Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/495

 American Historical Association 485 George L. Burr of Cornell University discoursed informally on '■ Protestantism and Tolerance ". After glancing at the rise of in- tolerance in the early church, which served the sixteenth-century reformers as a model, and sketching the causes which at the close of the Middle Ages had brought about a practical freedom of thought not since reached perhaps in continental Europe, he followed in some detail the growing intolerance of the reformers, pointing out how by 1529-1530, the date of the birth of " Protestantism ", Luther and his colleagues were advocating the punishment of heresy — and by death — under the name of sedition or of blasphemy, though it was left for Calvin to restore fully to heresy its place as a crime and to make valid in Protestantism the penal laws of the Middle Ages. Professor Dana C. Munro of the University of Wisconsin dwelt on " The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century ". The increasing study of the classical writers in that century he regarded as merely the culmination of a movement which had been going on through the preceding centuries. There was no distinct renaissance of let- ters. But the twelfth century was characterized in a remarkable degree by the evolution of the spirit of independence, not only in such matters as the growth of freedom and self-consciousness in communes and guilds, but especially in the prevalence of the spirit of free inquiry on the part of scholars, largely influenced by Aristotle, in the growth of interest in science, and in the enhancement of the practical desire to turn all things to immediate use. Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor of New York City read an interesting paper entitled " An Instance of Medieval Humanism : Some Letters of Hildebert of Lavardin ". Hildebert of Lavardin, who became bishop of Le Mans in 1095, and in 1125 archbishop of Tours, finely exemplifies in the balance and temperance of his attitude towards life, and incidentally in his facile scholarship, the subtle working of the antique culture upon character and temperament. As a classical scholar he was unexcelled in his time, and was a skillful writer of both prose and verse. Some of his poems in elegiac metre have been mistaken by comparatively modern scholars for genuine antiques. In his elegy on Rome, one of his best, one is almost startled to hear the frank medieval note of admiration for the idols of pagan Rome. And yet the major part of Hildebert was Christian, as his theological writings thoroughly attest. His classic tastes gave temperance to his Christian views. How sweetly the elements were mixed in him appears in a famous letter written to William of Champeaux, wherein he balances temperately and soundly the advantages of the active and the contemplative life. Hildebert's writings evince that kind