Professor James Estes has contributed to Renaissance and Reformation scholarship in several important ways. He has been an indispensable mainstay of Toronto’s Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and of the Collected Works of Erasmus. His monographs on Johannes Brenz and on the political, or rather kirchenpolitisch, thought of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon reveal the complexities of the relationship between Protestant ecclesiastical polity and secular authority in sixteenth-century Germany. The opening sections of the Festschrift review Estes’s scholarship and his effectiveness as a teacher. Its seventeen essays address topics germane to his research: Brenz, Erasmus, religious controversy, and the political and social organization of Protestantism. Brenz is the subject of two separate, detailed investigations of the relationship between Brenz and Melanchthon by Heinz Scheible and Timothy Wengert as well as Hermann Ehmer’s review of the legacy into the twentieth century of Brenz’s ecclesiastical organization in Württemberg. Erasmian studies, however, are most prominent in the volume.

Two essays deserve special attention. Amy Nelson Burnett’s essay, “Erasmus’ Exegetical Contribution to the Early Eucharistic Controversy,” is to my knowledge the only study in English on Protestant readings of Erasmus’s interpretations of New Testament passages relevant to Eucharistic doctrine. Erasmus would have called them misreadings. Burnett shows why his Protestant contemporaries concluded that their sacramentarian views coincided with his. Paul Grendler has written the most comprehensive study to date of the attitudes of the Jesuits toward Erasmus. The tensions between suspicions of Erasmus’s heterodoxy and the usefulness of some of his books in the classroom did not completely dissolve when in 1575 superior general Everard Mercurian proscribed the reading of Erasmus within the Society of Jesus. Burnett and Grendler have by no means said the last word on their respective subjects, but their essays should stimulate further research on Erasmian exegesis and Jesuit intellectual culture.

Some essays in the Festschrift present expositions of little-known sixteenth-century sources. Erika Rummel offers five documents from 1535–36 that shed light on the relationship between the humanist and Reformer Wolfgang Capito and Erasmus. The fourth, a letter from Capito to the mayor of Basel, appears in published form for the first time. While the Froben press was printing Erasmus’s voluminous preaching manual, Ecclesiastes, Capito defended a passage that the mayor wanted revised. Raymond Mentzer analyzes archival manuscripts to reveal the style of leadership of Bernard Constans, the Reformed pastor in the 1570s in Camarès, a small town in southwestern France. Silvana Seidel-Menchi examines a catechetical pamphlet in Italian that, in five out of eight editions, presents Lutheran doctrine under the authorship of Erasmus. This is more than camouflage, Seidel-Menchi argues, for Erasmus’s religious ideas “prepared the vernacular reader to receive as coming from him also the message of God’s infinite mercy that constituted the nucleus of Luther’s pamphlet” (233). An exposition of Genesis (1576) by the Lutheran theologian Simon Musaeus provides, as Robert Kolb shows, a twist on Luther’s Zwei-Reich Lehre. For Musaeus the two kingdoms become three.

Four essays rehearse well-established themes in Erasmian studies. Susan Karant-Nunn uses the correspondence volumes of the Collected Works of Erasmus to remind us of Erasmus’s “careful and successful quest for sustenance” (142) in support of his scholarship. Valentina Sabestiani emphasizes Erasmus’s struggle to manage the medium of print in the face of pirated editions and the distortion of his ideas, but she needs to supply more evidence to support her argument that his association with Johann Froben “gave Erasmus some measure of control over the dangerous consequences that unauthorized and haphazard publication of his writings might have had for his reputation” (108). Scott Hendrix retraces the famous controversy between Erasmus and Luther on the role of the human will in salvation. His conclusion that “the controversy itself had little impact on their lives or on the Reformation” (270) does not apply strictly to Erasmus, who responded to Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio with two long polemics, the Hyperaspistes of 1526 and 1527. Erasmus’s clashes with Catholic critics receive attention in Charles Fantazzi’s review of the humanist’s response to Agostino Steuco.

The themes from the volume’s title are evident in the remaining essays. Mark Crane documents the gradual development of the decision by theologians at the University of Paris to attack Luther in print. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Johann Herolt and Thomas Stapleton, respectively, contributed to sermon literature for Catholic priests. Their exposition of the parable of the wheat and the tares allowed for the good and the bad to coexist, although, as Thomas Deutscher points out, Stapleton held that “the civil power could legitimately punish a heretic with death” (248). The religious policy of Duke William V of Jülich-Berg led, as Nicole Kuropka observes, to confessional coexistence in the territory. Irene Dingel’s study of four religious peace agreements in the sixteenth-century environment of religious division concludes the volume.