The golden age of Heidelberg, between 1583 and 1622, has been badly neglected within both German and international scholarship. This bilingual volume – containing eight German-and three English-language contributions – is encouraging further evidence that this situation is beginning to be rectified. Yet it also reveals the scale of the historiographical obstacles blocking a fresh overall assessment.

The title artfully situates the volume between two developments culminating in the decades around 1600: the impressive final flourishing of late humanist scholarship and the divisive tensions of the confessional era. Heidelberg epitomised both. On the one hand, we have the fabulous Bibliotheca Palatina, poet-curators like Paul Melissus Schede, scholar-curators like Jan Gruter, scholar-counsellors like Georg Michael Lingelsheim and pioneers of German Renaissance verse such as Julius Wilhelm Zincgref and Martin Opitz, many of them traditionally characterised as members of a cosmopolitan republica litterarum standing above the confessional fray. On the other hand we have Christian of Anhalt, Friedrich v, the Protestant Union, the Bohemian adventure, the Battle of White Mountain and the decades of disaster which ensued from it. How are these two facets of Heidelberg to be reconciled? Is this tightly-knit community deeply divided by antithetical responses to the confessional and political tensions of the era? Or do these activities substantially overlap and form a still imperfectly understood unity of some kind? And what is their relationship to a third, seemingly intermediate, position: the Heidelberg theologians, largely Philippist in origin, famously irenical in professed aims, yet typically intransigent in defence of Reformed orthodoxy?

The first essay in the volume, by Eike Wollgast, provides both a checklist of topics central to any comprehensive account of this problem and some hints at where a solution might lie: he notes, for instance, that Heidelberg's theologians stood outside the late humanist republic of letters, and that the humanists' networks of correspondence and dedications were ‘only partly confessionalised’. Unfortunately, the rest of the volume does not closely follow this lead. Instead, confessional politics, irenical theology and even humanist scholarship are for the most part set aside, and the agenda shrinks to a far narrower enquiry into the extent to which ‘confessionalisation’ shaped Heidelberg's philosophy, theology and jurisprudence, each of which is considered in extremely restrictive terms.

The ‘philosophy’ most commonly associated with ‘Calvinism’ is Ramism; and three of the four essays on Heidelberg philosophy are devoted to this topic. Joseph Freedman ferrets out some precious new evidence of the positive reception of Ramism in Heidelberg – precious precisely because it is extremely rare. Donald Sinnema analyses Johann Jungnitz's lengthy preface to the commentary on Aristotle's Organon by one of Ramus' most influential critic, the leading Heidelberg theologian, Zacharias Ursinus. Kees Meerhoff contributes a valuable, extended study of the figure who culminates and creatively transforms Heidelberg's anti-Ramist tradition, Bartholomäus Keckermann, and complements this portrait with a collection of biographical extracts from the Danziger's writings. Grouped with these is Günter Frank's admirably clear and concise discussion of the way in which Aristotle's ethics was broken down and reorganised topically by Viktorin Strigel and Abraham Scultetus as a precondition of its institutionalisation and partial transmission in Heidelberg. While each of these papers tells us interesting new things about Ramism, anti-Ramism and alternatives to Ramism in Heidelberg, their chief collective accomplishment is to undermine the assumption that brought them together in the first place – the assumption, that is, that Ramism is an accurate index of confessionalisation in the philosophical domain – thus leaving the reader little the wiser regarding the impact of confessionalisation on Heidelberg's philosophy faculty. Equally absent is careful consideration of the title's other term – namely, how Heidelberg's most eminent humanists responded to Ramism.

The three theological papers in this collection are likewise focused on a single obvious topic: predestination. Theodor Mohlmann provides a juridical reading of the predestinarian teaching of Georg Sohn (1551–89). Herman J. Selderhuis traces the strands of predestinarianism in the writings of Heidelberg theologians back to roots in their debates with Lutheran theologians, their pastoral concerns and their complex relationships to Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin. Willem van ‘t Spiker offers a sympathetic and engaging survey of Heidelberg's relations with Conrad Vorstius – the prize student there whose theological transgressions provoked first disciplinary hearings in Heidelberg and then condemnation at the Synod of Dordt. While these studies clarify Heidelberg's commitment to mainstream Reformed scholasticism, this only deepens the difficulty of understanding its relationship to irenicism and late humanism, which are given even less attention here than in the philosophical papers.

Of the two final chapters dealing with jurisprudence, only one relates to Heidelberg's golden age: Detlef Döring's penultimate chapter on Samuel Pufendorf's relations with Heidelberg is separated from the rest of the volume by the chasm of the Thirty Years War, during most of which the university was disbanded. In the final chapter Christoph Strohm undertakes the most successful attempt in this volume genuinely to bridge late humanism and Reformed theology, in this case via the assertion (as familiar to German historians as it is puzzling to others) that both were essentially rational.

The thinking at work here, and the methodological difficulties underlying this entire project, are most fully revealed in the longest and most ambitious contribution, Cornel A. Zwierlein's sixty-five-page paper entitled ‘Heidelberg and “the west”’. Upon embarking on this topic, he claims at the outset, one must either plunge immediately into detailed empirical research or confront the problem of the German Sonderweg. The first half of his paper pursues the first of these strategies, assembling a valuable survey of the Palatinate's dynastic, political, academic, literary and economic relations with western Europe. In the second half, however, ‘the west’ morphs from a straightforward geographical category into a highly problematic cultural one, which effortlessly amalgamates the two terms of the volume's title into an essentially unitary, rational, secular and modern alternative to the German empire and the Lutheran territorial Church. Rather than analysing the tensions between Späthumanismus and reformierte Konfession empirically, in other words, this approach simply dissolves them theoretically with reference to an analytical framework deriving more from Weber and Troeltsch than from serious, modern historical research. And rather than reflecting on what the Palatinate's unique history and contemporary circumstances might have contributed to the establishment of Heidelberg's intellectual culture, this model postulates an essentially passive process of Kulturtransfer, in which the seeds of cultural progress are scattered into Germany from more enlightened regions elsewhere, a few flourishing (quite unaccountably) on Palatine soil while most fall on stony ground elsewhere. The results, predictably, are disastrous: when the Calvinist rebels are defeated in the battle of White Mountain, Germany as a whole deviates from the straight and narrow path of ‘western’ historical development and into the German Sonderweg, which leadeth unto destruction.

What is bafflingly absent from this essay, and from most of this volume, are fresh, empirically grounded analyses pitched at the crucial middle level of generality between expert scholarly expositions of individual texts and the Olympian explanatory paradigms of Weber, Troeltsch, Kulturtransfer and the Sonderweg. Although this volume contains a series of disciplined, scholarly contributions to discrete aspects of an important and unjustly neglected topic, collectively they scarcely begin to reveal the role which Heidelberg played within the international Reformed tradition and the international republic of letters, nor do they help to untangle the relations between humanist scholarship, irenical theology, confessional politics, political brinksmanship, vernacular and neo-Latin poetry and mannerist culture in this still poorly understood time and place. For these purposes, a fresher, more capacious and more flexible approach to intellectual history will be needed, emancipated from received theoretical frameworks and devoted to relating theological, philosophical, pedagogical, legal, literary, artistic and cultural traditions to one another, and grounding them firmly in specific political, social and economic conditions.