Note 1 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

The beginning of such a process had indeed taken place in Germany before Luther, insofar as the New Learning represented by such humanists as Erasmus, such scholars as Reuchlin,1 and such satirists as Ulrich von Hutten, set up a current of educated hostility to the ignorance and the grosser superstitions of the churchmen. For Germany, as for England, this movement was a contagion from the new scholarship and Platonism of Italy;2 and the better minds in the four universities founded in the pre-Lutheran generation (Tübingen, 1477; Mayence, 1482; Frankfort-on-the-Oder, 1506; Wittemberg, 1502) necessarily owed much to Italian impulses, which they carried on, though the universities as a whole were bitterly hostile to the new learning.3 The Dutch freethinker Ryswyck, as we saw, was fundamentally an Averroïst; and Italy was the stronghold of Averroïsm, of which the monistic bias probably fostered the Unitarianism of the sixteenth century. But it was not this literary and scholarly movement that effected the Reformation so-called, which was rather an economic and political than a mental revolution.