Since H. L. Gray questioned the view that “Italian learning languished” between the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1447 and 1488 when John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas Linacre visited Italy, several scholars have attempted to show the nature of the new learning fostered in England by such intermediaries as Robert Flemmyng, William Selling, and John Free, among others. Roberto Weiss has investigated more thoroughly than anyone else the interest of these Englishmen in the new learning during that interval. His book brings the narrative to 1485, a time which for him marks the beginning of genuine English humanism.While there is no doubt that Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre were leaders of the avant garde of humanism or that Selling, Flemmying, and Free helped bridge the gap between 1447 and 1488, some less well-known men played an important part in the advance of the new learning.

The question concerning the authorship of A Brief and Clear Confession of the Christian Faith, ascribed to John Hooper, is raised in the only extensive work on Hooper, an unpublished dissertation written at the University of Zurich by W. M. S. West. West covers certain intrinsic difficulties involved in ascribing this work to Hooper and finds that this work

The sixteenth century was a crucial period in the history of French monasticism. In addition to the causes of a general decline throughout Europe, in France two peculiar developments precipitated a nearly fatal collapse of monastic establishments. One was the commendatory system that spread over the whole country following the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Royally appointed commendatory abbots, whose only concern was the collection of their share of monastic income, contributed much to the moral and material decline of the institutions supposedly under their care. The other and even more devastating calamity was the series of religious and civil wars during the second half of the century that resulted in the pillage and partial or total destruction of hundreds of monasteries.

In a day when every theological curriculum is under fire and every presupposition of theological education is being questioned, there is both comfort and challenge in the discovery that things have been like that for a long time. Unfortunately, most histories of nineteenthcentury theology treat the great minds of that era in a way that emphasizes abstract relationships rather than concrete situations. Schleiermacher, Baur, Ritschl and the rest often seem to swim in a theological firmament far removed from the knotty problems of curriculum, faculty freedom, and social responsibility which beset contemporary theologians.

The American Colonization Society was organized in 1816 for the purpose of colonizing the free Negroes of the United States. After a series of difficulties, the society, in 1821, sent to Liberia Lott Cary who provided leadership and direction in this colony until his premature death in 1828. Advocates of African colonization were motivated by various and sometimes divergent ideals. One was the belief that colonization of the American free Negro in Africa would be a means of spreading Christianity and civilization to that continent. Although Cary was not always enthusiastic about the American Colonization Society and its policies, it never sent anyone to Liberia who more nearly fulfilled this ideal. By the time of his death the Liberian colony was firmly planted.

The flowering of foreign missions in nineteenth-century America owed so much to evangelical Protestantism in Europe, that historians looking for uniquely American features in missionary enterprises have had very little to go on. Historians who have attempted to identify the uniqueness of American missions have generally seized upon the links between the missionary spirit and ideas of manifest destiny. Ralph Gabriel taught a generation of historians to see American missions as one aspect of a “mission of America” with ramifications that went far beyond preaching to the heathen. Perry Miller traced the roots of the mission of America to the Plymouth Colony itself and rewrote the history of American development in terms of an “perrand into the wilderness.” Nineteenth-century foreign missions were for Miller the most typical expression of national self-consciousness.

Several essayists in a recent issue of Daedalus noted with regret the absence of utopian thought among twentieth-century intellectuals, a lack they held to be detrimental to progress. The tragic events of the century, compounded by disenchantment with the poor taste and judgment of the supposedly liberated masses, have turned writers to gloomy prophecies of totalitarian and science-ridden worlds of the f uture. Dystopia rather than utopia is ascendant, they claim.1

In the era between the Civil War and the Depression the mythical character called the “American Mind” was troubled. All was well during the day when prosperity and success faced him at every turn, but at night he would sometimes dream of his childhood and awake feeling strangely uneasy. His analyst explained that this tension was the product of latent guilt feelings and suggested for therapy that he read himself to sleep with recent studies of the oppressive effects of Puritanism on young national minds. Turning to these works, the “American Mind” found that the analyst had been quite right. The source of the guilt feelings, he discovered, was an irrational phase of his development called the Reformation. This phase had been dominant when he lived in New England (he since had moved to the Midwest), but he was assured that the latest scholarship had discovered its influence to be harsh, grotesque, superstitious, narrowminded, illiberal, and worst of all intolerant.1 The problem was, one expert informed him, that this era “was unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance.” Another observed that the Reformation attitudes were a “subtle poison” flowing thorugh the veins of the entire social organism. Still another implied that the “splendor of the Renaissance” had been delayed three hundred years by Reformation intolerance. Convinced that the open-mindedness of the Renaissance was healthier than the irrational bigotry of the Reformation, the “American Mind” of this era began to feel easier about his past. He resolved to tolerate everyone, except of course his more conservative enemies whom he damned as “Puritan.”