolished. University erudition not only signified the growing pride of a German nation ready to compete as an equal on the playing fields of cultured Europe; it also meant escape from the dark ages, now sensed to be at their most threatening.

There is probably no phase of medieval intellectual life that could not be portrayed as having reassessed and redigested the Augustinian legacy. Yet, in the middle of the fourteenth century we encounter a novel appropriation of that heritage which permitted Augustine to speak not merely as one of the four church fathers but also as an eminent gospel exegete. In seeking a proper understanding of this development, researchers have already encountered considerable difficulties. An ‘Augustinian school’ has been christened amid a mixture of enthusiasm and conviction but the subsequent explorations have been marred by question-marks and outright gaps in the documentary log. The final resolution of key problems must await intensive source study based on new and reliable editions equipped to deal critically with questions of textual transmission.

Whereas the term ‘schola moderna Augustiniana’ has quite properly entered the historian's vocabulary to stay, the interpretation of the unmistakable references to an ‘Augustinian school’ rests for the present on working hypotheses. And answers to the questions surrounding this ‘Augustinian school’ must be pursued in conjunction with the study of the transmission and reception of the Augustinian corpus both within and without the Augustinian order. In this regard the fourteenth century once more constitutes a historical watershed.

The first pebbles were cast into the pond by the nearly simultaneous beginnings of an academic Augustinianism mirrored in the writings of Thomas Bradwardine (†l349) and Gregory of Rimini (†l358); an Augustinianism linked in a manner as yet unexplained with English proto-humanism and early Italian humanism respectively.

Whateverthe influence of a historiographically harried Tübingen humanism upon the European scene, by any assessment it shaped the university's atmosphere between 1477 and 1516 in a peripheral manner at best. Elsewhere on the continent, humanism had allied itself by 1500 with two and occasionally with all three of the ‘biblical languages’, and ‘eloquence’ had long since ceased to mean mere elegance or nimble-tongued Latinity. Against this background the contemporary adulatory hymns addressed to Tubingen's provincial poeta, Heinrich Bebel, must be savoured with a grain of salt. They can best be admitted, if not as testimonium paupertatis, then as testimonium abundantiae: as witnesses to that epoch's passion for praise and praising.

On the other hand, the ‘academy of Thomas Anshelm’ flourished intermittently alongside the university only to disintegrate in the wake of Anshelm's flight to Hagenau in the summer of 1516. It is true that Christopher Scheurl, for a long time leader of the Nuremberg humanist circle, could report nearly three years later to Melanchthon in Wittenberg about a Frankfurt meeting of Melanchthon's former Tübingen colleagues and disciples. But such passing mention cannot disguise the fact that Melanchthon never managed to found a Tübingen sodality comparable to those in the university towns of Heidelberg, Erfurt or Vienna or to the sodalitas Augustana or Staupitziana in the bustling commercial centres of Augsburg and Nuremberg.

Tübingen occupies at best a modest niche in the as yet little-studied history of this fascinating preliminary form of the later scientific academies.

The revolt of the ‘new masters’ produced more than mere consternation on the part of the old. Johannes Fabri was sufficiently impressed by the potential of a Christian assembly such as he had experienced in Zürich to fall back on a variation long legitimate in church law, the diocesan synod, as a weapon against the threatened erosion of the authority of the church of Rome. The deliberations of an assembly of the bishops of the south German dioceses seemed most likely to prove effective against the mounting heresy. We do know that the bishops of Constance, Augsburg and Strassburg assembled in Tübingen in May 1523, although the report of this session gives no further details.

The plan to convene the clergy of various areas may have been discussed there. Fabri reported to the Constance cathedral chapter on 30 July 1523 concerning this proposal. He related that he had summoned the parish clergy of all Württemberg to Tubingen and Esslingen and impressed the provisions of the Edict of Worms and the decree of the Diet of Nuremberg on those assembled. Represented by a committee, the Württemberg clergy accepted the mandates against the Lutheran heresy ‘submissively and with good will’, reporting that only a few within their ranks were ‘followers of the Lutheran sect’. At the same time they considered assistance by the authorities in suppressing the ‘sectarians’ to be most desirable.