Talk:Humanism in Germany

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[edit] Blindly copied from Philip Schaff's 1882 "History of the Christian Church"

After changing Herzogenbusch, a WWII concentration camp, to 's-Hertogenbosch as the location of a Brothers of the Common Life school, I noticed some general oddities about this article. Hertogenbusch occurred in the paragraph: "Popular education, during the century before the Reformation, was far more advanced in Germany than in other nations. The chief schools, conducted by the Brothers of the Common Life, were located at Zwolle, Deventer, 's-Hertogenbosch and Liège." Does it strike anyone else as odd that all these towns are in the Netherlands and Belgium, rather than in Germany? Besides that, the "far more advanced" statement seems painfully POV and hard to support, in light of the abundance of universities in Italy in the 15th century.

The "Leaders of humanism" starts out with the intriguing: "The chief Humanists of Germany were Rudolph Agricola, Reuchlin and Erasmus. To the last two a separate treatment is given as the pathfinders of biblical learning, the venerabiles inceptores of modern biblical research." Besides the fact that Agricola was a Frisian from Groningen and Erasmus a Hollander from Rotterdam, the second, archaic sentence seemed to suggest that there should be a separate chapter on Reuchlin and Erasmus.

Indeed the text is blindly copied from the 1882 book History of the Christian Church by Philip Schaff, a German-educated theologian from the German Reformed church. I dare say there is a better, more modern, and less biased text to find as a source to describe the history of "Northern Renaissance humanism". The latter would be a far better title than "humanism in Germany" as well. Afasmit 07:56, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I added a bunch of tags; see if there will be a response now. I noticed that in April one sentence, straight from the original text, was taken out. It's a doozy: "Had Italy been careful to take lessons from the pedagogy of the North, it is probable her people would to-day be advanced far beyond what they are in intelligence and letters." The rest of the text honestly is not much better and it would be best to start from scratch here. Should I just ask for a deletion? Obviously the topic is encyclopedic. Afasmit 08:22, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 04:07, 10 November 2007 (UTC)