Melanchthon's rhetoric and the practical origins of Reformation human science

At the beginning of the 16th century in Germany, religious ends and human a rt joined forces to produce a sacred rhetoric: a rhetoric that could transf orm human nature, and explain at the same time how such transformation was possible according to both science and scripture. No longer was it enough t o ask in Scholastic fashion 'What is man?' his essence and unique faculties , his special place in God's world. A new question took on urgency in the w ake of religious reformation, namely 'What could man become?' But theology alone could not provide a practical response to this question. Rhetoric, in its various adopted forms, could. Consequently rhetoric emerged as archite ctonic of the human sciences in Reformation Germany, shaping pedagogy as a practical art. Whereas scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the w ay in which the exact sciences such as mathematics influenced Enlightenment human science, the history of human science as practical art has received little attention. This article contributes to such a history by showing how rhetoric as a practical protreptic art structured human scientific initiat ives in the wake of Philipp Melanchthon's Reformation pedagogy.