SOURCE: "Humanism and the Reformation," in Transition and Revolution: Problems and Issues of European Renaissance and Reformation History, edited by Robert M. Kingdon, Burgess Publishing Company, 1974, pp. 153-67.

In the following essay, Spitz examines the historical link between humanism, a cultural movement that flourished in the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation.

The intense scholarly debate over historical periodization and the concept of the Renaissance, the "most intractable child of historiography," has resulted in a better understanding of the true nature of the Renaissance and of its relation to the Middle Ages which preceded it. The relation of the Renaissance to the age of the Reformation which followed it, however, has received less careful scrutiny and is less well understood than the importance of the question warrants.

The discussion of this problem has progressed very little beyond the level of the classic exchange between the great German scholars Wilhelm...