In his ‘Italian influences on the development of Calvinist scholasticism’ (Sixteenth Century Journal vii [1976], 81–101), John Donnelly sj first attributed the development of seventeenth-century Protestant scholasticism to Peter Martyr's ‘unabashed philosophical theology’ (p. 82). Baschera's Tugend und Rechtfertigung examines the influence of Aristotelian ethics on the development of Peter Martyr Vermigli's philosophical theology, both by tracing it back to its Aristotelian sources and by documenting its influence on later reformed scholastics such as Beza, Daneau, Zanchi and Hooker. Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) studied theology at Padua, home of the humanist revival of Aristotle's thought. Martyr's Zurich hagiographer, Josias Simler, reports that he studied Greek with the express purpose of reading Aristotle in the original (Oratio de vita et obitu Petri Martyris Vermiglii, b5r). Throughout his exile, in Zurich, Strasbourg and Oxford, he was accompanied by Erasmus' Greek edition of Aristotle's works, which survives in Geneva with copious handwritten marginalia. To put the present work in its context: at a time when the reception of Aristotle's philosophy ranged from Luther's total rejection of the ‘blind heathen teacher’ (WA vi. 456) to Melanchthon's opinion that his philosophy could ‘inflame souls with love and inspire them to study truth’ (CR ii. 815), Martyr's lifelong fascination with Aristotle is remarkable. Reformation theologians generally drew on a wide variety of philosophical influences. For Martyr, however, Aristotle was central to the theological curriculum. In a telling letter to Rudolph Gualter of November 1550 (unfortunately not included in this work), Johannes ab Ulmis reported how two-thirds of his study with Martyr in Oxford was centred on Aristotle: every morning from nine to ten Martyr lectured on Romans, following a reading of Aristotle's Physics and Politics for an hour each from seven to nine (Original letters, ii. 419). Following his return to Strasbourg in 1553, Martyr continued his exposition of Aristotle's Physics, sharing the lecturing with his student Girolamo Zanchi. Between 1554 and 1556 he finally turned to the Nicomachean ethics, which he translated straight from the Greek and expounded by section. Testament to Martyr's thorough analysis is the fact that in two and a half years of lecturing he never ventured beyond the initial third of Aristotle's Ethics, ceasing at book iii, chapter 2. When leaving Strasbourg for Zurich in 1556 he abandoned the project. Following his death, the lectures were published by his secretary Guilio Santerenziano under the title In primum, secunduum et initium tertii libri Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum (Zurich: Froschauer, 1563). Baschera's monograph traces the basic building blocks of Aristotle's ethics, his understanding of habitus, ‘that what makes us to behave right or wrong in regard to our passions’ (Nicomachean ethics 1105b), in the theology of justification of Vermigli and his followers. By painstaking analysis Baschera demonstrates how Vermigli successfully shaped Aristotle's teaching on the habitus into a distinctive ‘Protestant soteriology and thereby established a Christian ethic which not only developed Aristotle's teachings on the habitus, but provided a clear sense of continuity with the basic principles of Protestant soteriology’ (p. 175).

It was undoubtedly Vermigli's commentary on the Nicomachean ethics that paved the way for the positive reception of Aristotelian philosophy by other reformed theologians. However, it was his theology of justification that ultimately led to the development of a distinctive reformed scholastic theology. Vermigli's understanding of justification straddles the confessional divide. In Die Theologie Peter Martyr Vermiglis (Neukirchen 1971), Klaus Sturm first suggested (pp. 62–9) that Vermigli's understanding of justification in terms of duplex iustitia stood in close proximity to the writings of Italian spirituali such as Juan de Valdés and Gasparo Cardinal Contarini. In his detailed analysis, Baschera documents how Vermigli shaped the thoughts of the Italian spirituali and his Strasbourg colleague Martin Bucer into a distinctive Protestant scholastic theology, established on a ‘rapprochement between a reformed doctrine of justification and Aristotelian ethics’ (p. 200). Baschera's Tugend und Rechtfertigung succeeds in tracing the origins of Protestant scholasticism in the works of Zanchi, Beza, Daneau and Hooker back to Vermigli's unabashed use of Aristotelian philosophy. Thoroughly researched, his work successfully combines reflections on the Reformation reception of Aristotelian thought with close readings of key Reformation works. German-speakers will find the work both eminently readable and accessible. Unfortunately, unless there is to be a translation, English readers will have to make do with the author's contribution, ‘Aristotle and scholasticism’, in the Brill companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (Leiden 2009).