Remembered as the official who failed to keep Luther in the Catholic fold, Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534) was a multi-faceted figure whose significance extends beyond those days in Augsburg. In the 1520s, he embarked on a labour of biblical commentary that occupied the final decade of his life, producing over a million words of translation and commentary. Offering an overview of this remarkable body of work, Michael O’Connor argues that Cajetan’s motive was the renewal of Christian living (more ‘Catholic Reform’ than ‘Counter-Reformation’), and that his method was a bold and fresh hybrid of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, correcting the Vulgate’s errors and expounding the text almost exclusively according to the literal sense.

A careful analysis of Luther’s thought in the context of his age, this volume examines Luther’s links with later medieval Thomism. The study is organized on the theme of theological anthropology—the state of humans within a theological system. In the course of the discussion, Janz studies parallels and divergences between the thought of Luther and the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, John Capreolus, Henry of Gorkum, Conrad Koellin, Karlstadt, and Cajetan. Janz suggests that at some crucial points late medieval Thomist teaching misrepresents the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. This, compounding Luther’s lack of direct knowledge of Thomas, helps to explain Luther’s opposition not only to his own nominalist teachers but to the scholastics generally. Students of late medieval and Reformation theology will find the wealth of primary citation and the detailed readings of the sources invaluable guides to the issues. Students of religion interested in contemporary problems in theological anthropology, in the natural capacity of humanity for good and evil, for example, will find the historical Christian perspective of great interest.

A study of the reception history of Thomas Aquinas's account of eucharistic sacrifice during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This book is focused on the reception history of Thomas Aquinas' account of Eucharistic sacrifice during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the sacrificial character of the Eucharist has been of interest to theologians throughout the Church's history, during the early sixteenth century renewed attention was given to this subject, in part because of disputes that arose between Reformed and Catholic theologians about the relationship between the Eucharistic liturgy and Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Does the Eucharistic presence itself have a sacrificial quality? Can aspects of the liturgy or dimensions of the moral life be considered a sacrifice, and if so in what way? The emergence of these and other new questions in Eucharistic theology at the beginning of the sixteenth century coincided with a shift within the practice of theology in universities that began to emphasize Aquinas' Summa theologiae as the standard text of theological instruction, in place of Peter Lombard's Sentences. Because of the Summa's relatively late ascendency as a text of commentary and instruction, studying the Summa's reception history involves the interpreter in a complex textuality. Although itself a product of the middle ages, as a received text the Summa is in many ways a creature of the early modern period. Interpreting the reception of this text therefore requires one to consider not only the Summa in its original environment, but the life of this same text as it was received in new interpretive contexts.

In August of 1520, Martin Luther published the first of three incendiary works, Address to the German Nobility, in which he urged secular authorities to take a strong hand in "reforming" the Roman church. In October, he published The Church Held Captive, and by December the deepest theological rationale appeared in The Freedom of a Christian. With these three books, the relatively unknown Friar Martin exploded onto the Western European literary and religious scene. These three works have been universally acknowledged as classics of the Reformation, and of the Western religious tradition in general. Though Reformation scholars have been reluctant to single out one as the most important of the three, Denis Janz proposes a bold case for The Church Held Captive. In the first entirely new translation in more than a century, Janz presents Luther's text as it hasn't been read in English before. Previous translations stifle the original text by dulling the sharpest edges of its argumentation and tame Luther by substituting euphemisms for his vulgarities. In Janz's dual language edition we see the provocative, offensive, and extreme restored. In his wide-ranging introduction, Janz offers much-needed context to clarify the role of The Church Held Captive in Luther's life and the life of the Reformation. This edition is the most reader-friendly scholarly version of Luther's classic in the English language.

In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden's immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects, to an extent remarkable for the times, the self-understanding of Judaism. Scholars celebrated for their own broad and deep learning gladly conceded Selden's superiority and conferred on him titles such as 'the glory of the English nation' (Hugo Grotius), 'Monarch in letters' (Ben Jonson), 'the chief of learned men reputed in this land' (John Milton). Although scholars have examined Selden (1584-1654) as a political theorist, legal and constitutional historian, and parliamentarian, Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi is the first book-length study of his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets and intellectuals, including Jonson, Milton, Andrew Marvell, James Harrington, Henry Stubbe, Nathanael Culverwel, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. It also explores some of the post-biblical Hebraic ideas that served as the foundation of Selden's own thought, including his identification of natural law with a set of universal divine laws of perpetual obligation pronounced by God to our first parents in paradise and after the flood to the children of Noah. Selden's discovery in the Talmud and in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind provides a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of the impact of Selden's uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship.

Almost on the eve of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the long-running debate over the respective authority of popes and councils in the Catholic Church was vigorously resumed. In this collection the editors bring together the first English translation of four major contributions to that debate. In these texts, complex arguments derived from Scripture, theology, and canon law are deployed. The issues that emerge, however, prove to have a broader significance. What is foreshadowed here is the confrontation between 'absolutism' and 'constitutionalism' which was to be a dominant theme in the politics of early-modern Europe and beyond. Even on the threshold of the twenty-first century the concerns that underlie and animate the scholastic disputations in these pages retain their force. This 1997 volume includes introductory material which elucidates the context of the debate, as well as a comprehensive bibliography.

This anthology provides a broad overview of the social history of preaching throughout Western and Central Europe, with sections devoted to genre, specific countries, and commentary on the appeal of the Reformation messages.

English devotional poets of 17c set in a wider European and Catholic context.