ABSTRACT
The impact of the Italian Renaissance upon both the Renaissance and the Reformation in Germany is clear and indisputable. The German Renaissance and German humanism, very much dependent upon Italian humanism and the great Italian awakening, naturally fused with cultural elements already present in the North. Moreover, the northern indigenous theory urged that because of the revival of the scholastic via antiqua in the Germanies around the middle of the fifteenth century, a climate favourable to a classical revival was created. Friedrich Nietzsche's idea does point up the fact that one historiographical tradition from the time of Jakob Burkhardts The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy to the present has seen Renaissance and Reformation, humanism and Protestantism, as having been antithetical. It is necessary to turn to a problem of much greater complexity, the impact of humanism upon the Lutheran Reformation.
