Some of us may have been disappointed to see only Lutherans among the hymn-writers which we recently sampled. But fear not, Reformed readers, because Latin culture flourished in early Reformed circles as well. They wrote plenty of poetry, but where they uniquely excelled was in their work on the biblical text, recasting it for scholarly, educational, artistic, and (in the vernacular) liturgical purposes. Here we will take a look at a few of these (literally!) Reformed Bibles, which we can still profitably read today.

(Read more at the Davenant Institute…)

Everyone knows that the Reformation opened the floodgates of German songwriting, transforming the hymn into communal song. No less astonishing, but much less remembered, is the early Lutherans’ tireless work at writing an entirely new corpus of Latin hymns. The Lutherans’ use of these new Latin hymns—along with edited traditional hymns, parts of the old Latin liturgy in church services, and the Latin-heavy humanistic education of their children—leads Ann Moss to speak of “Lutheranism’s bilingual culture” in her monograph on Latin hymns during the Reformation.

(Read more at the Davenant Institute…)

“Wherever possible I have broken with teaching tradition and sent kids down their separate paths to their own private truths . . . to be their own teachers and to make themselves the major text of their own education.” I can hardly imagine a more “progressive” plan than this, of the late John Taylor Gatto in his first book, Dumbing Us Down.

And yet Gatto elsewhere applies the label “progressive” not to himself, but to those who around the turn of the twentieth century reformed US public education into today’s public school system that represses learning. Who are the real progressives, then? Both, I would argue—but there is more than one type of progressive educator.

(Read more at the CiRCE Institute…)

Humanist drama as a medium for retelling Bible stories is one of the most fascinating genres of Latin literature of the Reformation. All over Europe Protestants and Catholics alike wrote biblical comedies and tragedies for their schools, each camp often using the other’s plays since in the first decades they rarely strayed from narrative into confessional statements. These plays aimed instead to teach good Latin style and to teach piety and virtue by example. If this sounds like a recipe for bland moralizing devoid of theology, we need only turn to the granddaddy of all humanist biblical plays to see that they can indeed explore the depths of God’s mysteries delightfully through story.

(Read more at the Davenant Institute…)

Thanks to the work of E. J. Hutchinson, many of us are aware of Theodore Beza’s emblems. The enigmatic woodcuts and poetry of emblem books were also employed by less well-known Protestant writers, but no less vividly and even hauntingly, to picture life in light of God. Among these was Georgette de Montenay, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Navarre. Her emblems went through several editions in the decades after their publication in 1567, culminating in a 1619 polyglot edition which contains no fewer than eight versions of the text by various hands: the original French, two in Latin, and one each in Spanish, Italian, German, English, and Dutch. Evidently this recondite work was in high demand.

(Read more at the Davenant Institute…)