These two books form part of the wave of publications on Philipp Melanchthon which emerged in connection with the 450th anniversary of his death on 19 April 1560: the first one is a collection of twenty-six papers, all of them previously published, by the renowned Melanchthon scholar Heinz Scheible, the long-time editor of Melanchthon's correspondence at the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg. Gathering articles from the fifteen years since the celebration of Melanchthon's five-hundredth birthday in 1997 (when a first collection of Scheible's essays appeared), the volume focuses on the one hand on Melanchthon's work as an academic teacher and his importance for the shaping of the German university in the sixteenth century. A second group of papers deals with the relationship between Melanchthon and specific persons such as Johannes Setzer, Matthäus von Wallenrode, the counts of Erbach or Katharina von Bora, as well as Melanchthon's connections with the Silesian city of Breslau, the evangelical churches in the diaspora, or the developing French reformation movement. Some of the articles put a clear emphasis on Melanchthon's early years, others show a systematic approach, especially on questions of political or theological ethics. Only the last entry in the volume is devoted to the history of Melanchthon scholarship in the early twentieth century, namely on Karl Holl. The volume is more than a mere reprint, since some texts have been slightly revised by the author and all footnotes have been reformatted – unfortunately reducing them to an awkwardly abbreviated form. The collection presents the broad variety of topics related to Melanchthon and documents the profound erudition and philological and theological expertise of its author. Since a part of the collected material is based on public lectures, some papers display not only a scholarly, but also a personal and sometimes even an apologetic perspective: Scheible tries sometimes not only to explain, but also to defend Melanchthon against his critics past and present.

The second book under review is in no way a scholarly work, but a popular biography written for a non-scholarly audience, especially in parishes and schools. The text is divided into fifty chapters of one to five pages in length, which add up to only 150 pages of text, without footnotes, with short sentences and many paragraphs on every page. This makes the reading easy, but somewhat short-winded. The author, professor of church history at the University of Osnabrück, tries to explain remote and sometimes complicated theological and political issues from the Reformation era in plain language, but in my opinion does not find the equilibrium between simple explanation and overly challenging exposition. Some passages, especially on theological questions, are highly sophisticated, others overly simplistic. The narrative puts an emphasis on Melanchthon's personal piety and his relations with other reformers, with some polemical descriptions of his opponents (including, in Flacius' case, serious errors). The books ends with a timetable and a survey of source editions and six pages of secondary literature, which record only titles from the last fifteen years, about a third of them by the author himself. An annotated bibliography might have been more helpful for the intended audience. Despite its flaws, the book seems to be the most successful of the current Melanchthon publications in Germany and has seen a second edition within the first year. Reader comments show that it is meeting the expectations of its target group.