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Education played a crucial role in the intellectual, socio-political, and religious developments that were part or the confessionalization processes in northwestern Germany. Particularly Bremen with its Gymnasium Illustre (1528-1812) developed into an educational stronghold, notably in theology and law. After Bremen's adoption of the Reformed confession in 1562 and more so under its prolific rectors Matthias Martinius, Ludwig Crocius, and Gerhard Meier in the seventeenth century, the Academy supplied hundreds of theologians and clergymen to Reformed churches and institutions throughout Europe. Molded by reform humanists of the Strasbourg and Zurich stamp, the Reformed character of the Gymnasium never lost its moderate, irenic bias. With this northern German flavor of the Reformed confession, the polychromy of Protestantism as well as of confessionalism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was enriched with yet another nuance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since its foundation in 1584, the Herborn Academy pursued the ambitious goal of stabilizing and politically modernizing not truly the regions within its own domain but also Reformed territories throughout Europe through the education of an elite class of social leaders. For this reason, Herborner conceptions of educational reform emphasized as a necessity the formation of an educated elite for the Reformed churches and European governments as a whole. Therefore the Academy's central political task was to train, according to so-called Ramist principles, an elite leadership for those societies in Europe that had been stamped by Reformed ideals. The practical orientation of the education aimed to prepare graduates to assume positions of leadership in and successfully weather the confessional disputes throughout Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]