124 Fourthly, Strehle mentions having completed his work during a period of tribulation in his personal life, thanking friends who sheltered him from the storms of the Antichrist and helped to raise him from the dead. This fine confession may explain but cannot justify the author's excessive existential involvement with his subject. His ecumenical bias results in enormities such as: "There can certainly be no ecumenicity until the tone of Reformation studies is changed. (...) For Anabaptist scholars this means that their work, instead of recounting the heroics of their martyrs (e.g., Martyr's Mirror), should highlight the rancor and sedition that the Swiss brethren brought to the city of Zurich and its council" (127). Strehle's commitment goads him into disqualifying not only scholarship, but even history itself. Thus, he defends Osiander's view of justification with over 60 Bible quotations, con- cluding : "It is as simple as that. (...) Osiander [proclaimed] a most important biblical teaching, which the church chose to overlook after she condemned it with him and exalted Melanchthon as her Preceptor" (82-84). About the Calvinists he grumbles: "This spirit of Calvin's theology unfortunately did not continue with the same fervor among the heirs of the great Reformer, the so-called Calvinists" (125). The latter he refutes quoting Socinus (!), Barth, Wittgenstein, and Moltmann. His conclusion: "Truth (...) is found in communion with our fellow man and is sought (...) by those Protestants who would be Catholic and Catholics who would be Protestant. Its paradigm is found within the very life of God" (129). With all respect: it would have been more fruitful for the author to have limited his subject to the Reformation in its actual sense, and to have directed his attention towards the sixteenth century via media as, for instance, represented by a Protestant "who would be Catholic" such as the inclusivist theologian Martin Bucer. The conciliatory efforts of this "great reformer of dialogue" (Greschat), for example in the colloquies with the Catholics 1540- 41, have been completely neglected. The value of Strehle's engagé discussion with fellow dogmatic theologians from ages past lies in its emphasis on the continuity of medieval and (pre)modern theology, and in the copious notes, reflecting the author's thorough acquaintance with the primary sources of Protestant Scholasticism, and his considerable analytical powers. Wim Janse BOEKBEOORDELINGEN/REVIEWS F. Akkerman, G.C. Huisman, A.J. Vanderjagt, eds., Wessel Gansfort (1419- 1489) and Northern Humanism (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 40), Leiden/New York/Köln: E.J. Brill, 1993, xiv + 425 pp. ISBN 90 04 09857 7. f 268,50; $ 168.50 This carefully edited, beautifully illustrated and erudite collection of papers in English and German to a large extent originates from the international interdisciplinary conference devoted to Wessel Gansfort and northern humanism at the University of Groningen in 1989. This had been preceded by the conference on Gansfort's younger friend Rodolphus Agricola in 1985 (F. Akkerman/A.J. Vanderjagt, eds., Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444-1485), Leiden: Brill, 1988), and was followed by a conference on northern human- ism in European context 1469-1625 in April 1996 (proceedings in press). With this trilogy the editors have effectively done justice to the intellectual history of the northern part of the Netherlands (the province of Groningen) and the neighbouring Germany between 1469, when first mention was made of the