SOURCE: "The Clash of Humanists and Scholastics: An Approach to Pre-Reformation Controversies," in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. IV, No. 1, April, 1973, pp. 1-18.

In the essay that follows, Nauert claims that the crisis of the Protestant Reformation was grounded upon earlier, minor controversies within the Catholic Church that provide further insight into the conflict between humanism and scholasticism.

History's well-filled dustbin contains many events and persons that once attracted great attention but have since been eclipsed by greater events and greater individuals, and that languish in an historical limbo, disturbed only by an occasional doctoral candidate trying to exhume events and personages that (so far as our general comprehension of the past is concerned) might almost never have existed at all. Yet sometimes these historical non-events can cast light on the greater events which have eclipsed them.

A good case in point is the numerous controversies over religious...