Biblical Humanism and its Resources

Near the time when Lefèvre issued his version of the Epistles of St Paul with commentaries from the press of Henri Estienne at Paris in 1512, he said to the young Guillaume Farel, ‘My son, God will renew the world and you will be a witness of it.’ Ten years later, he gave as one ground for this hope that, amid the discovery of new lands and the wider diffusion of the name of Christ, ‘the knowledge of languages and especially of Greek and Latin (for it was only later that the study of Hebrew letters was reanimated by Johann Reuchlin), began to return about the time when Constantinople was captured by the enemies of Christ…’. Here is confident enthusiasm for the potent renewal, spiritual and intellectual, to be found in a clearer understanding of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. This is something new and fundamental to the cultural world of the early sixteenth century: it cannot be set down as merely a further stage in the development of humanist studies which had begun in the fourteenth century or earlier. There was a preparatio evangelica in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, for it was then, and not before, that there appeared in combination the achievements of the humanist scholar-printers; the fruits of intensive study in the grammar and syntax of the three languages; and the energy provided by the economic development and regional patriotism of the cities where bonae litterae flourished—Basle, Wittenberg, Zurich, Paris, Strassburg, Geneva.