opinion-makers such as patrons, teachers, preachers, poets and counsellors, made it a community of discourse well on the way to becoming an independent force to be reckoned with. It saw itself as addressing the ‘judgement of the whole world’, totius orbis iudicium, as Mosellanus once put it, but of course by that the world of the intellectuals was meant. Its social range was limited. At first inextricably tied up with the humanist one, the reform and reformation movement, including its Lutheran forms,