Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), whose major writings were produced during the second quarter of the fifteenth century, is one of the most disputed figures among the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. His character and work were of such a nature that he aroused the admiration or antipathy of scholars from the beginning of his literary activities to the present day. It is largely because he dared to put into writing the critical ideas entertained, but seldom published, by many of his contemporaries, that he has ever since been considered either a hero or a scoundrel.

Calvinism as an historical movement was exceedingly complex. It was a phenomenon in which theology, economic theory, political philosophy, and a general cultural orientation were inextricably mixed and applied in an intense effort to refashion society into a Holy Commonwealth. In attempting to interpret this movement, as Sidney E. Mead has pointed out, “one is always in danger either of trying to do complete justice to the complexity and landing in a confusing incoherence and lack of clarity, or of seizing upon one interpretative theme in the interest of clarity and landing in over-simplification.” Most of the discussions of Calvinism, in any or all of its various manifestations, have avoided the first alternative—falling into the morass of confusion and incoherence—but many have succumbed to the second—an over-simplification that is definitely misleading.

Calvin's political interests had a beginning in his humanistic studies, before his conversion, or commitment to Protestantism. His Commentary on Seneca's De Clementia appeared April 4, 1532. The date of his conversion is much disputed, but there is fairly good evidence for placing it almost exactly two years later, about the time of his visit to Lefèvre in April, 1534. His own statements here must be given more weight than those made by Beza after Calvin's death. If, as is probable, he was inwardly half convinced of the Protestant position in 1532, he was, nonetheless, still clinging tenaciously—in his own words “obstinately devoted (adonné)”—to the papacy and had apparently not definitely discarded any of his traditional assumptions with respect to religion.

In December 1641 the Puritan preachers petitioned Parliament to establish regular monthly fast days with prayer and preaching and to call a synod of divines in order to reconstitute the Church. Parliament approved the first proposal at once but delayed adopting the second until a year and a half later. By that time war had begun with the King but, contrary to the assurances put forth by the preachers, the Lord had so far withheld victory from his professed servants, and in June 1643, a royalist plot was exposed in London only just in time to save Parliament from being overthrown by violence. Moved by this with sermons at St. Margaret's by Stephen Marshall and Obadiah Sedgwich and then at last voted to call the long desired Assembly of Divines. This body convened at Westminster on July 1, and a special fast day in honor of the event was held a week later with sermons by Matthew Newcomen and Oliver Bowles.

During the years of their greatest tribulation, English Protestant dissenters were steadily buoyed up by numerous efforts in their behalf; stemming from various sources, these efforts were inspired by motives equally various. Gestures toward a peaceful settlement actually began before Charles II ascended the throne. Little persecution marked the Cromwellian regime and although the Establishment had possessed a Presbyterian tinge, organized Presbyterianism had made little headway. The Church was rather an assemblage of congregations than a compact hierarchy. While Episcopalians had been forced from their livings, many did not appear vindictive, and as the Restoration approached, a tolerant mood seemed uppermost.

In the year 427, when Saint Augustine was seventy-two years of age, he began to work on a treatise which he called the Retractationes. This was a task he had been wanting to accomplish since 412, when the idea first occurred to him, as he confessed to Marcellinus,1 “to gather together and point out, in a work devoted to this express purpose, all the things which most justly displease me in my books.” He states in the Prologue to the Retractationes that he finally felt forced to begin the work. “For a long time I have been thinking over and planning a task which, with the help of the Lord, I am now beginning, because I think it should be postponed no longer: namely, to review my writings, whether books, letters, or tractates, with a kind of judicial severity, and to indicate, as if with a censor's pen, what displeases me.”2

The great historian of the reign of Justinian (A. D. 527–565) was Procopius of Caesarea in Palestine. He wrote a history of the wars of Justinian, an account of the Emperor's building activities, and a slanderous Secret History, designed to be published after his own death, in which he made a vicious attack on Justinian and Theodora.

It we were to choose the two most important allegorists of the twelfth century in Western Europe, one of them would certainly be Bernard of Clairvaux, and the other would probably be Hugo of Saint-Victor (1096–1141); for they are the two most influential mystical exegetes of their time. While these two men have points of contact, their careers and their writings offer many contrasts. Both are mystics: both seek after the vision beatific. But the one is a true monk, who shuns secular learning, is blind to the natural beauty about him; the other, as a canon-regular teaching in a busy Paris school, lives on the threshold of the outside world; and finds an important, if ancillary, place for the secular learning of the day in his program of studies. Each had his part to play in the quickening of piety and learning which characterized the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Western Europe.