ABSTRACT
D. Martin Luther's assertion, pegged to a scriptural base with key-concept in Greek, sums up the difficulty of relating humanism to the sixteenth-century reform movements. At present, moreover, no agreed framework for the interaction of humanism and the various reform movements Catholic, Protestant and Radical exists. Reform was indeed married to humanism but it was far from being a monogamous relationship. The close collaboration between the humanists and the new printing presses provided the reformers with their libraries, with the editions and translations of the Greek and Latin Classics, of the Early Christian Fathers, of Judaic and Rabbinic writings. The humanists may often have read the Church Fathers largely from a literary or cultural point of view, assuming too readily that the latter shared their own rather uncritical enthusiasm for the Classical world. Martin Luther launched a new culture as well as a new theology. It is one which must be sharply differentiated from the neo-Protestantism of the post-Enlightenment period.
