A Brill Calendar: September 27

Few prejudices are more pernicious than the idea that Christianity and academic investigation relate and mix with one another like oil mixes with water.

Further, that the two, when left to themselves for a while, would automatically dissociate. The philosophical ‘desideratum’ of a sovereign separation between church and state and between religious and secular affairs is akin to this bias. It is seldom that such distinctions can be made without crucial qualifications. The first half of the sixteenth century illustrates this ‘tapestry of culture’ to perfection; and it won’t do to depict Vesalius and Copernicus, heralds of a new age in scholarship, as individuals scheming to upset the stability of Christendom.

It should be noted that a substantially increased emphasis on the value of education and knowledge originated in the Roman Catholic order of religious men founded by the Basque aristocrat Loyola and approved by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540, well before institutionalized Protestantism became a significant agent of intellectual and scholarly change in Northern Europe.
The contingency of history saw to it that Calvinism, budding in the region of Flanders could only survive ‘ in situ’ for a few decades.

The quartermasters Leyden University ransacked the scholarly assets of North-Western Europe: an adroit process of lobbying and motivating, in which orthodoxy was seldom a central concern of Leyden Directors.