The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford Handbooks in History)
Date: 2016-12-15
Publisher: OUP Oxford
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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATIONS

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATIONS

Edited by
ULINKA RUBLACK

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United Kingdom

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

1. Introduction

ULINKA RUBLACK

PART I THE NEW THEOLOGY

2. Explaining Evil and Grace

CHRISTOPHER OCKER

3. The Nature of Spiritual Experience

ALEC RYRIE

4. Reforming Time

ROBIN B. BARNES

5. Political Obedience

GLENN BURGESS

PART II GEOGRAPHIES AND VARIETIES OF THE REFORMATIONS

6. Geographies of the Protestant Reformation

GRAEME MURDOCK

7. The Bohemian Reformations

HOWARD LOUTHAN

8. Luther and Lutheranism

THOMAS KAUFMANN

9. The Swiss Reformations: Movements, Settlements, and Reimagination, 1520–1720

RANDOLPH C. HEAD

10. The Radicals

C. SCOTT DIXON

11. Calvin and Reformed Protestantism

MACK P. HOLT

12. The English, Scottish, and Irish Reformations

FELICITY HEAL

13. Protestantism in the Age of Catholic Renewal

PHILIP M. SOERGEL

14. Protestantism and Non-Christian Religions

ANDREW COLIN GOW AND JEREMY FRADKIN

15. Outsiders, Dissenters, and Competing Visions of Reform

HOWARD HOTSON

16. Pietism

ULRIKE GLEIXNER

17. Protestantism Outside Europe

MARK HÄBERLEIN

PART III COMMUNICATING THE REFORMATIONS

18. Print Workshops and Markets

ANDREW PETTEGREE

19. The Word

HELMUT PUFF

20. The Reformation of Liturgy

SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN

21. An “Epistolary Reformation”: The Role and Significance of Letters in the First Century of the Protestant Reformation

MARK GREENGRASS

PART IV SITES, INSTITUTIONS, AND SOCIETY

22. University Scholars of the Reformation

MICHAEL HEYD

23. Education in the Reformation

CHARLOTTE METHUEN

24. Legal Courts

JOEL F. HARRINGTON

25. Rural Society

BEAT KÜMIN

26. Civic Religions

GUIDO MARNEF

27. European Nobilities and the Reformation

RONALD G. ASCH

PART V IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL MEANINGS OF THE REFORMATIONS

28. Explaining Change

CRAIG KOSLOFSKY

29. Visual and Material Culture

BRIDGET HEAL

30. Music

CHRISTOPHER BOYD BROWN

31. The Body in the Reformations

HERMAN ROODENBURG

32. Sexual Difference

KATHLEEN M. CROWTHER

33. The Natural and Supernatural

UTE LOTZ-HEUMANN

34. Commerce and Consumption

CHRISTINE R. JOHNSON

35. Natural Philosophy

ALISHA RANKIN

PART VI ASSESSING THE REFORMATIONS

36. Comparisons and Consequences in Global Perspective, 1500–1750

MERRY WIESNER-HANKS

37. History and Memory

BRUCE GORDON

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks go, above all, to the authors whose learning and commitment to present the most comprehensive interpretative Handbook of the Protestant Reformations yet have made this collaborative enterprise possible—in time for the commemorations in 2017. It is a pleasure to thank Christopher Wheeler, who invited me many years ago to edit this handbook, as well as Stephanie Ireland and especially Cathryn Steele from Oxford University Press who provided absolutely outstanding support. I also wish to thank William Richards at Oxford for all his help, as well as the team at Newgen. I am particularly grateful for the very generous and substantial assistance Asaph Ben-Tov offered to prepare the late Michael Heyd’s contribution for publication, and for Theodor Dunkelgrün’s advice and readiness to translate one entire contribution. Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Hamish Scott kindly shared some of their editorial experience. Francisco Bethencourt shared my excitement about new intellectual possibilities and, as always, made life happy.

Cambridge, April 2016

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, woodcut, 14.4 × 14 cm, ca. 1550. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

1.2 Johann Valentin Haidt, The Protten Family, ca. 1751. Cover Archives, Herrnhut.

1.3 John Hall, 1775, after Benjamin West, William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, engraving, 42.55 × 58.74 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

2.1 Adam and Eve depicted in Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), f. 7r. St. John’s College, Cambridge.

2.2 Pighius’s Controversiarum praecipuarum in comitiis Ratisponensibus tractarum sign. F6(v). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

7.1 Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of T. G. Masaryk, 1935–1936, oil on canvas, H: 38 3/ 8 in × W: 51 1/ 2 in (97.47 × 130.81 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

19.1 Interior of St. Peter and Paul, Weimar. Foto Constantin Beyer, Weimar.

19.2 Johann Eck, Bibel ~ Alt vnd new Testament (Ingolstadt: Weissenhorn, 1550). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

25.1 Karsthans dialogue, first published at Strasbourg in 1521.

25.2 Parish church of St. Michael in the imperial village of Gochsheim near Schweinfurt (present-day Bavaria).

29.1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Wittenberg Altarpiece, front view, 1547, oil on panels, Stadtkirche, Wittenberg.

31.1 Rembrandt, The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and his Wife, 1641, oil on canvas, 173.7 × 207.6 cm. Foto Jörg P. Anders.

31.2 The oculus imaginationis (mind’s eye). From Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (Oppenheim: De Bry, 1619).

31.3 Anatomical cut of the head. From Gregor Reisch, Margarita Philosophica (Freiburg: Johannes Schott, 1503).

31.4 Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome, 1521, oil on panel, 60 × 48 cm.

31.5 Hendrick ter Brugghen, Weeping Heraclitus (or St. Jerome), ca. 1621, oil on canvas, 125.5 × 102 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

31.6 Pietro Paolini, Portrait of a Man Holding the Frontispiece to Dürer’s “Small Passion,” ca. 1635, oil on canvas, 126.4 × 103.5 cm. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Ronald G. Asch is a graduate of Tübingen University and obtained the degree of Dr. phil. habil. in Münster in 1992. Having earlier taught for six years in Osnabrück he has held the Chair of Early Modern History at the University of Freiburg since 2003. He has published on both British history and the history of the European nobilities in the early modern period. His latest book is Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: The French and English Monarchies c. 1587–1688 (Berghahn, 2014). He is about to publish a short study of notions of heroism in France and England ca. 1580‒1780: Herbst des Helden: Modelle des Heroischen und heroische Lebensentwürfe in England und Frankreich von den Religionskriegen bis zum Zeitalter der Aufklärung.

Robin B. Barnes is Professor Emeritus of History at Davidson College in North Carolina. He specializes in the cultural history of the German lands in the Reformation era. His publications include Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford University Press, 1988) and numerous articles on early modern prophetic and apocalyptic thought. He is coeditor (with Elizabeth Plummer) of Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany (Ashgate, 2009). His most recent book is Astrology and Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Christopher Boyd Brown is Associate Professor of Church History at Boston University School of Theology and Graduate Division of Religious Studies. He is General Editor of the American Edition of Luther’s Works, volumes 56–75 and author of Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2005). His current project is an English edition of Johann Mathesius’s Life of Luther, forthcoming as Luther’s Works vol. 75.

Glenn Burgess is Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Affairs), and Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Hull. He is the author of The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Macmillan, 1992), Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (Yale University Press, 1996), and British Political Thought 1500–1660 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and the editor or coeditor of many books, including (with Howell A. Lloyd and Simon Hodson), European Political Thought 1450–1700 (Yale University Press, 2007). Professor Burgess is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Kathleen M. Crowther is an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. Her first book, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2010) won the Gerald Strauss Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for best new book in Reformation studies. She is currently working on a book about Sacrobosco’s Sphere in medieval and early modern Europe.

C. Scott Dixon is Senior Lecturer at the School of History and Anthropology at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He has written widely on the European Reformation and religious culture in the early modern period. His recent books include Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Contesting the Reformation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and The Church in the Early Modern Age (I. B. Tauris, 2016).

Jeremy Fradkin is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at The Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation will examine the relationship between religious toleration, anti-Catholicism, and imperialism in the English Revolution (1642‒1660).

Ulrike Gleixner is Head of the Research Department at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and Professor of Early Modern History at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Frauen und Geschlechterforschung (ZIFG), Technische Universität in Berlin. Her key publications include “Das Mensch” und “der Kerl.” Die Konstruktion von Geschlecht in Unzuchtsverfahren der Frühen Neuzeit (Campus, 1994) and Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005). She has coedited an exhibition catalogue and several volumes, recently Religion Macht Politik. Hofgeistlichkeit im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit (Harrassowitz, 2014). She is currently working on a study of the Pietist mission to South India.

Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. He also teaches in the History Department at Yale. His publications include John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (Princeton University Press, 2016), Calvin (Yale University Press, 2009), and The Swiss Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2002).

Andrew Colin Gow is Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200–1600 (E. J. Brill, 1995); coauthor with Lara Apps of Male Witches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester University Press, 2003); and coeditor with Robert Desjardins and François Pageau of The Arras Witch Treatises (1460) (Penn State University Press, 2016).

Mark Greengrass is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK, a Research Fellow at the Department of History, University of Warwick, and a membre associé of the Centre Roland Mousnier, Université de Paris-IV (Sorbonne). He has specialized on the Reformation in its French context, and is currently working on the large surviving correspondence of the lieutenant in Dauphiné, Bertrand Simiane de Gordes, during the wars of religion. He also codirected the British Academy John Foxe Project that published the variorum edition online of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He is author, most recently, of Christendom Destroyed (1517–1648), Volume V of the Penguin History of Europe (Penguin Books, 2014).

Mark Häberlein is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Bamberg in Germany. He has published extensively on Central European merchants and long-distance trade as well as on transatlantic migration and the religious and social history of eighteenth-century North America. His publications include The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1820 (Penn State University Press, 2009) and The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (University of Virginia Press, 2012).

Joel F. Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University (USA). His scholarship has focused on various religious, legal, and social aspects of early modern Germany. His books include The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honour and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (Bodley Head, 2013), The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge University Press, 1995). He is currently at work on a biography of the fourteenth-century theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart.

Randolph C. Head is Professor of History at the University of California Riverside. He specializes in the history of political and institutional cultures, focusing on Switzerland and early modern Europe. He is the author of two monographs and many articles, has edited two collections of articles, and recently coauthored a Concise History of Switzerland. Currently, he is completing a comparative study of archival inventories and organization in early modern Europe.

Bridget Heal is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews and Director of the Reformation Studies Institute there. Her first monograph, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) used both archival and artistic sources to investigate the fate of Marian devotion during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Her ongoing interest in religious culture, in particular its visual manifestations, is reflected in her current project, A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Felicity Heal is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the Reformation, the English gentry, and early modern society. Her book Reformation in Britain and Ireland was published in 2003 as part of The Oxford History of the Christian Church. Her most recent book is The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Michael Heyd (1943‒2014) was a Professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His fields of study included the history of science and its social and religious contexts, the history of universities, and the history of emotions. Among his studies are Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment (Nijhoff, 1982) and Be Sober and Reasonable (E. J. Brill, 1995).

Mack P. Holt is Professor of History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, United States, where he has taught since 1989. He has published a variety of books and articles on the Reformation, the French Wars of Religion, and on the history of wine. He is currently finishing a book titled Branches of the Vinve: Reformation and Culture in Burgundy, 1477–1630 (forthcoming), which addresses why vineyard workers in sixteenth-century Burgundy were so opposed to Protestantism. And he has begun a new project tentatively titled ‘Reading the Bible in Reformation France’, which attempts to adduce how lay readers read heir Bibles newly translated into French by an examination of readers’ marks in several hundred surviving Bibles printed in the sixteenth century.

Howard Hotson is Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St. Anne’s College, and Director of the Mellon-funded collaborative research project, Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750. His research is focused on the gradually expanding reform movements of the post-Reformation period, the intellectual geography of the Holy Roman Empire, international intellectual networks, and the development of digital technology to serve the study of these topics.

Christine R. Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (University of Virginia Press, 2008) and several articles on how practices of Renaissance knowledge shaped the evaluation of the newly-discovered lands and peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Her current research on “The German Nation of the Holy Roman Empire, 1440–1556” examines the intersections between national sentiment and imperial claims and their reconfiguration under the influence of Humanism, imperial political reform, and the splintering of religious identity in the Reformation.

Susan C. Karant-Nunn is Director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. She is also Regents’ Professor of History. From 1998‒2010 she was Managing Coeditor in North America of the Archive for Reformation History. She has published widely on aspects of early modern Germany. Her most recent monograph is The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2010). She is currently writing a book on Martin Luther’s body and personal life.

Thomas Kaufmann is Professor of Church History at the University of Göttingen and President of the Verein für Reformationsgeschichte. His primary field of research is the history of the Reformation and the confessional era. He has published numerous monographs, most recently: Geschichte der Reformation (3rd ed., Suhrkamp, 2016; French translation 2014); Luther (Eerdmans, 2016; translated into Italian, Japanese, and Korean; English and Spanish translations in preparation); Luthers Juden (Reclam, 2015; English, French, and Italian translations in preparation); Der Anfang der Reformation (Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

Craig Koslofsky, author of Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Macmillan Press/St. Martin’s Press, 2000), is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests focus on social centers (parish churches, public houses) in local communities, particularly in England and the Holy Roman Empire. Publications include The Shaping of a Community: The Rise & Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1560 (Scolar, 1996), The Communal Age in Western Europe c. 1100–1800: Towns, Villages and Parishes in Pre-Modern Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and the edited collection Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen (Chronos, 2004). He coordinates the online platform <http://my-parish.org>.

Ute Lotz-Heumann is Heiko A. Oberman Professor of Late Medieval and Reformation History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies and the Department of History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of a monograph on religious and political conflict in early modern Ireland: Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland: Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Mohr Siebeck, 2000). She has coauthored and coedited six volumes in the history of the European Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Currently, she is working on two books about spas and healing waters in early modern Germany between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Howard Louthan is Director of the Center for Austrian Studies and Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of several books on the religious history of early modern Central Europe including The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Guido Marnef is Professor of History at the University of Antwerp and a member of its Center for Urban History. His research focuses on Protestant and Catholic Reformation movements in the Low Countries, the Dutch Revolt, and cultural life in the cities of the Low Countries. He is the author of Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis 1550–1577 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Currently, he is working on a book about the Calvinist Republic in Antwerp.

Charlotte Methuen is Senior Lecturer in Church History at the University of Glasgow. She has taught previously at the Universities of Oxford, Bochum, and Hamburg. Her main areas of research are the intellectual history of Reformation, and particularly interactions between theology, philosophy, and astronomy, and twentieth-century ecumenical relations. She has also worked on women and authority in the Early Church. She is the author of Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics (Studies in Reformation History; Ashgate, 1998), Science and Theology in the Reformation: Studies in Theological Interpretation and Astronomical Observation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (T & T Clark, 2008), an undergraduate textbook, Luther and Calvin: Religious Revolutionaries (Lion, 2011), and numerous articles.

Graeme Murdock is Associate Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin. His work has focused on the Reformation in Hungary and Transylvania, on Calvinism in international contexts, and on pluralism and religious violence in early modern France. His publications include Calvinism on the Frontier: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church of Hungary and Transylvania, c. 1600–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2000), Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches, c. 1540–1620 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France (Oxford Univerity Press, 2012).

Christopher Ocker is Professor of History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. He has written Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany (E. J. Brill, 2006), Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life, c. 1310–1378 (American Philosophical Society, 1993), and many essays and reviews on religion and theology in the Middle Ages and the Reformation. He coedited the two volumes of Politics and Reformations: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (E. J. Brill, 2007), and he is coeditor of the Journal of the Bible and Its Reception. He is currently working on a study of the controversy over Luther in the sixteenth century.

Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews, and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of a number of books on the Reformation and, more recently, the history of communication, including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), and The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014). His latest book, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation, was published in October 2015 with Penguin USA. He is now engaged on a study of advertising in seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers.

Helmut Puff is Professor in the Departments of History, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Among his book publications are Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (De Gruyter, 2014).

Alisha Rankin is Associate Professor of History at Tufts University. She is the author of Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Gerald Strauss Prize for Reformation History. She is also coeditor of Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Ashgate, 2011), and the author of numerous articles. Her current work examines poison antidotes and panaceas in early modern Europe.

Herman Roodenburg is Emeritus Professor of Historical Anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam and a former researcher at the Meertens Institute, also in Amsterdam. A cultural historian, he likes to cooperate with cultural anthropologists and art historians. Among his English publications are The Eloquence of the Body (Waanders, 2004), Forging European Identities, 1400–1700 (Cambridge UNiversity Press, 2007), and A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2014). His book The Crying Dutchman: A History of the Early Modern Dutch and their Religious Emotions will be published in 2017.

Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother (Oxford University Press, 2015), Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Reformation Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005, 2nd ed. 2017).

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and coeditor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. His books include Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize and the Richard L. Greaves Prize, The Age of Reformation (Pearson Longman, 2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (Oxford University Press, 2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2006), and The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge University Press, 2003). His Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World will be published in 2017.

Philip M. Soergel is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has written a number of articles and book chapters, as well as four books, including Wondrous in His Saints: Counter Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (University of California Press, 1993) and Miracles and the Protestant Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, an editor of the Journal of Global History, and the author or editor of more than thirty books and nearly 100 articles that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. These include Early Modern Europe 1450-1789 (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2013), Gender in History: Global Perspectives (Blackwell, 2nd ed. 2010), and the nine-volume Cambridge World History (Cambridge University Press, 2015), for which she is both editor-in-chief and a volume editor.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

ULINKA RUBLACK

IN 1542, the Reformer Martin Luther reflected on a story about St. Francis of Assisi. It recounted how the monk had been so tempted by sexual thoughts that he had gone out into the snow to make several snowmen. He called them his wife and children, and told himself: “O Francis, look, you have a wife and child whom you must now support by your labours and efforts; then your carnal desire and lust will leave you.” Luther was repulsed. Francis seemed like a child who took fabrications for real. Just like children use dolls to furnish elaborate stories in which they imagine behaving as adults, so Francis seemed to play out a fantasy of how he would provide for a family instead of begging to sustain his life among allegedly celibate men. To Luther, who made much of his doctoral degree, paid university work, and busy domestic life in Wittenberg with his wife, children, students, and constant visitors, all this revealed that Francis of Assisi had been “uneducated and inexperienced.” He had filled the world with equally “childish,” “foolish” works to obscure the true Christian faith. “We now dare pass judgement upon such great saints,” Luther exclaimed: Francis should have recognized that he was human. This meant accepting that mankind lived in the shadow of Adam’s Fall from Paradise and in the “common sickness of the world.” The German Reformer hoped that a merciful God had saved fool Francis, for “then we, too,” he reassured followers, “should not despair” (Figure 1.1).[1]

This story neatly encapsulates some defining elements of the Protestant Reformations. The Reformations produced confessional difference by depicting Catholicism as a force which misled people to follow an unchristian faith. The papacy was demonic. A spiritual path marked by poverty, good works, and chastity was no longer sanctified—its pretense of perfection was simply deemed impossible. Original sin powerfully disabled reason and amplified desires. Piety could therefore only express itself through desperate belief in God’s grace. Marriage and work provided a Christian way of life; the end of the world was imminent. This different approach as to how the divine could be honored and known constituted a momentous break not only with medieval traditions, but many world religions. As a result, the Protestant Reformations have long been regarded as one of the most profound forces of mental, social, and political change in the past.

FIGURE 1.1 Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Luther, woodcut, 14.4 × 14 cm, ca. 1550.

Small portraits of this kind were designed to be pasted into bibles or on walls and were key to the commemorative cults spreading from Wittenberg.

By kind permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Protestantism emerged from the way in which many religious concerns and institutional church practices were subject to vibrant medieval discussions and contested intellectual traditions; it continued to pluralize Christianity and reshaped the world. Given the great spectrum of ideas in these movements, the modern connotations of the word “Protestant” as a collective noun to describe all those groups who broke away from the Roman Church in the sixteenth century of course would have horrified Reformers (see Holt, Chapter 11). Even so, we can identify some more broadly shared ideals and significant changes, which ranged from claims about the centrality of the Bible for faith to an endorsement that sacred texts should be substantially mediated in non-classical languages, for the benefit of the majority of people, who were illiterate and only knew their own tongue. Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament in 1522 and the complete Wittenberg Bible in 1534 were landmark achievements. The idea of purgatory was abolished as a greedy invention.

In major Protestant faiths this went along with the reduction in the number of sacraments from seven to two (baptism and the Eucharist) and an insistence that the Eucharist must be offered to the laity in “both kinds” through bread and wine. Those confessing their sins were not required to enumerate individual sins; there was no concern about degrees of contrition and no penance was imposed. Preaching and communion gained a new centrality in church services, sometimes alongside vernacular singing by the congregation. Ordered families began to be regarded as microcosms of the perfect state and thus gained great political relevance. Convents, monasteries, and confraternities were abolished to make heterosexual family life and men’s superior authority the norm.

The sheer size of the clergy was thus dramatically reduced. Clerical learning was controlled through university education in which the contents of learning substantially changed. As Protestantism argued that the papacy as an institution was heretical and corrupt, it briefly empowered laypeople as legitimate interpreters of the faith and then forged new church hierarchies. These continued to allow access only to men—but their social background began to matter less than their education, and scholarship systems for expanding schools and university allowed for some social mobility even from the lower-middle classes. High-ranking clergymen were no longer appointed by Rome, and were required to be theologians. Feast days were gradually reduced to Sundays and key holidays, while pilgrimages and processions were abolished. So were indulgences or the official sanctification of individuals. Clerical marriage became the norm. Church property was taken over by secular authorities and created new financial resources. In some areas, the power of church courts was reduced and helped to centralize secular power in the process of state formation. Last but not least, Reformations confronted Europeans with the fact that Christianity contained radically different truth claims—among Protestants, among Protestants and Catholics, and among all these faiths and Eastern Orthodox Christians. This meant that the history of and arguments embedded in truth claims were constantly reconstructed and questioned. Eventually this contributed to the emergence of intellectual positions which recognize religions as cultural systems of meaning and explore their ideas, tensions, and limitations.

Despite these momentous changes it makes no sense to think of Protestantism in itself as an invariably modern, individualizing, liberating force and moral achievement. Leopold von Ranke’s (1795‒1886) view in 1854 that “Protestantism, as evolved in Switzerland and Germany” did not suit “Southern nations, and less cultivated countries as such” remains testimony to the chauvinism which has often colored historical judgment of a movement which many writers continue to feel deeply emotional about and evaluate as a watershed for Western civilization. For Ranke, the Reformation had been the German nation’s task to restore the purity of revelation.[2] Three decades later a Pennsylvanian pastor announced on the four hundredth anniversary of Luther’s birth in 1883: “If there had been no Luther in Germany, there would have been no Washington in America.”[3]

Current scholarship critically questions such Protestant myth-making and memory cultures and turns away from linear grand narratives in which the Reformation provides clear stepping stones toward progress, human freedom, democracy, toleration, market capitalism and cultural superiority in the West, and Catholicism figures as a reactionary force (see also Burgess, Chapter 5). It pays more attention to links between Protestants and Catholics, in Europe as much as in Anglo-Iberian colonizations.[4] Critical grand narratives which argue that Protestantism contributed to a “failed Western modernity” are more rarely defended, although recently Brad Gregory has prominently asserted that secularization, consumerism, and hyper-pluralist relativism form the Reformation’s unintended and deeply deplorable legacies.[5]

Yet concepts of modernity which rely on the notion of secularization are to be approached with caution and qualifications.[6] At the beginning of the twenty-first century it remains easy to complicate the notion that living in a “modern” age means inhabiting a “secular” world. Faith-based issues remain extremely important in American politics and diplomacy. India’s liberal democracy sees frequent religious riots. The dwindling church membership witnessed in some contemporary European societies meanwhile can be regarded as indicative of beliefs which are transforming into newly spiritualized ideas about personhood, healing, or death rather than testifying to outright religious decline. “Unchurching” populations can still regard their lives as connected to supernatural forces and form vibrant non-affiliated spiritual groups.[7] What we really need to understand is how categories of the “religious” or “secular” have been constructed by whom, when, to what end, and which attitudes, definitions, and regulation such concepts affect[8] (see also Lotz-Heumann, Chapter 33).

Historians therefore do well to approach Protestant beliefs since the Reformation in terms of their own time and as furnishing particular concepts of confessional difference, of the sacred, selfhood and the sensuous, the heterodox and orthodox, the rational and irrational, temporal and eternal, in Europe and beyond. These processes of definition, demarcation, and debate continue to unfold globally, as Protestantism is nothing locked in an early modern past or a Western story—its varieties enjoy tremendous popularity in Asia, Africa, the United States, and Latin America. Between 1965 and 2000, for instance, the number of Protestants in Africa rose phenomenally from twenty-one million to one hundred and ten million people. The “average Anglican nowadays is a 24 year old African woman,” reports the Sunday Times, while born-again Africans often want to convince the West to rescue its overly liberal Christians from its “supposed apostasy.”[9] Tanzania is home country to the second largest Lutheran Church in the world. Two-thirds of Korean Christians identify as Protestants, and cultivate five main strands of theology and active missions.[10]

Europe’s early modern Protestantisms provide no homogenous point of “pure” origin and authenticity for these strands of global and transnational Christianity. Protestantisms have supported diverse alliances between state and church or para-churches. They have gone different paths in marking difference from or excluding specific groups, in mapping out internal hierarchies, interfaith relations, attitudes toward science and commerce, or moral discourses on issues such as social inequality or ethnicized politics. They have sustained very different approaches to the question of how God comes alive to people individually or collectively and through what practices the supernatural can be known.[11]

This means that a history of the Protestant Reformations is not about “one tradition” and legacy and not even without qualifications about a dominating tradition constructed through static core beliefs, but permanent processes of adaptation, development, consolidation, and the questioning of religious practices and ideas which we actively discover and interpret from our particular position in the present. It is possible to identify broader platforms of some more agreed mainstream ideas and practices. These can likewise be identified for the radical spectrum, characterized by its more literal approach to the Bible, or radical spiritualism, the distance to clericalism and the state, for instance (see Dixon, Chapter 10). Yet the authors in this handbook keep pointing to the fact that none of these traditions—ranging from Bohemian Utraquism to Pietists and spiritualists in America, or Lutheranism and Reformed churches, as well as ideas about political obedience—are as monolithic or coherent as they used to be portrayed. A historical project of this kind thus traces processes rather than fixed identities and points to rather more eclectic intellectual trajectories. Exactly whether and how past legacies—which include a broad spectrum of ideas and practices ranging from mysticism to millenarianism—link to contemporary Protestantisms, or how they are constructed in memory cultures are important historical questions to be asked as linear accounts of modernization and rationalization have ceased to be compelling. Each strand of the historical developments we can trace was replete with possibilities and limitations. Some strands became more dominant than others for a time, or lost and later regained significance. In North America, radicalism thus would turn into a force “the very heart” of Protestantism. In Germany, radical ideas influenced later seventeenth-century Pietism and eventually public religion more widely (see Dixon, Chapter 10). Future developments likewise can be described as uncertain and open to renewal.[12]

In gathering perspectives on layered temporal changes in different milieux through different actors, this handbook reflects how much the writing of religious history has diversified during the past decades. It has considerably widened in scope chronologically as well as geographically, and presents Luther as one of several influential Reformers, ranging from Hus and Zwingli, Melanchthon, Müntzer, and Calvin to Comenius, William Penn, or Rebecca Protten, a former slave who became an extremely successful Moravian preacher in the Caribbean and beyond (Figure 1.2). In its scope, this handbook is the most ambitious attempt yet to capture early modern Protestantisms’ complex geographies, by incorporating its global dimensions and following the itineraries of this faith from Massachusetts Bay to Danish St. Thomas in the Caribbean, Formosa in what is now Taiwan, Africa or Arctic missions (see in particular Häberlein, Chapter 17; Wiesner-Hanks, Chapter 36). Those wishing to understand why this handbook includes no map should turn to Graeme Murdock’s discussion in Chapter 6, which includes a brilliant critique of previous attempts to cartographically represent neat and clear geographical boundaries for particular confessions even within Europe.

FIGURE 1.2 Johann Valentin Haidt, The Protten Family, ca. 1751.

Rebecca Protten (b. 1718) preached to enslaved Africans in the West Indies, married a Moravian preacher and moved with him to the Saxon community of Herrnhut, where this portrait was painted.

By kind permission of the Cover Archives, Herrnhut.

The handbook also includes a far wider spectrum of ideas and practices than is common. Many new accounts in Reformation history are methodologically grounded in the anthropology of religion, materiality, and emotions. They are also bound up with a new approach to the history of great Reformers. Just as we no longer write the history of science predominantly in terms of the achievements of isolated geniuses who created knowledge about nature drawing on singular mental gifts, so we can see the making of religious knowledge to a significant extent as products of human society. Religious knowledge is always constructed within particular networks and in relation to their place in social and intellectual structures, by people who make use of ideas, information, and techniques as much as imaginative forms of engagement which are available to them in that society. “Knowledge” here is to be understood in its broadest sense, as assemblage of ways and techniques of knowing what is taken to be the supernatural, the divine, or demonic, for instance.

This allows us to ask who was able to stabilize competing notions that such knowledge was “truthful” knowledge at particular points and why, who managed to legitimize themselves as “religious expert,” and how such claims to truthful religious knowledge and expertise were contested. How was spiritual authority secured? Who was excluded by claims about what constituted “pure” evangelical teaching and what hierarchies existed in relation to those who were included? How were careers and systems of patronage reconfigured? A history of religious truth claims is thus bound up with questions of power, contestation, and group building, rather than individuality and free conscience in our modern sense: about which sites, media, and institutions shaped debates, for instance (see Pettegree, Chapter 18).

This approach leads next to the question of how beliefs about a truthful religion were informed by and gave shape to personal experiences. How, for example, did belief resolve into gestures, habits, and temperament, ingrained by practices of spiritual preparation such as learning and daily repetition?[13] Acts embody and build up specific ideals about the way in which communities of believers locate themselves on earth in relation to the divine. The ways in which Protestants made religion “happen in their world” and relevant to truth claims about their religion therefore can be studied through concrete acts which involve their bodies, material culture, gendered identifications, spaces, and texts through which religion becomes present in imaginative forms.[14] We can point to rules about what Protestants were expected to feel where and how, how these rules about restraint and intensification might have shaped actual emotions, and what status emotions were given to “know” the supernatural.[15] Such perspectives particularly highlight the value of culturally historical approaches (see Roodenburg, Chapter 31; Koslofsky, Chapter 28). These allow us to better understand the spectrum of experiences and ideas involved in what it meant to live as Protestant during the early modern period and a transforming world.

This handbook covers the “long Reformation” period from ca. 1400 to ca. 1750. Several contributions emphasize the importance of the earlier Bohemian Reformations as well as long ingrained aspirations for a universal reformation in the Holy Roman Empire alongside the influence of inherited prophetic practices and assumptions which were now super-charged (see Louthan, Chapter 7; Hotson, Chapter 15; Barnes, Chapter 4). Yet the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a particular focus as central time for the initial developments of faiths which began to be called “Protestant.” Most contributions explore the Protestant Reformations in relation to the Catholic Renewal before and after Trent (Chapter 13 by Philip M. Soergel in addition focuses entirely on this subject). They repeatedly point to areas of convergence among Protestants and Catholics and continuities which have been obscured by narratives of radical confessional difference, and thus pluralize our understanding of Catholicism. A rich and current handbook historiography covers the astounding dynamics of Catholic change, the seriousness of many reforms, its global reach as much as disciplinary grip.[16] This handbook in turn provides up-to-date surveys on a rich field of key themes to explore the complexities of early modern Protestantisms in innovative ways to serve as point of orientation for readers as well as inspiring new research.

As in the Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, published in 2014, chapters follow a thematic rather than chronological order.[17] Some authors present broad overviews, while others embed case studies within their accounts to rethink concepts, such as rationality, “superstition,” or sensorial experience. Familiar building blocks of our understanding of Protestantism are covered in authoritative chapters on Lutheranism, the Swiss Reformation, Anabaptism, or print, while other contributions foreground themes such as the body or commerce as part of a Protestant political economy, which have never previously featured in handbooks on the Reformation.

Six parts will hopefully make it easier to navigate the thirty-seven contributions by historians of theology, of political thought and ideas as well as societies and cultures which make up this hefty volume. Part I introduces some of the knowledge about religion which Protestants generated: intellectual developments expressed through learned theology and ideas about evil and grace; ideas about temporality in a movement which saw the Last Judgment as imminent; ideas about political obedience and resistance which were critical to the Reformations; and evidence for “the nature” of spiritual experience these theologies could engender. The aim of Part II is to work through geographies of Reform, in order to emphasize the plurality and vitality of the movement in interplay with the politics and societies in which it was embedded. Parts III, IV, and V demonstrate in what ways the formation of distinctive Lutheran and Calvinist cultures can be charted as a gradual and multifarious process through an emphasis on processes of communication (Part III), institutions (Part IV), and practices (Part V), which could nonetheless have very profound effects. There are close thematic connections between contributions in different parts, so that Chapters 2 and 3 in Part I, for instance, tightly interlink with questions about Protestant identities which feature in Part V, as do chapters on music, visual and material culture in Part III. Ideally, these will be read together. Part V closes with three contributions which respond to Max Weber’s formative ideas about Reformation changes and disenchantment, the Protestant work ethic, and scientific revolution, while Part VI turns to yet broader assessments to end the handbook. It covers innovation and reform in non-Western faiths during the early modern period, the consequences of the Reformation in a global perspective, and memory cultures in the past and present.

Collectively these contributions allow us to evaluate key developments in the period in fresh ways. The early modern period was characterized by renewed demographic growth, state building and new forms of popular politics, the beginnings of a “global age,” areas of significant economic expansion and diversified material cultures, new technologies, such as printing, the expansion of learning, and proliferation of new intellectual trends as well as new challenges to the status of women and distinct languages of self-awareness.[18] The religious transformations interlinked with these huge and varied political, social, economic, and mental changes across the globe.

One of the most important developments in this age related to scientific practices. Here, the idea of sola scriptura can be said to have created a broader platform to help justify an empirical method of scientific inquiry. Philip Melanchthon’s influential curriculum in natural philosophy across Protestant Europe set out that laws in nature provided evidence of God’s existence. Human anatomy was practiced as a moral undertaking to reveal the greatness of God and with an emphasis on the close connection of body and soul. Such ideas about the value of empiricism were supported by many Catholics and built on pre-Reformation views of nature and making, but, Rankin finds, they began to unite Protestants rather uniformly. Other elements nonetheless kept differentiating traditions, as interests in the spiritualist tradition of Paracelsianism, in alchemy and astrology could sit uneasily with orthodox ideas (see Rankin, Chapter 35).

An enduring as much as unresolved Protestant struggle was to reach conclusions about human nature in relation to ideas about nature and grace—a “tiny element of contingent, human input in the overall process of salvation could ignite furious debate” (see Ocker, Chapter 2). German Lutherans had involved themselves in particularly fierce conflicts since 1555; it is apparently not overstated to argue that “these internal debates soon preoccupied Lutheran theologians at times more than did battles against Rome, Geneva, Zurich, the sectarians, the Jews, and the Turks taken together.”[19] The so-called Flacian controversy pondered whether sin had become substance of Man, while the later Antinomian controversy explored whether law should be given a positive role in conducting the moral life of the justified (see Kaufmann, Chapter 8).

Yet by the early seventeenth century, Bacon and his circle for instance thought it possible to recover some of the wisdom lost through the Fall. Comenius, too, thought a universal reformation of mankind as fallen creature possible and pointed to the considerable advances in knowledge through printing and voyages of exploration the world had recently seen. Comenius wished to teach all people everything (see Hotson, Chapter 15).

These ideas of “progress,” thus, were not about secular rationalism, but inspired by religious fervor, a wish to overcome Christian divisions and frequently linked to millennial thought. This diverse spectrum of orthodox and minority positions began to feature those with greater trust in human rationality, who moved away from Luther’s notion of reason as a whore. Nature appeared an open book which by ongoing discovery could manifest the existence, power, and glory of God (see Heyd, Chapter 22; Barnes, Chapter 4). A Lutheran astronomer like Johannes Kepler (b. 1571) thus had no doubt that he was an ideal reader of God’s universe. God, Kepler confidently wrote, had waited for him as “apt contemplator” of his building plans. Yet the imperial mathematician never gained a university position and for many years was excluded from taking communion with fellow Lutherans because he held some heterodox ideas.[20]

Kepler was a scholarship boy from a lower-middle background and provides an excellent example of what a mainstream Protestant emphasis on education could unintentionally allow for. Schooling was deemed essential to produce a God-fearing population rather than stimulate independent thought. It was designed to shape moral citizenship, and this relied on the observance of moral laws which taught the obedience God wanted to see exercised. Moral obedience and virtue stood at the center of much Protestant education. Once more, a generalized idea that the Reformations ushered in more individual freedom cannot be rooted in history (see Methuen, Chapter 23). Institutions, and in particular universities, nonetheless created possibilities for Protestant men like Kepler to move beyond the simple imposition of conformity—though Kepler in turn, and unlike Comenius, never championed lay learning and often wrote in the most obscure Latin of the entire period.

An emphasis on possibilities to negotiate ideas and practices is also borne out by local historical research on other institutions and an approach which has questioned the idea that the Protestant churches together with the state rigorously implemented a whole program of social disciplining from top down (see Kümin, Chapter 25). Geneva’s systematic practice of excommunications for those unwilling to conform, for instance, was achieved independently from the magistrate and very much in opposition to large parts of the old elites. The policy, moreover, was unique. Protestant legal courts generally were active in relation to sexual crimes and public morality, but groups within the populace shaped which interests were followed. Courts did not so much determine confessional identity in relation to laws but provided a “charged venue” for such ideas to be worked out (see Harrington, Chapter 24). Scholars thus no longer look at the laity as either passive or resistant, but as agents who shaped the Protestant world in a much fuller sense.

The Reformed tradition in general stood apart from Lutheranism and other versions of Protestantism through its commitment to remain as independent of the secular state as possible, as well as through its constant goal of increasing moral discipline to create a kingdom of Christ on earth (see Holt, Chapter 11). Variation once more prevails: in England, local congregational discipline was only very partially supported by elites and a “complex pattern of acceptance of, and resistance to, zealous Protestantism” evolved. The nobility across Europe could be highly selective in their religious practices and beliefs, confessionally ambiguous or indifferent. Only in Scotland did Reformers labor “successfully … to turn the people into a nation of Protestants, or even Puritans, characterized by social discipline and a passionate conviction” (see F. Heal, Chapter 12; Asch, Chapter 27).

Gendered understandings of morality in mainstream Protestantism were nonetheless implemented across Protestant Europe in ways which were strongly biased against women’s equality. They continued traditional understandings of bodily and mental differences as well as the sense that unbridled female sexuality was particularly dangerous and disruptive (see Crowther, Chapter 32). Divorce was hardly ever granted. Family life continued to represent an important ideal and was communicated in detail in the correspondence of many Reformers to cement emotional bonds (see Greengrass, Chapter 21). Pre-marital sex in turn was more widely prosecuted and from Sweden to Protestant Switzerland the burden fell disproportionately on women, especially as having illegitimate children was more strongly criminalized. In Switzerland, the regulation of family life, pre-marital sex, adultery, and marital harmony, in fact turned into the key concern as the Reformation became fully institutionalized (see Head, Chapter 9). Witches were demonized.

Gendered ideals and sexual behavior, in short, were crucial for normative regimes which defined the “pure” and “impure,” mapped them onto confessional differences and easily led to a heightened sense of disorder. “Radical” groups often pioneered new arrangements for the choice of marriage partners, but in marriages themselves the dominant concern remained to keep women submissive (see Crowther, Chapter 32). The privileging of marriage went hand in hand with ethnicized policies in the Dutch East Indies: the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) (United East Indies Company) ordered that all Christians living together had to marry and forbade fathers of mixed-race children to return to Europe (see Wiesner-Hanks, Chapter 36).

At the same time, it is worth highlighting that historians of English religion point out that gender difference was not necessarily made to matter in many of their sources (see Ryrie, Chapter 3). The rise in travel literature as well as the popularity of alchemy provided competing discourses to the staple of gender ideals in sermons. Alchemy proposed that bodies could be both masculine and feminine, while global encounters provided accounts of other modes of living, which could complicate views of what should count as “natural” sexual difference (see Crowther, Chapter 32). Dutch missionaries could respect rituals of sexual maturity and indigenous practices of gendered piety (see Wiesner-Hanks, Chapter 36).

If we look at ideas about gender equality in Protestantisms more broadly, we moreover see how some spaces for women’s greater authority and different ideas about sexual difference could be created. French noblewomen often took the lead in the “Protestant self-fashioning” of their family (see Asch, Chapter 27). In Lutheran Germany, the valuation of empiricism could make it possible for elite women after the sixteenth century to gain a public role through their experience in making and freely dispensing herbal medicines for the poor (see Rankin, Chapter 35). By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Pietist and Moravian gender stereotypes became more flexible, as women were particularly attracted to the movement and active in it. An interest in genealogies which elevated the elect status of family members included women. These developments even cut across class bound conceptions, as “illiterate maidservants became visionaries, middle-class women hosted Pietist meetings, and noblewomen offered protection to persecuted radical Pietists and engaged in religious writings” (see Gleixner, Chapter 16). Women were in the majority and active participants among the settler communities in Massachusetts Bay (see Häberlein, Chapter 17).

Greater social equality was not a prime concern of mainstream Protestantism. It did nonetheless greatly care about the regulated distribution of charity for the resident poor in Europe, even though it was no longer seen as an avenue to salvation. While some of the radical communities attempted to hold all goods in common, most Protestants regarded a person’s rank and wealth as divinely ordained (see Johnson, Chapter 34). Dutch and English imperial claims were bolstered by Protestant ideology, and slavery was regarded either as irrelevant to salvation or as part of God’s yet to be revealed plan. Quakers had begun to question slavery since 1680; in 1736 Benjamin Lay systematically campaigned against it and the 1758 Philadelphia Meeting excluded those who bought and sold slaves.[21] In Ebenezer, the recently arrived community of Austrian Protestant migrants with their Pietist minister staunchly opposed allowing enslaved Africans into colonial Georgia. Their 1739 anti-slavery petition was “one of the first of its kind in Britain’s southern colonies” and provides another testimony to the vitality of religiously informed ideas in transatlantic worlds.[22]

Pursuing commerce without greed continued to be broadly legitimized, while there existed a spectrum of ideas about what constituted extravagant, superfluous spending. Contrary to Max Weber’s idea that only ceaseless work and profit to be reinvested mattered to those among the Reformed looking for signs of their predestined election, there is now substantial evidence to indicate the reverse. Much time continued to be spent on the “continuous effort to maintain a height of spiritual ardor” and receive flashes of grace rather than relentless work. Meanwhile commodities took on moral meanings in a community’s symbolic universe, and not least provided important signals for creditworthiness (see Ryrie, Chapter 3; Johnson, Chapter 34).

There is thus every reason for a continued inquiry into a history of Protestant trade in the age of joint-stock companies and expansion as well as a history of Protestant consumption. This must include a figure such as Benjamin Franklin, whose wife one day placed a china bowl with a spoon of silver on the breakfast table. Franklin recorded that it “had cost her the enormous Sum of three and twenty Shillings, for which she had no other Excuse or Apology to make, but that she thought her Husband deserv’d a Silver Spoon & China Bowl as well as any of his Neighbours.”[23] Even Franklin, whom Max Weber famously thought of as a model of Protestant frugality, thus quickly succumbed to costly, shiny, and delicate things: “This,” he noted, “was the first Appearance of plate & China in our House, which afterwards in a Course of Years as our Wealth encreas’d amounted gradually to several Hundred Pounds in Value.”[24] Protestants in the Dutch Republic as much as in America could thus record pleasure and excitement about things as well as shame, shock, and frustration. They loaded them with extra moral meaning, so that food, for instance, could mark the increasingly more complex modes of religious encounter among Europeans in global settings, as when the Bostonian Samuel Sewell recorded in 1697 that he met a Spanish governor for breakfast: “breakfast together on Venison and Chockolatte: I said Massachuset and Mexico met at his Honour’s Table.”[25]

How can we define then the “nature” of Protestant spiritual experience? This can still seem very much of an “undiscovered country,” but contradictory feelings once more seem to be characteristic (see Ryrie, Chapter 3). How did many Protestants live with the sense of enduring sinfulness, which gradually aged and killed the body, with that sense of being both an enemy and child of God (see Ocker, Chapter 2)? Some contributors argue that these ideas resulted in heightened collective and personal anxiety which brought with it vacillation between hope and despair (see Barnes, Chapter 4). The assurance of faith was very much designed to remain a constant struggle, so that suffering, despair, and unbelief could be seen as signs of God’s favor. Taken to extremes, spiritual life could even mean a type of “warfare with God, in which God feints disapproval while at the same time challenging and arming believers to overcome him” (see Ryrie, Chapter 3). The fact that the souls of the dead were beyond intercession raised further fears. God could no longer seem touchable, but distant, while the laity was encouraged to focus on their own state of permanent corruption, which in itself prolonged Christ’s perpetual passion (see Roodenburg, Chapter 31).

Added to this was the prominent notion that the end of times was near. Did this produce Protestants as more aggressively curious, restless, anxious, and in this sense “modern” species? (see Barnes, Chapter 4). German Pietists certainly seem to have characteristically shifted between “euphoria and melancholy” in the lyrics they found to express themselves. They tended to provide written testimonies of their penitential struggles and conversion, which could show the effects of God in an individual’s life and dwelt on systematic internal self-examination. Diaries became key tools to record disciplines and spiritual renewal in this culture of individuation (see Gleixner, Chapter 16).

On the other hand it needs to be stressed that many lived forms of early modern Protestantism were community orientated and, in contrast to Catholicism, sin was not regarded as an individual failure to conform to God—it implied collective culpability (see Karant-Nunn, Chapter 20). This explains why in Scotland, as in America, there were communal fast days and prayers (see Lotz-Heumann, Chapter 33). For most Protestants listening to sermons and encountering the Bible through reading and transcribing remained crucial. The practices held out consolation and comfort as something that could be expected, and further techniques of assurance were supplied by liturgy practices through lifelong repetition, not least praying the Creed. Burial services in England and Scotland routinely held out the promise that the departed were “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life” (see F. Heal, Chapter 12).

Music became a key element with which to express feelings and communicate with God and help in times of distress in many forms of Protestantism that practiced congregational singing or encouraged daily singing at home or at work. Calvin invested music with nearly “magical, unbound power” and it generally appeared as embodied practice through which God acted on humans. The Reformations thus were musical movements and fostered distinctive soundscapes which could serve as confessional markers (Brown, Chapter 30; Gleixner, Chapter 16). In relation to art, Lutheranism marked out confessional differences from Calvinism through its use of sensual imagery in the form of a Lutheran “baroque” of its own. A new genre of “confessional images” (Bekenntnisbilder) fostered a sense of unity, while pre-Reformation art could still be valued aesthetically and as memorial. Johann Arndt and his followers meanwhile believed that images and emblems could be imprinted in the soul and were certainly not subordinate to God’s Word (see B. Heal, Chapter 29).

The same assumption expressed itself in England, where Foxe’s best-selling Book of Martyrs enduringly used emotive woodcuts of steadfast preachers in flames. Services inspired new forms of “sacral looking,” which now focused on the pastor’s face. His voice and its affective registers became distinctly important for a long period in many milieux. Vehement preaching was believed to shape the soul and move hearts toward faith. Weeping was quite acceptable. In England and Scotland this style was popular until it fell out of favor in the late seventeenth century, and emotions of this kind were redefined as private (see F. Heal, Chapter 12). It is quite clear, in short, that the notion that Protestants were emotionally more cool, distant, or rational during the early modern period is outdated across the Protestant spectrum. They cultivated specific sensual worlds which were invested with great meaning.

Yet sensual and spatial worlds could remain in considerable flux. Swiss bi-confessional communities which used the same church tended to negotiate at length and sometimes even for years about the use of sacred objects, such as baptismal fonts, and needed to be ready to compromise (see Head, Chapter 9) As Benjamin Kaplan has recently underlined, there was thus no steady progress toward religious toleration or what is often termed “secularization” in Europe. The late eighteenth century still saw intense religious persecution, enlightened arguments could serve to endorse old Protestant prejudices against Catholics, and most enlightened thinkers looked for “more reasonable forms” of religious belief and practice rather than rejecting organized religion[26] (see also Gow/Fradkin, Chapter 14; Burgess, Chapter 5). One of the issues at stake was whether landscapes could still be seen as instruments of divine education and warning. Danish clergy were still happy to deliver spring sermons at healing wells during the eighteenth century. German Lutheran pastors by then agreed that the efficacy of waters was due to natural causes, but during earlier periods defended the notion that their healing power came directly from God and would be extended to all those approaching “holy wells” with a pious attitude (see Lotz-Heumann, Chapter 33). Religious symbols and spaces could thus be enchanted, de- as well as re-sacralized.

Such processes of renewal and reform occurred in many world religions, not simply in the West. And, as we have seen, Protestantism increasingly asserted itself as a world religion. Before 1750, Protestantism slowly expanded outside Europe, and not only in North America, where its impact was greatest. Protestants could be found in many places ranging from parts of Asia, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. These small pockets of presence or even impact expanded only in the nineteenth century. The much more recent “booming congregations” in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, especially of Pentecostalists and fundamentalists, will now shape much of the future of global Protestantism (see Wiesner-Hanks, Chapter 36). In faith communities around the world, selective adaptations of Protestant traditions and traditionalizing rituals will continue to amalgamate with new political, social, and emotional concerns in the enduring human endeavor to make a Christian God come alive.

In sum, then, this handbook examines the progress and directions of current scholarly research on the Reformation. It pays attention to the contested questions for 2017 and its aftermath: “Which Luther to remember?”; and how will different choices be made to remember, silence, or forget? Bruce Gordon explores this memory culture in detail. Gordon and Thomas Kaufmann both set out divergent assessments of Luther’s historical significance, and Kaufmann makes the strongest possible case for the “provocative” argument that without Luther there would have been no European or global Reformations. Howard Hotson, by contrast, sees Luther as a Reformer who “harnessed” much of the pre-existing energy and “channeled it into his narrower reformation while obstructing all efforts to pursue broader reforms” (see Gordon, Chapter 37; Kaufmann, Chapter 8; Hotson, Chapter 15). In the future, scholarly interpretations will continue to broaden globally and new comparative perspectives seem on the horizon. Extensive editions of Luther’s works have appeared in Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong, where Luther research for some time now has “involved an exchange between East and West, rather than an education by the West.”[27]

This handbook also provides a much wider and novel framework for discussions which move beyond Martin Luther and Lutheranism to address questions about continuities and change in relation to much larger chronologies and geographies. It will be crucial for the next decades of scholarship to investigate religious change as multi-centric and interconnected across Western and non-Western worlds of Protestantisms in the early modern period.

FIGURE 1.3 John Hall, 1775, after Benjamin West, William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, when he founded the province of Pennsylvania in North America, 1681, engraving, 42.55 × 58.74 cm.

By kind permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Current handbook literature on the Reformations is oddly skewed: it omits global Protestantism, and focuses entirely on the global Catholic experience. In these handbooks on the Christian world in the early modern period or the Reformation, Protestantism thus is presented as a European story.[28] The influential confessionalization paradigm was entirely European-based, as it explored the dual processes of state formation and confession building as part of a Western trajectory toward modernity. The point of incorporating these neglected global dimensions is that it demonstrates the vitality of varied traditions, which confronted very different institutional milieux, could significantly challenge political and cultural ideas of mainstream European faiths, and in turn reshape European Protestantisms (Figure 1.3). In Pennsylvania, for example, Quakers, Mennonites, Huguenots, Lutherans, and Calvinists from five different European nations created a pluralistic “holy experiment.”[29] Conceptions of the state, gender, or the supernatural could be worked out in distinctive ways; emotions were made to matter differently.

All these strands form part of a history of the “long Reformation” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries properly conceived. They are at the core of the story of European Reformations—even in the settlement of eighteenth-century British America, for instance, German migrants were more numerous than the English.[30] In St. Thomas, Danish settlers battled with German Moravians, mulattos, and black slaves who quoted the Bible to challenge slavery. New scholarship can draw on the considerable interest in “connected” histories and a de-centered perspective on narratives of change located in the West[31] (see also Crowther, Chapter 32). Questions about the nature of religious encounters among people of different Christian faiths in relation to their European traditions as well as Protestant constructions of ethnicity to pursue the ultimate universal reformation overseas in future are likely to command greater attention.[32] The considerable links between Protestant centers of missionary thought across Europe and the wider world around 1700, as Bostonian clergymen could network with German Pietists in India, and the effect of encounters in North America on later encounters in Africa and the Pacific are similarly important areas of study.[33] These new perspectives show the relevance and dynamism of a rich field of Reformation scholarship for our understanding not just of the European past, but a history of the world.

NOTES

1. Martin Luther, “Preface to Erasmus Aulber, The ‘Eulenspiegel’ and Koran of the Barefoot Monks,” in Christopher Boyd Brown (ed.), Luther’s Works, vol. 60, Prefaces (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 2011), 279.

2. Leopold von Ranke, Über die Epochen der Neueren Geschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), 102.

3. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3; and his contribution in “German History,” Forum Anniversaries 32/1 (2014): 89; an excellent guide to interpretations of the Reformation is C. Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

4. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

5. In Gregory’s view the Reformation was prompted by a significant divide between Christian ideals and the realities of life for most people during the later Middle Ages. In response, Lutheranism sought to strengthen the Church’s message by focusing on the Bible. However, it soon became clear that the Bible allowed different interpretations of faith. This unintentionally led to infinite conflicts among Protestants as well as between Catholics and Protestants. In turn, liberal states eventually privatized religion. This left little space for public debates about common values and more time for shopping. “In combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic, liberal states,” Gregory sums up, “a symbiosis of capitalism and consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the heterogeneity of Western hyper-pluralism”—a development that has reduced human possibility: Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 21, 23, 215.

6. This is powerfully brought out by Ruth Harris’s work, see her Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008); The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011); but also in a publication such as Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

7. Birgit Meyer, “An Author Meets her Critics: Around Birgit Meyer’s ‘Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Toward a Material Approach to Religion,’” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5 (2014): 205–254, here esp. 205–206. This also explains why the historiography of “confessionalization” which points to the “modern” features of both early modern Catholicism and Protestantism in alliance with state-making projects seems problematic: it assumes a modernity which itself needs to be questioned and analyzed as historical concept.

8. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), here esp. 17; Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in Robert A. Orsi (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36–57.

9. David Maxwell, “Post-Colonial Christianity in Africa,” in Hugh McLeod (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9: World Christianities c.1914–c.2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 401, 403, 421.

10. Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsten Kimm, A History of Korean Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

11. For a contemporary approach see Tanja Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2012).

12. Interestingly, this perspective can motivate historical scholarship, as one recent historian ends a book on the art of Reformation sermons with a utopia of sorts: “The established Churches gradually lose their institutional power; the voice of the preacher re-emerges as a charismatic source of authority; and the sermon culture described in this book awakens from its long sleep”; see Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 402.

13. This paraphrases Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s immensely useful approach to scientific objectivity, and thus the interaction with the natural, in Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 52.

14. For an introduction to such approaches see Henrietta L. Moore, Still Life: Hopes, Desire and Satisfactions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

15. Pascal Eitler, Bettina Hitzer, and Monique Scheer, “Feeling and Faith—Religious Emotions in German History,” German History 32/3 (2014): 343–352.

16. See, most recently, Peter Marshall (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.), The Ashgate Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

17. John H. Arnold (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

18. See the recent summary by Hamish Scott in Scott (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3, available at <http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199597260.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199597260>, accessed July 7, 2016.

19. Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur. Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 18.

20. See Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

21. Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 235–237.

22. James Van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4.

23. J. A. L. Lemay and P. M. Zall (eds.), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 76.

24. Ibid.

25. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 219.

26. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), esp. 13–16.

27. Pilgrim W. K. Lo, “Luther and Asia,” in Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel, and L’ubomir Batka (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 613. The volume also includes contributions on Lutheranism in Africa and Latin America.

28. See, for instance, R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol 6: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); or Marshall, Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation.

29. Elliott, Empires, 213—a rare comparative history.

30. Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery, 6.

31. Ibid., 12. Melton’s book is a model of this approach.

32. The seventeenth-century clergyman John Beale, for one, wrote to the natural philosopher Robert Boyle that hard-breeding Protestant Scotsmen should bring reformed religion to America, resist the lure of luxury trade, and bring greatness to the Stuarts—for an exemplary article on the link between natural philosophy, global missionizing, and trade politics, see Gabriel Glickman, “Protestantism, Colonization, and the New England Company in Restoration Politics,” The Historical Journal 59/2 (2016): 365–392.

33. Philip D. Morgan, “Encounters between British and ‘Indigenous’ Peoples, ca.1500–ca.1800”, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (eds.), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (London: UCL Press, 1999), 58; and on the contacts of clergymen across continents, Glickman, “Protestantism,” 389.

FURTHER READING

Arnold, John (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Bamji, Alexandra, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (eds.) The Ashgate Companion to the Counter-Reformation. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Dixon, C. Scott. Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania 1517–1740. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Hsia, R. Po-Chia (ed.) The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol.6: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Kaplan, Benjamin J. Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of the Enlightenment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Karant-Nunn, Susan. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping Religious Emotion in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kolb, Robert, Irene Dingel, and L’ubomir Batka (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Melton, James Van Horn. Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Pestana, Carla Gardina. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Rublack, Ulinka. Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Ryrie, Alec. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

PART I

THE NEW THEOLOGY

CHAPTER 2

EXPLAINING EVIL AND GRACE

CHRISTOPHER OCKER

FOR thirty years, Adam, the first man, lived a carefree life with his wife Eve in a garden of pleasure—Paradise—when the Devil came disguised as a serpent to tempt them. They took fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil against God’s explicit command. Suddenly awakened to their nakedness, they covered themselves in shame. An archangel drove them out of the garden. From then on, women gave birth in great pain and lived subject to men. Adam was condemned, together with his descendants, to cultivate his food by hard labor for the rest of time (Figure 2.1).

Humanity enjoyed a mere thirty-year generation of uninterrupted, God-intended bliss. Their descendants were condemned to a degraded misery.[1] So goes the familiar story in the version of Hartmann Schedel (d. 1514), compiler of the lavishly illustrated Liber chronicarum (1493), near the beginning of his history of the world.

More than a century passed before European scholars in any number believed that Adam and Eve might be only two of many human progenitors, relativizing the impact of their sin; or that the story might be an ancient myth, eliminating the historical argument for why humans are depraved.[2] At the end of the Middle Ages, all through the Reformation, everyone was to be a child of this couple, designed as perfectly good, plagued by corruptible bodies, leaning instinctively toward evil from birth, destined to eternal punishment—unless Christ’s redeeming sacrifice were received as a gift of God’s grace. This was the storied moral binary of a majority religion.[3]

Of course, Luther uniquely disrupted traditional practices and beliefs.[4] His followers applied and adapted his arguments for “justification by faith alone” to support several elements of a reform platform, breaking down barriers to the free flow of grace: the elimination of penance as a sacrament, a reconceptualized Eucharist, the reconstruction of the priesthood into a non-intercessory pastoral office, and a reorganization of clergy that eliminated popes and bishops as conduits of sacramental power. Catholic scholars certainly defended tradition, refining earlier scholastic arguments to describe “justification” as a process by which the gift of grace heals or embellishes human moral powers, and they went beyond late medieval practices to renew the church spiritually, in part to undermine Protestant appeal. The depth and vigor of polemic between the “confessions” can hardly be exaggerated. Intellectuals, most of whom were clergy teaching in schools or working in the retinues of popes, prince-bishops, princes, bishops, and cities, drew on the combined arsenals of scholasticism and Humanism to formulate and refine their competing “confessional” positions. They fought by pen and podium to separate cities, territories, and kingdoms into competing religious camps.

FIGURE 2.1 Adam and Eve, choose to eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in their plush garden (right), then are expelled from Paradise (left). Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), f. 7r.

By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

But Catholic and Protestant theologians also agreed about many things.[5] They agreed that Adam and Eve were created physically and morally flawless, with painless bodies that would not grow old or die; that the progenitors should have propagated a flawless species; that they enjoyed exceptional knowledge and complete mastery over the natural world; that they lived non-violently in a perfectly balanced environment, an actual garden located somewhere on earth; and that they possessed strong, persistent willpower, allowing them to choose freely to continue in this moral condition of “original righteousness” forever. Catholic and Protestant theologians agreed that God’s command not to eat of the fruit of a particular tree was an arbitrary proof of obedience; that the original human parents were tempted by an actual snake; that this temptation was a textbook case of deception; and that after Adam and Eve sinned, their descendants inherited both the guilt and the penalty for committing it. Official opinion on both sides said original sin is transmitted through lineage, not by imitation, and human sinfulness could only be remedied by divine grace. They agreed that Jesus did not inherit original sin, by virtue of his mother Mary’s virginal conception. Both parties of theologians were willing to regard those who denied any of these agreements, such as the followers of Faustus Socinus (d. 1604), as religious criminals.

In addition to these converging opinions, Protestant and Catholic scholars discussed some of the same open questions within their separate camps. They debated whether the original transgression involved: contempt for God’s Word, doubt, distrust, pride, disobedience, murder (by causing their progeny’s death), theft, rivalry, concupiscence, Adam’s wrongful submission to his wife, Eve’s failure to be subordinate to her husband, and/or demonic deception. They considered whether Adam or Eve’s sin was the worst in human history, and they argued between at least four different theories of the creation of individual souls.[6] Above all, they struggled among their own to agree on the exact relationship of divine agency and human will in moral action.

The process of Protestant–Catholic differentiation, so important on the whole, does not explain the entire effect of the religious controversy on an older moral system. It took time to reconfigure an established ethical culture, if that is what theologians were meaning to do.

A SCHOLASTIC BACKGROUND

Theological innovations of the sixteenth century stand on two distinctly Western–Christian notions about evil and goodness: that evil is an inherited trait (original sin) and that being good requires divine aid (a gift of grace).[7] Implicit here is an inverse proportion of human moral disability to divine agency. The more disabled, the more constant and unilateral was God’s intervention with grace. The more autonomous the human power of volition, the more collaborative was God’s grace with nature.

EVIL

People bore the marks of an ancient crime in their living bodies. To explain the inherited disability, theologians, since the rise of universities in the late twelfth century, defined the trait of sin in negative terms, either as a “privation” of being, rather than a “substance,” or as a privation of rectitude.[8] Either way, it was a morbid quality in the soul, and original sin aged and killed the body while amplifying physical desires. Desire, concupiscentia, and death bespoke the primeval origin of evil.

Adam and Eve’s transgression, like every subsequent human sin, violated an infinite God’s perfect dominion, argued Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), the early adapter of logic to theological uses in the west. The offense must be measured by the rights of the offended party, a perfectly just and infinite God. It was a transgression of infinite dimension.[9] Transmitted to all Adam’s descendants (in quo omnes peccaverunt, Romans 5:12 Vulgate), it was why all people tend to be bad.[10] The descendants were also guiltworthy, responsible for paying a debt they could never repay; nor could perfect justice stand if the debt were blindly forgiven. Only God as a human could satisfy a perfect and infinite God.

Medieval theologians argued that people were restored to a condition of righteousness by having Christ’s flawless life or innocent death accepted by God as satisfaction for sins, or sinners were restored by following Christ’s moral example. These two theories, of “satisfaction” (or “penal substitution”) and “moral influence,” developed by Anselm and Peter Abelard (d. 1142) respectively (and often contrasted by theologians in the nineteenth century and today), were elaborated in many ways by medieval and early modern scholars. Most began with theories of satisfaction (Abelard himself did not deny it).[11]

European theologians also agreed that through the sacrament of baptism (a ritual application of grace), a human being, normally an infant, is freed from eternal punishment as a gift of divine grace, but concupiscence lingers as the persistent desire to do wrong.[12] In Paradise, Adam and Eve enjoyed moral perfection, an “original righteousness.” Evil began with the loss of this condition. Take righteousness away and bodily desires run wild. Aristotle’s psychology then helped medieval scholars describe physical desire as a constant potentiality, even in Paradise before sin, and they traced evil actions to judgments between information, calculations, and wants. Some, most famously the Franciscan John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), a master of theology at Oxford and Paris of extraordinary influence, insisted that Adam and Eve in the state of innocence received a gift of grace to help preserve their original righteousness.[13]

GRACE

Grace was simply the remedy for evil. A strong consensus regarded grace as a real thing, a substance, transmitted by sacraments and other pious practices to living, ensouled bodies. Grace was “infused” at baptism and when the Eucharist is eaten, and given in other sacraments for special purposes, such as priesthood or marriage or death, or nurtured by means of pious deeds and practices. It transformed the self from transgressor to righteous or just: “what else are the justified but those who have been made righteous (iusti facti), namely, by him [God] who justifies the ungodly so that the ungodly becomes a righteous person?”[14] According to Peter Lombard’s (d. 1160) topical collection of opinions, the Four Books of Sentences, which served as one of two principal base texts of lectures in medieval theology faculties (the other text was the Bible), an endowment of caritas effected the return from evil to righteousness. To Lombard, on the strength of passages in the writings of the apostle Paul, this gift of grace, given at baptism, was actually an inpouring of the Holy Spirit and a prerequisite to any active and effective exercise of faith.[15] Such an “infused” faith “by which” (fides qua) a person believes was also meritorious, that is, it had tangible, positive moral value, in contrast with mere “belief that” (fides quae) the articles of faith are true. All other meritorious virtues stem from Spirit/love, divine affinity, injected right into the corrupt soul.

Three principal variations of Lombard’s concept of infused, enabling grace grew with scholasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Theologians variously stressed the role of free will and contrition (Bonaventure, d. 1274), contrition (John Duns Scotus, d. 1308), or the infusion of grace (Thomas Aquinas, d. 1274).[16] The Dominican Aquinas emphasized the priority of the divine gift, but he insisted it was a qualitas in the soul that produces faith and a habitus of virtue. This virtue comes without any prior cause: it is simply an expression of divine will, or election, although a soul must be “disposed” to receive it. Aquinas, like Lombard and others, called the entire process (the initial gift of grace, the remission of sin, and the effects of the “operating grace” apparent in the faith, love, and penance of a Christian person) justification.[17] The Franciscan Scotus agreed that grace is an infused habit given by God, but he stressed human moral capacity by insisting that a sinner can prepare for grace ex puris naturalibus, by natural power alone, while conceding that grace is routinely necessary to preserve goodness, even in the Garden of Eden, where a donum superadditum helped Adam and Eve remain righteous. In addition, Scotus argued that both the gift of grace and a person’s cooperation with it depended ultimately upon God’s free choice to accept the sinner as gracious. He even speculated that, de potentia absoluta (that is, as a matter of logical possibility but not in the actual world that God has ordained), mortal sin and grace could coexist and that sins could be forgiven without the infusion of grace; in fact, God could also refuse to reward deeds performed with the aid of caritas (this was based on his principle that a natural cause cannot limit or restrict how an infinite God acts).[18] Grace comes from beyond natural order but works within the natural order. Scotus’s younger contemporary, the Franciscan Pierre Aureol (d. 1322), pressed the discussion of grace in a still more anthropocentric direction, when he argued that caritas infused in the soul pleases God ex natura res and de necessitate, such that a person with caritas necessarily merits eternal life, and that even de potentia absoluta, no one can merit eternal life without caritas.[19] Grace, in this perspective, is subject to natural order.

Scotus’s speculations about moral action ex puris naturalibus and Aureol’s absolute natural order illustrate an early point in prolonged debate over nature and grace. To expose the powers and limitations of a grace-substance, scholars commonly discussed at least seven distinct sets of contrasting forms or modalities: “created and uncreated grace,” “grace given gratis and grace that makes gracious,” “operating grace and cooperating grace,” etc., each set juxtaposing the agency of divine giver and human recipient by subtle degrees.[20] Arguments built with these terms were generously ridiculed by Luther and Erasmus. But there were few alternatives to fighting over the conditions and implications of the forms of grace in late medieval schools. Radical alternatives to this approach were few, such as the opinion of Uthred of Boldon, an Oxford master active in the late 1350s, who reconceived grace as a “relation,” not a substance at all.[21] William Ockham (d. 1347) experimented with the idea that God could override the ordinary mechanism of grace by sheer power, de potentia absoluta, accepting a sinner by pure act of will; but this, as Alistair McGrath has emphasized, was a hypothetical exercise.[22] He was more famously thought to argue that gifts of grace were predicated on meritorious acts of will. Along with the contrasting forms of grace came the question of moral merit and worth: does the penitent’s action have intrinsic moral value (meritum de condigno), or does it have partial value, as a limited, maybe minuscule pledge toward future moral growth (meritum de congruo)? In this as in all subjects, late medieval scholars were trained to argue creatively from their sources, and the best freely did.

AGENCY

Linked to the question of grace was a question of divine agency. The Dominican Aquinas and others, especially scholars in the Augustinian Order, such as the Parisian masters Thomas of Strasbourg (d. 1357) and Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358), and eventually Martin Luther (d. 1546), each in distinct ways argued that divine choice must precede any consideration of future merit or worthiness. God gives grace freely in an act of premeditated love, unconditioned by human dispositions or choices. In this way of thinking, God’s beneficiaries were predestined to receive grace without any consideration of their worthiness or interest; whether or how remained an ongoing debate in Martin Luther’s religious order, where opinion usually stood close to Aquinas.[23] A complex logic explored alternative emphases on divine and human moral agency. Some, especially Franciscans, argued the possibility of human beings initiating the gift of grace, either by appealing to God’s freedom to accept such actions as meritorious (Scotus) or by appealing to God’s foreknowledge of future moral dispositions and actions (as William Ockham was, perhaps wrongly, said to argue).[24]

The varieties of grace, natural moral power, original sin, and divine agency formed a fourteenth-century storehouse of ideas from which scholars studying evil and grace drew for more than three hundred years. A shrewd Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (d. 1716), looking back over the Reformation, reduced this tangle to its quintessence: a debate between just two positions on the relationship of divine agency to future contingent actions.[25] But theologians were bound to a tangle of religious concerns. How was the flow of grace set in motion? What exactly did grace change and how? What exactly were the divine and human actions that healed the morbid self?

There were three general sets of contested opinions before the Reformation. Dominican and Augustinian friars variously emphasized God as the initial cause of grace and virtue as the outcome of human cooperation with God’s free gift. Franciscans and others emphasized human initiative and natural preparation for grace. And some theologians debated whether God is bound by the natural order to reward merit or does so as a free act of acceptance. Beneath it all was the challenge of describing the connections between nature and grace, human and divine action, a problem imposed by the limitlessness of traditional monotheistic concepts of God.

LUTHER

Luther modified two medieval ideas. First, he amplified and extended the effects of inherited evil. Beginning with his sermon on the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1514, three years before his conflict with the papacy began, he started to describe original sin and concupiscence as one and the same thing, returning to pre-scholastic usage.[26] Furthermore, he came to believe that not only the carnal desires associated with original sin but also personal guilt for Adam’s deed remained in all people until death, whether they received the sacraments or not. Luther argued that original sin creates a corruptio naturae that disables reason, will, and emotion from doing good in a manner that can contribute to salvation, leaving all people incapable of iustitia coram Deo, “righteousness before God.” In 1515, he reiterated the point in connection with his interpretation of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. “Can a person be perfectly just? No. A person is at once a sinner and just (simul peccator et iustus), a sinner by actual deed, and just by a certain consideration and promise of God, that God could liberate (liberet) one from sin, until one is perfectly healed.”[27] Perfect healing is always future to mortals—a healing “in hope” of a sinner “in fact” (in re). This conviction of lifelong unrighteousness and the alien source of goodness before God helped Luther develop his critique of indulgences and his rejection of a priest’s divine authority to pronounce the forgiveness of sins—a priest’s penitential power—in 1517 and 1518 for the first time with true clarity. The soul must always be desperate for the grace it receives by believing God’s mere promise. Grace preserves, remains predicated upon, this lifelong, desperate need. In the words of Philip Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession, “after Adam’s Fall all human beings … in the mother’s body and after, are entirely full of evil desire and addiction and can have, by nature, no true divine fruit, no true faith in God.”[28]

His second modification of medieval ideas follows from this. He made God’s agency absolute in the remedy to sin. In The Bondage of the Will, Luther’s famous 1525 rebuttal of Desiderius Erasmus’s moral theology, he argued that evil constrained human nature “necessarily” (but without compulsion, non coacte) to make sinful choices, unless one is under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit.[29] Only God’s choice could cause this spiritual gift. A divine “predestination and foreknowledge” determines not only who would be saved but the course of all events, Luther argued, expanding the idea of predestination beyond his predecessor’s in the Augustinian Order, Gregory of Rimini, author of one of the most theocentric theories of grace in the late Middle Ages. Luther adamantly rejected the more naturalistic speculations of medieval Franciscan theologians, but he also viewed Aquinas as a defender of autonomous moral power, perhaps relying on Gabriel Biel’s misleading presentation of the famous Dominican.[30]

Reflecting back on the beginning of the religious controversy near the end of his life, Luther pointed to the importance of a particular concept, which he called “passive justice” (iustitia passiva). He claimed that righteousness, in St. Paul’s usage, refers not to an active but to a passive moral quality of human personality.[31] A believer is iustus by faith alone; or in the Pauline phrase, iustus ex fide vivit, “the just shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17). The Pauline concept of righteousness refers not to a quality but to a relation, a state of “being in” or “existing toward”—not an internal possession.[32] It is “imputed” to, never cultivated within, the just man or woman. And the person accepted as “just” by God remains evil, “a Christian person is at once just and a sinner (simul iustus et peccator), holy, profane, an enemy and a child of God,” as Luther famously said in 1531.[33]

Luther first began to use the concept of iustitia passiva, although not the phrase, in the long series of lectures he gave at Wittenberg on the Psalms, from 1513 to 1516, three years before the religious controversy began. It appeared there alongside his revision of original sin and other reworked concepts—faith, imputation, promise, gospel, law, merit, grace, and human freedom.[34] He also adapted a medieval mystical theme of passive resignation to God (Gelassenheit) as he tried to find confidence in his pursuit of perfection.[35] In 1517, the concept of passive justification encouraged Luther’s rejection of indulgences, and it framed his criticisms of tradition during the quickly escalating controversy with other theologians and the papacy in 1518 and 1519. When Luther turned against “non-evangelical” monasticism in 1521, the concept of justification helped him see his own changing position as a stage in the conversion he began as a monk.[36] The new concept of justification removed an ethics of virtue from the realm of spiritual formation: being good could in no way help free a person from divine punishment or give the penitent confidence in God’s grace. One could only believe that God’s promises to forgive, accept, and receive the follower of Christ are true. Assurance came purely from faith, itself a gift given by God and produced by the action of the Holy Spirit.

Luther created a new binary, a new theoretical extreme. Permanent moral injury and guilt were coupled with grace as a unilateral gift. Grace was separated from any reciprocal exchange between heaven and earth.

This was a bold innovation, or rediscovery, as Luther’s followers would say. If passive justice was the axiom of a Protestant ideology of reform, it emptied monasteries, destroyed shrines, reduced and repositioned the means and media of divine power, recalibrated the measure of holiness, reconfigured emotions, and more. For or against, each side of the controversy over Luther had much to study and defend.

“FORENSIC” JUSTIFICATION

The indictment against mortal human nature was repeated and paraphrased frequently in Protestant confessional documents, all equally dire. The vast majority of Protestants, including most Anabaptists and even esoteric writers like Jakob Boehme, followed Luther’s identification of original sin with concupiscence, and they agreed that this sinfulness continued throughout mortal life. Enduring sinfulness became a distinctive element of all Protestant theology. The solution to evil had to come from outside. In a sharp restatement of Luther’s concept of iustitia passiva, Protestant theologians often described justification as “forensic,” “ ‘to justify’ signifies here [in St. Paul’s usage] not making a just person out of a wicked person but pronouncing a person just in the usage of the court (in usu forensi).”[37] Philip Melanchthon (d. 1560) originated the idea. Most Protestants accepted it. Although the two biblical sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, remained tangible “means of grace,” in John Calvin’s (d. 1564) famous phrase, their power depended on the promise communicated or on the atonement symbolically represented by them and the faith of the person receiving them, not on an intrinsic power in the physical sacrament created by a priest performing the rite. The media transmitting grace and the action of receiving it were distinct from the judicial declaration of forgiveness, justification—distinct from grace. In this manner, the new theologian demoted the priest and his rites. God, it seemed, was distinguished from the world by a generous, transcendent splendor.

Yet, tensions between nature and grace persisted among Protestants. A range of controversies suggest how the strain between embodied holiness on earth and alien righteousness from heaven diversified and grew over the course of the sixteenth century, for example, in conflicts about: the extent and mechanisms of publicly enforced religious discipline in south German and Swiss cities; the status of moral law in Christian life; the concept of participation in Christ’s righteousness (after the imputation of righteousness); liturgical and theological compromises imposed by the Imperial Diet after Protestants lost the War of Schmalkalden; the mystical theology of the Queen of Navarre Marguerite d’Angoulême; Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants in the early Dutch Republic; and the Academy of Saumur during the Jesuit-centered, Catholic renewal cultivated by Cardinal Richelieu in France.[38] By the end of the sixteenth century, Protestant theologians were keenly sensitive to the gradations of moral power. To the most theocentrically anxious theologians, the “Reformed Orthodox” but also “Gnesio-Lutherans,” a tiny element of contingent, human input in the overall process of salvation could ignite furious debate.

POWERS OF SELF

More intriguing still, to the medievalist at least, Protestants of all stripes found ways to describe a person’s moral apparatus positively, as a natural component of the living, ensouled body. Martin Luther insisted that a believer, and the gift of faith, exist “in Christ,” citing another common Pauline phrase, in which condition a believer wants to do good as an overflowing expression of gratitude. He divorced this from the language of virtue. Melanchthon carried over Luther’s distinction between justification and the transformation of the soul, but he was perfectly at ease with virtue, and like scholastic theologians since Peter Lombard, he admitted that supernatural virtues follow grace.[39] To him, the body’s natural affections, its natural concupiscentia, were morally neutral, their dishevelment (ἀταξία omnium affectionum) renders natural concupiscence bad.[40] He emphasized the freedom of the will under divine influence to decide between right and wrong, and he, like John Calvin, granted moral law a positive function in spiritual life: “the law is to be promoted to the reborn, that it may teach certain works in which God wants us to exercise obedience.” Both he and Calvin used Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in ways comparable to late medieval commentators.[41] In fact, among Protestant scholars of all kinds, as among their Catholic peers, there emerged over the course of the sixteenth century some dozen Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic ways to conceptualize moral weakness and its remedies.[42] The effects of grace, in other words, were still being analyzed in their natural human domain.

William Tyndale (d. 1536) fully embraced the Lutheran concept of imputed passive justice, but he never saw the imputation of righteousness and moral renewal as opposites;[43] nor did later Puritans or, presumably, their influences (Calvin, the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, and Reformed Orthodox theologians on the Continent). Puritans were keen on the idea of the imputation of an alien, external righteousness, “a mental boundary that divided true reformed Protestants from works-righteous papists.”[44] But their stress on biblical covenants as the model of divine–human interaction placed moral obedience and virtue at the center of religiosity. They were ready to pounce on anyone setting grace against moral law.[45]

LEXICAL BORROWING

Protestants could allude to the proximity of their vocabulary to a medieval Catholic lexicon. Justification by faith, according to the Augsburg Confession, blossomed as justification by faith formed by love, a clear allusion to the Pauline phrase central in Peter Lombard’s discussion of “infused grace,” as long as love is understood as a “relative noun,” not a substance or endowment poured into the soul.[46] The religious use of the term iustus in the Bible could refer to both passive justice “imputed” at baptism and “inherent” justice after, according to Protestant and Catholic theologians in their famous agreement on “double justification” at the Diet of Regensburg (1541).[47] Political circumstances encouraged theologians to collate opinions they would rather have juxtaposed. Johannes Brenz (d. 1570), Lutheran theologian in the retinue of the Protestant Duke of Württemberg, criticized the re-Catholicizing Augsburg Interim’s (1548) notions of faith, grace, and merit.[48] He also said the justified should exercise the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love and do good works by the favor and grace of God, alluding to a doctrine common among Catholic theologians since Peter Lombard. Martin Chemnitz (d. 1586), one of the two most influential Lutheran theologians of the later sixteenth century, described a person’s communion with God as a kind of participation in the union of divine and human in Christ, alongside the imputation of Christ’s alien righteousness, and he used medieval scholastic language to describe a sequence of experiences of grace in the soul: the purely divine disposition toward human beings (gratia praeveniens), a divine action preparing a person to believe (gratia praeparans), and a divine influence over human dispositions and behavior (gratia operans).[49]

In the Elizabethan church, the enemy of the Puritan’s doctrine of predestination looked popish (Peter Baro, d. 1599).[50] Yet the Puritan emphasized the methodical pursuit of virtue after grace, matching the rigor of Jesuit casuistry in an evangelical mode (William Perkins, d. 1602) or adapting the medieval distinctions of “grace freely given” (gratia gratis data) and “grace making acceptable” (gratia gratis faciens) (William Whitaker, d. 1595).[51] “We do not disallow the philosophy of your schoolmen,” said Whitaker to the Catholic reader. Then he repeated the distinction between a first justice imputed to the sinner and a second justice of infused virtues, alluding to the concept of double justification agreed at Regensburg. Broad church Calvinists like Richard Hooker (d. 1600), dismissive of Calvin and Perkin’s predestinarianism, were comfortable with Aquinas and Aristotle—all this in a vibrantly anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish Habsburg environment where doctrines continued to serve “myriad political narratives” for years to come.[52] One can discern, among Luther’s followers, the adaptations of a medieval ethics of virtue.

In these controversies, the Protestant repertoire of interlinked arguments illustrating and explaining evil and grace grew, energized not only by Luther’s discovery of passive righteousness but by Catholic accusations of antinomianism. By century’s end the new Protestant repertoire included sequences of arguments about the powers and relationships of intellect and will, divine decrees, the relation of God’s knowledge and will, the connections of divine action to God’s being, and the biblical diction, in Hebrew, Greek, and “Chaldean” (Aramaic), that supported a theologian’s standpoints. They argued about nature and grace like never before. When the Reformation was said and done, Protestant theologians expanded the theological vocabulary of human nature and divine grace. They extended a debate that had begun with the rise of universities three hundred years before Luther was born!

CATHOLICS

Cardinal Wolsey read the papal condemnation of Luther, Exsurge Domine, and burned several of the heretic’s books in St. Paul’s churchyard, London, on May 12, 1521. The Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher (d. 1535), then preached a sermon. He said, the “one grete grounde of Martyn Luther” is that “faythe alone withouten workes doth Iustifye a synner. Vpon ye whiche ground he byldeth many other erroneous artycles.”[53]
Exsurge Domine alluded to Luther’s doctrines of original sin and justification, but the condemnation centered on his criticisms of penance. Scholars pointed to Luther’s critique of active righteousness as the lynchpin of criticisms Luther meant it to be. The accusers included reform-minded scholastics, friends of Humanists, Humanists, quasi-Humanist scholastics, and of course high churchmen.[54] So it would be in Catholic theology up to the twentieth century. No clearer dichotomy can be imagined: orthodox versus heretic, Catholic versus Lutheran, at the matter of evil and grace.

Yet between the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 and the end of the first period of the Council of Trent (1547), while the religious controversy seemed to linger in an unsettled transition state, prominent Catholic intellectuals took positions approximating Luther’s own. Theirs has often been called a mediating, Erasmian stance, and Erasmus certainly represented it. He, too, discovered “a true and new grace, that is the free gift of the truly justifying faith of the gospel” in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.[55] Although he rejected Luther’s concept of the bondage of human choice to evil, Erasmus also worried over monks and theologians “who attribute too much to man’s merits.” Moreover, from 1527 to the end of his life in 1536, through the later editions of his Paraphrases and Annotations, he increasingly emphasized the role of faith and the uselessness of good works in justification, approximating Luther’s interpretation of key New Testament terms and phrases, to support authentic goodness and the trim, Christ-centered spirituality Erasmus promoted from his earliest writings.[56] In spite of Erasmus’s “charming and very agreeable intellect,” one could wonder—people did wonder—that “either Erasmus Lutherizes or Luther Erasmizes” (aut Erasmus Lutherizat, aut Lutherus Erasmizat), in the concerned and polemical report of the Jesuit Peter Canisius (d. 1597).

Italian Humanists began accusing Erasmus of instigating Luther’s rebellion as early as the 1520s. Juan de Valdés (d. 1541) kept an Erasmian read of Paul alive in the sodality of spirituali around the Colonna heiress Giulia Gonzaga (d. 1566) and the influential clergy at the court of Pope Paul III (Gasparo Contarini, Jacobo Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Morone).[57] Valdes also wrote a commentary on Romans to support Contarini’s team negotiating with Protestants at the Diet of Regensburg in the year he died. It relied heavily on Erasmus.[58] But suspicion never abated. By the publication of Pope Paul IV’s Index of Prohibited Books (1559) with Erasmus’s name on it (in the all-books-prohibited category), a line had been drawn, even though a vigilantly orthodox theologian had trouble putting those biblical and patristic commentaries and editions aside.

DOUBLE JUSTICE

Before the line was drawn, Catholic scholars experimented. Johannes Gropper (d. 1559), a Cologne theologian, developed a concept of “double justice” in his Enchiridion christianae institutionis (1538), drawing on the fifteenth-century Augustinian, Jacobo Perez of Valencia and perhaps also the late Dominican Tommaso de Vio Cajetan (d. 1534).[59] It was the source of the “double justification” doctrine accepted by theologians of the old and new faith at the Diet of Regensburg, including old friends of Valdes: Gasparo Contarini (d. 1542), papal legate to the Diet; Giovanni Morone (d. 1580), papal diplomat and future organizer of the Council of Trent; Albert Pighius (d. 1542), Gropper’s more famous teacher at the University of Cologne; Julius Pflug (d. 1564), the former jurist of the old-faith defender Duke Georg of Saxony; not to mention the Protestants Martin Bucer (d. 1551), Philip Melanchthon, and even, in a way, the uncompromising John Calvin, who wrote comfortably of a “double grace.”

Pope Paul III rejected the Regensburg Colloquy’s agreement on justification, but a Catholic mediating theology survived the condemnation. The issue was, could Catholic theology make place for passive justice, the axiom on which Protestant redefinitions of grace depended? Albert Pighius published two books in the year of his death. These suggest the parameters of Catholic experiment in the turbulent days preceding the Council of Trent (1545–1563). One book, De libero arbitrio (1542), attacked Calvin to defend the will’s natural moral sovereignty.[60] Another book, a report of the Regensburg Colloquy, defended a doctrine of double justice, which, at least to one of his Cologne colleagues, was influenced by John Calvin himself.

Pighius noted that the issue was justitia not within the Holy Trinity or in humans among themselves but in people before God (in creaturis, hominibus coram Deo, as an anonymous reader pointed out, Figure 2.2). Justice in humans before God may refer to God’s punishment of sin (iustitia per contentionem). But it may also refer to a justice that corresponds to a divine standard (iustitia per correspondentiam). This “justice by corresponding” is manifest either as “the absolute and most perfect correspondence to God’s rule” (ad suam regulam … absolutam et perfectissimam, in the marginalia), which since the fall of Adam and Eve only God incarnate achieved, or as a relative correspondence accommodated to human frailty (ad suam regulam … quatenus nostrae infirmitati attemperata [iustitia] est). At this point, Pighius made a large concession. He argued that justice so qualified involves imputed righteousness, “in him (Christ) we are justified before God, not in ourselves; not our righteousness but his, which is imputed to us with him when we are participating in him.”[61] Gesturing toward the new faith, Pighius said that imputed righteousness comes by faith. But those with faith always intend to fulfill God’s commands. Faith merely begins conversion. And good works are meritorious by virtue of God’s acceptance, not because God is indebted to doers of good. It was a both/and formula, nature and grace, with passive justice worked in.

The Gropper–Pighius doctrine of double justice contributed to the evangelical Catholicism that almost brought the Elector Prince-Bishop of Cologne, Hermann of Wied, into the Protestant party in 1545 and 1546.[62] Less influential scholars also embraced it (the Catholic schoolmaster in Zwiefalten, Bernhard Ott) or reconciled a Lutheran form of justifying faith to the sacrament of penance (the Franciscan cathedral preacher of Mainz, Johannes Wild, d. 1554) or adapted justifying faith to the freedom of the will (the Catholic teacher in the Protestant gymnasium illustre at Dortmund, Jacob Schoepper, d. 1554) or adapted it to the gamut of traditional devotional practices (the former Lutheran Georg Witzel, d. 1573). Julius Pflug went on to play a central role in negotiations with Melanchthon over the Augsburg Interim, accepting a basically Protestant concept of justification in exchange for concessions on Catholic rites and hierarchy. For a while, Catholic experiments with justification were trickling down and spread.

FIGURE 2.2 Anonymous notes in a contemporary hand outlining Pighius’s Controversiarum praecipuarum in comitiis Ratisponensibus tractarum sign. F6(v).

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—PK/Abteilung Historische Drucke/Signatur: 4” Dg 3738: S16.

LEXICAL CLEANSING

Other Catholics were leery. Were not Protestants anxious to claim that Contarini accepted Protestant doctrine?[63] One of the Italian spirituali, Bernardino Ochino (d. 1564), claimed it was the cardinal’s private report of the Regensburg colloquy that encouraged him to flee Italy for Geneva, and another, Pietro Martiri Vermigli (d. 1562), was said to have run to Zurich and Strasbourg after hearing Contarini tell his story.[64] Both became prominent among continental reformers supporting Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI. Double justice seemed to strengthen the Protestants.

The threat of Catholic loss helped erect a wall at justifying faith in the 1540s. The Council of Trent ultimately strengthened the wall, but only after Catholic theological experiments were aired and debated. Early in its business, after composing and publishing canons and a decree on the standard doctrine of original sin, in June 1546, theological delegates drafted a decree on justification. Further debate produced three more revisions of the draft over the next seven months, until the council’s general congregation published the fourth and final draft as its decree on January 13, 1547.[65]

It looked like a fitting complement to the Holy Roman Emperor’s rapid success in the war against the League of Schmalkalden in Germany in exactly these months. The debates at Trent put Catholic versions of iustitia passiva on full display. It was defended especially by members of the Augustinian Order, as an element of “double justice.” The display rankled. Dionysius Zannettino (d. 1566), a bishop in Crete and a member of the Franciscan Observance, was horrified to hear Augustinian friars echoing Luther in the sanctuary of Trent’s Santa Maria Maggiore: “Si vede manifestamente quella religion esser tuta infecta!”[66] On the other hand, Reginald Pole (d. 1558), at this point one of the council’s three presidents, and Girolamo Seripando (d. 1563), general vicar of the Augustinian Order and now the principal defender of the idea of double justice, warned their peers how zeal against Luther could go too far, driving Catholics into error.[67]

Catholics were experimenting with passive justification per solam fidem (Giulio Contarini, d. 1575, nephew of Gasparo Contarini), justification as divine acceptance with congruent merit in the preparation for grace (the Franciscan Andrés de Vega, d. 1549, the most important Scotist at the council), and double justice as a two-step righteousness: (1) unrighteous to righteous; then (2) righteous to more righteous (the Franciscan Anton of Pinarolo).[68] Seripando worked duplex iustitia into the second draft of the council’s decree. Enemies carefully sifted it out.

By the fourth draft of the decree, iustitia passiva was gone. Debate moved to the late medieval problem of prevenient grace and human predisposition (Thomists stressing grace, Scotists stressing human choices), under cover of “the certainty of faith.” Self-consciously excluded was Luther’s conviction that faith is itself the assurance of salvation. Dominicans at Trent denied certainty of grace in this life, while Franciscans asserted actual righeousness as assurance. The council’s prelates were neutral, determining that certainty might be possible only to those in a state of grace.[69] Grace, it was agreed, must be a transformative power in the soul. But the council left the exact relationship of human power and divine grace unresolved.

Soon the inquisition set to work showcasing the heresy of passive justice in Italy and Spain. Their most famous victim was the Dominican Archibishop of Toledo, Bartolomé Carranza, a veteran of the council and professor of theology in Valladolid. When the tribunal threatened him with the penalty of death, he was dismayed.

I will die for having said that [God’s] Son, Jesus Christ Our Lord, has justified his chosen ones with His Passion and Death; and that it was Jesus Christ alone who made peace between us and God; and that our works have no role in such a supreme work as this.

He added that while “our works are necessary, they are not the cause of our salvation.”[70] Was this Lutheran? In the proceedings, a friend protested that Carranza agreed with Luther only where Luther agreed with tradition. No matter. Carranza was removed from his see and died in the obscurity of an Italian convent. Others were less fortunate.[71]

The council had effectively neutralized passive justice. But Catholic debate over the relationship of human power and divine grace continued long after Trent, well over a century, under an increasingly complex vocabulary of terms and concepts. Conflict was provoked by assertions of the autonomy of nature’s moral order in Paradise (the Louvain professor Michael Baius, d. 1589), by a definition of God’s concursus generalis that distinguished between the “merely sufficient” and “efficacious” modes of divine will and proved their necessity in predestinarian fashion (the Spanish Dominican Domingo Bañez, d. 1604), by the formulation of human will as an extrinsic cause acting on God (the Portuguese Jesuit Luis de Molina, d. 1600), and by a reassertion of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian doctrine of grace as the predestined cause of holiness in and after Paradise (the Flemish theologian, Cornelius Jansen, d. 1638, with the Cistercian nuns of Port-Royal des Champs in Paris and Jean Duvergier, abbot of Saint-Cyran in central France).[72] These debates were answered by strings of papal commissions, censures, and decrees—and very many books. All this, too, sharpened and intensified the problem of human nature and divine-action grace. The Catholic repertoire of interlaced arguments illustrating and explaining evil and grace had grown.

This is where the religious controversy left evil and grace in Catholic theology. Erasmus, Valdes, Gropper, Pighius, and Contarini brought the concept of passive righteousness into the Catholic vocabulary, and the Council of Trent pushed it out. The council confirmed the conviction that justice must be a human moral condition produced by grace. The council’s aftermath intensified internal Catholic debate over the relation of divine agency and natural power. A new, modified theological vocabulary evolved, but a medieval problematic survived.

CONCLUSION

So it was that Martin Luther catalyzed both Protestant and Catholic theologians when he attacked indulgences and dramatically redefined righteousness, goodness seen in the pure light of God. Theologians in the religious controversy did not hide their ideological purposes. To party theologians, grace was about the concrete relations of God to human nature in everyday life under one or another form of religious discipline. Ideally, the entire clerical enterprise, of whichever church, was professionally committed to a set of concrete mediations of grace. All their erudition was meant to tear down or build up religious hierarchies and devotional practices.

But if the significance of Luther is bound to the reception of his theology, one notices how Luther’s great innovation, the doctrine that a mortal human being can only be passively just before God, did not escape turbulent, persistent debates about nature and grace. This counts for something, too. Their study of evil and grace was not just about Protestants dismantling, Catholics defending, an established religious culture. It was about trying to give it new life.

NOTES

1. Hartmann Schedel, “Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), f. 7r,” Genesis 3:16–19.

2. First suggested by Paracelsus (d. 1541) human polygenesis appeared in Giordano Bruno’s (d. 1600) theory of multiple worlds but was first worked out thoroughly in the Dutch collegiant Isaac La Peyrère’s (d. 1676) comprehensive Prae-Adamitae (1655). Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 49–64. Richard Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 115–145.

3. Jews (and Muslims) rejected the Christian idea of inherited guilt and stressed the collective dangers of sin for the community’s well being. David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Niaon Vetus (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 219 (and Hebrew section, 154); Joseph Caro and Moses Isserles, Code of Hebrew Law Shulan `aruk yoreh de’ah, trans. Chaim N. Denburg, 2 vols. (Montreal, QC: The Jurisprudence Press, 1954), 1:14; Byron L. Sherwin, Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague (London and Toronto, ON: Associated University Press, 1982), 142–160.

4. Berndt Hamm, “Typen spätmittelalterlicher Gnadenmedialität,” in Berndt Hamm, Volker Leppin, and Gury Schneider-Ludorff (eds.), Media Salutis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 43–83, here 43.

5. Heinrich Köster, Urstand, Fall und Erbsünde. Von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (II/3c of Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte) (Freiburg: Herder, 1982), 63–76, for this and the following.

6. The four positions are that: (1) Scripture is inconclusive (e.g. the Lutheran Martin Chemnitz); (2) the soul emanates from the soul of the producer (e.g. the Lutheran Joachim Hildebrand); (3) the soul is “traduced” from the soul of the producer (most Lutheran theologians); and (4) the soul is produced by God at the point of conception (most Reformed and almost all Catholic theologians). In an eccentric version of the last view, Cardinal Enrico Noris (d. 1704) and a few others argued instead that all souls were created at the beginning of the world with Adam’s soul and were present in him when he sinned. Köster, Urstand … von der Reformation, 93–94 with note 122.

7. Byzantine theologians rejected the idea of inherited sinfulness and guilt, while treating salvation as a process of participation of human beings in the being of God, a process of deification. John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology (New York: Fordham, 1974), 143–146, 163–164.

8. Augustine, De civitate Dei xii.2; xiii.2–4, and many medieval theologians. Köster, Urstand, Fall und Erbsünde in der Scholastik (Freiburg: Herder 1979), 146 with n. 1; for evil as not a substance; John Duns Scotus, Quaestiones in II. Sententiarum, d. 37, q. 1, Ioannis Duns Scoti opera omnia, 27 vols. (Paris: Ludovicus Vivés, 1891), 13:356–357; in general, Karlfried Froehlich, “Justification Language in the Middle Ages,” in H. George Anderson, T. Austin Murphy, and Joseph A. Burgess (eds.), Justification by Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1985), 143–161, and Froehlich, “Justification Language and Grace: The Charge of Pelagianism in the Middle Ages,” in Elsie Anne McKee and Brian Armstrong (eds.), Probing the Reformed Tradition: Historical Studies in Honor of Edward A. Dowey, Jr. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1989), 21–47.

9. Anselm, Cur Deus homo, Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 260–356.

10. Thomas Aquinas, ST IaIIa 85. 3 ad 2. Cf. Peter Lombard, who defined evil simply as a privation or corruption of the good (II Sent. D. 35, 3–4).

11. Thomas Williams, “Sin, Grace, and Redemption in Abelard,” in Jeffrey Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 258–278.

12. Gabriel Biel (d. 1495) summarized opinions. Gabriel Biel, II Sent. D. 30 q. 2 a. 1, Gabrielis Biel, Collectorium circa quattuor libros Sententiarum, edited by Wilfrid Werbeck and Udo Hofmann, 4 vols. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1984), 2:562–568. Froehlich, “Justification Language in the Middle Ages,” 145–146.

13. Scotus, II Sent., D. 23, c. 4; Scotus, Opera Omnia (Lyon: Laurentio Durand, 1639), 6/2:851.

14. Augustine, De spiritu et litera, xxvi.45, edited by C. F. Urba and J. Zycha (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 1913), 60:199; Froehlich, “Justification Language in the Middle Ages,” 157.

15. Otto Hermann Pesch, “Gnade und Rechtfertigung am Vorabend der Reformation und bei Martin Luther,” paper presented to the Ökumenisches Forum, University of Heidelberg, July 20, 2007. <http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/fakultaeten/theologie/oek/forum/13.1.pdf> (accessed January 6, 2015); Froehlich, “Justification Language in the Middle Ages,” 143–161. Galatians 5:22; 1 Corinthians 13:13.

16. Froehlich, “Justification Language in the Middle Ages,” 158.

17. Pesch, “Gnade,” 6; Froehlich, “Justification Language in the Middle Ages,” 143, 158.

18. Joseph Hefner, Die Enstehungsgeschichte des Trienter Rechtfertigungsdekretes (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1909), 22–25; Werner Dettloff, “Die Akzeptationslehre des Johannes Duns Scotus,” in Camille Bérubé (ed.), Regnum Hominis et Regnum Dei, 2 vols. (Rome: Societas Internationalis Scotistica, 1978), 1:195–211; Dettloff, Die Entwicklung der Akzeptations- und Verdienstlehre von Duns Scotus bis Luther (Münster: Aschendorff, 1963).

19. Dettloff, “Akzeptationslehre,” 198–199.

20. The seven contrasting groups: gratia creata — gratia increata, gratia gratis dans — gratia gratis data, gratia gratis data — gratia gratum faciens, gratia operans — gratia cooperans, gratia praeveniens — gratia concomitans — gratia subsequens, gratia prima — gratia secunda, gratia sanans — gratia elevans. Adapted from Adolar Zumkeller, Erbsünde, Gnade, Rechtfertigung und Verdienst nach der Lehre der Erfurter Augustinertheologen des Spätmittelalters (Würzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1984), 617.

21. David Knowles, “The Censured Opinions of Uthred of Boldon,” Proceedings of the British Academy 37 (1951): 405–342, here 328–329, 332–334; Christopher Ocker, Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life, c. 1310–1374 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1993), 36–41.

22. Alistair McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 152–155.

23. Zumkeller, Erbsünde, 1–18 and passim.

24. James Halverson, Peter Aureol on Predestination: A Challenge to Late Medieval Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 111–173, here 117.

25. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1985), 61–62, 144–146; Calvin Normore, “Future Contingents,” in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 358–381.

26. WA 1:107. José Martín Palma, Gnadenlehre von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg: Herder, 1980), 11.

27. For this and the following, Martin Luther, Römervorlesung 1515/1516, WA 56:272.

28. Augsburg Confession, ii, Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 53; Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, vol. 1, parts 1–3, edited by Eberhard Busch et al. (Neukirchen: Neukirchnerverlag, 2002–2007), 1/2:154–155. For the following, Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, vol. 1, parts 1–3, edited by Busch et al. (Neukirchen: Neukirchnerverlag, 2002–2007), 1/1:578, 1/2:45–46, 1/2:58–59, 1/2:87, 1/2:106–107, 1/2:226, 1/3:93–94, 1/3:238, 1/3:305, 1/3:348. Original sin was rarely challenged, e.g. by Palatine Anabaptists in conventions at Worms and Strasbourg, 1556 and 1557. George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 675, 733, 1218.

29. Luther, De servo arbitrio, WA 18:618, 634–635; Luther, The Bondage of the Will, edited by E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1969), 121–122, 139–144. For Luther and Rimini, Manfred Schulze, “Luther and the Church Fathers,” in Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 2:573–626, here 581.

30. Pesch, Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas von Aquin: Versuch eines systematisch-theologischen Dialogs (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1967); Denis Janz, Luther and Late Medieval Thomism: A Study in Theological Anthropology (Waterloo, IA: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983). Biel, Collectorium circa quattuor libros Sententiarum, 2:562–568.

31. Dietrich Korsch, “Glaube und Rechtfertigung,” in Albrecht Beutel (ed.), Luther Handbuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 372–381, here 375. In the 1545 preface, WA 54:185, 57. The phrase iustitia passiva also appears in Luther’s Annotations on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (1531), WA 40/1:48.

32. Palma, Gnadenlehre, 17 n. 36 with numerous references.

33. Annotationes Martini Lutheri in Epistolam Pauli ad Galatas (also known as the Second Galatians Commentary), chap. 3, WA 40/1:368.

34. Luther, Adnotationes Quincuplici Fabri Stapulensis Psalterio manu adscriptae (1513), WA 3:174, 282, 438–439, 488.

35. Volker Leppin, “Transformationen spätmittelalterlicher Mystik bei Luther,” in Hamm and Leppin (eds.), Gottes Nähe unmittelbar erfahren. Mystik im Mittelalter und bei Martin Luther (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 165–186.

36. Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele, “‘iam sum monachus et non monachus.’ Martin Luthers doppelter Abschied vom Mönchthum,” in Korsch and Leppin (eds.), Martin Luther—Biographie und Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 119–139.

37. Philip Melanchthon, Confessio Ausgustana apologia altera, CR 27:491. For the following, Olli-Pekka Vainio, Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008), 10 with n. 31; McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 238–240. Michael S. Horton, “Calvin’s Theology of Union with Christ and the Double Grace: Modern Reception and Contemporary Possibilities,” in J. Todd Billings and John Hesselinck (eds.), Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Possibilities (Lousiville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 71–96; J. Todd Billings, “Union with Christ and the Double Grace,” in Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception, 49–70.

38. For debates over discipline, Ocker, “Calvin in Germany,” in Ocker et al. (eds.), Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations—Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 323 with n. 44; Amy Nelson Burnett, “The Social History of Communion,” Past & Present 211 (2011): 77–119. For moral law in the “Antinomian controversy,” Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, “Im Zeitalter der lutherischen Bekenntnisbildung und Orthodoxie,” in A. Beitel (ed.), Luther Handbuch, 462–472, here 462; Christian Peters, “Luther und seine protestantische Gegner,” Luther Handbuch, 121–134, here 132–133. For Andreas Osiander and participation in Christ’s righteousness, Zur Mühlen, “Im Zeitalter,” 462–463; Ronald Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Vainio, Justification, passim. For the “adiaphorist controversy” and theological compromises, Ocker, “The German Reformation and Medieval Thought and Culture,” History Compass 10 (2012): 13–46, here 14–18; Luka Illic, Theologian of Sin and Grace: The Process of Radicalization in the Theology of Matthias Flacius Illyricus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 203–211. For Marguerite’s mystical theology and the “libertines,” Mirjan van Veen’s introduction to Contre la secte and Contre un certain Cordelier. Ioannis Calvini Scripta Didactica et Polemica, 4 vols. to date (Geneva: Droz, 1992–2009), 1:9–23, and Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009), 1: 553–563. For Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, James D. Tracy, Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650: Doctrine, Politics, and Community (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 157–158; Richard Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1991), 143–207, 154. For Saumur, François Laplanche, Orthodoxie et prédication: L’oeuvre d’Amyraut et la querelle de la grâce universelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 253–262.

39. Nicole Kuropka, Philipp Melanchthon, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein Gelehrter der Kirche (1526–1532) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 180–181.

40. Loci communes 1559, iii, “De peccato originis,” CR 21:673.

41. “Lex renatis ideo proponenda est, ut doceat certa opera, in quibus Deus vult nos exercere obedientiam,” Loci communes 1559, De usu legis, CR 21:715. Palma, Gnade, 24–25. Risto Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 164–209.

42. Saarinen, Weakness, 210–219.

43. Brian Cummings, “Justifying God in Tyndale’s English,” Reformation 2 (1997): 143–171.

44. David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 189. For Antinomianism as a form of anti-Puritanism, Peter Lake, “Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 94. For the relation of Puritans to Calvin (and modern debates about it), Richard Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2–21, 63–102. Also, Richard A. Muller, “Covenant and Conscience in English Reformed Theology: Three Variations on a 17th Century Theme,” Westminster Theological Journal 42 (1980): 308–334. Muller, After Calvin, 175–189. Andrew A. Woolsey, Unity and Continuity in Covenantal Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), chap. 4, reviewing scholarship.

45. Randall J. Pederson, Unity in Diversity: English Puritans and the Puritan Reformation, 1603–1689 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014), 75–82.

46. Palma, Gnade, 26. Melanchthon, Loci praecipui theologiae (1559), “de vocabulo fidei,” CR 21:750.

47. Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), 244; Ocker, “Calvin in Germany,” 313–344; Ralph-Peter Fuchs, Confession und Gespräch. Typologie und Funktion der Religoinsgespäche in der Reformationszeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995), 429–456. Historical theologians sometimes quibble with the claim that Melanchthon, Bucer, and Calvin admitted a concept of double justification. Anthony Lane, Justification in Protestant–Catholic Dialogue (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002), 58; Brian Lugioyo, Martin Bucer’s Doctrine of Justification: Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43–53.

48. Martin Brecht, “Abgrenzung oder Verständigung. Was wollten die Protestanten in Trient?” Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 70 (1970): 148–175, here 157–158, 170.

49. Vainio, Justification, 133, 144, 152–157.

50. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (New York: Cambridge, 1982), 222, 227–242.

51. William B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of Protestant England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 107–108 and passim; Muller, “Covenant and Conscience,” 309. For the following, Bryan D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 159–162.

52. For the quotation, Lake, “Anti-Puritanism,” 80–97, here 87, 89; Lake, Moderate Puritans, 97–99; Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Richard Cust and Anne Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England (New York: Longman, 1989), 55–76; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31–32.

53. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 187–189. Cummings, “Justifying God,” 152–157.

54. David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1991), 159–163. For the following, Avery Dulles, “Justification in Contemporary Catholic Theology,” in H. George Anderson, T. Austin Murphy, and Joseph A. Burgess (eds.), Justification by Faith: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1985), 256–277. Susan K. Wook, “Catholic Reception of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” in David E. Aune (ed.), Rereading Paul Together: Protestant and Catholic Perspectives on Justification (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), 43–59.

55. Greta Grace Kroeker, Erasmus in the Footsteps of Paul (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 24, her translation; 26 for the next quote. In what follows, Daniel A. Crews, Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valdés (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 52–53 for Italian Humanists against Erasmus. Erasmus is said to Lutherize, but Erasmus is hard to avoid: the opinion of Peter Canisius. Hilmar Pabel, “Praise and Blame: Peter Canisius’s Ambivalent Assessment of Erasmus,” in The Reception of Erasmus in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2013), 129–159, here 142, 144, 147.

56. Kroeker, Erasmus, passim.

57. For this and the following, Crews, Twilight, 91–112 and passim; Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 91–126; Elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 191–192, 98–99, 102–103, 143–151; Maria Celia Ropero Serrano, “Los Comentarios de Juan de Valdés a las Cartas Paulinas a los Romanos y a los Corintios 1” (Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad de León, 2013), 557–558 (<http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/tesis?codigo=40009>, accessed February 18, 2015).

58. But of the relation of text to printed text Maria Celia Ropero Serrano cautions, “los ejemplares de la edición no nos muestran un texto descuidado, como el que hubieran podido publicar con escasos fondos unos discípulos nostálgicos.” Ropero Serrano, “Los Comentarios de Juan de Valdés,” 85.

59. Suggested by Girolamo Seripando. Concilium Tridentinum, ed. Goerres Gescellschaft, 13 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1901–2001), 12:664–671 (hereafter abbreviated as CT). For this and the following, Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 172; Reinhard Braunisch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung im “Enchiridion” (1538) des Johannes Gropper (Münster: Aschendorff, 1974), 360–438, 431; Adam Patrick Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 37–192; Stephan Walther, “Vier Theologen für Morone. Ein unbekantes Gutachten im Prozess der römischen Inquisition gegen Kardinal Giovanni Morone (1555–1560),” Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique 106 (2011): 452–470; Ocker, Robbers, 253 and the literature noted in n. 24. John Calvin, Institutes (1539), x.1. CR 29:737; Institutes (1559), III.xi.1. CR 30:319.

60. It was made famous by Calvin’s mocking rebuttal. Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice against Pighius, trans. G. I. Davies, ed. Anthony Lane (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996); Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 84, 169. Ruard Tapper, Explicationis articulorvm venerandae Facultatis Sacrae Theologiae Generalis Studij Louaniensis circa dogmata ecclesiastica ab annis triginta quatuor controuersa, vnà cum responsione ad argumenta aduersariorum, 2 vols. (Louvain: M. Verhaselt, 1555, 1557), 2:32, for the allegation that Pighius adapted Calvin.

61. “In illo ergo iustificamur coram Deo, non in nobis: non nostra, sed illius iustitia, quae nobis cum illo iam communicantibus imputatur.” Albert Pighius, Controversiarum praecipuarum in comitiis Ratisponensibus tractarum (Cologne: Melchior von Neuß, 1545), sign. F6(v)–G4(r). Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 170–175, working from the 1542 edition.

62. Ocker, Robbers, 246. J. V. Pollet, Martin Bucer, Études sur les relations de Bucer avec les Pays-Bas, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 1: 161–177, 187–199. For the following, Ocker, “Between the Old Faith and the New: Spiritual Loss in Reformation Germany,” in Lynn Tatlock (ed.), Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 232–258, here 253–254.

63. Such an incident involving Melanchthon was reported by Marcello Cervino, President of the Council of Trent, in his private notebook. Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, Appendix p. 7, no. 10. Bucer claimed that Contarini accepted Protestant positions. Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 197, Appendix p. 7, no. 10.

64. Ochino, by his own testimony. Bernardino Ochino, Prediche di Bernardino Ochino da Siena I (Geneva: no publisher, circa 1550), x, sign. f3(v)–f4(r). Josias Simmler, Oratio de vita et obitu clarissimi viri et praestantissimi theologi D. Petri Martyris Vermilii, divinarum literarum professoris in schola Tigurina (Zurich: Christoph Froschauer the Younger, 1563), f. 9r. Cf. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, 257–303.

65. In general, Hefner, Die Enteshungsgeschichte, 84–155, which remains a thorough and insightful account; Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, 2 vols., trans. Ernest Graf (St. Louis: Herder, 1961), 2: 166–196, 239–316; McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 324–338. Ocker, “The German Reformation,” 14–18 and the literature noted there. For the war, Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) and the German Reformation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 294–317.

66. Dionysius Zannettino to Alexander Farnese, 25 June 1546. CT 10:539. Eduard Stakemeier, Der Kampf um Augustin. Augustinus und die Augustiner auf dem Tridentinum (Paderborn: Bonifacius Druckerei, 1937), 59 (where the reference is incorrectly noted as CT 10:359).

67. Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 84. Herculis Severoli commentarius, Oct. 8, 1546, CT 1:105.

68. For Giulio Contarini, Acta 10 Iul. 1546, CT 4:322 no. 127; 4:325–327 no. 129; Herculis Severoli commentarius, 10. Iul. 1546, CT 1:88; Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 149–150. For Seripando, Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 110–113; CT 12:703–715. For experiments, Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 91, Appendix 24–25 no. 58. For de Vega, McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 320–322; Henricus Recla, Andreae Vega, OFM: Doctrina de iustificatione et Concilium Tridentinum (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1966), 37–66. For Pinarolo, Hefner, Die Entsteshungsgeschichte, 86–87.

69. For this and the following, McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 334–338. Hefner, Die Entstehungsgeschichte, 155.

70. The Spanish Inquisition: An Anthology of Sources, ed. and trans. Lu Ann Homza (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007), 197. Ulrich Horst, “Bartolomé Carranza (1503–1576),” in Erwin Iserloh, Heribert Smolinsky, and Peter Walter (eds.), Katholische Theologen der Reformationszeit, 6 vols. (Münster: Aschendorf, 1984–2004), 6: 69–86. For the friend mentioned next, Fray Bartolomé Carranza: documentos historicos, ed. Ignacio Tellechea Idigoras, 2 vols. (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1962), 2: 153–156.

71. E.g. Servites in Bologna between 1547 and 1549, the Valdesian Pietro Carnesecchi in 1567, and Reginald Pole’s friend Carlos de Seso and Agustín Cazalla at Vallodolid in 1559. Hefner, Die Enstehungsgeschichte, Appendix 101 no. 197. Russell, Giulia Gonzaga, 172–208; James S. Amelang, “Italy and Spain: Culture and Religion,” in Thomas J. Dandelet and John A. Marino (eds.), Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion, 1500–1700 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 434–456, here 440.

72. M. W. F. Stone, “Michael Baius (1513–89) and the Debate on ‘Pure Nature’: Grace and Moral Agency in Sixteenth-Century Scholasticism,” in Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (eds.), Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 51–90; Alfred Vanneste, “Nature et grâce dans la théologie de Baius,” Facultas S. Theologiae Lovaniensis 1432–1797. Bijdragen tot haar geschiedenis, ed. Edmond J. M. van Eijl (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977), 327–350, here 332; Alfred J. Freddoso, s.v. “Molina, Luis de,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998); Alfred J. Freddoso, s.v. “Molinism,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 349–355.

FURTHER READING

Crews, Daniel A. Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan deValdés. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Cummings, Brian. The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Hamm, Berndt. “Typen spätmittelalterlicher Gnadenmedialität.” In Media Salutis, edited by Berndt Hamm, Volker Leppin, and Gury Schneider-Ludorff, pp. 43–88. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011.

Klueting, Harm. Luther und die Neuzeit. Darmstadt: Primus, 2011.

Kroeker, Greta Grace. Erasmus in the Footsteps of Paul. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Leppin, Volker. Martin Luther vom Mönch zum Feind des Papstes. Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2013.

McGrath, Alistair. Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

McGrath, Alistair. Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Muller, Richard A. Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012.

Ocker, Christopher. “The German Reformation and Medieval Thought and Culture,” History Compass 10 (2012): 13–46.

Rittgers, Ronald. The Reformation of the Keys. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Russell, Camilla. Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006.

Vainio, Olli-Pekka. Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580). Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008.

CHAPTER 3

THE NATURE OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

ALEC RYRIE

INTRODUCTION

THE theological history of the Reformation has focused on what doctrines the various theologians taught, how they arrived at them, and how they differed from one another, subjects which we now understand to an impressively high level. We have made less progress on the related subject of why so many sixteenth-century people, both learned and unlearned, cared so deeply about these doctrines. The question of how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century believers experienced and felt their religion is of course unanswerable, but it can seem like a Rosetta stone capable of unlocking almost everything we might need to understand about the period. If not that, it is at least an indispensable element of any analysis of the Reformation.

This is, in other words, a question not only for historical theology but also for a much newer discipline, the history of the emotions. Scholars of the Reformation have long had an interest in this subject, and we would now classify much of the work of cultural historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis under this heading.[1] However, the emerging discipline was formulated not by historians but by literary scholars, as so-called “new historicist” literary critics found they needed to find methods of handling inner experience in ways which were sensitive to how it can be shaped or even determined by historical context. This gave rise to programmatic works such as Jerome Kagan’s What is Emotion? History, Measures and Meanings (2007), and pathbreaking collections of essays such as Gail Kern Paster et al. (eds.) Reading the Early Modern Passions (2004). A parallel interest in the emotions from anthropologists of religion provided some theoretical underpinning.

Historians have been ready to follow where these disciplines have led, tackling the thorny issue of just what emotions, passions, affections, and feelings were understood to be in the period, and bringing these new methods to bear on key texts, such as the works of the medical philosopher Thomas Burton. Surprisingly, however, historians of religion have not been at the front of the queue. Attempts to apply the formal history of the emotions to the Reformation remain in their infancy. The ground has been broken by Susan Karant-Nunn’s The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (2010), which has used preaching to trace both the changes and the continuities between the emotional cultures of Protestantism and those of both pre- and post-Reformation Catholicism. My own Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013) has also tried to apply some of these methods to the inner experience of Protestant piety. We now also have a few studies of more specific subjects, such as the experience of fear or of mystical experience.[2] This chapter can do little more than sketch out some of the simplest contours of the terrain, in the hope that, in due course, more assiduous emotional mapmakers will find where the treasures are hidden.

BEING JUSTIFIED BY FAITH ALONE

The distinction between emotions and intellect, between “head” and “heart,” seems self-evident to modern eyes, but only emerged in its modern form during the seventeenth century. The heart, from late antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond, was the seat of the will and of the intellect as well as of the affections. In the Christian Humanist milieu out of which the Protestant Reformation emerged, the affections were not anti-rational or sub-rational, but an essential part of rationality. Rhetoric, the preeminent Humanist art form, is fundamentally a matter of engaging the passions in the service of a rational end. For all the Renaissance Humanists’ reverence for the ancient world, they universally reviled the Stoic belief that one ought to rise above the passions and attain indifference to them.[3] Transcending the passions was not merely impossible, but, for the disciples of a Lord who had wept at his friend’s tomb and sweated blood in his own torment, repugnant. Protestantism grew up in a context in which the emotions were expected to be disciplined, cultivated, channeled, purified, and then pursued to a pitch of intensity.

Hence the unabashedly passionate nature of so much of Martin Luther’s writing. Although most other Reformers were more restrained, his style was not a mere personal quirk. It reflected the religious experience on which all his preaching was based. Before justification by faith alone was a fully formulated doctrine, it was an overwhelming encounter with God’s redeeming power. Luther and many other evangelicals after him felt that this encounter turned their lives upside down. This was why William Tyndale described justifying faith as “feeling faith”—and why Thomas More mocked him for it.[4]

Luther’s view that subjective experiential states were of decisive theological importance arose directly from his own experience. He discovered an inner conviction, which he took to be a gift from God, that he was predestined to be saved by the irrevocable gift of faith which God had graciously chosen to give him. This led him, from very early in his public career, to teach a stark doctrine of assurance. He only gradually softened his language as it became plain that not everyone shared this experience, and that his assurance was too easily mistaken by his opponents for presumption. Like his lifelong struggles with another of his vital theological categories, Anfechtung or diabolically inspired despair, this is unmistakably a theology of experience rather than of disinterested reflection. Not that we attain justification through achieving a particular emotional state, but, rather, certain subjective states, such as assurance or Anfechtung, testify by their own nature—secretly, but plainly and unmistakably—that they are spiritual in origin, the work of God’s grace or of the Devil’s assaults.

This became a systematic part of Luther’s thinking in his famous distinction between theologies of the cross and of glory. For Luther, who was in love with paradox throughout his career, a “theology of glory” was a snare and a deception: a theology which glorifies the theologian, or which teaches the Christian to seek glory. But only the Devil offers glory; Christ offers penalties, death, and many tribulations. That is, one of the marks of authentic Christian discipleship is the experience of suffering. Generations of suffering Protestants found renewed reserves of strength in the conviction that their sufferings were a sign of God’s favor. Conversely, some Protestants who found themselves in safety, including Luther himself, were alarmed that this might be a terrible divine judgment on them.[5] Suffering could not have merit in God’s eyes, as was possible in Catholicism, but a theology of the cross meant that it could instead be a means of following in Christ’s footsteps.

What made the Reformers’ doctrines powerful, in other words, was the emotional punch they could pack. In particular, justification by faith alone, once properly grasped, could be heady stuff indeed. It is worth reading early accounts of the doctrine, not for the formal logic of their argument, but for the vertiginous, almost weightless sense of liberation that hangs about them. Luther in 1520 described the Word of God as the source of “life, truth, light, peace, righteousness, salvation, joy, liberty, wisdom, power, grace, glory, and of every incalculable blessing.” The Christian who has learned “to recognize his helplessness and [who] is distressed about how he might satisfy the law” is “truly humbled and reduced to nothing in his own eyes.” As such, this believer’s soul abandons works-righteousness and instead clings to God’s promises, such that it
will be so closely united with them and altogether absorbed by them that it not only will share in all their power but will be saturated and intoxicated by them. If a touch of Christ healed, how much more will this most tender spiritual touch, this absorbing of the Word, communicate to the soul all things that belong to the Word.[6]

That is a description of eschatological hope, but it is also hard to see it as anything other than direct testimony of Luther’s own experience.

Not all Protestants shared these experiences, but they were widely enough shared to provide an emotional “script,” which ministers who laid out what conversion and the Christian life ought to be could recommend to their people, and which believers could attempt to follow. In order to turn one professor’s experience of grace into a church which could function for entire communities, Luther’s experience had to be institutionalized. This was not straightforward. The emotional register of much Lutheran preaching was apparently warm, its focus on finding consolation in and nurturing gratitude for Christ’s sufferings.[7] Yet inevitably it became prescriptive. The bitter split in later sixteenth-century Lutheranism, between “Philippist” and “Gnesio-Lutheran” parties, was in one sense over precisely this issue. Gnesio-Lutherans fought their corner so hard because of their determination to preserve Luther’s paradoxical, overwhelming experience of grace as normative, against the brackish, Calvinistic rationalism which they believed had seeped into Philip Melanchthon’s thinking. Hence, for example, the Gnesio-Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s ill-considered claim in 1560 that humanity had at the Fall been entirely transformed, such that our souls no longer bear God’s image but are sinful in their very essence. As a matter of theology this was rash, and his opponents made hay with it. That very rashness, however, betrays the emotional depth of the Gnesio-Lutheran commitment to original sin, and thus to the experience of utter dependence on a God whose grace alone could save.[8] By contrast, the cool reasonableness of the Philippists, always readier to debate and to compromise than to lay down their lives for their faith, felt to Gnesio-Lutherans like a theology of glory.

EXPERIENCING PREDESTINATION

That battle for Lutheranism’s soul was part of a deeper split in the Protestant world, between Lutheranism and the Reformed (“Calvinist”) Protestantism to which Philippists were accused of leaning. This split is fundamental to the history of early Protestantism, but remains frustratingly difficult to define. There is a reliable doctrinal litmus test: Lutherans believed that Christ’s body and blood are physically, corporeally, and objectively present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, whereas Reformed Protestants did not. That is an important disagreement, to which we shall return, but it is not in itself sufficient to explain the profundity and bitterness of the Lutheran‒Reformed split. That split is best defined as a matter of mood and spirituality rather than of doctrine. Those differences are nowhere plainer than in the different experiences of justification by faith.

The Protestant doctrine of predestination argued that, since as human beings we are unable to save ourselves, it is purely God’s choice whether or not to save us, a choice which we cannot influence and are powerless to resist. This doctrine, now so closely associated with Calvinism, was in fact advanced forcefully by Luther himself from the beginning of his public career, whereas Zwingli was cool toward it. In the generation that followed, those positions were reversed. Melanchthon rounded the sharp edges of Luther’s doctrine. Calvin, by contrast, developed a yet more rigorous variant, and it was thanks to him and his successors that predestination became a central part of Reformed Protestantism’s experiential landscape.

Calvinist predestination was never unchallenged. There were Calvin’s Genevan opponents Jerome Bolsec and Sebastian Castellio; Moyse Amyrault’s attempt to square the circle with a doctrine of “hypothetical universalism,” which badly split the French Reformed church in the mid-seventeenth century; the Dutch disciples of Jacob Arminius, whose “Remonstrance” against predestination took the Netherlands to the brink of civil war in the 1610s; and the English Arminians, who helped to take all three British kingdoms over that brink in the 1640s. All of these anti-predestinarians’ arguments were, plainly, driven by a visceral moral revulsion at the doctrine, which they blamed for fostering anarchic libertinism, lethal spiritual pride and complacency, and crushing despair. Their quarrel was not with Calvin’s theological reasoning so much as with his intolerable conclusion.

Yet this is not a case of soggy Arminian wishful thinking versus clear-sighted Calvinist rationalism. Calvinist predestination stood against the revulsion of its enemies for so long because it too had a powerful emotional appeal. It helped to underline Calvinism’s almost rapturous emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God, and it could serve to counterbalance the Reformed emphasis on sin and repentance, which might otherwise become overpowering.[9] It also proved itself in practice in the face of persecution, when predestination can be liberating. You do not need to worry about standing firm in the faith when the torturer comes, since your salvation is in God’s hands, not your own. God’s grace is irresistible and predestined believers can never lose their salvation: you are beyond the Devil’s reach. During the Marian persecution in 1550s England, one recent convert to predestination enthused that the doctrine “so cheereth our hearts and quickeneth our spirits that no trouble or tyranny executed against us can dull or discomfort the same.”[10] Even in outwardly peaceful times, predestination could be a doctrinal expression of a felt reality, that is, that your salvation is utterly, wonderfully out of your own sinful hands. And this could be true of nations as well as individuals. The Calvinists who proposed the so-called “Dutch Israel” thesis or who suggested that “God is English” were not merely venting chauvinism, but reflecting that God’s past mercy for and loving discipline of those nations showed that they had a special place in his covenanted purposes.[11]

In one important strand of Calvinism, this exploration of predestination’s emotional power became central to the experience of being Protestant as a whole. This strand is often called “Puritanism” but is more accurately described as “experimental Calvinism.” It originated among pastoral theologians in England and Scotland; their works were then widely translated and then emulated, first by Dutch and then by German, French, Hungarian, and Swedish Calvinists in the seventeenth century; and their tradition was a decisive influence on the Pietism of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, The practise of pietie (1612), a devotional manual by the Welsh bishop Lewis Bayly (ca. 1575‒1631), had by 1750 run through over eighty editions in English, at least sixty-eight in German and fifty-one in Dutch, and smaller numbers in other languages from Romanian to Welsh. This tradition discovered that Calvinist predestination made for immensely rich emotional soil in which to dig. Rich does not necessarily mean comforting.[12] Even the despairing, however, found predestination’s ability to act as a prism through which all religious experience could be analyzed and interpreted to be compelling. And for many believers—perhaps for most—despair was not the end of the story. Indeed, it was usually understood as a necessary prelude to conversion. “It is not possible to you to make much of heaven,” warned the barnstorming Scottish preacher Robert Bruce (1554‒1631), “except you have had some taste of hell.”[13] Only when believers despair over their utter inability to save themselves can they receive grace. In this sense, it was only by embracing a wholesome despair that true assurance could be found.

That paradox was the gateway to an all-absorbing spirituality, whether we see it as a many-mansioned house for the believing soul or as a hall of mirrors. Fear of damnation was only part of the mix. The “conscience-literature” which predestinarian pastoral theologians churned out for their flocks was built on another central paradox. Concern for your salvation is a sign of the Holy Spirit working in you, whereas “security,” or nonchalant disregard for spiritual matters, is a sign of damnation. Therefore, the less “secure” you feel, the better your true spiritual condition. Although this paradox could not stop believers from sliding to either end of the seesaw, its logic relentlessly pulled them back to the fulcrum. You might take comfort from your own discomfort, but then be unsettled by your own inner peace. The constant effort required to maintain this balance was once linked by Max Weber to the emergence of the “spirit of capitalism,” on the grounds that such Calvinists lived a life of “systematic self-control” in which “hard, continuous bodily or mental labour” was the only route to even fleeting spiritual peace. However, Weber’s argument was based on his assumption that Calvinists focused only on the outward evidence of regenerate lives, rather than the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. If that was true of anyone, it was certainly not true of Anglo-Scottish “experimental Calvinism.”[14] The result, therefore, was less relentless worldly labor than continuous effort to maintain a height of spiritual ardor.

This could still be exhausting. For one English preacher, the Christian’s predicament was like being stuck at the bottom of a well, needing to “straine his voyce, as much as hee could” to call out to God.[15] Yet the stakes were often lower than that alarming analogy suggests. Believers who watched themselves for sinfulness and signs of backsliding might do so because they feared they were not, after all, predestined to be saved. But the conscience-literature assured them that the very fact of their fear proved the fear to be groundless. More commonly, believers watched for sin because they were heartstruck with shame and sorrow when they grieved their God.[16] Or again, while the conscience-literature taught that God speaks to believers through their emotions, it also taught they are not an infallible guide. You might, for example, not experience any kind of settled sense of assurance, but instead feel only momentary flashes of grace. That was enough. “Had you euer any assurance of saluation in all your life?” asked the best-selling English conscience-writer Robert Linaker in 1595. “Did you euer feele the power of true Repentance in your soule?” If the answer to either question was yes, that was grounds enough for comfort.[17] Whereas if the answers were no, that in itself might provide the necessary emotional jolt. One seventeenth-century Englishwoman testified that “through grief that I could not sorrow enough, I have fallen into a great measure of weeping,” and found comfort in the fact.[18]

Even if your heart remained stubbornly unmoved, that too could be a source of comfort. For experimental Calvinists met God in their feelings, but also knew he could transcend and indeed work against those feelings. The shrewdest and most influential theologian in this tradition, William Perkins (1558‒1602), insisted in a posthumously published work that emotion is merely a support which God sometimes gives to faith, not faith itself. “We must not live by feeling, but by faith.” God can save his chosen people without giving them emotional guarantees of the fact, and to believe this and find assurance in it is indeed one of the highest forms of faith.[19] This observation might seem to cut the ground out from under experimental Calvinism, but in fact reinforced it. For now it was possible to argue that, if you felt rejected by God, the truth might be the exact opposite. After all, axiomatically, the Devil leaves the damned sleeping in sweet security and only stirs up turmoil and horrors in those whom he fears he might lose. Or perhaps such feelings were God disciplining those whom he loves. According to the Scottish bishop and devotional writer William Cowper (1568‒1619), God says, “If I close the doore of my chamber upon thee, it is not to hold thee out, but to learn thee to knock.”[20] It is by apparently opposing us, and by withholding his gifts, that God trains us in faith and righteousness.

God, therefore, loves us by appearing to abandon us: and we return this love by rejecting his abandonment. The spiritual life could therefore consist of a kind of warfare with God, in which God feints disapproval while at the same time challenging and arming believers to overcome him. In prayer, Christians should refuse to take no for an answer—indeed should take no as an encouragement, an unspoken promise of grace if they redoubled their efforts and persisted to the end. They should argue with God, citing Bible verses like a prison-house lawyer in order to compel him finally to give them the gifts that they knew he always intended to. They should wrestle with God in prayer like the patriarch Jacob, refusing to release him from that violent embrace until he gives them the blessing they seek.[21] Wrestling became a cliched metaphor for prayer, but some sought to deploy further weapons against God. The English poet George Herbert, an orthodox although subtle predestinarian, defined prayer as an “Engine against th’Almightie.”[22] His contemporary Samuel Torshell, preaching at a fast day called to avert a plague epidemic, called his hearers
to fight with God’s weapons, against God’s judgements. Fasting days are days of pitched battle; God fights, and the Supplicants fight; prayers are the shafts, which are delivered flying to heaven.[23]

We do not need to approve of the spiritual experiences which these sources describe to recognize their power.

We should not, however, be unduly distracted by these emotional fireworks. Distress and conflict attracted the most attention from pastors and generated the greatest paper trail from troubled believers, but even in this Anglo-Scottish tradition, settled, nourishing assurance was a lived reality as well as a tantalizing mirage. The English sources suggest that there was a gendered element to this: it is men’s rather than women’s life stories which tend to emphasize spectacular falls into sin and heroic wrestling with God. Perhaps because early modern society did not allow women’s sins to be so easily shrugged off, it tends to be among women, such as the Northamptonshire gentlewoman and diarist Elizabeth Isham, that we find alternative narratives, of quiet and gradual awakenings to faith rather than dramatic conversions.[24] Not exclusively so, however. Theologies of conversion which demanded set-piece battles with despair repeatedly ran up against believers whose experiences did not fit the pattern. Some English Baptists shook themselves free of the Calvinist prescription of despair. This split between a prescribed experience of salvation and a more freewheeling readiness to accept that God might lead different individuals by different routes persisted into the Pietist revival. Classic Lutheran Pietism of the kind institutionalized by August Hermann Francke’s University of Halle taught a regular ordo salutis, in which the approved route to salvation passed through a series of set-piece spiritual struggles. The Moravians of the 1720s and 1730s, by contrast, disparaged this “self-induced sickness.” Their experience taught them that simple, imaginative identification with Christ allowed them to bypass the Pietist prescriptions. The Moravian leader Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf commented wryly that “a Pietist cannot be converted in so cavalier a way as we can … We ride and the Pietists go on foot.”[25] It should be added that the Pietists would also not have veered as cavalierly as did the Moravians into such weirdly baroque spiritual practices as crawling imaginatively into the spear wound in Christ’s side.

THE STAGES OF LIFE

If our understanding of how the Protestant experience varied between the genders is slowly becoming richer, our sense of how it varied with age remains badly underdeveloped. The stereotypical experience of conversion, which was normally held to be normative for the remainder of life, was placed in adolescence or early adulthood.[26] Children’s religious experience, in particular, is a badly under-researched field. One reason for this neglect is that Protestant theologians, ministers, and authors at the time also neglected it, generally assuming that children were sunk in sin. They also, however, reviled the “Anabaptist” doctrine that baptism could be restricted to those who made a mature profession of faith, and thus were committed to children’s membership of the visible church. The question, given that they denied that baptism was of itself efficacious for salvation, was what such membership meant. Luther’s boldly idiosyncratic argument was that, since faith is a gift from God rather than an act of the human will or intellect, God may give it to whomsoever he wishes regardless of age, and he cited the unborn John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb at the sound of the Virgin Mary’s voice to prove that true faith can even precede birth.[27] For Reformed Protestants, the answer turned instead on the doctrine of covenant: believers’ children might not, yet, be believers themselves, but they were children of the covenant. The result was a peculiar bifurcation in attitudes toward children’s sin and salvation. Some children—especially healthy ones, older ones, or “children” in the abstract rather than one’s own son or daughter—were assumed to be hardened sinners, little packages of Augustinian depravity in need of sharp correction until such time as it might please God to awaken them to their perilous condition. Other children—one’s own children, the very young, the dangerously sick, and, above all, the very many who died in childhood—were assumed to be the simple recipients of God’s mercy. Death itself was a sure sign of that mercy, as it meant a swift escape from the miseries of this world. Even England’s experimental‒Calvinist culture was apparently suspended when it came to sick and dying children. Impeccably orthodox Calvinist parents “invariably assumed” that their dead children were Heaven-bound, and found genuine consolation from the fact.[28]

If adults’ experiences of childhood religion were contradictory, children’s experience itself is almost beyond recovery. What we have, at present at least, is disconnected anecdotes: vivid but often highly idiosyncratic incidents and narratives of childhood faith. During our period these tended to be treated by the adult world as exceptional precocity.[29] It is only with the child-led revivals which became common in the eighteenth century that this picture changes.[30] Stereotypically, conversion, like the drawn-out battles with despair which accompanied it, was a matter for young adults, on the cusp of life changes such as leaving home, marrying, or—for a few select boys—attending university. The religious patterns set in those years tended to persist for the rest of life, then as now. During the first half of the sixteenth century this meant that religious change was in some sense a generational conflict, so much so that the Reformation itself has been described as a youth movement.[31] Even when this moment had passed, it is still worthwhile paying attention to generational change, as cohorts with radically different religious experiences succeeded one another.

Mortality patterns in this period ensured that old age was far less common than youth, although not exactly rare. Detailed testimonies of religious experience from the elderly are still all too rare, perhaps because many reporters felt the story was no longer dramatic enough to warrant regular updates. Some, perhaps many, ageing Protestants settled into a less agonized and perhaps more mature faith. The long quest for settled assurance could find its safe harbor in the quiet waters of old age. The “private exercises” which the English devotional writer Richard Willis published at the age of seventy-five are so full of settled joy that his most recent commentator imagines him “putting down his quill and leaving his prayer closet humming a psalm and beaming with beneficence.”[32]

However, the final confrontation with sickness and death, which could of course strike at any age, was another matter. Here, again, confessional moods appear to have pulled apart. The Lutheran deathbed was stereotypically attended by spiritual comfort and consolation, emphasizing, in the confessional era, the doctrine (which Calvinists denied) that Christ died for all, not merely for the elect. The Calvinist deathbed was, according to clerical rhetoric at least, a more rigorous and testing arena, in which the dying were expected to follow the penitential script to the end. Yet this too had its comforts, since the scripted battle with the Devil and with despair led to a scripted triumph, a testimony of salvation which could bring comfort to companions and mourners, and perhaps even to the dying themselves.[33]

DOCTRINE AND EMOTION

The emotional scripts and experiences which clustered around the Protestant doctrines of salvation are an important clue to a wider priority. In reading the Reformation era’s polemical and theological works, we need to focus on their emotional heft as well as their intellectual origins, logical consistency, or rhetorical effectiveness. This means distinguishing between stage arguments which may be logically central but which never truly persuaded anyone, and the arguments and assumptions which seem to have formed the emotional heart of the writer’s own convictions. These arguments may be poorly articulated, and may be more visceral than logical. They are often distinguished by vivid language rather than by subtle reasoning. Yet they are vital if we are to understand why so many early modern people were convinced that certain points of doctrine were worth dying for and killing for.

Take, for example, the most divisive Reformation-era controversy, that over the Eucharist. We now understand the doctrines and the shades of difference between them tolerably well, but not the deeper question of why these differences mattered so very much to so many people.[34] Why did both Lutherans and Reformed Protestants find the Mass intolerable, rather than simply erroneous? And why did Lutherans find the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist at least as offensive, whereas most Reformed writers were willing to be indulgent toward the Lutheran doctrines which they saw as erroneous? To look at these questions from the perspective of religious experience is to ask what work the different views did for believers in their spiritual lives. Take, for example, Lutheranism’s so-called consubstantial doctrine, which argues that Christ’s body and blood are physically present in the elements while those elements yet remained bread and wine (as opposed to transubstantiation, in which only the elements are fully transformed in their inner substance and only retain the outward appearance of bread and wine). Was the appeal of this that it was analogous to Christ’s incarnation, in which he had become fully human while remaining fully divine? Or was that argument itself an ex post facto rationalization of a simple experience of Christ’s presence in the sacrament and the assurance it brought?

The Reformed insistence that Christ is not physically present in the elements had a different appeal. The English polemicist Thomas Broke, amid a tedious procession of stock arguments for a firmly non-realist Eucharistic doctrine, let slip what he found unacceptable about both the Lutheran and the Catholic doctrines: they taught that “every man which receiveth the sacrament, receiveth also the natural body of Christ: be he never so wicked and unfaithful.” That was not simply an error, but an intolerable profanation. Likewise, he and many other Reformed commentators rejected a physical presence, not because they found the Aristotelian logic of scholastic theology wanting, but because their gorge rose with an almost visceral revulsion at a doctrine which amounted to deicidal cannibalism, in which Christ gives believers “parcels, and gobbets of his natural, and bodily flesh to eat with their teeth.”[35] Reginald Scot, who was as dismissive of Catholicism as he famously was of witchcraft, wrote that Catholics
are not ashamed to swear, that … they eat [Christ] up raw, and swallow down into their guts every member and parcel of him: and last of all, that they convey him into the place where they bestow the residue of all that which they haue devoured.[36]

That is not an argument; it is a gag reflex. But it may betray where the roots of Eucharistic controversy lay more truly than any sophisticated theology.

This is not to say that every doctrinal controversy was a mere disguise for baser urges or for inarticulable religious experiences. Rather, it means we must treat the emotional and experiential dimension of theological controversy much as we have long treated the socioeconomic dimension. That means that we should not treat ideas crudely, as if they were window dressing for conflicts which were not in fact about what the participants thought they were about. Yet nor should we treat ideas naively, dismissing the way unspoken concerns can decisively shape conflicts. In particular, we consistently need to ask not only what the substance of a particular theological dispute was, but why that dispute mattered to the people involved. How the face value of a doctrinal issue might relate to its beating heart will vary from issue to issue, from time to time, from community to community, and, sometimes, from individual to individual. Yet if we are to make any sense of how the religious conflicts of the age unfolded, this is perhaps the fundamental question.

THE EXPERIENCE OF BELIEVING

If the perspective of spiritual experience is necessary for understanding the impact of Protestantism’s most fundamental doctrine, justification by faith alone, it is necessary in a different way for understanding the working of its most fundamental theological method, the appeal to Scripture alone.

At the Diet of Worms, Luther took his stand not on one but on two linked authorities. His conscience, he insisted, was captive to the Word of God, and as such he dared not defy it. No other interpreter had the power to bind or to correct his conscience. It was this closed appeal to what he himself had seen in Scripture, regardless of whether anyone else had seen it, which led the Archbishop of Trier’s secretary, in the Diet’s initial response to Luther’s statement, to declare that “you are completely mad.”[37] In fact the truth was worse. Luther was making his own perception of reality an authority against which there was no appeal. The truth was, to him, self-evident, and no appeal to authority could override it. If the same truth was not self-evident to others, then that was their loss, but could hardly shake his own faith.

This became common ground for all Reformation traditions. However, the so-called “magisterial” reformers—the Lutheran and Reformed theologians who hoped to create universal churches—sharply distinguished their approach from that of the “radical” reformers, sometimes misleadingly labeled “Anabaptists.” The magisterial reformers insisted that they sought authority in plain Scripture, which was open to all, whereas the radicals stood instead on the shifting sands of spiritualism and prophecy, making claims that no one could test or challenge. Yet if we press the magisterial doctrine of “scripture alone,” the distinction blurs. Luther’s dictum that Christ is the Lord and King of Scripture not only allowed him to be dismissively cavalier about inconvenient biblical texts, from the epistle of James to the deuterocanonical Scriptures in their entirety, on the grounds that they did not preach Christ. It also provided him with an interpretative key to govern the interpretation of Scripture as a whole. This did not necessarily mean that his enemies were right to accuse him of twisting the text to suit his preconceived meaning. Rather, he was applying the well-established hermeneutical method of using Scripture as its own interpreter. He had learned his doctrines from Scripture, and having done so, used those doctrines to interpret the rest of Scripture. It was a respectable means of proceeding, but it was based on an almost revelatory insight. As Scott Hendrix has argued:

The authority of Scripture for Luther was not like a mathematical theorem which can be proven true for all by the use of self-evident axioms … Luther approached Scripture as we would approach a great work of art … Only as we struggle to understand the work of art, and bring to it the tools necessary to interpret it aright, and receive some of the same inspiration which the artist himself enjoyed in creating it, will the external claim of that work to be authoritative validate itself in our life.[38]

“Scripture alone,” in this sense, is no less experiential a doctrine than “faith alone.”

Luther did not attempt to prove the authority of Scripture, but Calvin, being a systematician, could not evade the subject. The relevant passage in the Institutes, however, simply refuses to advance an argument. “We ought,” he insists when asserting the Bible’s authority, “to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.” We will find this testimony “if we turn pure eyes and upright senses towards [Scripture, and] the majesty of God will immediately come to view.” That makes it sound inexorable, but he admits that it is not. “The Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.” Therefore, “Scripture is indeed self-authenticating… . We feel [‘sensimus’] that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there … a feeling [‘sensus’] that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.”[39] And by extension, of what each unbeliever does not experience. Like a work of art, or an astronomical phenomenon, Scripture’s authority depends on empirical experience rather than logic and argument. You either feel it or you do not.

The achievement of magisterial Protestant theology was to take this experiential doctrine of Scripture and build on it complex, effective doctrinal structures that were able to be grounded in the text with no need for further authorities. Many Protestant radicals, from the early Anabaptists to the Quakers, were either unable to match that achievement or had no wish to. The radicals typically did not depend on direct, extra-biblical revelation, but cited the Spirit to justify their readings of Scripture, so putting those interpretations beyond the reach of skeptical questioning. The early Anabaptist polemicist Hans Hergot called learned theologians “Scripture wizards,” who “have kidnapped the Holy Spirit and won’t release him.” The Anabaptist leader Hans Hut warned that Scripture can only be understood “through the goodness and mercy of the Holy Spirit.” “Many accept the Scriptures as if they were the essence of divine truth,” cautioned Hut’s disciple Jorg Haugk, “but they are only a witness to divine truth which must be experienced in the inner being.”[40] Over a century later, the nebulous English sect known as the Ranters supposedly distinguished between the “history” of Scripture—its dead letter—and the “mystery” of Scripture, its inner meaning which had been revealed to them.[41] These views could become nakedly self-serving and were anathema to respectable Protestant theology. Yet that theology was itself ultimately grounded on a not dissimilar claim.

The point is not that magisterial Protestantism’s theological edifice was built on shaky foundations, but, on the contrary, that the experiential mode of encountering Scripture remained primary for most Protestants most of the time. The daily devotional lives of Protestant believers were soaked in the biblical text, whether memorized, transcribed, expounded, paraphrased, or simply read, aloud and silently, collectively and individually. Neither the ministers who prescribed such exercises, still less the laypeople who undertook them, saw their primary purpose as training the population up in theological controversy. Most churches actively discouraged adventurous laypeople from engaging in independent doctrinal reasoning based on their Bible reading. Quotidian Bible reading, part of the bedrock of Protestant spiritual experience, was devotional in nature and was closely aligned to the experiential encounter with the Spirit through the Word which Luther and Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture implied.

And yet the religious experience of lay Protestant Bible readers remains elusive. Bible reading may indeed have acted as a leveler, by allowing lay men and women of only modest education to encounter the sacred text. Men’s and women’s devotional experiences and practices obviously varied, with the use of spaces, roles within family piety, and practices such as pious weeping being strongly gendered. Yet it may be that Protestant piety tended to blur rather than to emphasize the sharp gender divisions present in early modern society. One important study of Englishwomen’s Bible reading and devotional writing suggests that “there is greater truth in the early modern commonplace that ‘souls have no sexes’ than is often recognized,” for “the rhetoric of the devotional voice tends to suppress gender.” And indeed, scholarly attempts to ascribe male or female authorship to anonymous devotional texts on stylistic grounds have a poor record of success.[42]

But this is only one facet of a wider problem, namely the bias both of our sources and of our historiography toward debate and polemic, and away from the often non-discursive lived reality of devotional experience. We know a great deal now, for example, about the emotional culture which Reformation preachers were trying to inculcate; the study of the layperson’s experience of such sermons remains much less developed.[43] The devotional experience of Protestant worship is still mysterious. One recent study concluded, plausibly, that “prolonged exposure to Lutheran worship … played a key role, both in the establishment of discipline, and in the education of the laity in matters of belief.”[44] Actually reconstructing the sensory experience of such worship and its somatic effects is another matter.[45] Music is an important part of the story, as both Reformed psalmody and Lutheran hymnody could mobilize and involve whole congregations in worship in new ways, and quietly train a population in a new culture of piety.[46] The religious experience of the laity outside church buildings is harder still. The material culture of everyday Protestant life remains a badly under-explored subject: as one powerful recent study of Protestant domestic interiors in England and Scotland suggests, even Reformed Protestantism was much less “iconophobic” than its polemicists might lead us to believe.[47] The natural world, too, had a powerful part to play in religious experience.[48]

All of which is to say: The nature of Protestant spiritual experience remains, to a remarkable extent, an undiscovered country. It is at least now clear how fundamental a question this is to any understanding of the Reformation. Mapping out that question, and beginning to tease out some answers, is one of the principal scholarly challenges before us.

NOTES

1. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Fontana, 1991).

2. Andreas Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit: Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Tom Schwanda, Soul Recreation: The Contemplative-Mystical Piety of Puritanism (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012).

3. Richard Strier, “Against the Rule of Reason,” in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 23–28.

4. Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al. (The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1973), II, 742.

5. David Bagchi, “Luther and the Problem of Martyrology,” in Diana Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies (Studies in Church History, vol. 30. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 209–220.

6. Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Three Treatises (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1970), 279, 283–284.

7. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 96–98.

8. Robert Kolb, Luther’s Heirs Define His Legacy: Studies on Lutheran Confessionalisation (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), I, 8–9.

9. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 128–130.

10. Thomas S. Freeman, “Dissenters from a Dissenting Church: The Challenge of the Freewillers, 1550–1558,” in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 151–152.

11. Paul Regan, “Calvinism and the Dutch Israel Thesis,” in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, vol. II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), 91–106; John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes (London: John Day, 1559), sig. P4v.

12. A case made most forcibly by John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

13. Robert Bruce, Sermons Preached in the Kirk of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1591), sig. I3r–v.

14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 114–115, 158.

15. Nicholas Bownde, Medicines for the Plague that is, Godly and Fruitfull Sermons vpon Part of the Twentieth Psalme (London: A. Islip and F. Kingston for C. Burbie, 1604), 131, 133.

16. Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, ca.1590–1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

17. Robert Linaker, A Comfortable Treatise, for the Reliefe of Such as are Afflicted in Conscience (London: W. Stansby for John Parker, 1620), 25.

18. Vavasor Powell, Spirituall Experiences, of sundry Beleevers (London: Robert Ibbitson, 1653), 78.

19. William Perkins, The First Part of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge: John Legat, 1604), 104–105. On Perkins, see now W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

20. William Cowper, A Most Comfortable and Christian Dialogue, betweene the Lord, and the Soule (London: T. Snodham for John Budge, 1611), 32, 50.

21. Genesis 32:24–30.

22. George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 51.

23. Samuel Torshell, The Saints Humiliation (London: John Dawson for Henry Overton, 1633), 1.

24. Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 434–436; Kate Narveson, “Resting Assured in Lay Piety: The Lay Experience,” in Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda (eds.), Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

25. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 136–137.

26. See the pioneering discussion in Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, ca.1500–1700,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 21 (2011): 93–121.

27. Luther, Luther’s Works vol. 40: Church and Ministry II, ed. Conrad Bergendoff (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1958), 242.

28. Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 153; Ryrie, “Facing Childhood Death in Puritan Spirituality,” in Katie Barclay, Ciara Rawnsley, and Kimberley Reynolds (eds.), Small Graves: Death, Emotion and Childhood in the Early Modern Period (forthcoming).

29. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 428–436; Ryrie, “Facing Childhood Death.”

30. Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening.

31. Susan Brigden, “Youth and the English Reformation.” Past & Present 95 (1982): 37–67.

32. Narveson, “Resting Assured in Lay Piety,” 189.

33. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 195–214; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 460–468.

34. Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

35. Thomas Broke, Certeyn Meditations, and Thinges to be Had in Remembraunce (London: W. Seres for J. Day, 1548), sigs. A3v, A5v.

36. Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), 191.

37. Luther, Luther’s Works vol. 32: Career of the Reformer II, ed. George W. Forell (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1958), 113.

38. Scott Hendrix, Tradition and Authority in the Reformation (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), II, 147.

39. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), 78–81 (emphasis added); cf. Calvin, Institutio christianae religionis (Geneva: Robert I. Estienne, 1559), 16.

40. Walter Klaassen, Frank Friesen, and Werner O. Packull (eds.), Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2001), 19, 24, 45.

41. A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), 82.

42. Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Religious Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 132–133, 179–180, 194.

43. For the former, see Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling; for the latter, Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

44. P. J. Broadhead, “Public Worship, Liturgy and the Introduction of the Lutheran Reformation in the Territorial Lands of Nuremberg,” English Historical Review 120/486 (2005): 302.

45. Some of these issues are addressed in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): see especially John Craig’s article, “Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the English Parish Church, 1547–1642.”

46. See, for example, Daniel Trocmé-Latter, The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523–1541 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); and a classic article, W. Stanford Reid, “The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century,” Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 2 (1971): 36–54.

47. Tara Hamling, Decorating the “Godly” Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010).

48. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

FURTHER READING

Broomhall, Susan (ed.) Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

Corrigan, John (ed.) Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Coster, Will and Andrew Spicer (eds.) Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Dixon, Leif. Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590–1640. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

Hamling, Tara. Decorating the “Godly” Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Kagan, Jerome. What is Emotion? History, Measures, and Meanings. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Narveson, Kate. Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Religious Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012.

Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.) Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Ryrie, Alec. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Ryrie, Alec and Tom Schwanda (eds.) Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Stachniewski, John. The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, ca.1500–1700,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 21 (2011): 93–121.

Ward, W. R. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

CHAPTER 4

REFORMING TIME

ROBIN B. BARNES

THE movements of religious reform that exploded in sixteenth-century northern Europe were intimately bound up with epoch-making shifts in perceptions of time and history. Protestant outlooks and teachings were shaped on a basic level by broader ongoing transformations in late medieval and early modern temporal sensibilities. Yet they also marked the explicit rejection of certain key inherited assumptions, and in several respects they dramatically accelerated or redirected prior trends. This essay will attempt to sketch out the significance of the major Protestant strains in connection with three general approaches to time: as mundane experience (hours, days, months, and years); as a theological concept (in relation to eternity); and as an historical and prophetic narrative (in apocalyptic visions concerning the past, present, and future of the world). Our treatment thus moves from more immediately perceived human forms of time to more abstract doctrinal, historical, and eschatological conceptions. Yet these dimensions cannot be cleanly separated; indeed at many points they were interconnected, as at least some recent scholarship has come to recognize.

The manifold branches of Protestantism by no means followed a single path in negotiating these realms, but on the whole they worked forcefully to measure and chart worldly duration, to define the boundaries between time and eternity, and to locate present circumstances within a universal narrative. The following pages will propose that one overall consequence of these impulses was heightened anxiety, both personal and collective. As the great twentieth-century early modernist William Bouwsma explained in a classic essay, human anxiety is essentially a function of attitudes toward time; it arises from uncertainty about the future.[1] Scholars have often identified increasing anxiety as a characteristic of modernity (not to mention postmodernity), an inevitable accompaniment to the dissolution of presumably comforting premodern or pre-critical fictions. From this perspective we might see sixteenth- and seventeenth-century changes as effecting at least a partial disenchantment of time. Yet as we will see, the outlooks that came to prevail in the Reformation era remained quite far from anything one could justifiably call “modern.”

Neither abstract categories such as “enchantment” or “disenchantment,” nor preconceptions about “medieval” and “modern” modes of experience, afford adequate tools for exploring early Protestant conceptions of time. Our approach in this essay is anything but systematic; the goal is to touch on three main dimensions of the theme, and to suggest some connections among them.

TIME AS MUNDANE DURATION

A majority of late medieval Europeans knew very little of clocks and calendars and had at best a dim sense of mundane temporal chronology, not to mention historical change. As in many other largely oral cultures, lived experience was dominated by common cyclical patterns. The traditional Christian yearly cycle was based essentially on the framework of the ancient Roman (Julian) calendar as well as on agricultural rhythms. Onto this framework had been grafted a clerically determined correlation of particular days and periods with biblical events and saints’ legends. Mundane time was marked far less by numerically ordered hours, days, months, and years than by an uneven yearly pattern of feasts and fasts, sacred and profane times, and daily or seasonal tasks. Few people were aware of the Anno Domini, or even the year of their own birth. Routines were ruled largely by customs, not by calendars.

Especially with increasing commercial activity in the cities, however, new demands arose that began to change this picture. Merchants, craftsmen, physicians, local governments, regional lords, bishops, and sundry clerical bodies competed or cooperated to organize time in ways that served their interests. In a very real sense, control over time and its rhythms meant control over the political and social order. By the late fifteenth century, contests over the ordering of hours and days were growing more intense than ever. Pressures for a regularization of time were building rapidly; in the towns of the Holy Roman Empire especially, both public and private documents reflect a quickening movement to specify dates and times by number. Along with expanding economic activity, we might point to the growth of bureaucratic structures in both church and state, as well as the more subtle but at least equally powerful effects of the printing press. Humanist interests in the ancients, in historical change, and the unceasing flow of time were likewise related to these waxing pressures.

The evangelical movement set in motion by Martin Luther in the early 1520s dramatically accelerated the push to smooth out daily and calendrical patterns. The biblical and Christocentric emphasis of Luther’s teaching brought principled opposition to the irregular peaks and valleys of traditional medieval time. Luther’s attack on the cult of the saints was at the same time an assault on the whole tradition of saints’ days and the long-established round of feasts and fasts. In Luther’s understanding, which would be adopted at least in principle by Protestants everywhere, all times, days, and seasons were equally sacred, just as were all places. For the Reformer’s evangelical followers, the regularities of time were evidence of God’s benevolent providence, and the proper ordering and disciplined use of time were essential to the Christian life. Efforts to suppress the wave of excess at Carnival and to ease the trough of abstention during Lent have been well studied.[2] But the consequences of this new emphasis were evident in a variety of less obvious ways; these included for example the general push for weekly worship, which tended in turn to reinforce the flattening out of the yearly rhythms.

A large percentage of the traditional holidays were officially pared away from the Protestant calendar as medieval accretions. To be sure, the assault on saints’ days did not change the basic structure of the Christian calendar, which remained anchored by the Christ-centered seasonal celebrations of Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost. Moreover, nowhere in Protestant Europe were popular traditions eliminated as quickly as Reformers wished them to be, and in many cases they were never done away with altogether. Even much later in Calvinist settings, where the campaign to clear out the motley array of holidays was strongest, many traditional feasts survived on a popular level, or were revived in altered form. Still, the overall consequences of this program were unmistakable. Wherever anti-Roman movements spread, the calendar was thinned and regularized in ways that directly affected daily life.

Among the ongoing changes that helped prepare the way for Protestant attacks on the irregularities of medieval time was the development of a popular astrological culture. The revival of ancient astronomy and astrology—inseparable arts at that time—had begun as early as the twelfth century with the translation of Arabic texts, the main venue by which Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science came to the Latin West. The Humanist passion for classical learning had brought a tremendous and sustained interest in the stellar art. Cultivated in the universities and at a host of princely courts, astrology gained ardent advocates among medical practitioners and other practically minded burghers; this trend became especially notable in the German lands by the fifteenth century. Here again, the rise of the printing industry added a potent new dimension of publicity. Starting in the 1470s, above all in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire, the spread of popular astrology through printed vernacular calendars, prognostications, and medical tracts worked to undermine the qualitative variations of sacred and profane time, encouraging instead an approach to daily, seasonal, and historical duration as regular and measurable, grounded in the natural regularities of the heavens.[3]

Virtually all astrologers saw their art as a fully Christian practice that recognized God’s omnipotent rule over nature. Working within the divinely ordained natural order, they pursued two basic aims: the proper scheduling of medical treatments, and weather forecasting. Both these undertakings sought to provide people with a secure orientation in the world by allowing them to adjust their uses of charted time. The burghers who purchased and used the annual calendars and prognostications learned to choose times according to the mathematically calculated dictates of nature, which paid no heed to the power of saints. Astrology knew no sacred times, days, or seasons; its differentiations were part of the natural order of things. Stellar time itself was uniform and objectively measurable; only the changing relationships of the stars to one another and to the terrestrial realm made for propitious or unpropitious times for particular activities. The science of the stars thus offered a symbolic language that implicitly undermined—or at least posed an alternative to—the inherited sacramental and saint-centered culture of the late medieval church.

Despite Luther’s well-known skepticism toward the art of stellar prediction, German Protestants energetically adopted and expanded popular calendrical astrology. Far and away the leading agent of this process was Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s closest associate at the University of Wittenberg and the most highly regarded evangelical Humanist of his day. This famous teacher viewed the revival of this ancient art as providentially related to Luther’s recovery of the pure Gospel. In Melanchthon’s eyes, the beautiful and regular movements of the heavens directly manifested God’s power and glory; they also supplied the tools by which the Christian could properly organize his or her daily life, and adapt wisely to natural forces for purposes of health, husbandry, and general planning. Scripture gave the clearest possible sanction to this discipline, for in Genesis 1:14 God himself declared that the lights in the firmament were “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.” They were therefore the basic measure of time itself, knowledge of which was the very foundation of both religion and civic life. Without such understanding, humans would sink into utter barbarism. “How great a madness it is,” he told his students, “to undervalue the uses of [astrological] calendars! It is a great benefaction of God that every person can have an almanac on the wall!”[4] “The teacher of Germany” inspired generations of pastors and physicians who maintained an aggressive campaign of astrological education and publicity well into the following century.

Melanchthon’s interests encompassed personal horoscopes as well as the “mundane” astrology of the annual calendars and prognostications. But it was especially through the massive dissemination of these latter works that his program of stellar education infiltrated the broader culture of the German cities. Aimed explicitly at the “common man,” these cheap vernacular printings became a major channel of evangelical publicity through the late Reformation era. Indeed the goals of the astrologers stood in direct alliance with those of evangelical preachers; their opposition to the irregular medieval cycles of feast and fast, sacred and profane days emerged as fully conscious and explicit. Thus for instance the pious physician Christopher Stathmion explained that neither Scripture nor the stars permitted any distinction between sacred and profane times; proper reverence to God was required at all times without exception. References to the saints’ days did not disappear all at once in these annual publications. But in the 1530s and 1540s prominent astronomers such as Johann Schöner of Nuremberg, as well as physicians such as Achilles Pirmin Gasser of Feldkirch, established a lead in avoiding the holy days as far as possible. The practice of including them waned gradually over the middle decades of the century, giving way more and more to the exclusive use of numbered days.

In the German lands after mid-century, the astrological calendar evolved into the schreibcalender (writing calendar), a month-by-month booklet that invited people to keep a record of memorable events on particular dates over the course of each year. Users could mark happenings of public and political importance as well as events in their personal and family lives. This popular genre thus directly encouraged the intensification of both historical consciousness and biographical self-awareness. Serving the same function were more elaborate recording calendars such as Paul Eber’s massive Calendarium Historicum, first published at Wittenberg in Latin in 1550 and in German by 1582. Here separate pages were devoted to each day of the year. The work listed historical events associated with each day, but also left ample room for the book’s owner to comment on current events, or indeed to make notes on his own life story.[5]

In light of the powerful calendrical preoccupations evident among German Protestants, a certain irony accompanies the fact that the most dramatic and permanently important calendar change of the entire Reformation era was the result of a papal decree. In 1582 came the announcement of the Gregorian calendar reform, sparking a storm of controversy. Ten days were officially dropped from the old Julian calendar in order to bring the dates into line with astronomical observations, and new rules were instituted for determining the date of Easter as well as for calculating leap years. Serious students of the heavens everywhere had long been aware that such an adjustment was needed, yet most Protestant lands stubbornly resisted the shift for centuries; in fact Great Britain did not formally adopt the change until 1752. The reasons for this long refusal were entirely unrelated to questions of chronological and historical exactitude, but had everything to do with intense hostility to the Roman Antichrist. The papacy, it appeared, was pursuing its typical practice of dictating to Christians through arbitrary and biblically indefensible decrees.[6] Thus new quarrels over calendrical matters further inflamed confessional tensions. Certain practical accommodations, however, were unavoidable. In the German lands and in others with religiously divided local populations, for example, many printed calendars listed both the “old” and “new” dates; this practice continued through most of the seventeenth century.

Although no other emerging confessional group became as fully caught up as Luther’s German heirs in the stellar dimensions of calendrical reckoning, broader evidence of the Protestant-led movement toward the mathematization of time is not difficult to find. At Montpellier in France, for example, a city that witnessed a vigorous Calvinist movement during the mid- to late sixteenth century, business contracts from this same period show a dramatic shift away from traditional methods of dating by feast days to the use of numbered days of the month.[7] In England, as David Cressy has pointed out, a major boost to the regularization of dating came with the Book of Common Prayer, which purged scores of holy days and informal traditions. This work established a national calendar centered on events in the life of Christ, and during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods the new schedule became “an important instrument for declaring and disseminating a distinctively Protestant national culture.” Disputes over the calendar would play no small role in the tensions that culminated in the English Civil War, with Puritans attacking what they saw as resurging Roman corruptions under Charles I.[8]

Along with calendars, clocks both expressed and furthered the waxing obsession with time, and here again Protestants moved most quickly and forcefully to produce and employ the new tools. The late Middle Ages had already seen major advances in clockmaking, but the century of the Reformation brought an enormous surge in sophistication as well as growth in the industry. Of the master clockmakers with a known religious affiliation in the period from 1500 to 1700, some 87 percent were Protestants; most were concentrated in central and northwestern Europe.[9] The clock mechanism took on a quasi-divine aspect in many sixteenth-century eyes; it became a metaphor both for the entire cosmos and for the ideal working of the human world. The mid- to late sixteenth century saw the heyday of immensely elaborate astronomically oriented instruments such as the famous cathedral clock at Strasbourg, which was conceived as a microcosm of celestial movement. Ultimately more consequential was the tremendous proliferation of wall-hung or table-top chronometers. The Catholic Emperor Charles V collected and studied them obsessively, even if most of his prizes came from Protestant makers in Nuremberg and Augsburg.

The first hand-held watches also appeared by the early sixteenth century, and their proliferation largely paralleled the spread of the reform movements. Melanchthon owned one of the very first dated watches, a spherical timepiece of 1530, probably made by Peter Henlein at Nuremberg. Despite his general aversion to jewelry and bodily ornaments John Calvin thought the watch a highly useful instrument, and by 1600 Geneva was fast emerging as a leading center of advanced watch production. David Landes explains that “by the late sixteenth century, the typical watch wearer was North European and Protestant.”[10] In formulating his still debated, perennially provocative thesis linking Calvinism to modern capitalism, Max Weber did not make a direct connection to the watch as a new technology of time-measurement with immense implications for a new culture of work, new bourgeois habits of discipline and industry. Yet such an argument could only have strengthened his case.

Clocks and watches ticked on whether the sun was up or not. It is therefore even possible to see the pronounced “flattening out” of time among Protestants as affecting to some extent the traditional stark opposition between day and night. Craig Koslofsky argues that the religious conflicts of the Reformation era helped to evoke what he calls the “nocturnalization” of European life, an “ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night.”[11] More kinds of work were undertaken after dark, as commercial opportunities and pressures made time an increasingly valuable commodity for merchants and craftsmen. Other likely late-hour venturers included professional stargazers, as well as people curious about wondrous and possibly prophetic phenomena in the heavens, which were widely discussed throughout the era. Not all trends were consistent with this nocturnalization thesis; we can find evidence, for instance, of a growing tendency to associate nighttime darkness with the evils of witchcraft. But it would not be unreasonable to argue that the new positive employments of the night would ultimately outweigh new fears; nor do we lack reasons to think that active colonizations of the dark, especially for purposes of productive labor, came fastest in Protestant Europe.

TIME AND ETERNITY

From one perspective, the intensifying preoccupation of sixteenth-century Protestants with the measurement and effective use of mundane time might seem to imply a turning away from theological considerations and the adoption of a newly secular outlook. But this approach fails to consider deeper implications. To track time more carefully and systematically also implied taking closer heed of its ends or limits, and this concern led inevitably into theological territory: how was time conceived in relation to eternity? Here the thought of Martin Luther can serve as a touchstone. Luther’s theology involved a radical reconceptualization of the boundaries between the realms of the temporal and the eternal. The broad tendency among medieval thinkers had been to blur these boundaries, to imagine intersections and overlaps between this world and the next, the realms of the living and the dead. In effect, time continued in the afterlife, a notion most clearly expressed in the doctrine of purgatory; here those sin-burdened souls who were not immediately damned might be redeemed in stages, as they paid for their transgressions and were gradually cleansed through suffering. Depending on the severity of the sins, a soul might have to endure only a brief stay here, or tens of thousands of years, but heavenly bliss would come at last. Such calculations, coming mainly from the clergy, amounted to efforts to mathematize time beyond the grave. Luther did entirely away with this notion, for which he found no biblical support at all. To be sure, he was not the first to challenge the idea. Yet his rejection had especially widespread and lasting consequences because it sprang from a stark preoccupation with “last things,” eschatological realities involving the very end of time itself.

Regarding the fate of individual persons, the prevailing if rather vague late medieval assumption was that death brought the separation of the soul from the body. The disembodied soul then remained in heaven, purgatory, or hell until the end of the world and the Last Judgment; only then would it be reunited with the body in the full and final condition of salvation or damnation. In Luther’s view, however, both individual death and the end of the world were direct and immediate encounters with the absolute end of time, thus with eternity. Indeed, early in his reforming career he was strongly attracted to the doctrine later known as “psychopannychism,” or soul-sleep. “For just as he does not know how it happens, who falls asleep and comes to the morrow unexpectedly when he wakes, so will we suddenly rise from the dead on the last day, not knowing how we have been in and come through death.”[12] The living could only think of the souls of the departed as falling into a totally unconscious sleep, from which they would suddenly awaken for the final, eternal reckoning. But the souls themselves, exiting time, would instantly meet with judgment and with the full experience of heaven or hell. Luther may have later edged away from this perspective, yet he never entirely disavowed it. Soul sleep remained a forceful if widely feared undercurrent throughout the Reformation era, surfacing for example among several Anabaptist thinkers, as well as in a scattering of English writers from William Tyndale to John Milton. In its starker forms it approached the doctrine known today as Christian mortalism, the notion that the soul died along with the body. Whether totally expired or merely asleep, however, the whole person attained to eternal life only through God’s thoroughly miraculous act of resurrection.

The heightened impulse to divide sharply between time and eternity was likewise evident in Luther’s understanding of the change that would come with the end of the old creation, of the entire world. The inherited vision foresaw a transformation beyond all human imagining, but not a total break in essence. Luther, on the other hand, conceived a thorough destruction—indeed the annihilation—of the aged and corrupt natural creation. Thus too Luther rejected the Augustinian vision of a “city of God” within history. There could be no overlap between the eternal kingdom and the fallen natural world, no reign of Christ through the visible earthly church. The faithful Christian lived outside time only through grace; in this present worldly life, within the limits of time and history, every human remained a fallen creature at the mercy of natural forces.

Even as they accepted the principle of a greatly sharpened boundary between time and eternity, most sixteenth-century Protestant theologians, including many who identified with Luther’s evangelical movement, would resist drawing the most radical conclusions from this idea. John Calvin was among those who energetically opposed the notion of soul sleep. In his Psychopannychia of 1542, Calvin expressed his fear that to deny the inherent immortality of each divinely created soul was to risk undermining the essence of Christian faith itself. Had not God created human beings in his own image, after all? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the doctrine of immortality was strenuously defended in numerous works of the late Reformation era. Similarly, the idea of complete world annihilation at the end of time was widely resisted, for it seemed to suggest that the creator would entirely abandon his present creation. The perceived danger here was a drift toward gnostic dualism, which might encourage the believer to flee the physical, fleshly realm as evil. The safer approach was to speak in terms of a radical renewal, a divinely effected transformation of this fallen but redeemable world. Despite such qualifications, however, Protestant teaching and preaching continued to stress the humanly unbridgeable gulf between the temporal world and the eternal kingdom. The departed were entirely in the hands of God, beyond the reach of human prayers or intercession of any kind; nor could sainted souls in heaven reach across to aid or heal the living.

In spite of much formal resistance on the doctrinal level, this impulse to sharpen the boundaries between this world and that which lay beyond was never far from the surface among Protestant thinkers. Although salvation and perdition, heaven and hell were now to be seen in principle more as states of one’s personal conscience than as consequences to come in an afterlife, the prospects for one or the other as a fully realized eternal condition took on unprecedented weight. Each human being should look forward intensely and continually in expectation of death and the Last Judgment. The late Reformation era (ca. 1560‒1630) witnessed a spate of popular devotional works dwelling on this theme. Perhaps more widely read than any other, especially in the German-speaking lands, was Basilius Faber’s Christian Teachings on the Last Affairs of the World, which appeared in at least a dozen editions over the last third of the sixteenth century.[13] Faber, an evangelical schoolmaster trained at Wittenberg, pounded relentlessly on the need to face the reality of an imminent final reckoning, personal as well as universal.

Evangelical preachers and teachers such as Faber warned over and over against any and all worldly consolations, stressing instead the ultimate emptiness of all temporal hopes and dreams. One could not escape the sobering finality of the grave, but one had to see this reality in light of the Gospel promise, and thus with assurance, indeed with joy. As death and judgment loomed, the only hope lay in Christ; the believer’s sole need was the experience of faith. Yet this experience could never be taken for granted; it involved a neverending struggle, and was always a matter of the present state of one’s conscience. Inevitably, then, the believer had to strive continually to discern the genuineness of his or her own faith; this intensely personal, lifelong concern would become a common theme even as Protestantism splintered in many different directions.

Such stark theological emphases, reinforced by “the personalization of time” associated with clocks, watches, and recording calendars, accelerated the trend to individual self-examination and constant personal discipline that emerged forcefully in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Puritanism. The much-studied genre of the Puritan diary was marked above all by an intense daily and even hourly private examination of the writer’s own conscience. The Puritan minister Richard Rogers, for example, exhorted would-be godly livers to study their own thoughts and actions with “diligence and constancy” at every hour of the day, “to find fault with themselves throughout every day”; indeed he believed that “no time should be free” from the duty to study their own thoughts and actions. For Rogers and many who shared his ideals, sin itself was intimately related to the improper use of time; idleness was Satan’s most potent tool.[14] Not a moment was to be trifled away in anything less than sober self-interrogation in the face of eternity. For this reason among others the traditional assumption that the Reformation brought a liberation from supposedly morbid and obsessive medieval fears of death and the grave is at best misleading. What we find instead is a rechanneling and intensification of inherited currents of spiritual unrest.

APOCALYPTIC TIME

That the movement toward linear, mathematized time by no means brought the sudden advent of modern “secular” time becomes most glaringly evident when we consider the realm of historical and prophetic outlooks. The Reformation era witnessed the climax of “prophetic time” in Western civilization, the high point of literally conceived apocalyptic hopes and fears. The apocalypticism of that age was “prophetic” in two senses. It sought on one hand to warn or console Christians in the face of divine judgment; at the same time it involved a quest for insight into God’s plan for the entire world. The general presumption was that earthly circumstances had reached a critical juncture, and that some world-historical resolution was imminent, if not the Last Judgment itself. Thus far from simply dissolving older currents of medieval angst over how the critical last days of the world would play out, these heightened preoccupations with the fleetingness of time and its approaching consummation contributed greatly to an overall increase in future-directed apprehension.

Although Christianity was born as a Jewish apocalyptic movement grounded in hopes for the second advent of Christ, this element of the faith was gradually played down in later centuries, most notably by the preeminent church father Augustine (fl. ca. 400). Especially after the turn of the millennium, however, churchmen began to speculate about when the Antichrist (the Devil’s ultimate earthly agent) might appear, and to discuss other signs that the Last Times were nigh. A major break from the Augustinian habit of discounting historical changes since the time of Christ came with the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore (1131‒1202), who offered a Trinitarian vision of world history moving from the age of the Father, through that of the Son, to a coming fulfillment in the age of the Holy Spirit. But Joachimism was only one current that would feed a rising prophetic tide in subsequent centuries. The late medieval disasters of famine, plague, war, and institutional breakdown surely played a role in stoking the prophetic imagination of European Christians. These misfortunes in turn hastened political, social, economic, and technological changes that spawned a growing sense of future possibility, and by the same token raised general levels of anxiety.[15]

Visions of the coming judgment—or some sort of radical transformation to precede it—drew on a broad range of sources. They included not only the prophetic books and passages of Scripture, but also an ever-growing variety of classical and Byzantine writings, early medieval texts, and the utterances of contemporary visionaries. Humanist attention to the whole world of texts past and present gave further impetus to the widely shared sense that time was moving fast. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, just as with perceptions of mundane time, the printing press was instrumental in speeding up the overall pace of public discourse, thus adding further charges to an atmosphere already crackling with prophetic tension. Indeed as Jonathan Green has shown, printing itself took on prophetic dimensions, for the published page carried a nearly miraculous power to broadcast words.[16] The decades around 1500 thus witnessed what we might legitimately see as the emergence of the very first “public sphere” formed by a mass medium, at least in those cities where the new industry was most active. Under these conditions, prophetic traditions old and new jostled and often merged; terrifying scenarios of the birth of the Antichrist or a bloodbath at the hands of the infidel Turks circulated alongside dreams of a messianic emperor or an angelic pope who would bring peace to the world in preparation for the savior’s return.

The surging astrological culture that figured heavily in the refiguring of calendrical time had equally weighty consequences in regard to world-historical assumptions and prophetic outlooks. Beside the annual calendrical ephemera there appeared larger and more boldly speculative works such as the original popular blockbuster, the 1488 Prognosticatio of Johannes Lichtenberger, printed in at least eighteen editions in Germany and twelve in Italy by 1530. Filled with terrifying, cryptic words and imagery about divinely decreed planetary punishments to come for every estate, this tome also included elements of Joachimism suggesting an eventual breakthrough to worldwide peace. Despite such hopeful dreams, however, what came to prevail increasingly among German burghers was a discourse of dread favoring bleak apocalyptic images of finality over medieval dreams of restored order. Astrological predictions helped shape the most notable wave of public fear to arise in the period around 1520. This was the anticipation of a second and perhaps world-ending universal flood, associated with ominous planetary conjunctions expected for February of 1524. The resulting wave of panic was more than marginally related to the explosive spread of the new evangelical movement.[17]

We need to take this context of soaring expectancy into account in any effort to understand the reception of Martin Luther’s evangelical message in the 1520s. Luther worked mightily to redirect the anxiety of Christians, releasing them not only from the crushing burdens of the established penitential system, but also from medieval prophetic dreams and astrologically inspired nightmares. Yet it is crucial to note that Luther aimed not merely to banish fear; he also sought to use it productively. Focusing on the central lessons of Scripture, he urged the faithful to concentrate their fear on death, the Last Day, the end of time.

Indeed he who feels such fear [of the Last Day] in himself should not give up, but use this fear wisely. For he who does use it wisely allows this fear to hit home and to admonish him to pray for grace, which takes the fear away and gives him joy and longing for this day … Therefore such fearful people are closer to their salvation than those thoughtless, obstinate ones who neither fear nor take comfort in that day [of the Lord].[18]

Luther none too subtly exploited the rising panic over the prospect of a world-ending flood, working to turn people to the savior as their one remaining hope.

This exploitation was no mere tactic on Luther’s part. Among all the major Reformers, he showed the most pronounced apocalyptic tendencies. Other leading figures such as the urban Reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, more deeply influenced by Erasmian Humanism, did not place quite as much emphasis on the looming divide between the present fallen world and the perfection of the eternal kingdom. In some respects Luther’s expectancy was more directly shaped by prophetic ideas and assumptions of the late Middle Ages. He basically shared, for instance, the traditional vision of a world sinking into old age. Yet he rejected all medieval prophetic dreams of worldly reform or deliverance, and his original readings of biblical prophecy were fundamental to the entire tradition of Protestant interpretation. Luther’s apocalyptic faith involved both a literal belief in the nearness of the Last Judgment and a conviction of existential crisis in the present moment. God and Satan were at war; the universal drama was reaching its culmination.[19]

Central to Luther’s prophetic understanding was his discovery of the biblical Antichrist in the Roman papacy. Unlike the numerous medieval critics who had denounced the popes as Antichrist because they reportedly lived grossly immoral lives, Luther pointed to the institution of the papacy itself as the chief perverter of the Gospel. This discovery left no doubt that the scripturally forecast last days had arrived. The struggle was now fully public; the stage was set for the last act. The faithful were simply to bear the inevitable earthly trials as they joyfully awaited their deliverance. Luther prayed that the end would come before the Turks, whom he saw as the biblical Gog and Magog, could completely overrun Christendom; by the late 1520s, with the enemy at the gates of Vienna, he was rushing to finish his German Bible so that the Word might be spread the more quickly. The fundamental urgency of Luther’s prophetic outlook remained consistent throughout his life; but in his later years his preaching tended to become more stridently and consistently apocalyptic as he perceived this world’s plight becoming even more desperate, and as his historical understanding matured. The discoveries and pronouncements of the Wittenberg Reformer went far to sanction among his followers the most consistently pronounced apocalyptic atmosphere anywhere in sixteenth-century Europe.

Earlier generations of scholars who devoted attention to apocalypticism in the Reformation era tended to concentrate on the so-called left-wing thinkers and groups. Such figures as Luther’s early ally turned radical, Thomas Müntzer, Anabaptists such as Hans Hut and Melchior Hoffman, and spiritualists such as Sebastian Franck were typically viewed as men whose apocalyptic notions placed them solidly outside the main-stream. Yet the assumption that such figures were “radical” mainly by virtue of their apocalyptic convictions is unwarranted, as the case of Luther himself shows. Moreover, among the so-called “left-wing” figures we can find a wide variety of eschatological outlooks. A few, such as Hans Denck, generally avoided openly apocalyptic language. Others, including Hans Hut, appropriated medieval Joachimite visions of a final age of peace, and cast themselves as God’s chosen agents in the impending transformational cleansing of the world. Outright chiliasm, meaning literal belief in a soon-to-dawn thousand-year earthly reign of Christ (Revelation 20) was not at all common. It did appear, however, in a few figures such as Augustin Bader, an early disciple of Hut who suffered a brutal execution at Strasbourg in 1530.

The Anabaptist rising at Münster in 1534‒1535 is generally regarded as the most extreme and sensational example of popular apocalypticism in the sixteenth century. Here Melchior Hoffman’s teachings about a final Davidic kingdom to precede the Last Judgment spurred a violent takeover of the city under the leadership of Jan Matthijs, Bernhard Rothmann, and John of Leiden. The resulting siege ended in bloody slaughter. Yet what divided such figures from more mainstream, established Reformers was far less the intensity of their apocalyptic visions than their belief that they were called to participate in the work of God in the end times. Similarly Thomas Müntzer, who became the most noted preacher of the great peasant revolts in 1524‒1525, departed from Luther most consequentially in his conviction that God’s elect had been assigned an active role in a fast-approaching defeat of evil on earth.[20]

The most historically significant forms of Reformation apocalypticism took shape not in visions of social revolution, but in shared expectations that reflected the attitudes of a larger culture and that persisted over generations. Early Protestant piety shifted the religious imagination away from traditional rituals, turning it toward prayer and prophecy. The effect was to concentrate and focus the believer’s attention on a future-directed hope and the channels by which the word of salvation was revealed. Late medieval devotional culture had offered a host of contacts between the poor sinner and the realm of the sacred. These channels allowed a varied spiritual commerce that could at least partly assuage fears of judgment. Although in one sense evangelical teachings offered liberation from the oppressive aspects of this spiritual market, they also eliminated the relative comfort and security of these traditional transactions. In this sense it is hard to maintain that the Reformation brought a release from the apocalyptic anguish of the late Middle Ages. What it brought instead was the final great reorientation and focusing of the medieval apocalyptic imagination. Indeed, Reformation preaching and teaching tended to legitimize and intensify the sense of world-historical crisis that had been building for centuries in the Christian West.

Evangelical preachers and propagandists did not abandon the large store of medieval apocalyptic lore and imagery. Popular expectations of a final great prophet, for example, a last Elijah whom God would send to announce and prepare for the Lord’s return, were now frequently applied to Luther himself. Numerous other well-worn older traditions, among them the so-called Cedar of Lebanon prophecy, were co-opted to support the evangelical convictions that Luther’s movement was divinely ordained, that the godless would soon feel their full punishment, and that the salvation of believers was both assured and imminent. The prominent Nuremberg preacher Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg updated and published in 1527 an old Joachimist prophecy together with a visionary forecast of Hildegard of Bingen, both anticipating a revival of the true Gospel before the Last Judgment.

Indeed from the start, Reformation expectancy involved a supercharging of inherited prophetic practices and assumptions. Monstrous births and other natural wonders had long been commonly viewed as signs and warnings directly from heaven; Luther and Philipp Melanchthon gave new force to such interpretations with publications about the apocalyptic meaning of natural freaks.[21] While the year 1524 had passed without a major deluge, the astrologers lost no credibility. Indeed as we noted earlier in the section on “Time as Mundane Duration,” the stellar science gained new centrality and legitimacy under Melanchthon’s leadership at Wittenberg; by the 1530s and 1540s hundreds of pastors and physicians who studied here were working to establish a new religious culture in which the prophetic messages of the stars and the Bible were essentially complementary. Since mathematics was the basis of any proper reading of the stars, it was a natural step for some to apply the same methods to Scripture. Thus the mathematician and pastor Michael Stifel, a close friend of Luther, dug eagerly into the numbers of the Bible for insight into the mysteries of the Last Times. From his pulpit at a village near Wittenberg, he created a scandalous uproar with his prediction that the world would end at 8 a.m. on October 19, 1533.[22]

Following Luther’s own lead, more prudent evangelical leaders tried to discourage this sort of precise calculation. Yet far from waning as the sixteenth century progressed, announcements that the Last Day was imminent grew ever louder and more urgent. The decades following Luther’s death (1546) saw the spread of an increasingly explicit, eclectic, and strident apocalypticism among German Lutherans especially, but the reverberations would be felt among virtually all Protestants. These were times of intense factional strife among Luther’s heirs, a situation that convinced many of those very heirs that their movement was doomed along with the empire and the whole world. When one added the rise of Calvinism and other competing confessions as well as ongoing social ferment, such formal political agreements as the famous Peace of Augsburg (1555) seemed all but meaningless. Evangelical preachers and writers such as Andreas Musculus (d. 1581) of Frankfurt an der Oder expressed a hardening sense that the plight of this world was hopeless. The Devil was surely winning, at least in the short run. Everywhere one could see the drying up of true faith and love, along with rank religious and moral decay that would unquestionably bring terrible divine punishments, followed by the Last Judgment itself.

As the faithful turned away from saintly miracles, attention turned instead to direct evidence of God’s power and intentions. Scholars, pastors, astrologers, and burghers all called attention to the multiplying signs of the coming end. The second half of the sixteenth century was the golden age of the evangelical wonder books, which described every notable anomaly in nature as a sign of divine wrath and the imminent collapse of the old creation; among the most prolific and widely read wonder writers was the pastor Job Fincel, each of whose large collections came out in several editions.[23] But apocalyptic inquiry went far beyond the mere gathering of reported wonders. Steeped in the Bible but at the same time moved by Humanist interests in nature and in history, students of prophecy earnestly applied the methods of historical chronology, mathematics, and astrology to this broad field of urgent inquiry.

UNIVERSAL HISTORY

“The Reformation would not have happened,” writes Diarmaid MacCulloch, “if ordinary people had not convinced themselves that they were actors in a cosmic drama plotted by God.”[24] Apocalyptic speculation grounded in the Bible presumed a vision of world history encompassing past, present, and future. Reformation expectancy evoked a widespread and intense surge in efforts to discover the place of the present time within this cosmic narrative. Most universal histories adopted as their framework the traditional scheme of the four world monarchies from the Book of Daniel, essentially a story of decline. But newer schemes expanded the opportunities for reckoning the times. Especially useful was the extra-biblical “Prophecy of Elias,” by which the world would stand two thousand years before the Law, two thousand years under the Law (roughly the age of the Old Testament), and two thousand years after the coming of Messiah. The Gospel of Matthew (24:22), however, declared that the last age would be cut short, for “except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved.” Over fifteen hundred years of the third epoch had already passed; hence the end might come at any moment.

Histories of the world grounded in such assumptions, encompassing significant events from the Creation, and looking ahead to the Last Judgment, absorbed enormous energies in the late Reformation era. Martin Luther had made his own effort to reckon the ages of the world in his Supputatio Annorum Mundi of 1541. Far more influential was a text on world history originally composed by the Brandenburg astrologer Johann Carion, but revised and expanded by Melanchthon. The Chronica Carionis, first published in 1532, became a standard textbook for generations, and helped inspire countless efforts to establish more clearly the structure of the divine plan for history, as well as to foresee what might yet be expected as the end neared. Research into world chronology began with the Bible, but drew on an ever-widening range of historical and natural evidence. Astrology became by far the most important extra-biblical tool, thriving on the assumption that the lessons of Scripture and nature were ultimately complementary. All the heavenly signs, including eclipses, planetary conjunctions, and shocking phenomena such as the new star of 1572, reinforced the common conclusion that the Last Judgment and the end of the world were to be expected at any moment.

Despite repeated warnings that God was bound by no timetable, the year 1588 became a particular focus of public speculation. Yet its passing brought no slackening of apocalyptic warnings and calculations; indeed the period around 1600 brought still more excited, confused, and even desperate efforts to discover the prophetic secrets of a world on the eve of destruction and judgment, or possibly of radical transformation. The pervasive sense of dualism between the fallen present and the redeemed future, and the hope that God would grant new insights into saving truth to the worthy before the final consummation, inspired generations of earnest seekers in efforts to unravel the ultimate secrets of creation. These trends were once again most pronounced among German Protestants, among whom apocalyptic astrology, alchemy, number mysticism, and similar arts evoked dreams of a new and truly universal Reformation. The deflation of this pressurized atmosphere was a complex process, but one that had much to do with the sobering realities and suffering of the Thirty Years War (1618‒1648). As that conflict dragged on, the world of Reformation prophecy broke down, either withering into the formulas of Orthodoxy, or dissolving into more personal, subjective streams of faith.

The prophetic orientation of Reformed Protestants was far less marked by the sort of apocalyptic pessimism that prevailed among Lutherans. Nonetheless, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Reformed prophecy developed in ways that not only reflected the general excitement of the age, but also proved ideologically powerful. The figures who came to lead Swiss‒German Protestantism after Zwingli’s death in 1531 came to adopt an approach to prophetic interpretation far more literal than Zwingli’s own. Steering in this new direction was Heinrich Bullinger, whose influential One Hundred Sermons on the Apocalypse was first published in 1557. Increasingly, Reformed interpretations reflected a hopeful attitude about the possibility of spiritual progress within history. As a militant, expanding movement, international Calvinism grew more and more welcoming to forward-looking forms of millenarianism. To be sure, Calvin himself was perhaps less inclined to apocalyptic speculation than any other early Protestant leader, and like Luther he dismissed the notion that Christ’s kingdom could ever be realized on earth. Yet many of his followers would not hesitate to foresee positive movement in the current struggle against evil, culminating in either the literal or spiritual triumph of Christ. A remarkable example was that of Johann Heinrich Alsted of Herborn (d. 1638), whose highly learned writings drew on an enormous variety of sources ranging from the Bible to magical, “Hermetic” texts, and whose involved reckonings led him to foresee the advent of saintly rule on earth by the year 1694.[25]

While the conviction of a universal providential schedule emerged strongly among nearly all the major Protestant groups, nowhere did it take on more weight than among the English.[26] Here, as noted earlier, a quite distinctive Protestant culture emerged, borrowing heavily from continental thinkers but adapting them to help shape a strong national ideology. In the mid-sixteenth century, English writers began translating and appropriating German apocalyptic ideas emphasizing the crucial importance of accepting the purified Gospel and resisting the Roman Antichrist. Although many English preachers and writers continued in the sort of worldly pessimism that prevailed in Lutheran Germany, a different orientation soon appeared in the works of such figures as John Bale (d. 1563) and John Foxe (d. 1587). These writers worked to interpret the unfolding of the English Reformation in the context of God’s plan for history. Foxe’s famous Actes and Monuments (1563) gave the English nation an explicit and leading role in the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. Although these publicists did not espouse a literal millenarianism, their ideas did much to prepare the ground for the later approach epitomized by Thomas Brightman (d. 1607), who exhorted the English people to regard the events of their day as direct preparations for the earthly millennium.[27] Nationally tinged currents of Protestant millenarianism approached mainstream status in the decades leading up to the English Civil War, and reached a climax during the period of the war and Interregnum (1642‒1660). Millenarian thinking took yet more radical turns in groups and movements such as the Fifth Monarchy Men, who preached that believers were called upon to help realize the final and most perfect stage of history through militant agitation. Other, equally zealous aspirers to a godly society had already embarked on a different path: Puritans migrated to the New World, where they hoped the elect might yet properly prepare the way of the Lord.

The strong millenarian tendencies in seventeenth-century Calvinist and English thought may appear to contradict our claim that a central impulse of Protestantism was to emphasize the deep chasm between time and eternity. Hopes for an earthly realization of Christ’s kingdom surely implied, after all, that this fallen world could and would be somehow redeemed within the limits of historical time. Yet for nearly all thinkers who followed this leaning, even the dreamed-of earthly millennium would by no means represent eternity itself, and it was their very apprehension of a fully timeless, ultimately inconceivable perfection above and beyond the present creation that drove their excited visions of worldly spiritual fulfillment.

A well-worn theme in Reformation scholarship proposes that the future-directed hopes expressed in Calvinist millenarianism became gradually secularized in a way that gave rise to the modern vision of historical progress. In this view, modernity required a reversal of the traditional conception—still strong in the sixteenth century—of world history as a story of decline. This reversal occurred not through a rejection of biblical beliefs and apocalyptic visions, but from the attitude of Calvinist confidence that found scriptural grounds for hope rather than despair in regard to the earthly future. The most striking cultural shift that resulted from such positive anticipation was a belief that knowledge—particularly scientific knowledge—could and would progress. Historians of science have argued that by the mid-seventeenth century, Calvinist millenarians were effectively promoting “a confident, active, and exploratory approach to nature.”[28] Thus for instance the programs of natural investigation advocated by Francis Bacon were founded in no small measure on a biblical faith in the advancement of human knowledge before the end of history. Bacon’s progressive ideals were central to the formation of the Royal Society (1661), often regarded as the single most important step in the institutionalization of natural science as a discipline.

Yet if millenarian confidence played a role in the formation of new sorts of progressive hope, the longer-range implications of Reformation-era apocalypticism did not end there. Protestant preaching—especially though not exclusively in the Lutheran tradition—had emphasized the Christian sense of life lived “on the brink of eternity,” in the face of an absolute end.[29] This perspective sanctioned few comforting delusions about life in this world; any true hope had to look beyond the grave. Emphasis fell on the ultimate helplessness and dependence of human beings, on the limits of human reason and knowledge. Grounded in an apocalyptic sense of the radical otherness of eternity, such teachings undermined all rational and imaginative structures beyond the Gospel promise. They could and often did lead in the direction of worldly pessimism, practical skepticism, and agnosticism, outlooks that not only remained alive, but even gained traction, as the Reformation gave way to the pre-Enlightenment era. No less than visions of progress, these sobering perspectives were part of the heritage of early Protestantism.

NOTES

1. William Bouwsma, “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture,” in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 218.

2. See for instance Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. ed. (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1994), 207–243.

3. On this theme see Robin B. Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 2.

4. Philipp Melanchthon, CR 20, 549f (No. 122), quoted in Michael Beyer, Stefan Rhein, and Günther Wartenberg (eds.), Melanchthon Deutsch (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1997), vol. 1, 311.

5. Paul Eber, Calendarivm historicum: de utilitate huius calendarii itemque mensium apud diversas gentes varietate doctissima tractatio (Basel, 1550); Calendarium historicum: das ist ein allgemein Calender, in welchem uff ein jeden tag durchs gantze Jar eine namhaffte Geschichte… kürtzlich vermeldet wird (Wittenberg, 1582).

6. Helpful on this topic is Charlotte Methuen, “Time Human or Time Divine? Theological Aspects in the Opposition to Gregorian Calendar Reform,” Reformation & Renaissance Review 3/1–2 (2001): 36–50.

7. See Gerard Moran, “Conceptions of Time in Early Modern France: An Approach to the History of Collective Mentalities,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 12/4 (1981): 3–19.

8. David Cressy, Bonfires & Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989), xi, 44–45, and passim. Cressy extends the argument in “God’s Time, Rome’s Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime,” Viator 34 (2003): 392–406. For largely complementary insights see Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London: UCL Press, 1998).

9. David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), 93.

10. Landes, Revolution in Time, 92. On Melanchthon’s watch: Maia Wellington Gahtan and George Thomas, “GOTT ALLEIN DIE EHRE, Engraved on Philip Melanchthon’s Watch of 1530,” Lutheran Quarterly n.s., 15 (2001): 249–272. Insightful on Melanchthon is Timothy Wengert, “Philip Melanchthon on Time and History in the Reformation,” Consensus 30(2) (2005): 9–33. <http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol30/iss2/2> (accessed April 12, 2016).

11. Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 89, and passim.

12. Paul Althaus, “Luthers Gedanken über die Letzten Dinge,” Luther-Jahrbuch 22 (1941): 13–14.

13. Basilius Faber, Allerley Christliche/nötige und nützliche unterrichtungen/von den letzten Hendeln der Welt (Eisleben, 1563; many later editions). On this work see Barnes’s essay “Prophetic Pedagogy: Basilius Faber (ca.1520‒1575) and Evangelical Teaching on the Last Things,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 26(2) (2000): 269–283.

14. Steven Engler, “Time, Habit, and Agency in English Puritanism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 19 (2007): 301–322; quotation on 308. Rogers’s Seven Treatises first appeared in 1603.

15. For extensive background on Western apocalyptic thought see Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (eds.), The Continuum History of Apocalypticism (New York and London: Continuum, 2003).

16. See Jonathan Green, Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450–1550 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

17. On the flood panic, see Barnes, Astrology and Reformation, chap. 3.

18. Martin Luther, Ain Christliche, vnd vast wolgegründe beweysung von dem Jüngsten tag vnd von seinen zaychen (Augsburg, 1522), C4; WA 10, 1, 2: 113.

19. The best treatment of Luther’s apocalyptic world view remains Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

20. For a recent treatment that wisely avoids the traditional tendency to define “radical” reform in terms of apocalypticism, see Tom Scott, The Early Reformation in Germany: Between Secular Impact and Radical Vision (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), Part C, “Radicals in the Reformation.”

21. Among the most valuable recent studies dealing with monstrous births is Jennifer Spinks, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).

22. On this episode, and on the topics of the following two paragraphs, see Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 187ff.

23. On the wonder books, see esp. Philip M. Soergel, Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder-Book in Reformation Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

24. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Reformation Time and Sexual Revolution,” New England Review 24/4 (2003): 6–31; extract from MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003).

25. On Alsted see Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

26. An outstanding study on this broad theme is Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

27. The literature on apocalypticism and millenarianism in early seventeenth-century Britain is extensive. Among the older but most useful general treatments is Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

28. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 8.

29. The phrase “on the brink of eternity” is from Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, passim.

FURTHER READING

Ball, Brian W. The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2008.

Barnes, Robin B. Astrology and Reformation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Cressy, David. Bonfires & Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989.

Cunningham, Andrew and Ole Peter Grell. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Delumeau, Jean. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Firth, Katharine R. The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Green, Jonathan. Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change, 1450–1550. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Koslofsky, Craig. Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Landes, David. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983.

McGinn, Bernard, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (eds.) The Continuum History of Apocalypticism. New York and London: Continuum, 2003.

Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989.

Poole, Robert. Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England. London: UCL Press, 1998.

Richards, E. G. Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Soergel, Philip M. Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder-Book in Reformation Germany. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Whitrow, G. J. Time in History: The Evolution of our General Awareness of Time and Temporal Perspective. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

CHAPTER 5

POLITICAL OBEDIENCE

GLENN BURGESS

THE Reformation was one of the critical turning points in the history of Europe and of the West. It is hardly surprising that its impact on the history of political thought was profound. That impact was also protracted, and visible in the history of political ideas at least until the Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, over such a long period of time, the impact of the Reformation on political thinking became diffuse, taking us far from the intentions of the Reformers of the early sixteenth century. There was perhaps more than one Reformation and certainly no political idea that all of the proponents of religious reform would accept. There is no “core” to Reformation political thought, but there are patterns in it.

The study of the history of political thought has itself changed considerably over the last fifty years, and this has shaped the way in which the Reformation period is now viewed. There has been much greater attention to the precise contexts—political, institutional, social—in which ideas were formulated, partly because of an increased awareness that ideas were usually interventions, intended to achieve something in the world. They were weapons and tools. It is, therefore the use as much as the invention of theories that often mattered most. Who was trying to achieve what, and why? Furthermore, historians have come to emphasize the role of language in helping us to understand the ways in which ideas were being used. By looking closely at how words were deployed (in other words, at political vocabularies, and the conventions that governed the usage of terms within them), we are better able to understand whether a particular piece of writing was reinforcing a commonplace, challenging an established view, or seeking the subtle transformation of values by using words in innovative ways. This chapter covers too much ground to be able to engage with these matters in detail, but it is approaches like these that have informed many of the scholarly works cited in what follows. Much of the best work has been done in the detailed reconstruction of complex debates and topics.[1] This chapter is an attempt to step back and focus on the picture, not the brushwork.

The political thought of the Reformations was eclectic, and that is something that will surface from time to time in what follows. One of the most important changes to our understanding of early modern political thought has been the growing awareness of the continued vitality of classical and Humanist ideas, especially of ideas that derived from and sometimes inculcated the values of the classical and Renaissance republics.[2] Perhaps, if we are looking for a grand narrative for this period, it can be found in the dialogue between, on the one hand, Reformation demands, doctrines, and problems, and the neoclassical and republican responses to them. There is still much to clarify about this interplay.

At the core of Reformation ideas about political obedience was a seeming paradox. As one historian has put it, Reformers advanced an “uncompromising case for strict obedience to secular authority.” But this “fundamental” aspect of Protestant thought “was also somehow transformed into its opposite, a doctrine of rebellion.” A “rigid doctrine of obedience” had “revolutionary effects.”[3] In time, we will come to question some of the assumptions underpinning this formulation of the issues, but for the moment it usefully suggests the major themes that historians identify in Reformation political thought: obedience to authority (the state); theories of resistance; revolution. This chapter will explore each of these themes. It does not attempt to reconstruct lines of transmission and influence, though these things are important; rather it examines moments of debate or argument that reveal how the implications of key Reformation ideas unfolded.

STATE AND SOVEREIGNTY

The political thinking of the magisterial Reformation found its dominant ideas in two passages from the New Testament. In Matthew 22:21 (“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”)[4] the Reformers found grounds for a firm separation of church and state, and for the view that the state or polity was but a sideshow on the road to salvation. From Romans 13:1‒2 (“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whoseover therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation”)[5] they learned that the state and its rulers were nonetheless part of God’s providential design, and legitimately commanded the obedience of Christians.

Martin Luther’s call to religious Reformation, addressed to the Christian nobility of the German Nation in 1520, used the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to reject the view that the clergy were not subject to secular authority. In doing this, Luther declared that “inasmuch as the temporal power has become a member of the Christian body it is a spiritual estate, even though its work is physical.” It could exercise coercive authority over all (including popes and priests) “by divine right.” The function of secular authority was “to punish the wicked and protect the good,” and it could exercise this over all people, for there was no basic difference between priests and the laity.[6] Temporal authority could, therefore, aid reform by correcting the abuses of the clergy, insofar as those abuses were within the jurisdiction of secular governments. By 1524‒1525 radical leaders of peasant rebellion, sometimes claiming inspiration from Luther, were seeking to use the sword against church and state alike. Luther had some sympathy for the demands of the peasants, religious and social, frankly telling the princes and nobility that they had brought rebellion upon themselves; but he had no sympathy for the means that the peasants employed. “The fact that the rulers are wicked and unjust does not excuse disorder and rebellion, for the punishing of wickedness is not the responsibility of everyone, but of the worldly rulers who bear the sword.”[7] If private individuals or groups engaged in direct political action, “then authority, government, law and order would disappear from the world; there would be nothing but murder and bloodshed.” These were principles of natural law, binding on Christians and non-Christians alike. Though the peasants claimed a specifically Christian justification for their demands and their actions, Luther rejected such arguments:

Not one of the articles [peasant demands] teaches anything of the gospel. Rather, everything is aimed at obtaining freedom for your person and for your property. To sum it up, everything is concerned with worldly and temporal matters. You want power and wealth so that you will not suffer injustice. The gospel, however, does not become involved in the affairs of this world, but speaks of our life in the world in terms of suffering, injustice, the cross, patience, and contempt for this life and temporal wealth.[8]

As Christians, the peasants had no option but to “decide to suffer these injustices.” Even rulers who suppress the Gospel must be obeyed—or fled from.[9]

In his response to the peasant wars Luther was, by and large, drawing upon the ideas of On Secular Authority (1523), the most important and thorough account of his thinking about politics. Whereas Luther in 1520 had called upon the princes to aid in his attack upon the Catholic Church, he was in 1523 concerned that some of them were using their authority to inhibit the evangelical movement in their territories. The task that Luther therefore set himself in this work was to establish both the legitimacy of secular authority and its limits. Luther distinguished two kingdoms, each with its own government: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. The first was characterized by a purely spiritual regiment or government, the second by a purely secular or temporal government. Luther drew a sharp divide between them. True Christians did not, for themselves, need secular government (the main weapons of which were law and the sword, or force), which existed to maintain peace and order among the wicked and the sinful. However, they were nonetheless required to give it their obedience, because they did not live in a world populated only by Christians. Secular rule contributed nothing directly to the essential work of salvation. No resistance to secular authority was permitted, but even so, Luther’s insistence on obedience was not total. There were circumstances in which the commands of a secular ruler should not be obeyed (for example, the command “to adhere to the papacy”) because they exceeded the sphere of temporal authority. But active resistance was never permissible, and subjects had to accept the punishment for their disobedience: “you should thank God for counting you worthy to suffer for the sake of his Word.”[10]

Luther summarized his political thought in his Preface to the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans, commenting on Romans 13, which
teaches us to respect and obey the secular authorities. This subject is introduced, not indeed because such conduct will make the people good in God’s eyes, but because it ensures the public peace and the protection of those who are good citizens; whereas the wicked will not be able to do evil without fear, or with easy minds. Such authority must therefore be held in respect by good people, although they do not require its services.[11]

Calvin’s political thought embraced an equally strong view of the state and its command over the obedience of all Christians. His Institutes (or Institution) of the Christian Religion went through several revisions in French and Latin between 1536 and 1560. Its chapter “On Civil Government” was the main statement of Calvin’s political thought. Calvin followed Luther in distinguishing two governments, the spiritual, “which rules over the soul or the inner man, and concerns itself with eternal life,” and the civil, concerned “with a merely civil and external justice, a justice in conduct.”[12] These things were far removed from one another, and the “freedom” promised by the Gospel should not be confused with a freedom from civil authority. (The same could be said of Luther’s thought.) Unlike the early Luther, though, Calvin drew the line between the two governments differently. For the point of secular government was not just to preserve order and peace, but “to foster and protect the external worship of God, defend pure doctrine and religion and the good condition of the church.” This “care for the right order of religion,” it was important to note, did not mean that the state could make laws about religious doctrine and worship.[13] Views similar to this were adopted by the later Luther and Lutherans too, to which they might add a right of secular rulers to lead the reform of the church in their territories (the jus reformandi).[14] Such ideas accommodated the development of confessionalized states, in which the secular authority protected a particular national church. Secular rulers exercised “a commission from God” and represented him. Private citizens had no right actively to resist rulers, not even tyrannical ones. Their duty was “to obey and suffer.”[15]

The strong separation of state from church, and the assertion that the former had claims upon the obedience of Christians and non-Christians alike, formed a key strand in Protestant political thought. The ideas sometimes have particular local contexts, but broadly they can also be said to have served a key protestant purpose: they eradicated any claims that the church had to direct political authority. Tracing the direct influence of Luther and Calvin is not the purpose of this chapter. Both were widely cited and discussed by later thinkers across Europe (Calvin especially); more important is to understand the potential of this strand of Protestant political thinking. And that opens up two topics: toleration and absolutism.

Toleration

In On Secular Authority Luther, keen to indicate the limits to that authority, laid down this principle:

The use of force can never prevent heresy. Preventing it requires a different sort of skill; this is not a battle that can be fought with the sword. This is where God’s Word must fight. And if it does not win, then secular power can certainly not succeed either, even if it were to fill the world with blood. Heresy is a spiritual thing; it cannot be struck down with steel, burnt with fire or drowned in water. God’s word alone can conquer here … And indeed neither faith nor heresy are ever stronger than when mere force, rather than the Word of God is used against them.[16]

Luther’s position was neither new—like much in Luther it echoes views of St. Augustine and many since—nor a defense of religious toleration or religious pluralism. In 1541 he stated that he “could not conceive of any reason by which toleration could be justified before God.”[17] His argument of 1523 was more about who could or could not persecute and how intolerance might or might not be pursued.

This did not prevent others from drawing upon his remarks. The mainstream early Reformation was hardly tolerant in spirit or in letter, and it is a tired truism that the major impact of the Reformation on the development of tolerant ideas came from the way in which it fragmented Christendom, forcing thinkers in the long run to confront the implications of ineradicable religious differences.[18] Yet there were some who developed ideas on the limits of the state further. The best known of these was Sebastian Castellio, writing in the wake of the execution in Calvin’s Geneva of Michael Servetus on October 27, 1553. Servetus, a scholar of wide interests, was an anti-Trinitarian, condemned and burnt for heresy with Calvin’s approval. Whereas Calvin defended the right of secular authorities to persecute heretics, Castellio (making use of Luther) was able to assert that the secular sword had no part in defending the true faith, and that secular government concerned itself with bodies not souls.[19]

Castellio was a remarkable—and relatively isolated—defender of toleration, but it should not be assumed that this defense was in any way a deduction from Luther’s (or anyone else’s) views on the limitations of secular authority. There were many other ingredients in his thinking.[20] In particular his crucial insistence “that we regard those as heretics with whom we disagree … so that if you are orthodox in one city or region, you are held for a heretic in the next” suggests a skepticism more at home in the Humanist world than anywhere else.[21] Though there was a time when the Reformation was seen as a major step in the story of human freedom and emancipation, not least because it fostered religious freedom, this perspective is hard to sustain. On the one hand, forms of tolerance (people learning to live peacefully alongside those of very different beliefs) long predated the Reformation; on the other hand, it is hard to see (harder for us in the twenty-first century, perhaps than for our predecessors in the twentieth) that the principles of religious toleration have ever triumphed for long.[22] The early principled defenders of toleration who followed Castellio—Dirck Coornhert in the Netherlands of the late sixteenth century, even the Leveller Willam Walwyn in the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century—owed more to Christian Humanism than to Reformed political thought.

That is not to say that a clear separation of the two kingdoms and two regiments, spiritual and secular, did not play a continuing role in defenses of toleration. An interesting example can be found in the works of the American Baptist and founder of the Rhode Island colony, Roger Williams. Williams’s Bloody Tenent of Persecution (1644) took issue with Calvin and Beza and other defenders of persecution, and in words that take us to the heart of that strand of Reformation political thought which was concerned with the implications of God’s instruction to obey secular rulers in order to keep sin and disorder at bay, declared:

… it is most true that magistracy in general is of God (Rom. 13) for the preservation of mankind in civil order and peace (the world otherwise would be like the sea, wherein men, like fishes would hunt and devour each other, and the greater devour the less).[23]

Christian magistrates had no more authority than pagan or infidel rulers, and that authority was purely secular. They “make and execute … civil laws which may concern the common rights, peace and safety”;[24] they have care for “the defence of persons, estates, families, liberties of a city or civil state, and the suppressing of uncivil or injurious persons or actions by such civil punishment.”[25] Though Williams’s work was a contribution to English debates, he also founded the Rhode Island colony in an attempt to institutionalize the separation of church and state, and to create a haven in which people could follow their religious consciences.

Absolutism and the Divine Right of Kings

All the Reformers agreed that civil government was—in some sense—of divine institution and that Christians were commanded by God to give it their obedience. This very simple, and, on the face of it, uncontentious, claim packed a powerful anti-papal punch, nowhere more so than in seventeenth-century Britain. King James VI and I, from 1603 King of Scotland and England, was a significant figure in the international Protestant (especially Calvinist) world. At least in the eyes of some thinkers, he was a potential leader of a united Reformed Christendom, and he sponsored a number of international ecumenical projects.[26] He was also involved in an international debate over the rights of kings (and of the state). This debate, the Oath of Allegiance controversy, was the result of the imposition on English Catholics, following the Gunpowder Plot (1605), of an oath that required them to repudiate any papal claims to be able to depose kings or to release their subjects from obedience. Two of the greatest Jesuit political theorists, Francis Suarez and Robert Bellarmine, would in time contribute to the ensuing debate.[27]

In 1608 James’s own contribution to the debate was published, a reply to arguments advanced by Bellarmine and others, and called Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus (a triple wedge for a triple knot, alluding to three Catholic opponents). James presented himself as the defender of the rights of kings (and, by extension, of the rights of secular government). It was, he said, “an infallible Maxim in Divinity, that temporal obedience to a temporal magistrate did nothing repugn to matters of faith or salvation of souls.”[28] James denied that the oath required anyone to take a position on anything that was a matter of faith. It insisted, that is, on the clear separation of the two kingdoms and their governments. Like both Calvin and (more guardedly Luther), James drew the boundary between temporal and spiritual authority in ways that allowed Christian kings “to govern their Church” as they governed all their people, and gave them authority to command the obedience of all, to reform religion, and to assist the spiritual power with the temporal sword. What they could not do was determine “articles of faith.”[29] James ruled religiously divided kingdoms, and it was important to him that no church could ask its adherents to contravene the divine instruction to obey Caesar.

Bellarmine’s views were also strongly rejected by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was probably the most important (albeit idiosyncratic) philosopher of absolute government. His Leviathan (1651) was his most uninhibited and exuberant work, and also, it might be said, his most overtly Protestant. There have been scholars willing to call Hobbes an Anglican, a Calvinist, even a Lutheran, but any such labeling would be too neat. It would also be hard to square with Hobbes’s considerable unorthodoxy, his religious skepticism and sarcasm—all of which may or may not signal an underlying atheism. In referring to Leviathan as a Protestant work, I am indicating that in this work Hobbes places his political thought in relation to the Reformation, which he describes as the key episode in a process that retracted political authority from the church and the papacy, who had usurped it during the Middle Ages. The first phase of the Reformation destroyed (in England) papal authority, a second Presbyterian phase destroyed episcopacy, and the English Revolution looked likely to restore “the Independency of the Primitive Christians” (congregationalism). This was a narrative of the liberation of secular authority and the weakening of ecclesiastical power. Hobbes, it seemed, approved of the process, which served the interests of an absolute sovereign. In criticism of both the Jesuit Bellarmine and the Calvinist Theodore Beza, Hobbes defined the church as:

A company of men professing Christian Religion, united in the person of one Soveraign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble. And because in all Commonwealths, that Assembly, which is without warrant from the Civil Sovereign, is unlawful; that Church also, which is assembled in any Commonwealth, that hath forbidden them to assemble, is an unlawful Assembly.[30]

In a Christian Commonwealth, the sovereign was head of the church. Hobbes certainly had a Reformation sense of the value and legitimacy of the state, independent of the church. He had rather less sense of the two regiments. The sovereign, in the famous frontispiece to Leviathan, carried a sword in one hand; in the other hand, he carried a crozier, symbolic of ecclesiastical authority.

RESISTANCE

In 1585 Thomas Bilson, a future bishop in the English church, in the course of rejecting any right for English people to resist their queen, had already noted that across Europe things were a little more complicated. One of the examples that Bilson used was Luther, who came to allow acts of reformation against the will of the emperor. This was not, said Bilson, a reversal of Luther’s view that “no Magistrate should be resisted” (a rule derived from God’s Word), but instead an expression of another principle of God’s word, that “the Gospel doth not … abolish any politic laws.”[31] Governments differed from one place to another, and constitutions and laws with them. The Gospel demanded obedience to the powers that be, but what constituted such a power varied from one political society to another. Private individuals could never resist, but in some places the laws allowed other public authorities or groups to challenge the magistrate.[32]

This captures a second important theme in Reformation political thinking. Reformed thinkers—some of them anyway—identified a value in the state quite separate from spiritual matters. That value might have been largely negative—to bring as much peace as possible to a sinful world—and to endow the state with functions that did not contribute to human salvation or the ultimate purposes of existence. Nonetheless there were things the state alone could do, and could do without external interference (including that of the church). In making this point, Reformation thinkers opened up questions about how states, thus severed from the church, were organized. What historians have studied as “resistance theory” is as much a detailed engagement with the way these secular states actually or should have functioned.

Both Luther and Calvin ended up leaving more ambiguity on the question of resistance than the account of their ideas given so far would suggest. For Luther and his followers the crucial problem became the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and his hostility to reform. The question then arose whether the princes of the empire and the other territorial rulers within that complex entity could act against the emperor’s commands. From the answers given to this question emerged a second core Protestant idea, that “inferior magistrates” might in some circumstances resist their superiors. This was not exactly a rejection of Luther’s original insistence on the duty of obedience and non-resistance: “it was not so much a new type of political theory as an adaptation (stretching it almost to breaking point) of the old.”[33]

During the 1530s, Luther (and Philip Melanchthon, with less hesitation) began to accept ideas developed by lawyers and others working for the German princes. There were two key arguments for resistance. One was derived from the Roman private law principle of self-defense, suggesting that if the emperor exceeded the boundaries of his office then he became in effect a private person, and his acts could be resisted by force as a form of self-defense. The argument served to support resistance to any attempts forcibly to extirpate the Reformation. The second, constitutionalist argument, derived from the peculiar structure of the Holy Roman Empire, which could be viewed as a federation in which the princes and other territorial rulers had constitutional rights that enabled them to resist the emperor. This latter argument had the benefit of clearly confining resistance to these “lesser magistrates.” The risk with the private-law argument is that it might seem to support resistance by private individuals, and few before the 1550s cared to present such a radical position. A key expression of the Lutheran position was in Martin Bucer’s Commentaries, published in 1554, in which it was argued that all power was indeed from God, but that this was true of both superior and inferior magistrates. The latter could use the power of the sword to ensure that the former performed his duties, including a duty to maintain the true faith.[34]

The position developed by the Lutherans thus started from the assumption of the divine right of all authority, and the principle of non-resistance to that authority. This was a fundamental theological as well as a political principle. But it was a matter of law and constitutional principle as to where authority lay in any particular place. Citizens and subjects, as private individuals, were always bound to obedience and non-resistance, but the law might allow constituted “lesser magistrates” (themselves constituted by God) to resist the supreme ruler, in order to defend true religion and ensure that the secular authorities served the purposes for which God had ordained them.

It is arguable that such a theory was also implicit in Calvin’s Institutes, notwithstanding Calvin’s powerful emphasis on obedience and non-resistance. In a passage that came to be widely cited by future Calvinist defenders of resistance, Calvin said:

All that has been assigned to us is to obey and suffer. Here, as always, I am speaking about private persons. It may be that there are in our days popular magistrates established to restrain the licentiousness of kings, corresponding to those ‘Ephors’ which were set against the authority of the kings of the Spartans, or the Tribunes of the People, set over against the Roman consuls.

Calvin noted that the assemblies of the three estates, where they existed, might be a contemporary example of this.

This passage, however, sounds a new note that we have not heard before. These lesser magistrates are “popular”—that is, elected by the people—though also “ordained by God.”[35] The passage became a hook on which ideas of popular sovereignty, derived from classical and scholastic sources, could be hung. This opens up a very important question. Historians have often talked of a “Calvinist theory of resistance” (or sometimes, of revolution). This was a theory of a secular “popular” right to resist tyranny. Popular, not individual: original sovereignty was vested in the people as a whole (by God), and they had established constitutions that determined the nature of rule in each political society, including the terms and conditions on which authority was exercised. Faced with tyranny from their rulers, the people might revoke authority from them, though generally it then fell to other constituted authorities to take remedial action in the people’s name. The important question, to which I have alluded, however, is this: what makes this a Calvinist theory of resistance? Whereas Lutheran resistance theories tended to operate within a framework of religious duty (lesser magistrates having a duty to serve God’s purposes that required them to resist their superiors in some circumstances), this Calvinist theory advanced a secular political theory of popular sovereignty and resistance to tyranny. But it was more than just working out and modifying the consequences of the core protestant insistence on obedience and non-resistance, and much less of a break with late-medieval political thought. So why was this a Calvinist theory of resistance? We will return to this question.

Not all later Calvinists did adopt this “Calvinist theory of resistance.” Though the political thought of the Dutch Revolt, and struggle for independence from Spain, did see allusions to ideas of popular sovereignty,[36] much also rested on a less radical discussion of the particular features of the laws and constitutions of the Low Countries.[37] Furthermore, even such a late tract as the Political Education of 1582 sounded very much like the Lutheran writings of the 1530s and 1540s. It worked from the perspective that God ordained rulers, and also set limits to their jurisdiction, notably in religious matters. It did adopt, perhaps from the Huguenot tract, the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (see later in this section), the idea of a double covenant, between God and king, and between God and the people, to ensure a duty on the king to serve God’s purposes, and on the people to obey to this end.[38] The king of Spain had failed to do this, both because of his assault on the reformed faith, and because of his attack on the liberty possessed by the people of the Low Countries. He had attempted to enslave their persons and their consciences, and the law permitted resistance.[39] The argument of this tract rested as much on Cicero and Roman law as it did on Scripture or on theological sources, reinforcing the point made earlier, that “resistance theory” was often rooted in the detailed application of legal and political principles to particular constitutional contexts.

It was among the Scottish and English reformed thinkers of the 1550s and the French Huguenots that more radical ideas developed. Like much Dutch thought, the ideas developed in Britain before 1558, especially among the “Marian exiles” who fled to the Continent during the years of Mary Tudor’s reign in England, looked back to the early Lutheran arguments for resistance. But particular stress was laid on the private-law argument. John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politic Power (1556), Christopher Goodman’s How superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed (1558), and John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) all made use of the private-law argument that allowed unjust violence to be resisted with violence. All of them, too, made it clear that even private individuals might be allowed this capacity, largely because in the circumstances of Marian England there were no lesser magistrates on whom the Reformers could rely. But their arguments, though “legal,” were also at core powerfully religious. The law permitted people, even in extreme cases private individuals, to take action to stop tyranny and idolatry and the breach of God’s laws; but God demanded such action. There was no excuse for inaction, which allowed evil to triumph. And if there were no lesser magistrates, then anyone could execute God’s judgments on evil rulers.[40]

It was in Scotland and France that most was done to forge the classic “Calvinist theory of resistance.” The Scotsman George Buchanan, tutor to the infant James VI and I, possessed European-wide fame as a Humanist intellectual. His De Jure Regni apud Scotos (on the law of kingship among the Scots), written after 1567, was an account of Scottish monarchy that rooted it in a classical republican understanding of the commonwealth. There was almost nothing discernibly Calvinist in Buchanan’s argument. Drawing upon Seneca, Cicero, and Roman law, Buchanan argued that the people as a whole—individually as much as collectively—came together to form political societies and to constitute rulers on strictly limited terms. When those rulers strayed into tyranny, the people retained the right to resist and to protect themselves. And this right could be exercised not just by “lesser magistrates” on behalf of the people, but by individuals, displaying in doing so the virtues of patriotic citizenship.[41] There was no role played in this argument for the idea that secular government was ordained by God.

If Buchanan were the typical exponent of the Calvinist theory of resistance, then there is no doubt that one would have to conclude that there was little Calvinist about this theory. Arguments broadly similar to Buchanan’s, derived from classical and legal but also scholastic sources, are found in the writings of French Huguenots too. The greatest and most influential of these was the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, probably written by Hubert Languet and Philippe du Plessis Mornay, and published in 1579. The main purpose of this and other Huguenot defenses was (in the words of Theodore Beza’s The Right of Magistrates [1574]) to show that “a remedy [for tyranny] does exist, and it is to be found in human institutions.”[42] The Vindiciae emphasized that though God instituted secular rulers, they were constituted by the people over whom they ruled. “God ruled that it should be done this way, so that whatever authority and power they have, should be received from then people after Him.”[43] The people were more powerful than the king, but were represented by the officers of the kingdom and estates—the lesser magistrates. Subjects were not slaves of the king, and when he acted tyrannically he breached the purposes for which he was created, as well as breaking the laws that he was bound to respect. In such circumstances, the people’s political capacity could be exercised by the lesser magistrates, who had a right and a duty to restrain tyranny. However, individuals could not exercise this right. This was because “the sword is not conceded to individuals either by God or by the people.” Moreover,

[i]‌t is not individuals who constitute a prince, but all do so together as a whole. Therefore before moving against any prince they ought to await the command of all together—of those, that is who represent all together as a whole in the kingdom, or in a region or city which forms part of the kingdom, or at least one of these.[44]

There is little in this argument that could not be found in late medieval scholastic writers.[45] It recurs again in the 1640s in England, where Presbyterian defenders of the parliamentary cause (and the covenanter cause in Scotland)—men like William Prynne and Samuel Rutherford—found the people’s sovereignty to be exercised for them by Parliament. And from this Anglophone resistance theory, one can trace forward the development of theories of popular sovereignty in the Atlantic world.[46]

Does this mean that we should abandon any notion of the “Calvinist theory of resistance”? At one level, yes. As Quentin Skinner has suggested, there is little in the theory that cannot be found in Lutheran, classical (including Roman law), or scholastic sources.[47] Calvinists might have had occasion to deploy these arguments when they found themselves in conflict with their rulers; but they neither invented them nor had a monopoly on them. In the right circumstances, Catholics could also use similar arguments. And yet, the only thinker in the sixteenth century who seems to owe nothing to his Calvinism is George Buchanan. For the rest, there is more to be said. Though the Vindiciae, to stick with this example, is eclectic in its sources, it does have a religious frame, constituted by the “twofold covenant,” the first between God, king, and people, the second between king and people.[48] The first had piety as its object, the second justice; the second was also absolutely binding on the king, but only conditionally on the people, who were absolved from its requirements if a king behaved unjustly or tyrannically.[49] But the first covenant also had political consequences, especially in a world where people were fighting over the true faith. “If God commands this, and the king the opposite, who would judge that a man rebel who denied obedience to the king against God?”[50] In such a situation the “whole people” may resist actively, but so too may lesser magistrates.[51] We do not seem here to have lost a Reformation sense that God ordains (institutes) government to serve his purposes; nor have we strayed too far from that perspective of Thomas Bilson’s with which this section began. Reformation theories of resistance from the start were eclectic, and often secular. That is, they started from the insistence that secular government had its own sphere, independent of the church but nonetheless ordained by God. But quickly, they also accepted that there were different varieties of governments, laws, and constitutions, so therefore the powers that were ordained by God did not take the same form everywhere. It was perfectly proper, in consequence, to ask whether there were “lesser magistrates,” who could restrain their superiors, and the answer would vary from place to place. So, yes, many Protestant and Reformed thinkers drew on an eclectic range of ideas to develop secular political theories. But, other than Buchanan, few forgot altogether that they were applying these theories in a world in which obedience to secular authority was commanded by God. Perhaps there was not, as historians once thought, a Calvinist theory of resistance; but there was a Reformed and Protestant sense of the value and limits of secular government. “Resistance theory” was generally shaped by that sensibility.

REVOLUTION

Revolutions—especially the “great” revolutions like the English, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese—used to be seen as large-scale popular uprisings, in pursuit of liberty and progress, and inspired by rational emancipatory ideologies. They constituted major turning points in history, and usually had deep structural roots, often social and economic in nature. After several decades of “revisionist” challenge, revolutions are now as likely to be seen as contingent rather than the product of deep-seated causes, as muddled and chaotic, as violent and irrational, and as more likely to produce tyranny than emancipation. They induce, not hope, but a shudder. This is not the place to debate these points, but one development of “revisionist” views is worth noting. The idea of revolution has come to be seen by some historians and philosophers as essentially a religious one, a secularized version of the millenarian, apocalyptic, and gnostic strands that are part of Christianity. (The view is not altogether a new one, however.) Such an interpretation is allied to the argument that the ideologies of the modern age—Communism, Fascism—are in fact “secular religions,” functioning and behaving like the religious movements of old. At the same time, this is proof that the moment of secularism has never come, and that the ideals of the Enlightenment were as unrealistic as they were shallow.[52]

None of this may seem to have particular reference to the Reformation, but in fact it is often religious revolutions of the Reformation period that serve as the model for understanding revolutions as religious events. One historian’s account of the role of revolution in modern history begins with religious revolutions (the Hussite in fact, though the other three are Lutheran Germany, Huguenot France, and the Dutch Revolt), and emphasizes the role of religious radicalism in them.[53] Different historians, of course, mean different things by the term “revolution.” We have already encountered the “Calvinist theory of resistance,” also known as a theory of “revolution.” But this was not generally a theory of revolution as the term is being employed in this chapter. Resistance theory was normally used to justify religious challenge to secular rulers, but in such a way that it preserved political and social order, and could be reconciled (however half-heartedly) with the duty of obedience to the powers ordained of God. By “revolution” we might understand something that had cast aside secular obedience altogether, and justified the root and branch reconstruction of economic, social, and political order (to make the world match God’s expectations).

Reformation Europe did not have to wait long for revolution in this sense to take its place on the stage. The German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525, and its radical clerical supporters, took some inspiration from Luther’s message of “Christian freedom” and his attack on the church as an enemy to this freedom. Surely such freedom might have secular consequences, and lead to a Christian sense of social justice. And did not the priesthood of all believers imply that the “common man” was a better Christian than any priest? Some of the thinkers who supported the peasants also moved beyond this doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, tempered in Luther by the importance he attached to the Word of God (Scripture), to claim direct divine inspiration, a direct line to God for one or all. These peasant rebellions were dangerous, rooted as they were in a genuine evangelical movement for popular reform that threatened the respectability of the Reformation as well as its control. Luther was, as we have seen, quick to respond to the peasants and their supporters, especially Thomas Müntzer, who risked bringing discredit to Reformation ideas by associating them with social upheaval. They misunderstood the nature of Christian freedom—“baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul.”[54]

Perhaps the hallmark of the radical Reformers’ views on political obligation was their rejection of Luther’s “two kingdoms” theory, for the most part implicitly, through a tacit denial of the view that secular government and secular communities had purposes quite separate from spiritual matters. One of the more explicit attempts to elaborate a political position was the anonymous pamphlet To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry (1525), which began with Romans 13 and Matthew 22:21, acknowledging that “disobedience is hated by God to the highest degree.” But the authority that one must obey was established “only to tend God’s lambs”; rulers were “God’s stewards.”[55] Their duties might include, for example, maintaining a common fund to secure the welfare of all. The community had the power to depose lords who behaved greedily and oppressed the poor, because they were acting contrary to God. Importantly, in these arguments was a refusal to accept the separation of the secular and the spiritual:

And unceasingly they may talk about two kinds of commandments, namely the divine, which concerns the salvation of the soul, and the political, which concerns the common good. Oh God, these commandments cannot be separated from each other. For the political commandments are also divine: truly to further the common good is nothing except truly to maintain brotherly love, which is the highest merit for blessedness.[56]

Violence might result, and the author of To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry did not shirk from it: “if someone ever wants to exert arbitrary power over you … then the matter must be commended to God. And let happen what cannot be avoided. If someone is so eager for the innocent blood of Abel, may he indeed be confronted with it—and drowned in it.”[57]

The radical Reformation did not end with the Peasants’ War. Some radical groups, to survive, sought separation from the secular world; but those that did not had to find ways of retaining hope that the world might still see the Christian freedom and equality that had been expected in 1525. Hans Hergot’s On the New Transformation of the Christian Life opened with the expectation “of a future transformation of the bad situation in which people now find themselves.” In this, “God will humble all social estates, villages, castles, ecclesiastical foundations and cloisters. And he will institute a new way of life in which no one will say, ‘That is mine.’”[58] What human agency cannot achieve, God would bring about, in time. The world would become a better place for poor people—private property, social oppression, greed, inequality, social classes and estates would be eradicated. Possibly with much blood spilled; certainly with God’s blessing and aid.

The perspectives advanced by radical Reformers in the 1520s were seldom as overtly political as these examples, but they identified a number of issues that historians of Reformation revolutionary radicalism have argued about for many decades, especially in relation to the English Revolution. These issues revolve around one question—the relationship between “politics” and “religion.” Was the religious language in which revolutionary demands were cast a cover for demands that were really rooted in political and social (or class) grievances? Cast in this form, the question is probably unanswerable. Politics and religion were intertwined so thoroughly that trying to separate them can be fruitless. Social experience was interpreted in religious terms; religious principles refracted through social experience. A more interesting form of the question, as posed of the English Revolution, has emerged in recent years. The growing interest in classical and republican ideas has led some to argue that many of the arguments advanced in support of the “Puritan” (and parliamentary) resistance to Charles I were not, in fact, Puritan arguments at all, but classical, republican, or even scholastic arguments.[59] As such, this is a version of the broader argument, discussed above in the section on “Resistance,” about Calvinist resistance theory. But here it goes further, suggesting that the radical or revolutionary edge of the English Revolution came less from Puritanism and religion, and more from a secular republican drive to secure the foundations of liberty and the end to the slavery of the English people. These perspectives may not be as incompatible as they seem. One historian has suggested that what he terms “deliverance politics” owed something both to Reformation readings of Exodus and the deliverance of the people of Israel from bondage, and a neoclassical sense of deliverance from slavery, the paradigmatic form of un-freedom.[60]

Undoubtedly, though, there were those in the England of the 1640s and 1650s who were advancing radical religious positions, not dissimilar to those of the 1520s. Gerrard Winstanley (the Digger), and Abiezer Coppe are among the best known of them, but they included also the Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists, early Quakers, even to a degree the Leveller leader William Walwyn. They shared a millenarian sense that the world was being transformed, and that the result would be social leveling, the abolition of private property, and the emancipation of the poor from oppression. At the core of their thinking was the view that God was active in the world, doing the work of leveling, reducing the proud, uplifting the “godly.” This could be both reassuring (God could hardly fail, however grim things looked), and disempowering (if God was doing the work, what was there for mankind to do—in any case, how could they know what to do?) These radicals, in consequence, did not always think that the violence or the sword should be used to usher in the new order. Winstanley and the Diggers, for example, explicitly disavowed the use of force. A second core feature of their ideas was the belief, shared with the radicals of the 1520s, that true Christianity lay not in creeds and doctrines, or in churches; it lay in living the Gospel message, living in freedom and equality. Christian freedom was more than just a spiritual matter.[61] It still came, though, from obedience to God’s will. Thus Abiezer Coppe:

The Eternal God, the mighty Leveller is coming, yea come, even at the door; and what will you do in that day.

Repent, repent, repent, Bow down, bow down, bow down, or howl, resign or be damned; Bow down, bow down, you sturdy oaks and cedars, bow down.[62]

If Coppe’s rhetoric struggled to find specific application, others were more to the point. Gerrard Winstanley, founder of the Digger communities, declared,

I took my spade and went and broke the ground upon George Hill in Surrey, thereby declaring freedom to the creation, and that the earth must be set free from entanglements of lords and landlords, and that it shall become a common treasury to all, as it was first made and given to the sons of men.[63]

It was thinkers of this sort that gave the religious wars of the Reformation era their “revolutionary” edge, and made them (for a few) comparable in ambition to the French or Russian revolutions. But it is far from obvious that this is enough in itself to support the broader reading of modern revolutions as quasi-religious in character. It should also be remembered that the radicals, though they have received much attention from historians, were nonetheless a small part of the English Revolution, whose main function was most probably to diminish the revolutionary enthusiasms of others. The future of this radicalism may be seen more clearly, perhaps, in later movements of deliverance, on both sides of the Atlantic, including the campaign to abolish slavery and the US campaign for black civil rights.[64]

CONCLUSIONS

There was a time when the Reformation had its place in the “Whig theory of history,” which saw history as the story of progress, above all progress in the form of an increase in human freedom. The Reformation was a step in the emancipation from superstition and priestcraft. Its political doctrines fostered a degree of secularization, but also, through the theory of resistance, nurtured some of the roots of democracy. The story of the rise of toleration also conventionally began with the Reformation, though in this case it might be acknowledged that its impact was both indirect and slow.

Much of this is difficult to endorse today. A lot of what has happened in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—from totalitarianism to religious violence and terrorism—seems to challenge the easy optimism of the Whig view of history. More relevantly for this chapter, our understanding of the Reformation and its relationship to political thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has become more nuanced. There are some particular things worth noting. Reformation political thinkers were eclectic, and only some of what they thought and wrote was distinctive to them. Some aspects of Protestant thought allowed for a secularization of political thought, not least the separation of the two kingdoms; but this was often a very limited secularization, occurring within a broader religious framework. Any connection between Reformation ideas and the defense of toleration looks very limited.

There was, indeed, no such thing as a Reformation political doctrine. This chapter has looked at three themes (obedience to the state, resistance, revolution), and it is clear that they pulled in different directions. For some, obedience always entailed non-resistance; but others disagreed. For some, the state was purely a secular institution; for others quite the opposite. For some, Christian freedom had nothing to do with deliverance from social oppression; for others, everything. At the beginning of this chapter, a paradox was identified. How could Reformation ideas lead in such contradictory directions—absolutism and revolution? But the paradox is not, in fact, well-constructed, for it assumes that Reformation ideas were connected by a process of logical entailment. They were not.

There was a Protestant political mood rather than a Protestant political doctrine. This mood was rooted in some core theological ideas, but they could be unpacked politically in different ways. It came, among other things, from the rejection of the political power of the church, the stress on Christian liberty, the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. For well over a century the Reformation held out an evangelical hope of emancipation and transformation. Reformation political thinkers, drawing on a large heritage of political and legal ideas, attempted to give political substance to the mood, to make it concrete—above all, to make the world as little an obstacle to God’s work as possible. But there could be no simple coherence in this, for the heart of Reformation thinking and aspiration did not lie in politics or the secular world.

NOTES

Note: Spelling and punctuation have been modernized in all quotations (direct or indirect) from early modern sources.

1. There are many examples, some cited below (for example Martin van Gelderen’s work on the Dutch Revolt); but some of the more striking exemplars range from Quentin Skinner’s very focused study of Lorenzetti’s buon governo frescos, in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), II, chaps. 3 and 4, along with a good many other essays in this book (for example those on Machiavelli); and the more expansive studies by Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) or David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

2. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

3. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2012), 59, with particular reference to Luther.

4. Also Mark, 12:17 and Luke, 20:25.

5. Also 1 Pet., 2: 13–14.

6. Martin Luther, Selected Writings of Martin Luther, 4 vols., ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), I, 265–268.

7. Luther, Selected Writings, III, 325.

8. Luther, Selected Writings, III, 335.

9. Luther, Selected Writings, III, 336.

10. Harro Höpfl (ed.), Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 29.

11. John Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 33.

12. Höpfl, Luther and Calvin, 47.

13. Höpfl, Luther and Calvin, 49–51.

14. W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Marin Luther (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 134, 136–153.

15. Höpfl, Luther and Calvin, 82.

16. Höpfl, Luther and Calvin, 30–31.

17. Quoted in Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 77.

18. Possibly not even a truism—see Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 337: “one might ask why it took a hundred years to learn this lesson and not fifty or a hundred and fifty.”

19. Zagorin, Religious Toleration, 119.

20. Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 126–130.

21. Zagorin, Religious Toleration, 107.

22. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, chap. 12.

23. Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), 231.

24. Williams, Bloody Tenent, 210.

25. Williams, Bloody Tenent, 79; Forst, Toleration in Conflict, 183.

26. W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

27. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 13.

28. Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95.

29. Sommerville, James VI and I, 129.

30. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 479–480, 321.

31. Thomas Bilson, The True Difference between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585), 517–518.

32. Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought 1500–1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 100–101.

33. Cargill Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, 92–93.

34. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ii, 191–206; Cargill Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, chap. 6.

35. Höpfl, Luther and Calvin, 82–83.

36. van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162–164.

37. van Gelderen, “The Low Countries,” in Howell A. Lloyd, Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson (eds.), European Political Thought 1450–1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 387–388 is a good discussion.

38. van Gelderen, The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 191–193.

39. van Gelderen, Dutch Revolt, 210–214.

40. Burgess, British Political Thought, 57–72; Skinner, Foundations, II, 221–238.

41. Burgess, British Political Thought, 82–91; Skinner, Foundations, II, 341–345.

42. Skinner, Foundations, ii, 326; Theodore Beza, Right of Magistrates, in Julian H. Franklin (ed.), Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York: Pegasus, 1979), 103.

43. George Garnett (ed.), Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68.

44. Garnett, Vindiciae, 169.

45. Skinner, Visions of Politics, II, chap. 9 (“Humanism, Scholasticism and Popular Sovereignty”).

46. For example, Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Poplar Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988).

47. For the continuities between early modern constitutionalism and late medieval scholastic and canonist ideas see also Brian Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

48. See also the debate on the Vindiciae between Anne McLaren, “Rethinking Republicanism: Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos in Context,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 23–52; Garnett, “Law in the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: A Vindication,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 877–891.

49. Garnett Vindiciae, 129–131.

50. Garnett Vindiciae, 19.

51. Garnett Vindiciae, 49–50.

52. For example John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2007); Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Burleigh, Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); Jonathan Clark, “ Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narrative,’” Historical Journal 55 (2012): 161–194. Work on secular religions can be studied in the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, which began publication in 2000.

53. Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), part 1.

54. Luther, Selected Works, III, 351.

55. Michael G. Baylor (ed.), The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 103, 106, 108.

56. Baylor, Radical Reformation, 121.

57. Baylor, Radical Reformation, 127.

58. Baylor, Radical Reformation, 210.

59. Skinner, Visions of Politics, II, chap. 12.

60. John Coffey, Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also Coffey, “England’s Exodus: The Civil War as a War of Deliverance,” in Charles Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds.), England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), chap. 12; and Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

61. Burgess, British Political Thought, 271–295. The best overview remains Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Some of the debates can be seen in the various perspectives gathered in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Comparable debates have also circled the German Peasants’ War, for example Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke (eds.), The German Peasant War of 1525: New Viewpoints (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), and the overview in Michael G. Baylor, The German Reformation and the Peasants’ War: A Brief History with Documents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

62. Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century (London: Junction Books, 1983), 89–90.

63. Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 127–128.

64. Coffey, Exodus and Liberation.

FURTHER READING

Baylor, Michael G. (ed.) The Radical Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Burgess, Glenn. British Political Thought 1500–1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Burns, J. H., with Mark Goldie (eds.) The Cambridge History of Poliitcal Thought 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Cargill Thompson, W. D. J. The Political Thought of Martin Luther. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984.

Coffey, John. Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Franklin, Julian H. (ed.) Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay. New York: Pegasus, 1979.

Gelderen, Martin van (ed.) The Dutch Revolt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Höpfl, Harro. The Christian Polity of John Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Höpfl, Harro (ed.) Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Lloyd, Howell A., Glenn Burgess, and Simon Hodson (eds.) European Political Thought 1450–1700: Religion, Law and Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

PART II

GEOGRAPHIES AND VARIETIES OF THE REFORMATIONS

CHAPTER 6

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

GRAEME MURDOCK

THIS chapter analyzes the geography of Protestant Europe. It begins by considering the maps deployed in many studies of the Reformation to depict areas impacted by Protestant ideas. There are significant difficulties in providing any sort of clear visual impression of the dynamic and changing pattern of religious life as Protestants and Catholics contested and shared space in many parts of the Continent. Thinking about the problems of representing the Protestant Reformation in maps nevertheless offers a helpful basis for analysis of the key features of the spread and extent of different forms of Protestant religion. This chapter will examine the frontiers of Protestantism and analyze how they related to state borders. It will also review how the communication of Protestant ideas between towns and within and across linguistic communities shaped the geography of Protestant Europe. It concludes by discussing how the outcome of the Reformation reshaped imagination of European space and framed the mental geography of Protestants.

MAPPING THE REFORMATION

Many textbooks on early modern European history as well as more specialized texts devoted to the European Reformation include maps that attempt to show the presence of Protestant churches and communities across the Continent. Offering a clear and accurate impression of the emerging patchwork of religious loyalties following the Reformation is not straightforward. While acknowledging some of the inherent difficulties involved, particularly in depicting the religious life of the Continent as a whole, many maps reveal inconsistencies in approach and include some obvious errors. Some maps divide Europe between Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox areas, but most distinguish between varieties of Protestantism or at least show distinct Lutheran (or Evangelical) and Calvinist (or Reformed) regions. Some maps present the geography of the Reformation by marking out those monarchies and territories where Protestant churches were established by state law. These lands are commonly depicted with solid areas of distinct color denoting their shift from Catholicism to Protestantism. Other maps attempt to offer a representation of Europe’s changing religious demography, marking areas in which different religions were dominant. Many maps seem to adopt combinations of these two strategies in depicting religious life in different parts of the Continent which leads to some radically divergent impressions of the geography of Protestant Europe.[1]

Turning first to the representation of Lutheran Europe during the sixteenth century, Saxony, Brandenburg, Denmark, and Ducal Prussia are identifiable in most maps as the heartland of Lutheranism. Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway are likewise colored on maps as solidly Lutheran, rendering the Baltic Sea as an almost undisturbed Lutheran lake.[2] Maps also show Lutheranism in territories of the empire to the west, south, and southwest of Saxony. This reflects the decisions of rulers and urban councils to adopt Lutheranism, and picks out the lands in which Lutheran churches were established by law following the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. To the southeast and east of Saxony, some regions within Poland, the lands of the Bohemian crown, the Austrian lands, and the territories of the Hungarian kingdom are also shown as impacted by Lutheranism. In these lands Lutheran religion was sustained thanks to the protection of nobles and urban magistrates but mostly without formal legal acceptance by monarchs. Many maps present a rather ill-defined impression of areas where Lutheranism gained support across Central Europe’s monarchies by the middle decades of the century. Some maps strive for a little more accuracy and indicate regions where Lutherans were particularly numerous such as Royal Prussia, Upper Hungary, and Transylvania.[3]

Maps provided in many texts on the Reformation also depict the emergence of Reformed Churches during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Viewers can most clearly identify states with established Reformed Churches such as Scotland, the Palatinate, and Béarn.[4] England and Wales are sometimes presented as part of this Reformed world but, in apparent deference to later English particularism, these lands are often depicted using a distinct color or pattern to mark out Anglicanism. Representations of the state of religion in sixteenth-century Ireland provide a helpful example of varied approaches adopted toward mapping the growth of Reformed Protestantism. In some maps the island is represented as remaining Catholic after the Reformation. In other maps a blob of color in east Leinster suggests during the sixteenth century the presence of a concentration of Protestants, Anglicans, or Calvinists (maps differ on how best to describe Ireland’s non-Catholics). Other maps suggest that during the late sixteenth century the island remained Catholic, except for the northeast of Ulster which is marked as Protestant, Anglican, or Calvinist. This is perhaps intended to reflect the impact of later Scottish and English settlement in that region during the seventeenth century. One map shows the island as Anglican around 1600 but with markings depicting a Catholic presence across the island. A key to this map suggests that the viewer should understand that the “established religion of Ireland was Anglican, but the majority of the population remained Roman Catholic.” However, on the same map no similar explanation is offered as to why for example Bohemia and Moravia are depicted as Catholic, despite the overwhelming demographic dominance of non-Catholics in the Czech lands at that time.[5]

Maps often struggle to provide a clear sense of the extent of Reformed religion across the Continent. In part, this is for very understandable reasons. It is far from straightforward to offer a convincing visual representation of the impact of Calvinism in the empire given its lack of legal status before 1648 and also because of the small size of many of the territories impacted by Reformed religion. The latter difficulty also arises in attempts to portray Reformed areas within the Swiss lands. Maps indicate an arc of Reformed Churches running from St. Gallen, Zurich, Schaffhausen, Basel, and Bern, to Neuchâtel and Vaud. However, even this level of detail only approximates to the intricate divisions between different Catholic and Reformed Swiss territories and enclaves.[6] There are also problems in portraying the complex reception of Reformed religion, as well as the presence of Lutheranism and Anabaptism, within the Netherlands. The illegal status of non-Catholic churches in the Habsburg Netherlands, efforts by the state to repress heresy, and large-scale population movements as a result of conflict and persecution, all make very difficult the task of accurately illustrating the emerging pattern of religious loyalties within the Netherlands during the middle and latter decades of the sixteenth century. Within the Dutch Republic there was no requirement on citizens to be members of the Reformed Church and a substantial Catholic community. However, the provinces of the Republic are often depicted in maps as having uniformly adopted Reformed religion.[7]

Maps also attempt to offer some indication of those parts of the French monarchy that were affected by the spread of Calvinism. It is again difficult to offer a clear impression of the intricate way in which France’s towns and villages were divided between Catholics and Calvinists during the second half of the sixteenth century. The presence of Huguenots is commonly shown using dots or blocks of color from Geneva in the east across the Languedoc to the Atlantic coast at La Rochelle. Central Europe was also home to a number of substantial Reformed Churches, most notably in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hungary, and the Transylvanian principality. Many maps indicate some presence of Calvinists across Central Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea. Some maps attempt to show particular areas with a concentration of Calvinist churches. However, the viewer is often left with at best a rather general sense that there were a number of Calvinist communities in this region.[8]

Lands in which Lutheran or Reformed religion achieved the status of an established or public church therefore appear in most maps to be the most significant constituent elements of the geography of Protestant Europe. This tends to mask the presence of Catholic minorities and other communities within many ostensibly Protestant states. At the same time, maps tend to underrepresent the place of Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, and other communities within Catholic states. Some mapmakers respond to these challenges by depicting kingdoms and territories with a mixed religious demography (whatever the intentions of their rulers) with multi-colored stripes or via lettering or some other device to indicate that Catholics and Calvinists or Catholics and Lutherans shared space in such areas. Some maps also add in spots of color to indicate regions where other religions were strong, such as parts of Moravia with a concentration of Anabaptists, or to mark the presence of Utraquists and Bohemian Brethren in the Czech lands, or of Antitrinitarian churches in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Transylvania.

Many maps also depict some sort of border between Latin and Orthodox Europe, offering a false impression of a neat separation between the two communities. Notions of precisely where this frontier might be also vary wildly. In some maps Orthodoxy is represented only beyond the borders of the medieval Hungarian kingdom and to the east of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This fails to acknowledge the presence of Orthodox churches far to the north and west of this suggested dividing line and obscures regions with both Protestant and Orthodox communities. Finally, some maps present the European territories of the Ottoman Empire as solidly Orthodox, while others show only Muslims in the Balkans, and still others mark Muslims in the western Balkans and Orthodoxy elsewhere. There is only rarely any attempt to depict the presence of the modest number of Protestant communities under Ottoman rule.[9]

A CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

Viewing different maps depicting Europe’s religious landscape during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries provides us with some impression of key changes over time in the geography of Protestantism. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, areas colored in maps to mark Lutheran and Reformed communities almost disappear from sight across many of the monarchies of Central Europe. The Transylvanian principality becomes an increasingly lonely outpost of concentrated Protestant color with an apparently monochrome Catholic world to the west in the lands of the Habsburg monarchy and to the north in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the middle of the seventeenth century areas designated as Protestant also steadily retreat north within the empire. Maps confirm the legal status gained for the first time by Reformed rulers in the empire according to the terms of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. They also show that some of the gains made by Catholic rulers during the Thirty Years War were confirmed in 1648 in territories such as the Upper Palatinate. Likewise in France blotches of color used in maps to mark Huguenot communities mainly in the south and southwest of the kingdom are depicted as growing smaller through to the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[10]

However accurately maps are drawn, there are a number of ways in which these visual depictions of religious life in early modern Europe often do not particularly well serve the cause of understanding the changing geography of Lutheran, Reformed, and other Protestant communities. By way of example, how might the evolving pattern of religious life of the Transylvanian principality best be depicted? Transylvania had long been a multi-confessional and multilingual society, with both Latin and Orthodox Christian communities and no neat geographic separation between Hungarian-, German-, and Romanian-speaking communities. In 1558 the Transylvanian diet recognized an autonomous Lutheran Church. In June 1564 the diet intervened again in an effort to preempt conflict over religious rights by also recognizing a Reformed Church. In the wake of a rapid collapse in loyalty to Rome, in 1566 the diet decided that any clergy who followed “the Pope’s learning” should be expelled from the country.[11] In 1568 the diet then agreed that the only legitimate forms of Christianity were those which were based upon study of the Bible by which they meant Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Antitrinitarianism. There was a concentration of Antitrinitarians in southeastern Transylvania and of Lutherans in southern Transylvania but elsewhere complex and localized patterns of religious loyalties developed.[12]

Under pressure from Catholic princes during the latter decades of the century, the Transylvanian diet conceded rights for surviving Catholic communities. In 1581 the diet agreed that Catholic priests could return to serve their communities. In 1595 the diet conceded that there were four “received religions” in Transylvania; the Lutheran, Reformed, Antitrinitarian, and Roman Catholic Churches. Rights of public worship were formally given to local confessional majorities in each parish although in the countryside the views of nobles and landowners held sway in determining the character of worship. This settlement remained in place throughout the seventeenth century under a series of Reformed princes, with additional legal rights extended to settlements of Anabaptists in 1621, and of Jews in 1623. Following the Habsburg takeover of the principality at the end of the seventeenth century, the rights of existing churches were maintained. However, the Habsburg court promoted the interests of the Catholic Church and also supported a Greek Catholic Church drawn from among Romanian speakers who had overwhelmingly remained loyal to Orthodoxy throughout this period.[13] In the light of this shifting political context and very complicated religious demography, we might sympathize with mapmakers as they consider how best to depict the religious life of this region. Even so, different maps present conflicting and inaccurate impressions of Transylvania. Some maps represent the principality during the late sixteenth century as Catholic with Calvinist and Lutheran minorities. Others present Transylvania during the seventeenth century as Reformed, perhaps in deference to the religion of elected princes. Meanwhile, Antitrinitarian and Orthodox churches are often left out of the picture altogether.

MAPPING PROTESTANTS?

Maps of Reformation Europe tend to give the impression that Protestants (or Lutherans or Calvinists) belonged to one identifiable, trans-territorial community. This is problematic given the depth and enduring significance of divisions among Protestants. Use of the term Protestant emerged in some contexts during the early modern period to suggest a united front between Lutherans and Calvinists or between all non-Catholics. Protestant political and diplomatic alliances were sometimes proposed when Lutheran and Reformed rulers saw the advantage of uniting against a common Catholic threat. Many Protestants also responded positively to the spiritual appeal, emotional attraction, and practical benefits of asserting their sense of belonging to an international community of co-religionists. However, there were also profound divisions over who could claim to be the true heirs of the cause of religious reform. Utraquists were not willing to have their religious tradition depicted as merely a step toward true reform inspired by Luther. Lutherans were equally unwilling to listen to the same claims made by Calvinists, and Calvinists rejected the same challenge to their reform movement from Antitrinitarians.

A sense of collective purpose proved difficult enough to sustain among Lutherans or Calvinists let alone among all Protestants. Both Lutherans and Calvinists struggled to maintain unity within their own broad and sometimes fractious traditions.[14] Both Lutheran and Reformed Churches also evolved over time with some issues acquiring a significance which previous generations would not have recognized and also sharp debates between conservatives and reformers.[15] Many points of dispute also remained unresolved between Lutherans and Calvinists. Rival clergy defended their different views about the nature of God, about salvation theology, and sacramental theology in debates and in print. In the central ritual of Christian religion, Lutherans and Calvinists were never persuaded during the early modern period that they could break bread with each other. Antitrinitarians and Anabaptists almost everywhere faced harsh persecution from the hands of those described by some as fellow Protestants.

Theological consensus among Protestant clergy was normally only achieved when they were under considerable political pressure to reach agreement. Political circumstances provided a vital context for the 1549 Consensus of Zurich between Calvin and Bullinger. When non-Catholic nobles in Bohemia joined forces to press their king Maximilian to concede rights of worship, Utraquist, Lutheran, and Bohemian Brethren ministers proved able to agree a common statement of faith in the 1575 Bohemian Confession.[16] Likewise in Poland, Trinitarian reformers were able to arrive at a doctrinal agreement to present a united platform in negotiations with their king. The Sandomierz Confession was based on Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession, and was accepted in 1570 by both Calvinists and Bohemian Brethren in Poland and also, with reservations, by Polish Lutherans.[17] However, in other contexts where Lutherans had gained secure legal rights but Calvinists remained under threat of persecution (such as the empire), Reformed advocacy of Protestant irenicism was seen by most Lutherans with a good deal of justice as little more than a tactic to advance crypto-Calvinism.[18]

One of the most obvious points of divergence among Protestants emerged over attitudes toward the presence of objects of devotion in church buildings. To Reformed eyes, it seemed that Lutherans and Utraquists had made only superficial and utterly inadequate adjustments to previously Catholic church buildings. Lutherans meanwhile entirely rejected the demands of Calvinists that all images within churches should be regarded as engines of superstition and idolatry and must be removed from public view. The spread of Reformed religion across the Continent can be traced in part by mapping the spread of this Calvinist iconophobia and of resulting outbreaks of popular iconoclasm. The distinctive attitude of Calvinists to material objects in church buildings established one of the most visible of confessional frontiers between Reformed and Catholic and Lutheran areas.[19]

The enthusiasm shown by Calvinists to campaign against idolatry in Lutheran as well as in Catholic churches was expressed for example by Abraham Scultetus, Reformed court preacher to Frederick V of the Palatinate. Scultetus looked forward to the day when “leftover dung” (he meant Lutheranism) would be swept out of the empire. This optimism came in the wake of the removal of statues from Berlin’s cathedral following the conversion of Johann Sigismund Hohenzollern from Lutheranism to Calvinism in 1613.[20] Scultetus was on hand at St. Vitus cathedral in Prague to see Frederick V crowned in 1619 as Bohemia’s king. Frederick’s accession brought new hope for secure legal rights for Utraquists and Lutherans in the Czech lands. However, Utraquist opinion was soon outraged by an iconoclastic attack on Prague’s cathedral by Calvinists, to the point that even Frederick felt the need to distance himself from those responsible. Catholics were quick to point out the hypocrisy holding this Protestant alliance together in the Czech lands. When Abraham Scultetus led a service in Olomouc during Frederick’s visit to Moravia one local Catholic wrote of his amazement as “Lutheran bootlickers dressed in Calvinist skin” celebrated the arrival of their new king.[21]

STATE BORDERS AND RELIGIOUS FRONTIERS

As we have noted, many maps present some territorial states as exclusively Catholic or Protestant (or exclusively Lutheran or Calvinist). This is problematic not only because it masks the presence of minority churches but also because it bolsters the notion that the frontiers of Protestant Europe were simply determined by state borders. Caution is needed to prevent an impression being created that the decisions of monarchs and introduction of state laws on religious rights were simply able to turn Catholic societies into Protestant ones. The Protestant Reformation was not merely a legislative event, nor a matter determined exclusively by those holding legal and political power. Many Protestants (and Catholics) worshipped in churches or in their homes despite the lack of any legal right to do so. Even where communities outwardly conformed to the religion supported by the state, turning Catholics into Protestants was a slow process of spiritual and cultural persuasion. A reliable body of clergy first needed to be trained in order to convince the faithful to adapt to new beliefs and rituals. In many areas Protestant rulers and ministers could only point to partial success in eradicating traditional practices. Visitation reports from churches across the Continent bear significant witness to the long road of establishing new styles of Protestant piety. Parish clergy reported on the limited understanding of many people about even the most basic points of doctrine, ministers complained about the reluctance of many people to attend church services, and anxiously reflected on the apparently limited impact of religious instruction in shaping the behavior of ordinary people.[22]

It is certainly the case that political frontiers marked the limits of Protestant Europe in some contexts. The ability of territorial rulers to impose their will over the character of religious life was clearly promoted as one of the key claims of monarchical sovereignty and magisterial authority. For example, the 1555 Peace of Augsburg reflected the aspirations of territorial rulers and magistrates in the empire to determine whether their subjects were Catholics or Lutherans. In some larger states in which one religion was consistently backed by rulers over time a degree of religious stability could be achieved. However, the idea of clearly separate Protestant and Catholic states and societies in many parts of the empire hardly reflected lived reality.

We might take by way of example the territories ruled by the Palatinate branch of the Wittelsbach family. The lands of the Upper and Lower Palatinate had seen Lutheranism introduced by Frederick II before the Peace of Augsburg. Otto Henry was legally entitled to enforce Lutheranism on his subjects after 1555. On Otto Henry’s death in 1559 the Palatinate passed to Frederick III. Frederick embarked on a new phase of reform, directing the Wrocław-born Zacharias Ursinus to prepare a new catechism for use in the schools of the Palatinate. While the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism came to be seen as a key statement of Reformed faith, its origins lay in Frederick’s attempts to negotiate a path toward further reform in the context of the dictates of the 1555 Augsburg settlement. His efforts were opposed by justifiably suspicious Lutheran clergy and nobles, while Emperor Maximilian demanded that Frederick’s reforms were illegal and must be reversed.[23]

On Frederick’s death in 1576, the Palatinate was inherited by Louis VI who restored Lutheranism to the Palatinate and dismissed Calvinist clergy from posts at the University of Heidelberg and from parishes in his territories. However, Louis could not impose Lutheranism in Neustadt, which had been left by Frederick to his younger, Calvinist, son John Casimir.[24] On the death of Louis VI in 1583, John Casimir became regent for his nephew Frederick IV who was educated as a Calvinist. Reformed religion was reintroduced to the Palatinate. Both Frederick IV and his son Frederick V developed alliances with other Reformed princes, and the Palatinate became a key base for both Wittelsbach dynastic ambition and plans for Calvinist expansion in the empire and Central Europe. These aspirations gained a focus when the estates of Bohemia refused to recognize their crowned Habsburg king Ferdinand over fears that he would not uphold the formal protections granted by Rudolf II in 1609 to Bohemia’s Utraquists, Lutherans, and Brethren. In 1619 Frederick V was elected and crowned as king of Bohemia promising to uphold religious liberties. All of Frederick’s plans collapsed with military defeat in 1620. The Lower Palatinate was subsequently occupied by Spanish forces in 1622 and all of the territory’s Reformed Churches were closed. In 1628 Ferdinand II as emperor transferred control of the Upper Palatinate to the Bavarian Catholic Wittelsbachs. The new ruler Maximilian immediately invoked his right under the 1555 Augsburg peace to enforce Catholicism on the Upper Palatinate, offering the Reformed population six months to convert or to leave his territory.[25] At the end of the Thirty Years War, Frederick V’s son Charles Louis was returned to power in the devastated Lower Palatinate. The terms of the peace agreed at Osnabrück recognized the rights of Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed rulers in the empire. However, while Charles Louis was now legally entitled to be a Calvinist prince, territorial rulers in the empire were no longer able to change the religion of their subjects.

How should the religious life of the agglomeration of territories and enclaves ruled by the Wittelsbachs after the Reformation best be represented—as a Protestant state? Were the rulers of the Palatinate simply able to turn Catholics into Lutherans, Lutherans into Calvinists, Calvinists into Lutherans, Lutherans into Calvinists, and Calvinists into Catholics, at the whim of princely conscience or under threat of persecution and exile? We might certainly question the pace and depth of conversions in this context. It is equally important to recall that for those living in the Lower Palatinate who were dissatisfied with the religious choice of their ruler there were alternative churches within easy reach across the Palatinate’s borders in neighboring states throughout this period.

State borders in many contexts prove to be unreliable as firm markers of where the Protestant world ended and the Catholic world began. For example, the city of Geneva had been ruled before the Reformation by a prince-bishop, nominated by the dukes of Savoy. When Duke Charles III pressed for the transfer of the bishop’s temporal authority it fostered some opposition in the city from those concerned about this loss of relative political autonomy. Opponents turned to the city’s Swiss neighbors, and to Reformed Bern in particular, for help. Geneva’s Reformation was therefore born of an attempt to assert the autonomy of a new city state. The extent of Reformed Geneva’s territory was augmented by secularized monastic lands and lands of the deposed bishop. The council demanded that all who lived within the city’s walls and in villages and individual properties now under their jurisdiction must adopt Reformed religion. The dukes of Savoy regained control of lands around Geneva previously held by Bern after the implementation of the treaty of Lausanne in 1567. Catholic religion was subsequently restored in villages around the city from the late 1580s. Geneva’s city walls may still have seemed to protect a purely Reformed urban space where the public practice of Catholicism was not permitted. However, there were enduring social connections and economic interdependency between the urban population and surrounding villages, both Reformed and Catholic. Meanwhile those who lived in a patchwork of Genevan-controlled villages and hamlets around the city and in micro-enclaves in Savoyard lands lived alongside, worked with, and socialized with their Catholic neighbors across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.[26]

The precise geographic extent of the Genevan republic and duchy of Savoy was carefully negotiated by both sides. State power was able to some degree to impose religious conformity on Genevan and Savoyard subjects in this region. However, local people also proved adept at testing the limits of the powers of both states and churches, with their parallel demands for adherence to different calendars and rituals and moral codes. The presence of Genevan enclaves within Savoy in the northern part of the duchy of Chablais provided liminal spaces for both Reformed and Catholic communities in the area. For example, some Catholics tried to evade the demands of their church to maintain Lenten restrictions by visiting their Calvinist neighbors, since there was no Lent on Genevan land. Meanwhile some Calvinists used the proximity of Savoyard land to avoid demands for church attendance on Genevan fast days as well as engaging in all sorts of illicit behavior beyond the eyes and ears of their otherwise vigilant clergy and elders. The Genevan state thus acted both as a crucial hub of the international Reformed cause and also as a borderland between Reformed and Catholic Europe.[27]

A different example of the complicated relationship between state borders and confessional frontiers, and between Protestant and Catholic states and societies, developed in an enclave of the Dutch Republic surrounded by Catholic lands. The village of Vaals was acquired by the Dutch state as part of a 1661 settlement with the Spanish crown over lands in Limburg. Vaals stood as an outpost of the Dutch Republic bordering both the Spanish Netherlands and the territory of the Catholic imperial city of Aachen. Although most of the people who lived in Vaals were Catholics, the Dutch state was determined to acquire the enclave to provide Reformed residents of nearby Aachen with somewhere to worship. After 1648 non-Catholics who lived in Aachen gained the right of freedom of conscience in their city and the right to travel in order to attend church services. These arrangements led to endless petty disputes and problems caused by both sides. There was the potential for low-level violent incidents with harassment of worshippers as they made their way from Aachen to Vaals. At the same time there was considerable social interaction across the border and across the religious divide. Marriages between Catholics and Protestants occurred but could lead to disputes over whether children should be baptized in the religion of their father or mother, just one of many intimate hostilities that developed in these overlapping and neighboring communities.[28]

In other areas of the Continent, rulers had conceded (in theory or in practice) rights of conscience to their subjects to dissent from official church practices. In some states Protestants lacked the right to worship in public but they were permitted to worship in neighboring areas without crossing a state border. In all sorts of contexts around Europe, Protestants traveled from surrounding villages to a nearby town, or from a town to a neighboring village under the protection of a sympathetic lord, in order to attend services on Sundays. For example, after 1578 Rudolf II put an end to the right of Lutherans to worship within the walls of the city of Vienna. Vienna might thereafter be regarded as a purely Catholic space. However, town walls could be as ineffective as state borders in separating Protestants and Catholics. On Sunday mornings, the roads out of Vienna were packed with as many as 10,000 people traveling out of the city to attend Lutheran services in a number of nearby villages. Most of all, they traveled to worship in the village of Hernals which had been bought by a group of Lutheran nobles especially to serve this purpose.[29]

In France, the 1598 Edict of Nantes confirmed the dominance of Catholicism in the monarchy but offered (or reaffirmed) specific and limited rights of worship to its Huguenot minority. Rights of Reformed public worship were closely regulated and Paris was for example confirmed as being a purely Catholic city. No site of Reformed worship was permitted within about ten miles of the city’s walls. Parisian Calvinists therefore built a church just beyond this limit at Charenton which could seat around 4,000 worshippers until it was destroyed at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Similar patterns of Protestants crossing internal boundaries of different kinds in order to worship in public occurred in different legal and political contexts across the Continent.[30]

These examples confirm the varied and complex ways in which the geography of Protestant Europe was affected by the authority of rulers, by the legal rights of towns and nobles, and by the loyalties of ordinary people. In different circumstances laws and royal edicts about religion expressed the intent of states to maintain a strict uniformity of religious practice. However, the notion of a Europe, increasingly divided into clear and separate confessional societies, simply never came into existence in many areas. Certainly there was pressure to conform and attempts to ensure that communities attended state churches. Minorities were routinely denied a wide variety of civil, social, and economic rights, and some found themselves forced to migrate from their homes in order to maintain their religious practices. However, we should not underestimate the degree to which Protestant and Catholic societies remained intertwined in many parts of the Continent. Clergy knew only too well about the enduring patterns of sociability between neighbors of different faiths despite their best efforts to warn of the dangers of association with heretics. Some religious borderlands acquired shared characteristics on either side of a frontier that distinguished societies in these areas from those living at some distance from the border. These borderlands were certainly not always harmonious sites of pluralism and exchange. In some places the proximity of religious rivals led to very sharp confessional tensions. Shifting patterns of porosity and rigidity in confessional loyalties were framed by religious demography and by specific political and social contexts, and hitherto peaceful relations between rival communities could be profoundly altered by external shocks that unsettled local arrangements.

COMMUNICATION: TOWNS AND LANGUAGE

The attention of a viewer of a map of Protestant Europe is inevitably drawn toward the apparent importance of some large territories with rather low population density, including for example Scotland and the Lutheran monarchies of Scandinavia. Areas with high population density in the Netherlands and Rhineland, some of which were very greatly impacted by Protestantism, can appear to be relatively insignificant or simply rather difficult to interpret. Key cities and towns are likewise hardly visible on maps of the Continent as a whole; towns were more than simply significant Protestant population centers but were also vital hubs of Protestant movements and at the heart of the geography of the Protestant world. For Protestant reformers and activists, towns acquired a symbolic meaning as the spaces in which religion had first been reformed. In 1535 a new coin was minted in Geneva that gave expression to the religious purpose that the magistrates of the city had embraced. One side of the coin declared: “Our God fights for us,” while on the reverse was the motto: “after darkness, light.”[31] Reformers from France sought safe haven in Geneva and then worked to spread the light of true religion back across the border into France. Catholics saw things rather differently, frequently employing the image of Reformed religion as a heretical poison which could spread all too easily unless the king, nobles, and clergy were vigilant to protect France.

Analysis of how Protestant ideas spread across Europe has often focused on the role of urban centers such as Geneva. Protestant towns, often featuring universities or academies, were key spaces within which bibles and books were printed and discussed, synods and other decision-making bodies were held, clergy were educated, and church institutions were developed. The geography of Protestant Europe was shaped in part by communication links between towns, often by rivers and seas, and through networks of individuals including merchants and students.[32] We can follow for example the spread of Francophone Reformed religion from Geneva along the rivers of southern France and around the French coast. Calvin and his supporters developed Geneva as a center for printing and education, and sent out missionaries to serve churches in Lyon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Montauban, and La Rochelle.[33]

Analysis of the spread of Reformed religion in France cannot be reduced to a simple function of river systems and trade routes. However, we can see how books and people quickly spread new ideas along well-established communication networks. Even so, the reception of Calvinism in French towns was very mixed with some towns remaining overwhelmingly Catholic and others becoming divided by religion between neighborhoods or occupation groups or with no obvious social markers between Calvinists and Catholics. Meanwhile, nobles, and links between noble families, were also critical to the Reformed cause, with sympathetic landowners supporting Reformed religion on their lands and sustaining the development of a rural French Calvinism.

Shared cultural links and a common language also helped in the exchange of ideas about religious reform and the spread of Protestantism. Linguistic affinity played a complex role in the emerging religious life of Reformation Europe. Lutheranism outside Scandinavia was largely, but not exclusively, delivered in German. Calvinism proved to be more adept at crossing boundaries between different linguistic communities. For example, Calvinism made its first impact in the Netherlands in French-speaking towns such as Valenciennes and Tournai, from where Calvinist ideas then quickly spread into neighboring Dutch-speaking communities in Flanders and Brabant.[34] This different pattern of cultural development between the two churches can be related in part to political contexts. Lutheranism acquired secure legal status in the empire and in the Scandinavian monarchies.[35] By comparison, Reformed Churches mostly lacked state support and clear legal guarantees. Reformed activists often found themselves driven into exile in urban centers such as Geneva just beyond the border of the French monarchy and Emden in East Friesland just beyond the border of the Habsburg Netherlands. These towns acted both as bases for mission efforts and also aided the exchange of ideas among diverse groups of exiles across linguistic and political frontiers.[36]

In considering the link between Lutheranism and German-speaking towns, the obvious point of departure is Wittenberg with its preachers, printers, and activists promoting the cause of reform. We can trace how Lutheran ideas quickly spread to the large towns of southern Germany and also to German-speaking urban communities from the Baltic coast to Transylvania. German speakers in Tallinn, Stockholm, Malmø, and Copenhagen were the first in the region to receive Lutheran ideas through contacts with northern German towns and through German-language printed texts. In Central Europe preexisting economic links and trade networks between German-speaking urban communities provided channels for the communication of Lutheran ideas. A common language certainly played some role in the spread of Lutheranism from Saxony to towns in Royal Prussia, Silesia, western Bohemia, Upper Hungary, and Transylvania. However, caution is needed not to overestimate the role of a common language in the spread of Lutheranism. Urban Polish, Czech, and Hungarian speakers, and people who lived in bilingual contexts, were equally impacted by ideas about religious reform. Many Polish and Hungarian speakers later moved toward accepting Reformed religion under the influence of Heinrich Bullinger. However, this can hardly be interpreted as some sort of rejection of a German-language reform movement or religious culture. Some Hungarian speakers also retained a strong attachment to Lutheranism and proved to be as strident opponents of crypto-Calvinism as could be found anywhere.

By way of example of the complex relationship between religious loyalty and linguistic affinity, we might consider the predominantly German-speaking royal free towns and mining towns of Upper Hungary. These towns had close economic and trading links with Silesia and southern Germany. As Lutheran ideas gained support among these urban communities, councils managed to extract royal privileges for the practice of Lutheranism according to locally formulated confessions. Ferdinand and then Maximilian included a condition for this privilege that councils must ensure that there were no further changes to the religion practiced in their towns. Concerned that the crown might use any perceived infraction of this condition to restore Catholicism, Lutheran councillors bitterly opposed attempts by Reformed preachers to share their hard-won religious liberties. This fight to protect exclusive Lutheran rights took place as increasing numbers of Hungarian-speaking Calvinists were migrating north to this region to avoid the threat posed by Ottoman armies. In the towns of Upper Hungary a clear association emerged between Lutheranism and German speakers. However, rather than connect this to some cultural or theological appeal of Lutheranism to German but not Hungarian speakers, it is better understood as a reflection of the determined efforts made by an established urban elite to defend their traditional rights and social privileges.[37]

MENTAL GEOGRAPHY

One further perspective on the complex character of the geography of Protestantism can be gained from those who traveled across the Continent. One rather poignant example is provided by a young Hungarian Reformed student called Márton Szepsi Csombor who declared his enthusiasm to travel to see the wonders of Europe just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Csombor’s direction of travel reflected the outlook of his Calvinist community.[38] He did not follow the path of Hungarian Catholic students to Austria and Italy but rather turned north and traveled through Poland to the Baltic coast at Gdańsk. In Poland, Csombor noted the good relations that he witnessed between Lutherans and Calvinists. This was certainly a discovery of interest since on Csombor’s return to Hungary he taught in one of the towns of Upper Hungary where Calvinists had long been attempting to persuade suspicious Lutherans that they could be regarded as fellow Protestants and granted rights of public worship.[39] Csombor then headed west by boat around Denmark to Friesland in the Dutch Republic. In many ways the time that he spent in the Dutch provinces proved to be a highlight of Csombor’s voyage. In the company of Calvinist co-religionists, he greatly enjoyed his visits to Amsterdam, Leiden, and other Dutch towns. However, he also noted differences between the practices of Dutch Reformed and Hungarian Reformed Churches. For example, Csombor was not persuaded that his home church should copy the Dutch custom of allowing men and women to sit together during services.[40]

Csombor traveled on across the English Channel to visit Canterbury and London. He was rather unimpressed by aspects of the English church, criticizing for example the retention of traditional clerical vestments. Csombor then headed toward Paris intending to fulfill his ambition to visit northern Europe’s greatest city. Csombor was duly impressed by the scale of Paris and by its palaces and bridges. He was equally ready to acknowledge the quality of scholarship and learning in the city, commenting that wherever one looked in Paris “one may see wonders of intellect.” Csombor also described the beautiful churches he visited, and sometimes, but not always, adding hostile commentary about the presence of statues and images. Despite his positive impressions of life in Paris, Csombor could not forget that this was the same city where in 1572, “those mad dogs, minions of the Cerberus of Rome, the papists, killed more than eighty thousand of the Christians of our confession.”[41] Tensions arose in Csombor’s mind about the pleasure and interest he took from his visit to Paris. He recorded that in a dream he saw himself as a martyr in bloodstained, white clothes, and “was greatly put out that my clothes were ruined and ran to my mother and aunts, who washed the blood from my head and arms; they could not, however, wash them as clean as was needed.”[42]

Csombor then headed for home traveling to Heidelberg, where he attended a sermon given by Abraham Scultetus in the castle church of the Elector Frederick V. In his travels across the German lands Csombor experienced the sort of petty hostilities (or attempts at humor) that could arise from everyday encounters across the religious divide. When locals in a Catholic town discovered Csombor was a Calvinist and seeking a bed for the night they directed him to the local brothel. Csombor informed his readers that he trudged on wearily to the nearest Reformed village for shelter and a warm meal. Csombor also witnessed something of the unfolding drama of 1618 when he encountered representatives of the Bohemian estates traveling west to Heidelberg to attend the court of Frederick V. According to Csombor, they “laughed at the misfortunes that had befallen the Jesuits both there [in Bohemia] and elsewhere.”[43] Toward the end of Csombor’s voyage, he concluded his account of his stay in Cracow, with its “army of whores,” by referencing a city he had not visited nor expressed any interest to see: “The Poles have a proverbial saying about their metropolis: If Rome were not Rome, our Cracow would be Rome … I left them to their Rome (though Rome it is indeed, for in fact every failing of Rome is to be found there).”[44]

Márton Szepsi Csombor declared that he wanted to travel to experience “Europe in its variety.” However, Csombor’s religious loyalties restricted his mental horizons and shaped his direction of travel. Csombor’s text offers an impression of the geography of early seventeenth-century Reformed Protestant Europe, as he traveled to key urban centers at Leiden, London, and Heidelberg. It is hardly surprising that Csombor expressed no particular interest in visiting Lutheran Wittenberg. He also did not venture either to Zurich or to Geneva, partly for practical reasons of the expense and distance, and partly because neither town held the prominent role that they once had as centers of Protestant communication and exchange. Confessional prejudices sometimes poisoned even the most mundane of social interactions between Csombor and Catholics that he encountered. However, Csombor’s text also reflected the contradictions and ambiguities of religious life through his contacts with other Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics. The description provided by Csombor of life in Europe on the eve of the Thirty Years War confirms the difficulty in charting the precise contours of the intricate and dynamic confessional landscape of the Continent. A map of Europe’s religious life relying on the description provided by this young Hungarian Calvinist might present a mosaic of dark and light shades of overlapping colors. While such a map might seem bewildering to most viewers, it would resemble the complex reality of how many people experienced the adventure of religious pluralism that followed the Reformation.[45]

NOTES

1. For examples of maps on religious life in Reformation Europe see Eugene F. Rice, Jr. with Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Norton, 1994), 198; Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1715, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979), 7; Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 183; David Nicholas, The Transformation of Europe, 1300–1600 (London: Arnold, 1999), 404; John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe. From the Renaissance to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York and London: Norton, 2010), 102; Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 105; Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 399; Peter G. Wallace, The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350–1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 161; Lee Palmer Wandel, The Reformation: Towards a New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 103; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 486; Mark Greengrass, The European Reformation, c. 1500–1618 (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 372–377.

2. Ole Peter Grell, “Scandinavia,” in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation World (London: Routledge, 2000), 257–275.

3. Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock (eds.), Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015).

4. On Béarn see Greengrass, “The Calvinist Experiment in Béarn,” in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis (eds.), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119–142.

5. Compare MacCulloch, Reformation, 486, Rublack, Reformation Europe, 105, and Nicholas, The Transformation of Europe, 404. On the treatment of Ireland and Bohemia see Lindberg, The European Reformations, 399.

6. See the map in Greengrass, The European Reformation, 370. On the complexity of the Swiss lands see Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

7. Compare MacCulloch, Reformation, 486, and Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 183.

8. See for example Wallace, The Long European Reformation, 161.

9. Compare MacCulloch, Reformation, 486, Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 183, and Wallace, The Long European Reformation, 161.

10. For the greatest extent of Reformed Churches in France during the 1560s see Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 138. On the declining numbers in France’s Reformed congregations see Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1994).

11. Sándor Szilágyi (ed.), Comitialia Regni Transylvaniae. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, 21 vols. (Budapest, 1875–98) 2: 302–303.

12. Szilágyi, Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, 2: 343; Agnes Várkonyi, “Pro quiete regni – for the Peace of the Realm (the 1568 Law on Religious Tolerance in the Principality of Transylvania),” The Hungarian Quarterly 34 (1993): 99–112.

13. István Keul, Early Modern Religious Communities in East-Central Europe: Ethnic Diversity, Denominational Plurality, and Corporative Politics in the Principality of Transylvania (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009).

14. Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed; Murdock, Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

15. On the divided state of Reformed religion in the Netherlands see for example Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Aza Goudriaan and Fred van Lieburg (eds.), Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011).

16. David Zdeněk, “Utraquists, Lutherans, and the Bohemian Confession of 1575,” Church History 68 (1999): 294–336.

17. Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Consensus of Sandomierz: A Chapter from the Polish Reformation,” Concordia Theological Monthly 18 (1947): 825–837.

18. Bodo Nischan, “Reformed Irenicism and the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631,” Central European History 9 (1976): 3–26.

19. Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

20. Bodo Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).

21. Howard Louthan, “Breaking Images and Building Bridges: The Making of Sacred Space in Early Modern Bohemia,” in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 282–301; Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

22. See for example research on the work of Reformed consistories including Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Raymond Mentzer (ed.), Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition (Kirksville, MO: Truman State Press, 2002); Raymond Mentzer, Françoise Moreil, and Philippe Chareyre (eds.), Dire l’interdit: The Vocabulary of Censure and Exclusion in the Early Modern Reformed Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010).

23. Lyle D. Bierma, The Doctrine of the Sacraments in the Heidelberg Catechism: Melanchthonian, Calvinist, or Zwinglian? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1999).

24. Henry Cohn, “The Territorial Princes in Germany’s Second Reformation, 1559–1622,” in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 135–166; Bernard Vogler, Le clergé Protestant rhénan au siècle de la réforme (1555–1619) (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1976).

25. Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

26. E. William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva (New York: John Wiley, 1967); Monter, Studies in Genevan Government (1536–1605) (Geneva: Droz, 1964).

27. For context on religious life in this region see Jill Fehleison, Boundaries of Faith: Catholics and Protestants in the Diocese of Geneva (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2010).

28. Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: The Case of Vaals,” Dutch Crossing 37 (2013): 4–19; Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

29. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 147–148.

30. Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds.), Toleration and Religious Identity: The Edict of Nantes and its Implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003).

31. Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 17.

32. On a network of one group of Italian families see Grell, Brethren in Christ: A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

33. There are a number of important studies of French towns impacted by Calvinism. See for example Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict: Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Philip Connor, Montauban and Southern French Calvinism during the Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Judith P. Meyer, Reformation in La Rochelle: Tradition and Change in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1568 (Geneva: Droz, 1998).

34. Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); Nicolaas Gootjes, The Belgic Confession: Its History and Sources (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007).

35. On the different pace of reform movements in the Danish and Swedish monarchies see Martin Schwarz Lausten, “The Early Reformation in Denmark and Norway, 1520–1559” and E. I. Kouri, “The Early Reformation in Sweden and Finland, c. 1530–1560,” in Grell (ed.), The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12–41, 42–69.

36. Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

37. Murdock, “The Boundaries of Reformed Irenicism: Hungary and Transylvania,” in Howard Louthan and Randall Zachman (eds.), From Conciliarism to Confessional Church, 1400–1618 (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2004), 150–172; Márta Fata, Ungarn, das Reich, der Stephanskrone, im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Multiethnizität, Land und Konfession 1500 bis 1700. (Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung 60) (Münster: Aschendorff, 2000), 67–86.

38. Márton Szepsi Csombor, Europica Varietas (1620), trans. Bernard Adams (Budapest: Corvina, 2014).

39. Csombor, Europica Varietas, 26–27, 51–54.

40. Csombor, Europica Varietas, 88–104.

41. Csombor, Europica Varietas, 131, 141–143, 145.

42. Csombor, Europica Varietas, 147.

43. Csombor, Europica Varietas, 171–172, 174, 177.

44. Csombor, Europica Varietas, 194–195.

45. On this term see Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999).

FURTHER READING

Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Cameron, Keith, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (eds.) The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999.

Csombor, Márton Szepsi. Europica Varietas (1620), trans. Bernard Adams. Budapest: Corvina, 2014.

Grell, Ole Peter. Brethren in Christ: A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Johnson, Trevor. Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Kaplan, Benjamin J. Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

Keul, István. Early Modern Religious Communities in East-Central Europe: Ethnic Diversity, Denominational Plurality, and Corporative Politics in the Principality of Transylvania. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009.

Louthan, Howard and Graeme Murdock (eds.) Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015.

Murdock, Graeme. Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Nischan, Bodo. Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.

Pettegree, Andrew, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis (eds.) Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Prestwich, Menna (ed.) International Calvinism, 1541–1715. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Spicer, Andrew. Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 7

THE BOHEMIAN REFORMATIONS

HOWARD LOUTHAN

INTRODUCTION

IN 1935 the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka began work on a portrait of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia. Kokoschka had settled in Prague the previous year seeking refuge from the growing fascist threat (Figure 7.1). There in his new home he developed a great admiration for the elderly statesman and executed the painting in his honor. Kokoschka’s allegorical portrait salutes the great political achievement of Czechoslovakia’s founding father. Over Masaryk’s left shoulder in Kokoschka’s signature swirl of yellows, blues, and greens is a cityscape of Prague, a tangible reference to the new independent state that Masaryk had worked so hard to create. To Masaryk’s right Kokoschka celebrates what he saw as the president’s intellectual or spiritual legacy. Behind the president is the small but recognizable figure of Jan Hus (d. 1415), the kingdom’s most famous religious dissident, who is slowly engulfed by flames. Immediately to Hus’s right is the indistinct face of a man clinging to a book. This is Bohemia’s last great Reformation leader, John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), a man who for both Kokoschka and Masaryk represented an exiled Protestant tradition at long last returning home. Masaryk himself summarized his view of the new country’s past with a simple binary:

Every Czech who is aware of his nation, has to choose either in favor of the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation, either for the Czech idea or the Austrian idea … Hus, Žižka, Chelčický, Comenius are our living heritage.[1]

Masaryk’s pronouncement, his identification of the true Czech spirit through the lives of its heroes—its martyrs, soldiers, prophets, and exiles—was more than a simple expression of popular nationalist sentiment. He had studied philosophy in Vienna and had taught at the Charles University in Prague. His comments were an extension of a lively and long-running public debate concerning the meaning of the Czech past, and the religious developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were an essential element of an emerging nationalist narrative.[2] Many in the historical community viewed the Hussite era as a critical first step in a long struggle for independence from foreign domination that ultimately culminated in October 1918. They understood the Bohemian Reformation as a unilinear phenomenon, a movement galvanized by the martyrdom of Hus in 1415, carrying through the tumultuous wars of the fifteenth century, maturing during a period of stabilization and growth in the sixteenth, and then reaching a tragic climax with its forcible suppression after the victory of the Catholic Habsburgs at White Mountain in 1620. This nationalist interpretation of Bohemia’s religious past has had a profound impact on its historiography. It was a powerful model that brought together the disparate events of more than two centuries and transformed them into a tightly unified narrative. Even today, it continues to exert an influence often in subtle ways.[3] Still, there is general acknowledgment that the old story is insufficient. Though there are certainly continuities and connections, there is no master narrative that links Czech religious history from Hus to Comenius. But what we may have lost in terms of cohesion, we have gained in depth and insight. If there is a common feature or characteristic of this newer scholarship, it is breadth, a conscious widening of the discourse and context of Bohemia’s Reformations. Before we launch into a more general overview of these two centuries of reform, however, let us briefly consider four distinct ways that new research is transforming our understanding of this region’s religious landscape.

FIGURE 7.1 Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of T. G. Masaryk, 1935–1936, oil on canvas, H: 38 3/8 in × W: 51 1/2 in (97.47 × 130.81 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: Patrons Art Fund, 56.46.

Scholars today are re-evaluating issues of both chronology and geography. Most now reject a tight unilinear model that runs ineluctably from Hus to Comenius. It is important to remember that the enduring appeal of this paradigm owed as much to an older Whiggish historiography of the Reformation as to nationalist notions of the past. In 1520 Luther himself proudly proclaimed, “We are all Hussites now.”[4] Protestant artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries strengthened the link visually through engravings that celebrated a Reformation genealogy running from Hus and Wyclif to Luther and Calvin. Contemporary researchers are now more likely to speak of Bohemia’s “Reformations” and emphasize aspects of contingency.

Hus in many ways represents less of a beginning than a culmination of a distinctive era of reform, and correspondingly, historians and theologians are turning with greater interest to this earlier period. At the same time, there is a recognition that the seventeenth century is more complex than many have assumed, and a chronology that ends abruptly with White Mountain leaves many issues unresolved. Our perspective also changes when we examine the past synchronically. Hus looks differently when extracted from a nationalist schema and examined in a framework that considers him side-by-side such figures as the French conciliarist Jean Gerson and the fiery preacher Bernardino of Siena. In similar fashion our view of Bohemia’s re-Catholization expands when we explore it not only as a struggle between Czech estates and Habsburg monarchs but also as a transnational manifestation of Tridentine reform. Geographically there has been a salutary expansion of coverage with new attempts to examine the Bohemian lands in a regional context.[5] Central Europe’s distinctive political and social culture, its weak administrative structures, its elective monarchies, and its powerful nobilities, helped create the needed space for the growth and spread of heterodox ideas. Finally, historians have paid closer attention to regional variations that existed between the territories of the Bohemian crown. Moravia, for example, had a distinctive tradition of its own and confessionally was the most pluralistic of the crownlands.[6]

Scholars are also reconsidering the matter of confession. The Masaryk quote with which we began reflects an old nationalist sentiment that pitted a modern and progressive Protestant spirit naturally inclined toward democracy against a traditional and authoritarian Catholic dynamic represented by the Austrian Habsburgs. Though the influence of this model lingers, few today would defend such a stark and simple dichotomy. Instead the emphasis is more often placed on multiplicity and hybridity. Early modern visitors of the Czech lands frequently noted the complexity of its confessional landscape. An English traveler passing through in the 1590s spoke of “a great confusion of religions” while a few years later a Jesuit more caustically described Moravia as a “melting pot for all heresies on earth.”[7] For those interested in questions of multi-confessionalism, there is no better place to begin such an investigation than Bohemia. Indeed, Europe’s first multi-confessional settlement occurred not between Catholic and Lutheran at Augsburg in 1555 but some eighty years earlier between Utraquist and Catholic at the Bohemian town of Kutná Hora. At the same time a consideration of religion in the Czech lands challenges standard confessional definitions. What exactly was Utraquism as the religious movement inspired by Hus came to be known? Was it, as some have assumed, a Czech variant of Catholicism or as others have maintained a reform movement that flowed naturally into the Reformations of the sixteenth century?[8] Though debate continues, it seems clear that Utraquism was no monolithic phenomenon and resists easy categorization. Confessional boundaries, especially in the Protestant communities, were porous. How did their permeability contribute to early expressions of ecumenism and forms of irenicism characteristic of the region? Such questions recognize the need to examine religion in a manner that rises above anachronistic national divisions and the more narrow strictures of confessional historiography.

Finally, there have also been significant methodological changes to the study of religion in late medieval and early modern Bohemia. A field once dominated by top-down institutional histories or studies of historical theology has given way to a broader variety of approaches. There is a burgeoning interest in social history, an area largely underrepresented for the Reformation period in Bohemia, and topics focusing on concerns of Alltagsgeschichte, crime, and gender are increasingly common.[9] This methodological plurality is evident when discussing the nature of religious experience in Reformation Bohemia. There is a lively sub-field dedicated to the study of worship and devotion in the Utraquist community with theologians, musicologists, and historians investigating the evolution of the Hussite Mass, changing liturgical practices, and other related issues. Specialists in homiletics have turned our attention to a critical source that has been woefully underused. Nearly 800 sermons of Hus exist in printed editions! Art historians, on the other hand, have highlighted the material culture of the period and have opened up new vistas by calling us to reconsider the physical world of village and city and its relationship to the sacred. Others have examined systems of belief through the use of symbols or the manipulation of memory. Hus was a powerful but at times an ambiguous symbol whose memory and legacy Protestants and Catholics contested well beyond Bohemia throughout the early modern period.[10]

REFORM AND REVOLUTION

Where to begin a study of the Bohemian Reformations? As noted in the previous section, there is growing interest in the generation before Hus, in the Prague of Charles IV (1346–1378). The more pressing questions at this point, however, may be less when and where and more how and why, for teleological problems have marred an older historiography. Scholars frequently mined the pre-Hussite period for precedents and patterns they saw reaching a climax in Hus. This problem of chronology and teleology in the Bohemian context is closely connected to a larger question—how do we understand the late medieval period more generally? John Van Engen has recently remarked that any historical period designated with the prefix “late” is headed for trouble.[11] This is especially true for the Middle Ages, for the term seems to presume a type of decline. Such a perspective has only been bolstered by a triumphalist Reformation historiography that needed corruption and collapse before reform and renewal. We are, however, in the midst of a broader re-evaluation of this period. The world that Van Engen now describes is one quite different from one of decadence and decay. He argues for a long fifteenth century beginning in the 1370s. Responding to the Great Western Schism, religious leaders from across the Continent began questioning basic ecclesiological issues. They pushed for greater participatory forms of church governance. Wyclif and the Lollards, Grote and the Devotio Moderna, Catherine of Siena and her calls for conversion were all manifestations of this phenomenon. This was an age of regionalism when the church at the local level was strong and parish life vibrant. In short, the fifteenth-century church offered the laity a wide array of religious options.[12]

The rich and diverse ecclesiastical culture that Van Engen describes fits Bohemia particularly well during the reign of Charles. The Prague of Charles IV was without doubt one of the great golden ages of the city.[13] Though born in Prague and christened Václav, the Luxembourg prince came of age in France and Italy. At his confirmation he chose the name Charles in honor of his uncle, Charles IV of France, at whose court he lived for seven years. As his father’s eyesight began to fail, Charles assumed a greater role governing his lands in Central Europe. After his father’s death in 1346, he was crowned King of the Romans, secured Bohemia as his power base, and began transforming Prague into a worthy capital. At the center of Charles’s grandiose urban vision was the establishment of a massive New Town alongside a renovation of the city’s fortifications. Through these projects Charles quadrupled Prague’s size and created the largest walled city north of the Alps. What was in the city was just as important for the ambitious prince. Though he renovated the royal palace and replaced a critical bridge across the Vltava, a greater priority was matching Prague’s political status with an appropriate ecclesiastical distinction. With strategically placed allies at home and abroad, he successfully petitioned for the elevation of the diocese into an archbishopric and brought the architect Matthias of Arras to begin work on the St. Vitus Cathedral. Prague’s first archbishop, the energetic Arnošt of Pardubice, became one of Charles’s closest advisors, and together they helped lay the foundation for the University of Prague, the first university in Central Europe.

A papal chaplain may have best captured the mood of the day by stressing the growing importance of Bohemia: “There one now finds the seat of empire which was formerly at Rome, later at Constantinople, but now exists at Prague.”[14] As emperor and son of a Přemyslid queen, Charles clearly saw himself bringing east and west together. According to one early legend the Czechs’ original homeland lay on the Mediterranean in Byzantine territory. Charles elaborated on this connection throughout his reign. A manuscript from the period features the emperor as the heir of Constantinople and a guardian of its relics while the art and architecture produced at his court reflect a distinct Byzantine influence including the magnificent Chapel of the Holy Cross of the Karlštejn castle.[15] Charles established a number of religious institutions in New Town that burnished his imperial image and strengthened his ties with eastern Christianity. The Church of Our Lady and St. Charlemagne (Karlov) was modeled on the Aachen chapel and served as the focal point of a renewed Charlemagne cult. For the new Benedictine Monastery of Our Lady and Slavonic Patrons, Charles imported monks from Dalmatia who had received papal permission to celebrate liturgy in Church Slavonic and use the Glagolitic language.[16]

The general picture we have of Prague, then, in the Caroline era is one that does stand out in a century often characterized by crisis. Though in recent years historians have disputed earlier claims concerning Bohemia’s supposed immunity from the Black Death, it does seem that the kingdom did not see the type of demographic collapse common elsewhere in Europe. Under Charles most scholars believe that Prague grew to 40,000, one of the largest cities north of the Alps.[17] As an imperial residence, the city was a hub of a broad communication network. Most famously, the marriage of Charles’s daughter Anne to Richard II of England facilitated an important dialogue between the two kingdoms. Not surprisingly, the city’s energy and dynamism was also mirrored in the vibrancy of its religious life. A quick survey of three areas of activity offers an intriguing cross section of local piety and praxis.

Relics

Any visitor to Prague in the second half of the fourteenth century would have been quickly struck by the concentration of relics across the city and their regular celebration throughout the liturgical year. Both Charles and Archbishop Arnošt were assiduous collectors, and during his wide travels the emperor rarely left a sacred site unplundered. Even in Prague saintly remains were reportedly not safe from Charles’s reach. At the cloister of the Poor Clares he surreptitiously snipped off a section of St. Nicholas’s finger for his personal collection but returned it once it started bleeding and then helped make the miraculous appendage the center of a new pilgrimage cult. Other cults in Prague benefited from Charles’s patronage including St. Sigismund, the sixth-century king of Burgundy whose translation the emperor organized. During this period only Rome and perhaps Cologne could boast of more relics than Prague.[18]

Vernacular Translation of Scripture

Even before Charles started bringing saints’ bones to Bohemia, the kingdom was emerging as one of the key centers of book production and would arguably have remained so had it not been for the disturbances of the Hussite period.[19] During the reign of Charles’s father, John of Bohemia (1310–1346), a gifted team of scribes created one of the most remarkably illustrated manuscripts of late medieval Central Europe, the Velislav Bible. The Velislav Bible included nearly seven hundred and fifty illustrations from the Old and New Testaments, scenes from saints’ lives, and a pictorial cycle of the Antichrist. Though the accompanying text was in Latin, vernacular bibles would soon be produced with Charles. The oldest translation of the entire Bible dates from the 1350s, most likely produced by a team of Dominicans, Benedictines, and Franciscans. Some have argued that the lead scholar was Charles’s own confessor. Scribes made copies of this original Czech translation. The most important of these transcriptions was the so-called Dresden Bible, the oldest surviving translation of Scripture not only in Old Czech but in any Slavic language.[20]

Preaching

The establishment of both the university and the archbishopric contributed to the development of Prague as an important center of popular preaching. One of its most dynamic representatives was the German-speaking Augustinian canon Conrad Waldhauser who arrived in the city in the 1360s. A fierce opponent of the mendicants, Waldhauser railed against the friars from the pulpit. Many emulated his oratory. There are more than one hundred surviving copies of his collected sermons intended as models for students and parish priests and later used liberally by Hus. Even more celebrated is the career of Milíč of Kroměříž. Milíč was originally a canon of St. Vitus and a member of Charles’s court chancery. He eventually resigned his positions and began preaching across the city, often several times daily, in Czech, German, or Latin. The charismatic Milíč may have found his most enthusiastic reception among the city’s prostitutes. With the emperor’s assistance he took over Prague’s most famous brothel and transformed it into an experimental religious community.[21]

THE EMERGENCE OF A HUSSITE MOVEMENT

These varying examples illustrate the danger of making broad generalizations or applying simple labels to Bohemia’s complicated religious cultures of the Caroline era. Charles’s grand imperial vision, his gestures of uniting ecclesiastical traditions of east and west, his patronage of contrasting expressions of piety obscure any discernible trajectory or cultural shift. The plurality of practice and belief resist easy categorization. But this was also a competitive marketplace of ideas. Some notions were picked up and developed while others were rejected or forgotten, and we are still left with an important question. How does one move from this multipolar world of the 1360s and 1370s to that of Hus a generation later, to a period when there was a distinct and recognizable reform agenda? Scholars have employed various models to explain this transition such as the tendency to emphasize “precursors” of Hussite reform. It may be more useful, however, to examine this problem from a slightly different perspective. If Charles’s Prague was an arena of “multiple options” and a variety of possibilities, Hus’s Bohemia was one of more limited maneuverability and choice. Charting this transition and the narrowing of options may help us better understand this critical passage.

An emphasis on Scripture, a renewed stress on moral reform, and strains of apocalypticism were all elements of Caroline ecclesiastical culture. In the right circumstances these currents could coalesce and become central to a more coherent and ambitious reform program. Here the career of Matěj of Janov is particularly instructive. Matěj had studied in Paris but returned to Prague in the 1380s. He saw the church besieged by the forces of Antichrist and weakened by the sins of a corrupt and hypocritical clergy. To counter these threats he composed his most important text, Regulae veteris et novi testamenti, a list of twelve rules derived from Scripture. This evangelical code of conduct along with frequent communion offered the believer the only sure means of remaining faithful in a fallen world. The message that Matěj offered acquired a new sense of urgency in the wake of the Great Schism. A crisis of authority closer to home also contributed to its relevance.

The quality of leadership in both church and state suffered significantly after the death of Charles and Arnošt. Their successors were not of the same caliber as scandal and controversy plagued both the royal and archiepiscopal courts. In such an unstable environment, preaching emerged as a critical component of a new religious culture. A charismatic orator could assume a more prominent profile in civic life. Both Waldhauser and Milíč had promoted the preacher as a messenger of reform imbued with a special sense of spiritual authority. Hus, one of the great communicators of his age, built upon this tradition and adopted a performative style reminiscent of the two. His platform was the Bethlehem Chapel, a space that could accommodate up to three thousand listeners. It was established in 1391 in the wake of Milíč’s earlier work. Here Hus held forth for a decade and delivered by one count more than three thousand sermons.[22]

There was a series of other factors that helped shape the distinctiveness of Hus’s message and honed the edge of his reform agenda. Perhaps most significant was the influence of John Wyclif (ca. 1330–1384), England’s controversial theologian and reformer.[23] Ties forged during the reign of Charles IV contributed to the lively intellectual exchange between England and Bohemia. Wyclif’s philosophical texts were the first of his works to make it to Prague, but the theological treatises soon followed. One visiting Czech scholar even managed to bring back a fragment of Wyclif’s tomb as a relic. Though Wyclif’s ideas provided greater coherence to an emerging reform program, they also polarized the academic community, for Wyclif supported a rival philosophical tradition, realism, which clashed with the nominalist orientation of the university. This dispute quickly acquired an ethnic dimension as the university’s smaller Czech nation tended to support Wyclif while the three German nations generally remained committed to nominalism. The escalating tensions culminated with an “academic coup” in 1409 when a royal decree granted the Czech nation precedence over its German rivals.[24] Most German masters left Prague and with them a significant obstacle for the reform party disappeared. Hus, an important leader of the Wyclifite faction, had assumed his position at the Bethlehem Chapel as these issues were coming to the fore, and his practice of preaching in Czech continued the process of polarization.

There were also political factors in play contributing to the growth and radicalization of the reform party. King Wenceslas effectively sidelined the efforts of Archbishop Zbyněk to combat Wyclif’s growing influence. The arrival in Prague of a small group of theological firebrands helped move these issues to the streets. In the years immediately before Hus’s detention and execution in Constance there was increasing urban agitation spearheaded by individuals such as Nicholas of Dresden who developed an effective propaganda campaign that contrasted the poverty of the apostolic church with the wealth and corruption of the papacy. Crowds stirred up by the Dresden circle marched across the city with placards emblazoned with images such as one pairing a half-naked Christ washing his disciples’ feet with a group of sycophantic monks bending low to kiss the sandals of a smug and self-righteous pope.[25]

Though the authorities at Constance executed Hus in 1415, the movement he launched reached its theological apex several years later with the Four Articles of Prague. This was a compromise statement that for most represented the basic Hussite platform: the celebration of the Eucharist sub utraque (in both the bread and the wine), free preaching of the Word of God, the clergy’s withdrawal from secular power, and strict punishment of sin regardless of social standing.[26] It was of course the article on the Eucharist that became the most distinctive feature of the Utraquist church. During the Caroline era Milíč celebrated daily communion with both clergy and laity while Matěj of Janov endorsed such practices in the Regulae. Most important, though, was the work of Hus’s successor at the Bethlehem Chapel, Jakoubek of Stříbro, who took the idea of frequent communion to its next logical step. Pointing to passages in the Gospels and neglected precedents within the church, Jakoubek argued that the laity should receive the chalice as part of the sacrament. Hussite leaders soon extended the cup to infants as well. The chalice quickly became the primary symbol of the movement affixed to banners, stamped on shields, or embroidered on garments. One sixteenth-century architect even designed a city tower in its shape.[27] The Four Articles eventually became the basis of the so-called Basel Compacts (Compactata), a settlement with the Roman Church the Utraquists negotiated at the Council in 1433. They provided a framework for a longstanding convivencia between Catholic and Utraquist. Though they were never formally recognized by the popes and officially abrogated by Pius II in 1462, their assent was an essential precondition for any candidate to the Bohemian throne.[28]

THE CENTURY AFTER HUS

The fifteenth century is particularly challenging for those studying Bohemia’s religious cultures. Older nationalist and Marxist historiographies glossed over these decades offering only a few general stereotypes. According to the traditional narrative, the Utraquist movement entered a period of gradual decline after the defeat of the radical Hussite revolutionaries at Lipany (1434). The church lost its energy and direction awaiting a partial revival in the sixteenth century through the outside influence of Luther and others. Though such blanket descriptions have largely been rejected, the fifteenth century does stand out in several distinctive ways. It was a period of relative isolation and narrowing intellectual horizons. The university became the preserve of an Utraquist elite as the new church gained control and progressively strengthened its hold over the institution. Not surprisingly, the number of foreign students and masters dropped precipitously.[29] Emperor Sigismund (1433–1437) accepted an agreement that reserved the kingdom’s highest offices for the native-born while the Czech language became an increasingly important medium for government, culture, and religion. New intellectual currents such as those coming from Italy frequently encountered resistance. Society in general took a more conservative turn. This was also an era of political decentralization dominated by the secular estates. With the church largely removed from politics, the towns rushed in to fill the void and played a major role well into the sixteenth century. Then there was the diet (sněm), the chief organ of executive power in the kingdom which met nearly two hundred times during the Jagiellonian period (1471–1526). The weakness of royal rule was perhaps best exemplified by King Vladislav (1471–1516) who removed himself from Prague to Hungary for the final twenty-six years of his reign.[30]

Utraquism Enters the Mainstream

Against this political backdrop religious life in fifteenth-century Bohemia oscillated between two poles—a more traditional set of beliefs and practices and a distinct radical strain of social and theological expression. After five unsuccessful international crusades it was only a domestic coalition of Utraquist and Catholic nobility that was able to defeat the famous Hussite armies in 1434 opening a way for a settlement based on the Basel Compacts and the emergence of a more conservative form of Utraquism. As part of this agreement, Emperor Sigismund authorized the Bohemian diet to elect an archbishop. The diet’s designate, Jan Rokycana (ca. 1396–1471), helped steer the Utraquist church in a more conservative direction. Though the use of the chalice and the veneration of “St. Jan Hus” became distinctive features of Utraquist worship, the church retained basic elements of Catholic doctrine including celebration of the seven sacraments, belief in purgatory, the saints, and apostolic succession. As Rome never consecrated Rokycana, the Utraquists sought creative ways to ordain their priests and find ecclesiastical support outside papal jurisdiction. They sent a number of their priests to Venice for ordination by sympathetic bishops, occasionally used the Armenian Church, and carried on a dialogue with the Orthodox community that was terminated only by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The royal election of Jiří (George) of Poděbrady, Bohemia’s only Utraquist king, bolstered Rokycana’s work as the church became more grounded and institutionalized in the second half of the fifteenth century.[31]

Though precise numbers are difficult if not impossible to determine, it is clear that the majority of the kingdom defected to Utraquism. Alongside a group of nobles loyal to Rome, there were certain Catholic strongholds, towns such as Plzeň or České Budějovice, or areas along the German border. The running of day-to-day affairs in both churches was complicated. The Hussite wars had nearly completely destroyed the kingdom’s ecclesiastical infrastructure. Nearly all church property had been secularized and most monasteries wrecked or shuttered. With the absence of a Catholic archbishop in Bohemia two officials in Prague now oversaw administrative business while the bishop of Olomouc was responsible for Moravia. After the death of Rokycana, a consistory at the university supervised the Utraquist church. Such overlapping systems and their conflicting ecclesiastical calendars elevated social tensions and raised the potential of renewed violence.[32] Leading figures from both sides, including the Catholic sons of King Jiří, were keen to find a pragmatic solution to these problems. In 1485 in the mining town of Kutná Hora, they negotiated Europe’s first bi-confessional settlement. Significantly, the estates were the driving force behind the Bohemian agreement as the clergy were absent from the negotiations. This may explain the broad reach of the accord. Hammered out by nobles, knights, and burghers who knew at first hand the problems of religious conflict, the peace granted freedom of choice to all inhabitants of the kingdom irrespective of social standing.[33]

Radical Religion in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia

While the Utraquist church did establish itself over the course of the fifteenth century, more radical voices also clamored for attention during the same period. Though these prophets appealed to precedents from the apostolic age or Early Church, theirs was no monolithic movement. They expressed contrasting visions of ideal Christian community as the Hussite revolution functioned as a great incubator of ideas combining outside influences such as Wyclifism, Waldensianism, and Joachimism with domestic impulses of reform. Though a figure such as Jerome of Prague, executed as Hus’s follower in 1416, prefigured a number of these developments, it was the fiery preacher Jan Želivský (d. 1422), who in many respects initiated this period of theological ferment and social experimentation.[34] With his martial rhetoric and its millennial overtones, Želivský was the driving force behind the urban uprising of 1419 that culminated in the defenestration of the king’s Catholic allies in Prague’s New Town. The most radical experiments, however, took place in southern Bohemia. When in 1419 the king issued an order forbidding the celebration of the Eucharist sub utraque, a group of priests organized massive outside services in the south of the kingdom where the laity could receive the chalice. Here at the hill settlement of Tábor these gatherings slowly transformed into a more permanent religious community ostensibly committed to a simple biblicism and the communal ideals of the primitive church. Among its achievements was the Confessio Taboritarum, arguably the most important theological statement produced by the radical wing of the Czech Reformation. Some in fact have argued that we should consider it the first “Protestant” confession for its emphasis on biblical authority, its simplification of Christian worship, and its critique of sacramental theology.[35] The center, however, could not hold, and the radical wing of the Hussite movement splintered into ever smaller factions. Tábor eventually spent its revolutionary fervor and made peace with more moderate Utraquists as the city quietly surrendered to King Jiří in 1452.

There were others in the fifteenth century who though not identifying directly with radical Hussitism continued to call for a more thorough reform of church and society. The most important of these was Peter Chelčický. Little is known of Chelčický’s personal background. Of modest means he was a layman from southern Bohemia who though on friendly terms with many of the Taborites lived apart from them. He was critical of their appeal to the Old Testament with its calls for righteous vengeance and judgment. Chelčický believed the New Testament had perfected its inferior predecessor. Using the Sermon on the Mount as his guide, he called on Christians to accept the true law of Christ, renounce all claims to power, and refuse the swearing of oaths and the bearing of arms.[36] Chelčický’s message resonated with others even as it became clear that the Taborite experiment had failed. In the second half of the century a group of like-minded believers led by a nephew of Jan Rokycana established a religious community in a village in eastern Bohemia. They combined many of Chelčický’s ideals with other influences from the Hussite left. They initially operated within the Utraquist Church, but by 1467 they had established a separate priesthood with its own bishop. The Unity of Brethren (Jednota bratrská/Unitas fratrum) as they came to be known followed a strict form of discipline and were initially wary of any involvement with the state. They based their doctrine on a straightforward reading of the Bible that emphasized the sayings and teachings of Christ (lex Christi). Though initially tolerated, they faced significant persecution from King Jiří who feared a second coming of Tábor. They did survive this difficult period, however, finding refuge on the estates of sympathetic nobles.

These experiments in radical religion opened greater space for the participation of women than in many more traditional settings. The emphasis on Scripture crossed lines of gender and other social divisions. The Italian Humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II (1405–1464), once commented that peasant wives in the Czech lands knew their Bible far better than many Italian priests. The Beguines were also active in Bohemia. They established their first house in the late thirteenth century. By the time of Hus’s execution they had nearly twenty. Women from all ranks of society participated to some degree in the Hussite revolution. Peter Chelčický was openly critical of traditional gender restrictions in the religious sphere, and women frequently violated such norms. We have reports from a Carthusian prior of a woman who ascended the pulpit at Bethlehem Chapel and began preaching. Hus himself wrote for women. In The Daughter (Dcerka), a devotional text that can be compared to the spiritual writings of Thomas à Kempis or Geert Grote, he addressed a group of women who were living in a religious community in Prague.[37] As the various movements and factions within the Bohemian Reformation became more institutionalized, however, opportunities and openings for women decreased though they did not disappear altogether. While a group such as the Unity of Brethren never officially sanctioned women in the pulpit, they did emphasize the importance of education for both sexes and allowed a certain degree of space for women in the public life of their church. In the early seventeenth century one of their members, the cultivated Anna Marie Treitlarová z Krokvic, transcribed sermons of several of the Brethren’s most important leaders and appended them with a collection of her own prayers.[38]

SIXTEENTH CENTURY: BOHEMIA MEETS THE REFORMATION

Entering the sixteenth century, then, we encounter a confessional landscape that is enormously complex, one that stubbornly resists the historian’s best efforts to map, chart, or outline. The specific challenges presented by the Bohemian kingdom reflect a series of broader dynamics that complicate the study of religion across Central Europe as a whole. Three are particularly relevant for our discussion and should foreground any analysis of the Czech lands in the long sixteenth century.

Multi-Confessionalism

“In the same Citty some were Calvinists, some Lutherans, some Hussites, some Anabaptists, some Picards [Unity of Brethren], some Papists … Yea the same confusion was in all the villages.” So wrote the well-traveled Englishman Fynes Moryson toward the end of the sixteenth century.[39] The plurality of confessional life was clearly entrenched by Moryson’s day. The situation is even more complicated when tracking the interaction between these groups. Before 1517 there were three distinct churches in the kingdom: the Catholics, the Utraquists, and the Unity. As the century progressed, they were joined by Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Calvinists. An older historiography has at times attempted to amalgamate the churches of the Hussite Reformation with those of the sixteenth century. Thus, an increasingly feeble Utraquist community turns to Lutheranism, or somewhat later the Unity adopt a Calvinist profile. Though the various churches certainly influenced each other, these ecclesiastical traditions did not fully merge, a lesson that contemporaries learned all too well on several occasions. In 1524, for example, after several years of a creeping Lutheranization of the Prague city council, an influential group of Utraquists staged a coup to prevent the emergence of an Utraquist–Lutheran church. Nearly a century later Frederick of the Palatinate, the so-called Winter King, attempted to implement a Calvinist reform of his new kingdom. He was clearly caught off guard by the resistance of his supposedly “Protestant” subjects to his ecclesiastical policies.[40]

Problems of Confessional Identity

While acknowledging the religious pluralism of Bohemian society, we must treat confessional categories with some caution. Utraquism, especially as it moved into the sixteenth century, was in many respects an umbrella term for a diverse religious movement that continued to evolve over time. Scholars in fact have devised a special nomenclature to describe different factions of that church: left Utraquism, neo-Utraquism, old Utraquism. The nature of the Unity changed as well. Their leader Luke of Prague (ca. 1460–1528) steered the group away from the separatism of Chelčický. Slowly, they began to engage both secular society and potential religious allies. As such, they became a more difficult community to follow and evaluate. Their beliefs and values continued to advance, develop, and change through their interaction with Utraquists, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Then there is the issue of hybridity. The case of Moravia and the mining center of Jihlava (Iglau) is particularly intriguing. Lutheranism grew through the work of Paul Speratus, who later became one of the great hymn writers of the Reformation. As a royal town, however, there were strict restrictions against its practice. Thus in the first half of the sixteenth century evangelical sentiment was expressed in Jihlava through Utraquist forms of worship.[41]

Religious symbols, too, could be multivalent. Hus, of course, was the most potent symbol of the Bohemian Reformation. A variety of confessional groups appropriated his memory to bolster their identity. During the fifteenth century the Utraquist church developed a cult around “St. Jan Hus.” They adapted the ancient processional hymn, Pange Lingua Gloriosi, into a song venerating their church’s new martyr and memorialized July 6, the date of Hus’s execution, as his feast day. Outside Bohemia, Catholics and Protestants alike manipulated his memory to support their respective religious communities. In 1537 the reformer Johannes Agricola wrote a play illustrating the continuity between Hus and Luther. He was answered the following year by the Catholic controversialist Johannes Cochlaeus who composed a satire illustrating that Hus and Luther actually differed on key points of doctrine. For Bohemia’s later Protestant exiles, Hus occupied a significant place in their imagination. He was a symbol of a lost religious world, of confessional liberties stripped by an unforgiving Habsburg regime. Over time, even Catholics occasionally appealed to Hus. We have at least one example of a Catholic polemicist using Hus positively to differentiate his church from the Unity of Brethren. By the eighteenth century references to Hus became ever more common. In the 1780s Kaspar Royko, a professor of theology at the university in Prague, declared that Hus was both a good Catholic and a precursor of the Enlightenment.[42]

Power of the Estates

“You are our king, but we are your masters!” Such was the maxim attributed to the Bohemian estates in the early sixteenth century.[43] Across Central Europe, in this region of elected kings and emperors, the balance of power lay with the nobilities. The strength and support of conciliarism in late medieval Bohemia and Poland had been one manifestation of this phenomenon. The freedom of confessional choice was another. Though the majority of Central Europe’s elites claimed this privilege in the course of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, these were not uncontested prerogatives. A general sense of vulnerability remained. The Utraquists had never reached an official settlement with Rome. The Peace of Kutná Hora did not protect the Unity who were dependent on sympathetic nobility. Catholics felt keenly exposed as a distinct religious minority. Lutherans in most cases hovered on the kingdom’s edge, while the Anabaptists huddled together in small and isolated settlements wondering how long their welcome would last. As a region, Central Europe is well known for the ecumenical efforts of many of its religious leaders. Much of this activity was a result of various groups seeking alliances in an effort to safeguard their security. In Bohemia the situation became even more acute in the second half of the sixteenth century. Tensions between the estates and the new Habsburg kings steadily grew thus raising the stakes for the kingdom’s various confessional groups.

We may best view the sixteenth century, then, as a kaleidoscope of shifting confessional allegiances against the backdrop of an intensifying rivalry between the crown and estates. Two potential coalitions were particularly significant in the first half of the century. On the more conservative side of the theological spectrum, the Utraquists continued their dialogue with Rome. The issue of the Compacts and an appointment of an Utraquist archbishop who could ordain new clergy was a topic of discussion in the Bohemian diets throughout the 1490s, and there were occasional meetings with papal representatives. The most promising came in 1525 when a Czech delegation met in Buda with an embassy led by Rome’s savvy diplomat Lorenzo Campeggio. The following year Ferdinand I acceded to the Bohemian throne and with him came a new sense of urgency to the Utraquist dilemma. More clearly than the papacy, Ferdinand recognized the looming confessional crisis and saw a Catholic–Utraquist alliance as an important firewall against Luther’s growing threat. He had hopes for an eventual church union based on the Compacts and with a joint archbishop. The situation, though, was complicated. As Ferdinand worked for a settlement during his long reign, by the 1540s the Utraquists had already rejected the Compacts as a basis of agreement.[44]

At the other end of the spectrum, an interesting series of discussions was taking place between the Unity of Brethren and Martin Luther. Evaluating Luther’s impact on Bohemia is difficult for a number of reasons. Though a significant number of Utraquists and Brethren studied and interacted with Luther, the extent and nature of his influence are often not easy to assess or distinguish from other reform currents. At the same time scholars until relatively recently have generally neglected the Lutheran communities that did develop in the Czech lands.[45] Luther’s teachings found a receptive audience among German Catholics living in north and northwest Bohemia. This was a mountainous region, home to an important mining industry. Workers from Saxony, who sought employment in the mines, brought the new faith with them, but they received support from the local nobility as well. The Schlick/Šlik family harbored large groups of Lutherans on their estates in Joachimsthal (Jáchymov) and Elbogen (Loket). The boomtown of Joachimsthal was particularly important with its famous school and charismatic teacher and reformer, Johann Mathesius.[46] For his part, Luther early in his career knew very little of Hus and in 1519 publicly criticized the “most noxious errors of the Picards.”[47] He found, though, a thoughtful conversation partner in Luke of Prague (Lukáš Pražský), one of the most original thinkers of the Brethren.

Luke was among the first of its members who had formally studied patristic and medieval theology. He developed a theological scheme that in some ways anticipated Luther but did not reject the efficacy of good works altogether. Despite doctrinal differences that were never completely resolved, Luther and Luke engaged in a series of constructive discussions, and after Luke’s death relations between Wittenberg and the Unity grew even closer. Luther in fact became an important ally and wrote a preface to a German translation of their 1535 confession that unlike his confrontation with Zwingli reflected a more charitable spirit concerning confessional variance. “If there occur some difference in this their confession about rites and ceremonies,” he asserted, “let us remember that all the rites and ceremonies of all the churches never have been nor can be equal and the same.”[48]

The Unity was characterized by a type of eclectic confessionalism that helped it move between various Protestant groups. While initially many of their young men studied with Luther and Melanchthon, by the second half of the sixteenth century they were drawing closer to the Reformed tradition and began sending students to Geneva, Heidelberg, and Basel. The Unity placed a high priority on education and established a much-praised network of schools in Moravia. One of their most important leaders, Jan Blahoslav (1523–1571), was a product of this system. A polymath of sorts, Blahoslav translated the New Testament from Greek, wrote music theory, compiled hymnals, authored histories and preaching manuals, and served as archivist and bishop. The highpoint of the Brethren’s intellectual tradition was the production and publication of the Kralice Bible (1579–1594), still the best-known Czech translation of Scripture today. The Kralice Bible, though, was just one of many translations, for Bohemia in the sixteenth century was awash with vernacular literature. More than two thousand titles in Czech survive from the period. Particularly prominent were translations of Scripture. A printer such as Jiří Melantrich of Aventino produced Czech bibles in Prague and other forms of religious literature that were gauged to appeal to readers from across the confessional spectrum by avoiding contentious theological issues.[49]

The deteriorating relationship between the crown and estates affected religious alliances in the second half of the sixteenth century. Most significant was the impact of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547). When Ferdinand overstepped his constitutional bounds by ordering the Czechs to raise an army against John Frederick of Saxony, he prompted a rebellion within Bohemia that briefly united the non-Catholic estates against him. The half-hearted uprising ultimately failed. The consequences, though, were serious as towns lost political rights, and the Brethren, in particular, faced severe persecution. Many emigrated to Poland while the church transferred its leadership to Moravia, a region with an even more tolerant reputation than Bohemia proper.[50] Policies of accommodation were seemingly giving way to tactics of confrontation. The Council of Trent rejected a more conciliatory approach to the Utraquist question while within Bohemia the arrival of the Jesuits in 1556 and the appointment five years later of the first Catholic archbishop since the early fifteenth century led to a new sense of urgency among the non-Catholics. In 1567 the Bohemian diet opened the possibility of a closer union between the Utraquists, the Unity, and the Lutherans by formally abrogating the Compacts. The Consensus of Sandomierz (1570), an agreement negotiated between Calvinists, Lutherans, and the Brethren in Poland, served as a template for a potential settlement in Bohemia and prompted negotiations that eventually resulted in the Czech Confession of 1575, a remarkable document that brought together the various strands of the Bohemian Reformations. Though the Augsburg Confession formed its basis, nearly a third of the text came from doctrinal statements of the Unity, while a smaller portion comprised material from the fifteenth century including the Four Articles and other foundational statements of Hussite reform.[51] Although Emperor Maximilian II guaranteed the confession orally, written authorization did not come until 1609 and the famous Letter of Majesty wrung reluctantly from Maximilian’s enigmatic son, Rudolf II.

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CODA

The final chapter of the Bohemian Reformation is well known. The road from the Letter of Majesty to the 1618 defenestration and ultimately the Battle of White Mountain has been ably charted. Relations between confessional groups deteriorated to such an extent that the emboldened Protestant estates staged a coup to overthrow the Catholic regime of zealous King Ferdinand in 1618.[52] After the Habsburg victory at White Mountain two years later, the royal family and their allies re-established Catholicism while thousands of religious dissidents marched despondently into exile. The great irony of this story is that the dynamic so central to the growth of the Czech Reformation in all its manifestations was also a principal cause of its demise. The prerogatives and privileges of the elites, including the religious freedoms they jealously guarded, reflected a sense of independence that often made cooperation and mutual assistance difficult. The Bohemian crownlands were a loose confederation at best. Silesia had limited engagement with the 1618 revolt and the Lusatias even less. Though ties were much closer between Bohemia and Moravia, they had separate political institutions. During the constitutional crises of 1546–1547, 1606–1609, and even the first twelve months of the 1618 revolt, the Moravian estates did not make common cause with their Bohemian counterparts. The great patron of the Brethren in Moravia, Charles the Elder Žerotín, a famously moderate Protestant, was skeptical of the cause and remained loyal to the Habsburgs.[53] But despite the political failure of the Bohemian Reformation, its legacy survived in at least three different forms.

Notwithstanding the determined efforts of secular and ecclesiastical authorities to root out pockets of religious resistance, scattered groups of hidden Protestants did survive. Not unexpectedly, many of them developed close to the German border. Two to four times a year Lutheran pastors from Dresden, Meissen, or Zittau would steal across the frontier and meet furtively with those secret believers to celebrate communion, baptize children, and impart words of encouragement. At moments of crisis these congregations did reach beyond their borders for assistance as they appealed to prominent Protestant princes for protection. Frederick William I of Prussia received a memorandum in 1719 from one such dissident group that claimed eighteen thousand believers in Bohemia and Moravia continued to celebrate the Eucharist in the Utraquist manner.[54] At the same time, the revived Catholic Church also incorporated cultural and material building blocks of the Bohemian Reformation into their new structure. Catholic priests and musicians recycled the popular hymns of the Unity for their own songbooks. Their liberal borrowing policies went as far as reproducing a cover illustration of Hus for one of their hymnals! A group of Jesuit scholars relied to a significant degree on the Kralice Bible in their own translation of Scripture. There was even an abortive campaign to transform Milíč of Kroměříž into a Catholic saint.[55]

Finally, there was the legacy of the Bohemian Reformation that survived beyond the kingdom. After White Mountain, thousands of non-Catholics emigrated to Poland, Germany, the Low Countries, England, and beyond. It was the tradition of the Unity that best survived though in attenuated form as it ceased to exist as an independent church by the middle of the seventeenth century. Its last bishop, John Amos Comenius (1592–1670), wrote an eloquent summation of the key traditions and ideals of the Unity late in his career.[56] Comenius commended its order and discipline, commitment to education, and stewardship of the Czech language. He was particularly proud of the network of schools that the Brethren had established across Bohemia and Moravia. Above all he praised a desire for unity and a willingness to learn from other Christian traditions. Comenius’s irenic vision survived into the eighteenth century through the work of two individuals in particular. His grandson, Daniel Ernst Jablonski (1660–1741), worked nearly fifty years as court preacher in Berlin where he promoted his plans to unite German, Swiss, and English Protestants. There was also Jablonski’s younger colleague, the wealthy Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, who opened his family estate in Saxony to remnants of the scattered Unity and like-minded German Pietists. Under Zinzendorf’s leadership, the Renewed Unity, better known as the Moravians, spread around the globe, out to the Caribbean, down through Africa, over to North America, and even up into the Arctic, as they pioneered the first large-scale Protestant missionary movement.[57] The era of Bohemian reform closed then as it had begun, a multipolar phenomenon surviving in exile and in enclaves. It seems especially fitting that the Moravian church, which emerged from the wreckage of the seventeenth century, reflected a wide variety of influences and introduced such bold experiments with both gender and race.[58]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank David Mengel and Michael Van Dussen for their careful reading and thoughtful critique of this essay.

NOTES

1. Cited from Jan Herben, Chudý chlapec, který se proslavil (Prague: Nakladatelství Česká expedice, 1990), 75.

2. T. G. Masaryk, The Meaning of Czech History, ed. René Wellek (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

3. See my comments in Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6–7.

4. Scott Hendrix, “ ‘We are all Hussites’? Hus and Luther Revisited,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 65 (1974): 134–161.

5. See Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock (eds.), A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015).

6. In our period the crownlands comprised Bohemia proper, Moravia, Upper and Lower Lusatia, and the Silesian territories. For this chapter I focus almost exclusively on Bohemia and Moravia. Best on Moravia is Josef Valká, Dějiny Moravy II: Morava reformace, renesance a baroka (Brno: Muzejní a vlastivědný spolek, 1995).

7. Cited in David Holeton, “Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary: A Sixteenth Century English Traveller’s Observations on Bohemia, its Reformation, and its Liturgy,” The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice 5/2 (2005): 390–391; Alois Kroess, Geschichte der Böhmischen Provinz der Gesellschaft Jesu (Vienna: Opitz, 1910), 289.

8. The name Utraquist comes from the movement’s most distinctive practice, the celebration of the Eucharist in both the bread and the wine (sub utraque).

9. See for example the recent compilation, James Palmitessa (ed.), Between Lipany and White Mountain: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bohemian History in Modern Czech Scholarship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014).

10. Foundational on liturgy is the work of Holeton; on preaching see Pavel Soukup, most recently “Jan Hus as Preacher,” in Ota Pavlíček and František Šmahel (eds.), The Brill Companion to Jan Hus (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015), 96–129; Kateřina Horníčková (ed.), Umění české reformace (Prague: Academia, 2011); Phillip Haberkern, “ ‘After Me There Will Come Braver Men’: Jan Hus and Reformation Polemics in the 1530s,” German History 27 (2009): 177–195.

11. John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257–284; on “lateness” see Erich Metheun, “Gab es ein spätes Mittelalter?” in J. Kunisch (ed.), Spätzeit: Studien zu den Problemen eines historischen Epochenbegriffs (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990), 91–135.

12. Also see the work of Caroline Bynum whose scholarship complements this broader schema developed by Van Engen. Particularly relevant is her Wonderful Blood (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), which examines late medieval blood piety and casts a special light on the emergence of the Hussites.

13. Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiří Fajt (eds.), Prague the Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1447 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); best on religion in the Prague of Charles IV is David Mengel, “Bones, Stones and Brothels: Religion and Topography in Prague under Emperor Charles IV (1346–78),” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2003.

14. Cited in Mengel, “Bones, Stones and Brothels,” 22.

15. Zoë Opačić, “Architecure and Religious Experience in 14th-Century Prague,” in Jiří Fajt and Andrea Langer (eds.), Kunst als Herrschaftsinstrument (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 136–138.

16. Paul Crossley and Zoë Opačić, “Prague as a New Capital,” in Boehm and Fajt, Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 59, 63–64.

17. Mengel, “A Plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death,” Past & Present 211 (2011): 3–34.

18. Boehm, “Der gläubige Herrscher,” in Fajt (ed.), Karl IV. Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden. Kunst und Repräsentation des Hauses Luxemburgs 1310–1437 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006), 137–147.

19. Uwe Neddermeyer, Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 2:657.

20. Vladimír Kyas, Česká Bible v dějinách národního písemnictví (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1997); Die alttschechische Dresdener Bibel, ed. Hans Rothe and Friedrich Scholz (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993).

21. Mengel, “From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of Kroměříž and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague,” Speculum 79 (2004): 407–444.

22. Soukup, “Jan Hus as a Preacher,” 104.

23. For an overview see Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 306–331.

24. Martin Nodl, Dekret kutnohorský (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010).

25. Howard Kaminsky, Dean Loy Bilderback, Imre Boba, Patricia N. Rosenberg, and Nicholas of Dresden, “Master Nicholas of Dresden: The Old Color and the New: Selected Works Contrasting the Primitive Church and the Roman Church,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55 (1965): 1–93; for the visual component of Hussite protest see Thomas Fudge, The Magnificent Ride (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 226–251.

26. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss (eds.), Creeds and Confessions in the Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 791–795.

27. For an overview see Holeton “The Bohemian Eucharistic Movement in its European Context,” The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice 1 (1996): 23–48.

28. Zdeněk Jaroš (ed.), Jihlava a Basilejská Kompaktáta (Jihlava: Muzeum Vysočiny u.a., 1992).

29. Michal Svatoš and Ivana Čornejová (eds.), Dějiny Univerzity Karlovy 1347/8–1622 (Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1995).

30. Josef Macek, “The Monarchy of the Estates,” in Mikuláš Teich (ed.), Bohemia in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 98–116.

31. Frederick Heymann, “John Rokycana: Church Reformer between Hus and Luther,” Church History 28 (1959): 240–280; Otakar Odložilík, The Hussite King (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965).

32. Utraquists had simplified the liturgical calendar and eliminated a number of feast days. Here see Macek, “Pojem času v jagellonském věku,” in Zdeněk Beneš, et al. (eds.), Pocta J. Petráňovi (Prague: Historický ústav ČSAV, 1991), 137–160.

33. Winfried Eberhard, “Entstehungsbedingungen für öffentliche Toleranz am Beispiel des Kuttenberger Religionsfriedens 1485,” Communio Viatorum 29 (1986): 129–154.

34. Best as an overview is Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).

35. A. Molnár and R. Cegna (eds.), Confessio Taboritarum (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medioevo, 1983); Craig Atwood, The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 124–127.

36. For an introduction to Chelčický see Kaminsky, “Peter Chelčický: Treatises on Christianity and Social Order,” in William Bowsky (ed.), Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, vol. 1 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 104–180.

37. John Klassen, Warring Maidens, Captive Wives, and Hussite Queens, East European Monographs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 161, 169, 175; for a brief treatment of The Daughter see Fudge, Jan Hus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 85–94.

38. Anna Císařová-Kolářová, Žena v Jednotě bratrské (Prague: Kalich, 1942); for a more recent overview of this literature see the thesis of Barbora Hanušová, “Ženy v reformaci,” Charles University, 2013.

39. Cited in Holeton, “Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary,” 390–391.

40. On the 1524 incident see Zdeněk David, “Utraquism’s Curious Welcome to Luther and the Candlemas Day Articles of 1524,” Slavonic and East European Review 79 (2001): 51–89; on Frederick see Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 147–157.

41. Eberhard, “Bohemia, Moravia and Austria,” in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Early Reformation in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 40.

42. Phillip Haberkern, Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Fudge, Jan Hus, 186; Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 126, 323.

43. Cited in Eberhard, “Bohemia,” 26.

44. František Kavka and Anna Skýbová, Husitský epilog na koncilu tridentském a původní koncepce Habsburské rekatolizace Čech (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1969), esp. chap. 3.

45. Petr Hlaváček, “Luteránství jako skrytý fenomén českých duchovních a kulturních dějin,” in Jiří Just, R. Zdeněk Nešpor, and Ondřej Matějka (eds.), Luteráni v českých zemích v proměnách staletí (Prague: Lutherova společnost, 2009), 9–22.

46. For a recent English treatment of Joachimsthal see Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

47. Heymann, “The Impact of Martin Luther upon Bohemia,” Central European History 1 (1968): 113.

48. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds, 801.

49. For an overview see Pál Ács and Howard Louthan, “Bibles and Books: Bohemia and Hungary,” in Louthan and Murdock, A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, 290–299.

50. Eberhard, Monarchie und Widerstand (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985), 399–501. On Moravian tolerance see Jaroslav Mezník, “Tolerance na Moravě v 16. století,” in Milan Machovec (ed.), Problém tolerance v dějinách a perspektivě (Prague: Academia, 1995), 76–85.

51. Jiří Otter, “Ökumenische Aspekte der Böhmischen Konfession,” Communio Viatorum 18 (1975): 13–26; The classic study remains Ferdinand Hrejsa, Česká konfesse (Prague: Nákl. České akademie císaře Františka Josefa pro vědy, slovesnost a umění, 1912).

52. For a recent overview see Václav Bůžek, “Nobles: Between Religious Compromise and Revolt,” in Louthan and Murdock, A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, 316–337.

53. See the observations of R. J. W. Evans, “Bohemia,” in Hans Hillerbrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Tomáš Knoz, Karel starší ze Žerotína (Prague: Vyšehrad, 2008).

54. Ondřej Macek, “Geheimprotestanten in Böhmen und Mähren im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Rudolf Leeb, Martin Scheutz, and Dietmar Weikl (eds.), Geheimprotestantismus und evangelische Kirchen in der Habsburgermonarchie und im Erzstift Salzburg (17./18. Jahrhundert) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 246.

55. Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 139, 219–226, 233–244.

56. John Amos Comenius, The Bequest of the Unity of Brethren, ed. and trans. Matthew Spinka (Chicago, IL: The National Union of Czechoslovak Protestants, 1940).

57. There is no modern survey of the Moravian church. For a dated but serviceable overview see J. Taylor Hamilton, A History of the Church Known as the Moravian Church (Bethlehem, PA: Times Publishing, 1900).

58. On gender and race see Atwood, “Sleeping in the Arms of Jesus: Sanctifying Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1997): 25–51; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Even today the Moravian church recognizes a remarkably broad range of Reformation documents that have shaped its doctrine and worship. In the “Ground of Unity,” the Moravians’ 1995 doctrinal statement, they explicitly acknowledge their debt to the Unity of Brethren (1535 Bohemian Confession), the Reformed (the Heidelberg Catechism), the Lutherans (1530 Confession of Augsburg), and the Church of England (Thirty-Nine Articles).

FURTHER READING

Atwood, Craig. The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.

Comenius, John. The Labyrinth of the World, trans. Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998.

Boehm, Barbara Drake and Jiří Fajt (eds.) Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1447. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

David, Zdeněk. Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Eberhard, Winfried. “Bohemia, Moravia and Austria.” In The Early Reformation in Europe, edited by Andrew Pettegree, pp. 23–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Evans, R. J. W. Rudolf and His World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Haberkern, Phillip. “The Lands of the Bohemian Crown: Conflict, Coexistence, and the Quest for the True Church.” In A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, edited by Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock, pp. 11–39. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015.

Kaminsky, Howard. A History of the Hussite Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967.

Mengel, David. “From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of Kroměříž and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague,” Speculum 79 (2004): 407–444.

Morée, Peter. Preaching in Fourteenth-Century Bohemia. Slavkov: EMAN, 1999.

Palmitessa, James (ed.) Between Lipany and White Mountain: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bohemian History in Modern Czech Scholarship. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014.

Perett, Marcela. “Battle for the Public Mind: John Hus and the Hussite Movement,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2009.

Říčan, Rudolf. The History of the Unity of Brethren, trans. C. Daniel Crews. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Church Publications, 1992.

Soukup, Pavel. Jan Hus. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013.

CHAPTER 8

LUTHER AND LUTHERANISM

THOMAS KAUFMANN

NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF LUTHERAN SCHOLARSHIP

MARTIN Luther belongs to those figures in the history of Christianity to whom, ever since the sixteenth century, particular and usually controversial attention has been devoted. For the most part, this has been in the context of confessional predispositions. Catholic writers labored long under the spell of Johannes Cochläus, the first Catholic biographer of Luther (1549), and regarded the man from Wittenberg as the cause of a rupture of the church, of the loss of Christianity’s significance, and of the lamentable secular modernity of the Western World.[1] Since the 1930s, however, clearly different evaluations and explanations have appeared among Catholic theologians and church historians. Catholic scholars such as Joseph Lortz, Hubert Jedin, and Erwin Iserloh frequently considered Luther a “Catholic Reformer” (Reformkatholik) who had exposed the grave abuses of the church of his time, even though—not in the least on account of his having been influenced by nominalist scholastic theologians, in particular William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel—it had led to “uncatholic” consequences. These included his “subjectivism”, based on the Bible alone, his criticism of the magisterium and of tradition, and his condemnation of canon law. Since then, Catholic Luther-scholarship has often stressed that Luther’s original intention was not to split the church, and that his early theology fit comfortably into the manifold theological currents of his time.

One of the aims of situating Luther historically and theologically within the late Middle Ages was to relativize and contradict the intellectual and political claim of Protestantism as the standard-bearer of modernity, an idea, which had gained strength since the Enlightenment. Similar tendencies also shaped the studies of Luther and the Reformation by Heiko A. Oberman and his internationally successful school. They uncovered Luther’s nominalist influences and integrated his theology into the wider strand of a late medieval Augustinian revival, which was centered on the anti-Pelagian writings of the North African church father and strongly emphasized the significance of grace. The school of Oberman stood at a critical distance from the “Luther Renaissance” inaugurated by Karl Holl and elaborated by Gerhard Ebeling and Hanns Rückert, the impact of which often carried over into systematic theology and saw the doctrine of justification as the pivot and axis of Luther’s theology. As a result, Luther lost the importance for identity politics that he had long enjoyed, above all in German and Scandinavian Luther scholarship.

Consequently, an avenue of research initiated by the Protestant church historian Bernd Moeller situated Luther in the social history of his time, interpreting him against the background of a relatively stable late medieval culture of piety and directing the focus of its interest to the efficacy of Luther’s publications in particular. The Finnish school of Luther scholarship, founded by Luther scholars Tuomo Mannerma and Risto Saarinnen, freed itself from the orientation on a forensic model of justification dominant in the German tradition, emphasizing instead the idea of a “deification” (theosis) of the human being in the act of faith. This interpretative perspective, which strongly accentuated mystical motifs in Luther, also aimed to underline the theological commonalities between the Lutheran and Eastern Orthodox traditions.

Since the ages of Pietism and Enlightenment it has become customary to distinguish sharply between Luther and the history of his influence in so-called Lutheranism and in Lutheran orthodoxy, respectively. This distinction has only been strengthened by the liberal Protestant theology so influential since the later nineteenth century in connection with the Göttingen theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822‒1889). As a rule, one strove to distinguish the “young” Luther from the “old.” The former was understood as a positive figure for contemporary theology, while the latter was understood to be the father of condemnable tendencies that culminated in “Lutheranism.” On the other hand, confessional Lutherans in Germany, and similarly the Lutheran theologians of the Missouri Synod in the United States of America, stressed the internal coherence of Luther and Lutheranism. In his widely admired work, The Structure of Lutheranism (English translation 1962, originally published in 1931 as Morphologie des Luthertums), the systematic theologian Werner Elert presented the hitherto most comprehensive attempt to draw the theological, institutional, and social history of Lutheranism out of Luther’s religious experience, which was theologically entwined with the doctrine of justification.

Melanchthon, frequently mocked by both representatives of the Luther Renaissance and by confessional Lutherans and criticized as the source of the “Neo-Scholastic orthodox” development of an authoritarian state, has been associated more strongly with Luther as an exemplary intellectual leader (Leitfigur) of the confessional type called “Lutheranism.” The close connection between Luther and Lutheranism in the history of their reception and influence is also emphasized in the contemporary study of confessionalization and in the history of theology focused on confessional writings.

Many of the scholarly trends sketched above in scholarship on Luther and Lutheranism persist today; there is no single, unified picture of Luther. The relationship between the different views of Luther and his work in theological, cultural, and social history remain largely unexplained. Moreover, there is no agreement with regard to the historical significance of Luther in the context of a notion of multiple Reformations. Following Ranke, the classic Protestant master narrative of the Reformation in Germany saw the beginning of the Reformation inseparably linked with the historical events of the beginning of the indulgence controversy, the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses on October 31, 1517. The pluralization of the notion of Reformation, however, above all in Anglo-American scholarship, has led scholars to ascribe to each individual Reformation a starting point of its own, and to expand the “Age of Reformations” into the broad and drawn-out period of several centuries (ca. 1450–1700). The way these Reformations are related to Luther cannot be reduced to a unified common denominator. Nonetheless, there can be no serious doubt that the use of the Reformation (singular) as a historical epoch has the historiographical right of the firstborn.

Recent biographical studies of Luther stress the way he was mentally rooted in the late Middle Ages (Oberman), the situational openness of his development (Martin Brecht), his entanglement with the monastic and religious life of his time (Volker Leppin; Berndt Hamm), the staged and fragmentary nature of his life’s work (Thomas Kaufmann), the unconventional nature of his physicality (Susan Karant-Nunn; Lyndal Roper), and the religiously focused radicalism of his character (Heinz Schilling). In the context of Protestant theological Lutheran studies, which in terms of both quality and quantity continues to play a dominant role, the relationship between two different ways of treating the Reformer—historical distantiation and systematic appropriation—remains shaped by considerable, and sometimes productive, tensions. And in anticipation of and preparation for the approaching quincentenary jubilee of the Reformation in the year 2017, the unresolved relationship between historical and dogmatic approaches to Luther leads to considerable tensions.[2]

LUTHER AS THE STARTING POINT OF THE REFORMATION

If by the Reformation one understands the historical syndrome of a transformative change of local, regional, territorial, or national churchdoms of the Latin West, which—initiated or safeguarded by the political rulers of the day—intervened in the existing ritual traditions, breaking openly with canon law, and challenged, revised, or abolished traditional ecclesiastical institutions according to the criterion of the Holy Scriptures and subordinated them to the worldly authorities, then the events that began in the autumn of 1517 in the Electorate of Saxony can be considered the starting point of this Reformation. For only after Luther began to criticize indulgences, developed a steadily growing literary productivity, and built his own reforming movement was the sequence of events set in motion that would lead to individual municipal and territorial processes of change in churchdoms—that is to say, reformations—both within and beyond the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. The one Reformation, as an epochal event, is the sum of these reformations, which at the time were limited and shaped by specific conditions and dynamics.

This view of reformation implies that one must attribute to Luther a more comprehensive importance for the Reformation as a whole and the variety of its expressions than to any other reformer of the sixteenth century. One contemporary asserted that while Zwingli was the admirable “Evangelist” of Zurich, Luther was the Reformer of the entire globe.[3] No “reformation”—not that of the Anabaptists, nor that of Zwingli or Calvin, nor the English, nor the French, nor the reformations in various European lands—emerged independently of Luther or from the events that he triggered in the empire. Even from the Catholic point of view, “All of Germany was brought into chaos and confusion by him [sc. Luther].”[4] Because of Luther, “heresy and crime” were said to have torn through “nearly all of Saxony, Pomerania, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.”[5] Due to him, “monasteries, seminaries, churches and cathedrals, too (after the Mass and the canonical prayers had not just been abandoned, but had also been prevented with outright violence and forbidden),”[6] were said to have gone the same way. For those who fought him or who singled out his motivations independently against a consolidating Lutheranism, Luther’s person was also an indispensable point of reference.

It is true that many representatives of the other reformations soon separated from Luther and went their own ways. And of course, “pre-Reformation” ideas about, and tendencies toward, reform flowed into many of the ecclesiastical transformations. Nonetheless, in view of the centrifugal international scholarly discourse on Reformation in our own day, which identifies countless autonomous reforms and reformations in which it is immensely difficult to demonstrate internal historical coherence, the provocative proposition remains valid: without Luther, no Reformation! It was only for Lutheranism, however, that he became the enduring formative theological authority and the cultural marker of identity.

The claim that Luther’s attack on indulgences was the starting point of the Reformation as a whole is true in terms of both historical events and publication history. In the autumn of 1517 a wave of controversial publications swelled with tremendous speed. Luther’s trial in the Roman Curia—initiated by Albrecht of Brandenburg, the prince of the church responsible for the “indulgences for St. Peter’s” which Luther incriminated—began immediately after the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses. Along with the “internationalism” of the Latin Church and its practice of indulgences, the spread of Luther’s ideas and news about him through printed media contributed rapidly to their reception across Europe. The Humanists, who played the decisive role in the early spread of Lutheran texts, transmitted the knowledge of Luther’s “case” across their European-wide network of communication. The first Latin collection of the most important of Luther’s writings produced by that point appeared as early as October 1518, edited by the Basel Humanist and close friend of Erasmus, Wolfgang Fabritius Capito. In less than half a year, copies of the publication had been sold in France, Italy, Spain, and England. The Basel printer Johannes Froben informed the Wittenberg Reformer that he had never sold any book better than this one.[7]

Reprintings of Luther’s writings soon followed in various European countries. Leiden, Paris, Basel, and Antwerp saw the beginning of the spread of both Latin and the first vernacular texts by Luther as well as other authors of the “Wittenberg School,” especially Melanchthon and Andreas Bodenstein, called Karlstadt. At first, the international network of the Augustinian order to which Luther belonged collaborated in the distribution of his publications. Writings by Luther and students educated at Wittenberg played important initiating roles in most of the processes of Reformation that began in individual countries of the Latin west from the 1520s onwards. The University of Wittenberg and the printing presses were the central institutions that laid the foundation for Luther’s universal influence as a Reformer, as well as his significance in shaping the Lutheran confession.

UNIVERSITY AND PUBLISHING—LUTHER’S CAREER AS A HERETIC

The chair of the order of Augustinian Eremites at the University of Wittenberg (founded in 1502), which Luther occupied from October 1512 onward following his teacher Johann von Staupitz, formed the basis of his work as a theologian and as an author. In Luther’s self-understanding, after obtaining his doctorate in theology under Karlstadt on October 19, 1512, he committed himself “out of sheer obedience” (aus lauter gehorsam), that is, on the grounds of his monastic vow of obedience, “to preach and teach the Holy Scriptures faithfully and with integrity” (trewlich und lauter zu predigen und [zu] leren).[8] Consequently, he would later legitimize his literary efforts in support of the “teaching of the Gospel,” with the fact that he was “a sworn Doctor of Holy Writ” (ein geschworner Doctor der heyligenn schrifft).[9] As he understood it, the acknowledged position of authority held by the Doctor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg in the territory of the Elector of Saxony justified and obligated him to criticize freely the development of the curriculum of scholastic theology and of ecclesiastical practice.

Upon entering the Erfurt convent of Augustinian Eremites in 1505 following a calamitous experience in nature which he had interpreted religiously, Luther quickly won the trust of his superiors as a diligent and scrupulous monk. Ten years later, between 1515 and 1518, he already held the responsibility as provincial vicar over eleven monasteries. Friendships from his early days in the Erfurt monastery, as well as the networks within his order, formed an important element of later reform communication and shaped its structure.

In his academic pedagogical capacity as a professor of theology, Luther practiced biblical exegesis all his life. This corresponds with the conviction at which he arrived early on, that only the Bible may be regarded as the source of theology. The general character of his chair could also have allowed for a different personal fulfillment. Aside from a small number of New Testament texts that were particularly significant for the formation of his theological position (Romans in 1515/16; Galatians in 1516/17; Hebrews in 1517/18), Luther primarily taught texts from the Old Testament. Detailed, thorough commentaries grew from many of these lectures, e.g., the so-called small (1519) and large (1535) commentary on Galatians, and the second lecture on the Psalms (Operationes in Psalmos, 1521), which found enthusiastic early readers and which had lasting effects on parts of Lutheranism.

Luther’s criticisms of scholastic theology and of individual phenomena of contemporary ecclesiastical and monastic practices first began within the framework of his regular academic teaching. Already in his first lecture on the Psalms (Dictata super psalterium, 1513–1514)—owing to the way he was shaped theologically by the Apostle Paul and the patron saint of his order, the church father Augustine—he took offense at human “justification through acts,” that is, to a piety that makes demands of God through moral efforts and religious orthopraxis, and wants to be “justified” before him. Rather, Luther propagated a radical theology of humility and repentance, one that saw him placed before God “empty-handed” and completely dependent on his grace. Whether Luther owed his doctrine of justification to one single experiential discovery—as he later stylized it in an analogy to the classical conversions of church history[10]—or to a longer, gradual developmental process, remains disputed. But there is much that suggests that already in his early days in the monastery, he was struggling to understand what Paul meant by “faith” and “justification by faith” (Romans 1:17).

From the autumn of 1517 onward, Luther formulated the first consequences of his radical interpretation of Augustine’s theology of mercy for scholastic theology as a whole. In this endeavor, he had the support of his colleagues in the faculty of theology, especially Karlstadt as well as Nikolaus von Amsdorf, one of his closest, lifelong friends. In September 1517, in a disputation about scholastic theology (Contra scholasticam theologiam), he marched off to battle, armed with Augustine and the church fathers, against a broad phalanx of medieval theologians. At their head was Gabriel Biel, the schoolman with whom Luther was most familiar from his studies. In particular, Luther blamed the logic of merit prevalent in the pious culture of his day on the doctrine of habitus that had been developed out of Aristotle, according to which one can obtain the habitus of a righteous man through righteous action. It was when these disputations were sent to Nuremberg that Luther became known outside the central German world of his order for the first time. The Humanists began to observe parallels and commonalities between Luther’s fight against scholasticism and their own concerns. Henceforth they would be the most agile communicators of news about the monk from Wittenberg, and they played a decisive role in the reprinting of his writings.

Luther’s theses on the power and efficacy of indulgences (Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, 1517) were originally intended to be debated within the framework of an academic disputation. In an exordium to the printed version of the theses, Luther requested people outside of Wittenberg who could not attend the disputation in person to take a position on them in writing. Perhaps he was thinking above all of the opinions of colleagues from other theology faculties in the vicinity, such as Erfurt and Leipzig. Compared with typical theses intended for academic disputation, which, as a rule, were published with a set date of the planned event and the name of one of the respondents, the Ninety-Five Theses were “irregular.” Incidentally, they shared this “irregularity” with Karlstadt’s 151 Theses, concerning the proper understanding of grace, published on the Sunday of Misericordias Domini, April 26, 1517, the second most significant date for indulgences after All Saints (November 1) in the Wittenberg liturgy. The affixing of a public notice is attested in Karlstadt’s case, too.[11]

Because of the immediate protests they triggered, an academic disputation on the Ninety-Five Theses never took place. Scholars disagree whether they were ever in fact publicly fastened to the church door of Wittenberg as intended, as the statutes would have it.[12] What is certain is that the act of sending these theses together with a particularly critical letter demanding an end to the sale of indulgences to Albrecht von Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Magdeburg who was responsible for the indulgences for St. Peter’s, was decisive for Luther’s self-image. Moreover, Luther took part in the dissemination of the Ninety-Five Theses himself. In hindsight, he felt that on October 31, 1517 he had stepped “out of the shadows.”[13] The fact that on that very day the man born as “Luder” also changed his name and from then on, in a play on the Greek word eleutheria (freedom), called himself Luther,[14] underscores the extraordinary importance the event had for him. In the fourth decade of his life, out of awareness of the responsibility to defend the “true doctrine,” the mendicant friar and professor of theology had for the first time stepped into open contradiction to an expression of piety that was protected, indeed pursued, by leaders of the church.

The Ninety-Five Theses do not represent a comprehensive program for church reform. They deal with indulgences and the system of sacramental confessions of penance. If indeed the Ninety-Five Theses were made known in their customary form by being affixed to the church door, they are likely to have reached more people in this way than would usually have been the case in a city like Wittenberg. For the following day, the feast of All Saints, abundant indulgences were offered at a display of relics at the Schloßkirche castle church. Luther probably expected visitors who had come to the capital and university town because of the indulgences to show a corresponding interest in his criticism.

One may conclude that criticism of the excessive sale of indulgences could also count on approval among several church leaders in the empire from the fact that Adolf von Anhalt, the Bishop of Merseburg, spoke positively about Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses to a counselor serving Duke Georg of Albertine Saxony.[15] This also makes clear that in the autumn of 1517 the situation was entirely “open.” In the territories of Saxony, the sale of indulgences for St. Peter’s was prohibited. In later recollections,[16] Luther stressed the pastoral responsibility for members of the Wittenberg community, who had obtained an indulgence in the nearby towns of Zerbst and Jüterbog in the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, and the financial motivations that had driven the Archbishop of Magdeburg to sell the indulgence.[17] Presumably this includes a measure of retrospective stylization.

The Nintey-Five Theses brought Luther his first experience of resounding publishing success. An unpublished account of the history of the Reformation from the pen of Friedrich Myconius, Luther’s close acquaintance, reads: “But before a fortnight passed, these propositiones [i.e., the Ninety-Five Theses] had passed through all of Germany, and in a mere four weeks all of Christendom, as if the angels themselves were their couriers and carried them before the eyes of all.”[18] For Luther’s further activities and for the development of a Reformation movement, the efficacy of the printed word would remain decisive. Luther, the professor, who through appointment by the Wittenberg council had also been active as a preacher for quite some time (since ca. 1513/4), transformed himself in the course of the literary battles in which he was caught up from that point on, into a sensible and efficient author, whose publications were incomparably effective.

By the end of 1519, twenty-five Latin and twenty German writings by Luther had been published, which appeared in 112 and 143 editions, respectively. By 1526, their corresponding number had increased more than tenfold. Since 1520, the year of Luther’s conviction by Pope Leo X’s papal Bull Exsurge Domine, the printing capacities in Wittenberg had swelled. From then on, the brilliant stylist and pugnacious rhetorician of the mendicant order controlled the emerging “public opinion” as none had done before, and as hardly anyone has since. In one year alone—1520—he published Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, the comprehensive manifesto of the Reformation; his treatise On Good Works, the first evangelical ethics; his treatise On the Freedom of a Christian, a succinct summary of Christian doctrine; and On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the decisive theological attack on the Roman doctrine of sacraments and the authoritative contribution to the reconstruction of a Protestant one. No previous or contemporary author had ever achieved anything close to such great and so many literary successes as had Luther. As a publishing phenomenon, he was one of a kind. It was only through Luther’s activities that the possible social consequences of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type became clear for the first time. Without the printing press, which enabled the distribution of Reformation publications across many European lands, the fate of the Reformation would hardly have been different from that of other heresies.

In many respects, Martin Bucer represents the ideal type of “Lutheran” of the early period. Like Luther, he came from a mendicant order, in his case that of Saint Dominic. Like most other Reformers he had received a rigorous Humanist education and had discovered Luther via the “detour” of Erasmus. Similar to other Humanists, he admired Luther’s biblical commentaries tremendously; he transmitted news about the Wittenberg Reformer and disseminated his texts. For a while, he found a close connection to the Imperial knights Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten, who—in large part thanks to Luther’s Address to the Nobility—propagated and practiced a Reformation of the knighthood based on feudalism. Bucer belonged to that important circle of later southwest-German Reformers who had come to know Luther in person at the Heidelberg Disputation of April 1518, an event that would be critical to his fame in upper Germany. Bucer also felt completely like a Lutheran when he broke with the monastic lifestyle, married, and, as pastor in Strassburg, gradually advanced the Reformation. Where the doctrine of justification is concerned, Bucer saw in Luther the only true teacher of the Scriptures since the time of the Apostles. He admired Luther’s fight against the “Antichrist of Rome.” And he believed that Luther had also established the authoritative criteria concerning the preaching of true penance and his understanding of the Bible as the sacred rule.[19] It was also thanks to the influence of the Alsatian Reformer that Calvin, the French religious exile who wound up in Bucer’s Strassburg, found himself as a student of Luther’s.

Admittedly, Bucer also considered himself a “Lutheran” in that he had a well-grounded difference of opinion with the man in Wittenberg about the understanding of the Eucharist. Indeed, he even believed—not without good arguments—that he was pursuing a line of thought in Eucharistic theology that Luther himself had begun in his De captivitate Babylonica. There Luther ascribed to the bread, identified with the body of Christ, nothing more than the function of an outward sign of confirmation of the opening words that he understood as promise (promissio). Why should a sign that “merely” offered a confirmation itself be the body of Christ?! Bucer’s substantial attempts, from 1528/9 onward, to mediate in the Eucharistic controversy among Reformers built on a conscious sense of common identity and unity. Even if Bucer was not a “Lutheran” in the sense of a confessional Lutheran doctrine, he nonetheless represents a profound theological connection to the Reformer of Wittenberg on the one hand, and to an intellectually independent further development of the impulses he received from Luther on the other. In terms of reception history, this relationship to Luther was in a sense typical of the entire generation of early Reformation theologians. This is what distinguishes them from the “posthumous” epigones, for whom Luther’s authority was infallible.

From the point of view of their contemporary reception and of their lasting influence, several of Luther’s publications merit special consideration. First of all, there is the translation of the Bible. Luther’s translation of the New Testament appeared in September 1522, shortly after his return from Wartburg. This fortress belonged to the House of Wettin, and it was there that he had found shelter after the Diet of Worms and the definitive condemnation by emperor and empire through the Edict of Worms, which placed Luther’s teachings under an imperial ban (Reichsacht). It immediately became an immense publishing success and influenced subsequent theological discussions for years. Luther’s version of the Bible was used in a multitude of Reformation pamphlets published between 1522 and 1525.

The first Wittenberg “Complete Bible,” published in 1534, influenced the development of the German language for centuries. Luther’s catechisms, published from 1529 onward, especially the Small Catechism, would also impact the piety and ethics of Lutheranism for four and a half centuries. They introduced children, adolescents, and servants to the duties toward God and the world, as well as the commandment of obedience to parents, lords, and worldly authorities (the Ten Commandments). They made the creeds of Christian faith familiar in such a way that they could make them their own (the Apostolic Confession of Faith). Moreover, the catechisms clarified the sense and the significance of the two remaining “evangelical” sacraments: baptism and the Eucharist. In the practical piety of Lutherans, the latter had an especially important meaning: it assured the faithful of the salvific presence of Christ in, with, and among the elements of bread and wine. Furthermore, the catechisms structured the course of a Lutheran’s day. The so-called household rules (Haustafeln) arranged by prayer and blessing the way each class and profession in Christendom ought to live. Through their absorption in Luther’s confessional writings, both the Small Catechism as well the Large Catechism, which was aimed primarily at the theological and ethical instruction of pastors, obtained a normative dogmatic validity.

Through his Postille, a collection of model sermons and explanations of relative pericopes in the course of a church year, Luther laid the foundations for this literary genre which would become immensely influential in Lutheranism. His role as an exemplary preacher was formative, too. And his influence as a liturgist and composer of church hymns is hardly less so. Luther composed the first evangelical church hymns, which won the euphoric acceptance of the “common man” and which were disseminated quickly as mediating forces for the consolidation of identity and community. As “the survival kit” of basic knowledge of evangelical faith, they determined, together with the Small Catechism, Lutheran Christians’ sensibilities and way of life for centuries. The attempts by authorities of the “old religion” to end the singing of “Lutheran songs” also demonstrate that they functioned as important armory in the advancement of the Reformation, and that Catholics felt a considerable attraction to them. The vernacular orders of service, for which the Wittenberg Reformer had argued from 1520 onward, became a decisive element in the Reformation movement as a whole, and of Lutheranism in particular.

Even if Luther displayed thoroughly conservative tendencies toward the “Radicals” in his own ranks, who argued during his sojourn at the Wartburg for the swift transformation of general Reformation demands about the liturgy; and even if he slowly but surely secured the right for images to be present within the space of a church, his early reforming initiatives were immensely important in shaping the Reformation movement as a whole. In the “Wittenburg Movement,” which during Luther’s absence at the Wartburg (from May 1522 to the end of February 1522) had pushed through practical changes in the church and made demands which Luther, too, had raised (clerical marriage, communion in both kinds, abolition of the Mass), Luther’s ideas found their sharpest contradiction. By spurning Karlstadt, and later Thomas Müntzer, he succeeded upon his return in regaining “control” over the tempo and content of the reforming innovations and in consolidating the reforming development in a general movement oriented toward the local sovereigns.

Until 1525 Luther’s theological influence on the Reformation movement as a whole was decisive. With the intra-Reformation Eucharistic controversy, which sealed the split of the Reformation movement and the emergence of distinctive evangelical confessions (Lutheranism, Reformed), his authority began to crumble. Henceforth it was only for the “Lutheran theologians” that Luther represented the critical human doctrinal authority. The particularization of his influence matched a gradual diminishing of his publishing success. The separation—irreversible from the 1530 Diet of Augsburg—between the “Lutherans” (who noticeably started calling themselves by this name at this time) and the “Reformed” (centered around Zwingli, the Basel Reformer Johannes Oecolampadius, and Bucer), was at its core also due to Luther’s intolerance in his relationships with theological “deviants.” For him, a common military‒political alliance was unthinkable without a corresponding confession. Luther insisted on the material presence of the undivided God-man in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine. The biblical words of institution (this is my body and not, as his Swiss High German opponents claimed, this signifies my body, i.e., the symbol of my body) played a significant role in his argument. Luther was convinced that the authority of sacred Scripture would be irreparably damaged if one would interpret “is” as “signifies.”

In the last decade and a half of his life, until his death in 1546, Luther was the undisputed teacher of “his”—Lutheran—particular church particular church. The Wittenberg theologians of the first generation worked alongside him, above all Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, and Philipp Melanchthon. After the “expulsion” of Karlstadt from the Electorate of Saxony, only partisans of Luther taught at the Wittenberg faculty of theology. For the theological offspring of Europe’s Lutheran churches, a period of study at Wittenberg, at the feet of the Reformer, was a form of knightly “accolade.” Whoever was able, came to Wittenberg. Into the second half of the sixteenth century, Wittenberg was the most frequently attended university of the European continent. At first, the Wittenbergers ordained the servants of the church of other lands and languages. Notices about vacant church positions in Reformed Europe came together here, too. For a time, the small university town functioned as a kind of “job fair.” In hindsight, a relationship to Wittenberg and the common experience of student life there had an identity-building and integrating effect on Lutheranism’s growing academic elite.

CONFESSIONAL CONTROVERSY

Wittenberg University shaped the indispensable institutional foundations of the Lutheran Reformation and its enduring ecclesiastical and theological impact into the mid-sixteenth century. Gradually, in the course of the sixteenth century, new Reformed, local universities were established (e.g., Marburg or Helmstedt) in the few territories that had become Lutheran. Older universities were remolded according to the example of Wittenberg or awaited a new life (such as Rostock, Greifswald, or Tübingen). Wittenberg provided the model for the way in which these universities conceived of the organization of knowledge. According to Philipp Melanchthon’s vision, Humanist and artistic pursuits were combined with evangelical (evangelischer) piety. In theology, the homiletic orientation of exegesis became more dominant and, following Melanchthon, the configuration of dogmatics in accordance with specific commonplaces (loci communes) culled from Scripture and knowledge of the three ancient languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) took a central place. The confession-shaping significance of theological doctrine within Lutheranism, which fit with the fact that its leading theologians in the first generation had held university chairs of theology, matched a remarkable willingness to fight out internal battles over orthodoxy.

In none of the other confessions was there as much open argument as in the Lutheran. At its core, the extraordinary significance of internal controversy—especially in German Lutheranism, which had no counterpart in the Scandinavian countries that subsequently joined the Lutheran Reformation—might have to do with the fact that Luther occupied an incomparable position among the Lutherans in the empire. After Luther’s death a “normative vacuum” appeared in his place, one that could not be filled by the remaining Reformers led by Melanchthon. Moreover, the territorial structure of the empire favored the escalation of controversy. When quarrelsome theologians in a given domain wound up in conflict with the worldly authorities, who wanted to put an end to the “rabies theologorum,” they always found domicile in other territories and continued their polemic. Scandinavian kings had an easier time preventing the polemic of pulpit and cathedra. When immediately after Luther’s death Charles V succeeded in winning a crushing victory over the members of the Schmalkaldic League in the Schmalkaldic War (1546/7), these experiences powerfully stoked apocalyptic expectations among the oppressed Lutherans, along with the willingness to engage in confessional polemic. Further, faced with the growing powers of the Counter Reformation and the Reform movement that was pushing forward under the leadership of Bullinger and Calvin, the prevailing fear among the Lutherans soon after Luther’s death, that they would fall behind, consolidated the feeling of belonging to the “holy remnant” of the true church at the end of time.

In the course of the clashes involved in Charles V’s religious politics of introducing gradual re-catholicization to the Protestant estates he had just defeated, heavy theological quarrels occurred within the camp of those who felt especially connected to the “legacy of Wittenberg.” On one side stood Melanchthon with his colleagues, who were ready to accept the “Augsburg Interim,” a “weaker” form of the imperial decree on religion, provided that fundamental creedal declarations were retained, especially the doctrine of justification. On the other side, a group of radical opponents emerged, centered around Luther’s old confidant, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, and Melanchthon’s students Nikolaus Gallus and Matthias Flacius in Magdeburg. For them, compromising was out of the question, even in the case of the so-called adiaphora, that is, doctrinal and ecclesiastical questions that did not pertain to salvation, did not touch upon confession and therefore could be dealt with separately (e.g., the chasuble). To them, “in casu confessionis,” nothing was an adiaphora.[20] The first of these inner-Lutheran quarrels, the “Adiaphoristic Controversy,” which erupted because of the adoption of the Interim in Albertine Saxony and its ritual regulations and was therefore also called the “Interimistic Controversy,” led to a real schism in Lutheranism. The clashes continued in a series of further disputations in which the front lines among the individual actors shifted constantly. They turned Lutheranism into the most restless confession in the empire.

They quarreled, too, about the meaning of “good works” for salvation—a central aspect of Reformed doctrine of justification. While Melanchthon’s Wittenberg student Georg Major—for whom the “Majoristic Controversy” was named—insisted on the fact that good works, as the fruits of justification, were necessary for salvation, Amsdorf saw therein a regression to the catholicizing notion of man’s collaboration in his own redemption. Amsdorf represented the contrary thesis, according to which good works were detrimental to salvation. Later, when the battle lines were redrawn, a similar question was debated pertaining to the consequences for the image of man. In the so-called “Synergistic Controversy,” which took up the debate conducted between Erasmus and Luther in the 1520s about the freedom of the will and developed it further, the central issue was the question of whether after the Fall of Man, humankind still possessed any “remnants” of an original creaturely goodness or—as Flacius claimed—sin had become the “substance” of man, and whether the image of God in which man had been created had been perverted into the image of the Devil and the sinner related passively to his salvation like a woodblock being axed.

Other controversies, each of which was accompanied by a considerable flood of pamphlets, mainly in the vernacular, and which clearly transcended the small circle of theologians, were about the status and validity of the law for the salvation of the sinner. Was the purpose of the law limited to leading the sinner away from his sins (the so-called usus elenchticus seu theologicus legis) and to submit his outward way of life to norms (the so-called usus politicus)—a position which in all likelihood corresponded with Luther’s doctrine? Or should the law also be given a positive role in conducting the moral life of the justified, which would form a “third use” (tertius usus legis)? The latter position more closely matched the convictions of Melanchthon, and also of Calvin. This question, which was already critically debated in Luther’s lifetime and which would enter the history of theology as the “Antinomian Controversy,” was by no means inconsequential to preaching and religious education. At stake, fundamentally, was the basic problem of the Reformation as a whole, of a Christian way of life derived from faith.

An additional theological debate, which evolved around the Nuremberg Reformer Andreas Osiander who had fled to Königsberg in Prussia because of the Interim, likewise touched on a core theme of Lutheran theology, i.e., the proper understanding of justification in relation to the person of Christ. Osiander understood justification as the real inhabiting of the God-man Christ in the believer. This conception had certain connections to Luther and stood in opposition to a strictly forensic‒imputative understanding of the process of justification, according to which the believer in Christ is credited with justification but not truly granted it. Thus the “Osiandrian Controversy” also involved a question that was central to the Reformed understanding of Christianity.

The dynamics of inner-Lutheran controversy in Germany were reinforced by a religious‒political “compulsion towards orthodoxy.” This arose from the fact that after the stipulations of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) only that “evangelical” doctrine which corresponded to the Confessio Augustana (CA) was legally recognized. In theological hindsight, however, this criterion was not unequivocal. Melanchthon, the author of this decisive confession, had, as part of an attempt at reconciliation with the Reform tradition of upper Germany, circulated a version (the CA variata) that had been revised in light of the original form of the Augsburg Confession (the CA invariata), on which the Reformed in the empire had also gradually come to rely. Below the level of the empire, in individual territories, the sovereigns of the day determined the confessional state of their territory by defining through church orders or a canon of various confessional documents (the so-called Corpora Doctrinae), the practical terms in which they understood their commitment to the CA. As a rule, Lutheran territories professed the Schmalkaldic Articles and its catechisms to be binding alongside the CA.

A movement emerged in the course of the 1560s, led by the Württemberg theologian Jakob Andreae and the Braunschweig superintendent Martin Chemnitz, who set out to clarify the inner-Lutheran controversies, which had broken out after Luther’s death, in their relation to the CA, which had the force of law throughout the empire. The outcome was the Formula Concordiae (FC), the last of the Lutheran confessions of doctrine, adopted in 1577 by a series of cities and territories as their own confession. The FC resolved the controversial questions of theological anthropology (the doctrine of original sin; free will) and the doctrine of justification (justification by faith; good works; relationship of law to Gospel; tertius usus legis). Furthermore, it delineated the bounds within which a doctrine of the Eucharist and its corresponding christology had to remain in order to be recognized as “Lutheran.” Regarding the understanding of the person of Christ, the religious core of Lutheran theology, the FC set the framework within which all orthodox doctrine was to be situated: the inseparable unity of divinity and humanity in Christ, in the sense of the FC, implied the real participation of the man Jesus in the statements of omnipotence and of the Godhead in statements of mundanity.

The fundamental theological concern of the FC was integrative: its aim was the exclusion of extreme positions and the explanation of the specific theological profile of Lutheranism vis-à-vis both Catholicism and the Reformed. Whereas the authors of the FC gave no special appreciation to Melanchthon, with whom the Reformed in the empire commonly also had good relations, the extensively quoted Martin Luther took on a position of exceptional authority. The FC sought to reformulate his doctrine, identified with the substance of the imperially binding CA, within the context of inner-Lutheran controversies. Regarding sacred Scripture as the decisive norm (norma normans), the confession of doctrine certainly claimed a secondary compulsory position (norma normata).

The process of concord found its most important literary expression in the Book of Concord, the Lutheran corpus doctrinae of binding creeds and confessions, published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the CA in 1580. In addition to the creeds of the ancient church (the Apostolic, the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanan, and the Athanasian) it included the CA, the Apology of CA, the Schmalkaldic Articles, Melanchthon’s treatise De Potestate et primatu Papae, Luther’s catechisms, and the FC. For parts of German Lutheranism, this process of concord had a limited pacifying significance. The FC did not, however, prevent further theological controversies within the Lutheran camp. Questions about the proper understanding of predestination (the “Huber Controversy”), the relationship between the word and spirit of Scripture (the “Rathmann Controversy,” the “Arndt Debates”), confession-specific and “common-Christian” doctrine (“Syncretistic Controversy”), and others accompanied Lutheranism and persisted well into the seventeenth century (the “Pietistic Controversy”). To be sure, the FC provided an interpretative framework that was uncontroversial within confessional Lutheranism. The aforementioned post-concord controversies pertained to doctrinal questions that the FC had left unclear. A certain doctrinal pluralism was inherent within Lutheranism throughout. Beyond Germany, the FC gained validity in Sweden and in North American Lutheranism. In relation to Reformed Protestantism on one hand and Roman Catholicism on the other, the FC had a polarizing effect. Catholics accused Lutherans of having abandoned the earlier foundations of their religious‒political toleration (the CA), while the Reformed contested the “success” of the concord, uncovered merely apparent resolutions and contradictions, and mobilized them in theological controversy.

Regarding Lutheran theology of the “Confessional Era,” that is, essentially the period between the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the processes of pluralization which set in with Pietism (from ca. 1675 onward), the concept of “Lutheran Orthodoxy” became common parlance. If one does not take this concept in the sense of a dogmatically petrified, intellectually sclerotic authoritarian form—as the Pietist criticism of “the Orthodox” insinuated—it can still be used meaningfully. For Lutheran theologians were indeed concerned with the explanation and justification of the “true doctrine” from sacred Scripture and against the background of the confessional tradition in such a way that it seemed intellectually, religiously, and existentially plausible to their contemporaries. Orthodox Lutherans stood for a comprehensive truth claim and employed the argumentative and methodological support of philosophy—usually that of Artistotle. Many orthodox teachers—such as Johann Gerhard, to this day the best known among them—were also very successful authors of edifying and devotional literature. The accusation of one-sided intellectualism fails to appreciate the fact that orthodox theologians had to communicate in very different contexts and in many ways. Orthodox Lutheran theologians conducted a lively exchange with the Lutheran churchdoms of Scandinavia and the Baltic. To the orthodox, the permanent confrontation through theological disputations with the positions of Roman Catholics, Reformed, anti-Trinitarians (Socinians), and skeptics critical of religion, was indispensable, especially for the sake of defending their own truth. Only in an age in which the “true doctrine” did not stand above all else did “the Orthodox” become suspect. For Luther himself the true doctrine had also been the non plus ultra.

LUTHERAN CONFESSIONAL CULTURE

For the confessional tradition that depended on him, the person of Martin Luther possessed a singular significance. No second figure in any of the competing confessions played a role comparable to his. To be sure, this estimation of Luther’s exceptional position is valid primarily in relation to German Lutheranism. Beyond the empire, in Scandinavia and the Baltic for instance, he did not outdo the native Reformers, such as Heinrich Tausen, Olaus and Laurentius Petri, or Michael Agricola by much.

A special moment in the construction of Luther’s authority was of a prophetic kind. Sayings from his mouth or his plume were collected and distributed in the form of anthologies, which “revealed” the near future and the secrets of the troubles of the End Times. One mystery-filled logion was given special attention: “Pestis eram vivens moriens ero mors tua, Papa” (Alive I was your pest, in dying I will be your death, Pope).[21] Consequently, the decline and fall of the papacy was expected in the near future. The celebration of St. Martin’s Day as Luther’s birthday festival and as a day of commemoration of the Reformation avant la lettre followed from suggestions by Luther’s close friends, Amsford and Bugenhagen.[22] In many places the start of his struggle against the papal Antichrist was commemorated on this date. Bugenhagen used the term “saint” in relation to Luther in the context of the conceptual considerations about the design of his burial place in the Wittenberg Schloßkirche. It ought to be designed in such a way that the adherents of the Reformation would have “cause to visit their Saint there after his death.”[23] The portrait of the Reformer was present in many church spaces. His likeness or his “forceful sayings” were also present on objects of daily use, such as pewter plates, cups, cans, or tiles.

About no other Protestant theologian, indeed of no other person of the early modern period, was more ado made. Already in the sixteenth century, and then more strongly in the seventeenth century, the real or replicated rooms that Luther had inhabited, in Eisleben, Wittenberg, in the fortress of Coburg, or at the Wartburg, had become auratic “personal memorials,” which consistently attracted visitors. Objects from Luther’s personal possessions, the so-called Reliquiae Lutheri, were traded or treated with reverence. Miraculous events clung to them, too. The fact that the room in which Luther had slept during his sojourn in Magdeburg had not been damaged during Tilly’s burning of the city during the Thirty Years War was considered a miracle and demonstrated the truth of the Reformer’s teaching. The formation of modernity is considered connected to a rationalism commonly associated with Protestantism, yet miracle wells, the appearances of angels and devils, and belief in prodigies of all kinds were ubiquitous in early modern Lutheranism.

With the first centennial celebrations of the Reformation in the year 1617, a liturgical stabilization of Luther memorials set in, which were institutionalized at subsequent annual Reformation days, and only took root in broad parts of evangelical Germany from 1717 onward. In the context of this commemoration of the Reformation, the “nailing of the Theses” as an act of the God-sent prophet Luther, who had made the papacy crumble and who had restored “the true teaching of the Gospel,” shifted to the center of a confessional battle for self-assertion that was also linked to militant motivations. The expectation of an approaching end of the world, which remained dominant in Lutheranism until the late seventeenth century, retained an upswing thanks to the Reformation jubilee.

In the historical run-up to the Thirty Years War it contributed decisively to a sharpening of the confessional conflict. In the latter part of the century, the Reformation jubilee turned into a mark of national identity. Denmark and Sweden also celebrated Reformation jubilees in the year 1617. The costs of the 1717 bicentennial celebrations in the unified kingdoms of Denmark and Norway and in the parts of northern Germany which belonged to Denmark are said to have been higher than anywhere else. After the Elector of Saxony’s conversion to Catholicism, the Danish monarch found himself Lutheranism’s critical patron. In Sweden, by contrast, no official Reformation jubilee was celebrated in 1717. The fact that Denmark lavishly celebrated not 1836 instead of 1817 as the jubilee date of the official introduction of the Reformation into the kingdom, makes clear that Lutheranism was diverse, and that in the age of European nationalisms the memory of the Reformation became a politically sensitive issue.

The Lutheranism of the early modern era engaged and connected with contemporary culture in specific ways. The concept of “Lutheran confessional culture” describes the specific, multifaceted fusion of a particular, confession-bound form of the Christian religion with phenomena of contemporary culture and can be described according to the model of concentric circles. Each inner circle represents the “denser” content of the confession specific; in the outer circles, commonalities with the other confessions or participation in the culture at large lie in the foreground.

The preached, taught, written, sung, and printed word formed the center of Lutheran confessional culture. Throughout the Lutheran world, the word was critically important in the shaping of culture. It can be proven statistically, based on books printed in the German-speaking world, that the Lutheran territories had an immense quantitative lead in vernacular print production. The abundance of pious‒theological and catechismal literature is particularly remarkable. It has been shown that in the German-speaking realm in the period between 1520 and 1620, about five times as many Lutheran as Roman Catholic catechisms were published.[24] Compared with the Reformed, there were about seven times as many. Similar proportions might have been the case for vernacular prayer- and songbooks, and also for vernacular theological polemical pamphlets. When one looks at literary genres, such as that beloved in Lutheranism above all: the funeral sermon, as well as the more than one hundred and fifty anthologies of sermons (Predigtpostillen) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,[25] one can even speak of a near-total domination of Lutheran print production. “Lutheran confessional culture” was therefore determined, to a quantitatively demonstrable high extent, by the word and by the vernacular book. This may be said, in a more limited sense, not only for the situation in the empire, but also for Lutheran churches in other European lands. Wherever the Reformation was victorious, vernacular bibles appeared and the production of pious literature, above all those of catechismal character, exploded.

Lutheran Reformers were often among the first authors of written documents in a European vernacular. This is the case for Michael Agricola in Finnish, for Primus Trubar in Slovenian, and for Flacius in Croatian.

To a certain extent, the so-called confessional paintings (Bekenntnisgemälde), which appeared from the 1590s onward, can be considered to be the most dense visual and political expression of Lutheran confessional culture. They usually depicted the handing over of the CA to the emperor. In the background of the image, one sees the Lutheran community listening to the preaching of the Word and celebrating the “visible words,” the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and sometimes also confession, which was held in high esteem into the seventeenth century. Open bibles and biblical verses in the form of inscriptions made the core content of Lutheran doctrine present. Occasionally these images also showed individual Reformers administering sacraments. In the cities and territories that had not joined the FC, especially Franconia, Melanchthon was often present besides Luther. Sometimes the pre-Reformers Wyclif and Hus were drawn into the visual and historiographic representation of one’s own “true” Church of Jesus Christ.

One can hardly overestimate the power of the religious and social‒ethical ideas of the Small Catechism in shaping the mentality of its readers. For centuries, it represented the form of doctrine and way of life of Lutheran Christianity as it was known to each Lutheran Christian. The judgment according to which Lutheran Christianity of the confessional era should be qualified as a “Christianity of the catechism”[26] is essentially accurate.

But the culture-shaping significance of Luther’s translation of the Bible, preached each Sunday, visualized in church galleries, translated and studied in school lessons, and edited into anthologies of Gospel- and Epistle-pericopes, also for the praxis pietatis of the homestead, is difficult to esteem too highly. At its most dense, inner core, Lutheran confessional culture was a culture of the Word and of the book.

A further concentric circle is comprised of the normative rules that regulated doctrine and life, school and worship. Lutheran princes often established them in the form of so-called church regulations. They were binding, but also subject to significant changes, particularly in their non-doctrinal parts. Similar things may be said for the handling of the so-called adiaphora, such as images, clerical garments, and other customs. There was a confluence here of Lutheran and common-Protestant or general-Christian ideas and elements. The internal pluralism of Lutheran confessional culture regarding liturgical and ethical questions becomes visible in the mirror of a genre that is particularly illuminating for Lutheranism: the opinions of theological judicial courts, especially the faculties of theology. Normative regulatory models, such as the doctrine of the three estates, also belong in this context. On the one hand, they defined in binding terms the way in which church and society ought to be constructed according to Creation: the “armed estate” (status politicus) assures the outer peace and bears the sword; the “teaching estate” (status ecclesiasticus) provides eternal salvation by preaching the Word and administering the sacraments; the “nourishing estate” (status oeconomicus) assures the subsistence of society. On the other hand, it offered flexible possibilities for political‒theoretical discourse, in terms of the possibilities and limits of a right of resistance.

One can relegate to a yet further concentric circle moments of Lutheran confessional culture that can hardly be described as specifically or exclusively “Lutheran,” even when they occur very frequently in Lutheran sources and in other traditions. This is perhaps the case for conjugal and gender roles, which were practiced in the so-called Hausväterliteratur. And this is also the case for the Teufelsbücher, which were distributed with special enthusiasm among Lutherans. Regarding the image of the “Jews,” the “Turks,” and the extra-European “pagans,” as well as ideas for a suitable interaction with them, Lutherans (the particularly emphatic anti-Judaism of the “late” Luther notwithstanding) also shared to a certain extent the ideas and mental dispositions that are found in all three confessions. The fact that relevant literature was accepted and rejected by both Lutherans and Catholics confirms that alongside the particularities of confessional culture, fundamental cultural commonalities of Latin Europe persisted and were elaborated, especially in the perception of the “Other.”

NOTES

1. Johannes Cochläus, Historia Lutheri, 1549; see Adolf Herte, Das katholische Lutherbild im Bann der Lutherkommentare des Cochläus, 3 vols. (Münster: Aschendorff, 1943; see also Herte, Die Lutherkommentare des Johannes Cochläus. Kritische Studie zur Geschichtsschreibung im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung [RGST 33] (Münster: Aschendorff, 1935).

2. Cf. the programmatic publication of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), Justification and Freedom: 500 Years of Reformation 2017. A Foundational Text of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017). Heinz Schilling and I have articulated a common/collective contradiction of the document in the newspaper Die Welt (May 24, 2014), 2. For further remarks on this topic from my pen, see the review Thomas Kaufmann, “Lerngeschichte” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (July 1, 2014), 14, as well as “Geschichtslose Reformation? Die EKD droht sich 2017 ins Abseits zu feiern,” Zeitzeichen 15/8 (August 2014): 12–14; cf. my article: Kaufmann, “Comment écrit-on une histoire de la Réforme? Réflexions historiographiques et théologiques,” Études théologiques et religieuses 90/1 (2015): S. 31–50.

3. Martin Bucer, Correspondance Vol. 2, ed. Jean Rott (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 174, 66.

4. Cochläus, cited by Helmar Junghans (ed.), Die Reformation in Augenzeugenberichten (Munich: dtv, 1973), 451.

5. Bucer, Correspondence Vol. 2, 450.

6. Bucer, Correspondence Vol. 2, 450.

7. WABr 1, No. 146, 331–333 (February 1519); cf. Leif Grane, Martinus noster: Luther in the German Reform Movement 1518–1521 (Mainz: von Zabern, 1994), 46ff.

8. WA 30/III, 386, 31.33.

9. WA 6, 405, 1.

10. WA 54, 179–187; cf. the translation and commentary in Martin Luther, Aufbruch der Reformation, Schriften vol. 1, ed. Kaufmann (Berlin: Verlag der Weltregligionen, 2014), 482–492, 626–630.

11. Karlstadt to Spalatin, April 28, 1517, in Kaufmann (ed.), Kritische Karlstadt-Gesamtausgabe der Schriften und Briefe Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadts <http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=edoc/ed000216&distype=start&pvID=start>, accessed April 22, 2016 (ed. Alejandro Zorzin).

12. On the most recent state of the scholarly debate, see Joachim Ott and Martin Treu (eds.), Luthers Thesenanschlag—Faktum oder Fiktion (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2008); Kaufmann, “Luthers 95 Thesen in ihrem historischen Zusammenhang,” in Der Anfang der Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 166–184.

13. Cf. WA 1, 526, 34; WA 54, 180, 12–21, 185, 5–8; WATR 4, 440, 18f.

14. Bernd Moeller and Karl Stackmann, “Luder—Luther—Eleutherius. Erwägungen zu Luthers Namen,” in Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 1981, Nr. 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981).

15. “Es gefil aber s.g. [seiner Gnaden] [that is, the Bishop of Merseburg] auch wol, das die arme leute, die also zulifen und die gnade [sc. den Ablaß] suchten, vor dem betrig Tetzels vorwarnt wurden und die conclusiones, die der Augustinermönch zu Wittenberg gemacht, an vil ortern angslagen wurden; das wurde grosen abbruch der gnaden thuen.” [“It also well pleased his Grace [that is, the Bishop of Merseburg], that the poor folk, who came running seeking grace [i.e., indulgences], were warned about Tetzel’s fraud, and the conclusions, which the Augustine monk in Wittenberg had made, were nailed up in many places; that would do great harm to the graces.”] Felician Gess (ed.), Akten und Briefe zur Kirchenpolitik Herzog Georgs von Sachen, 1st ed. (Leipzig, 1904; repr. Köln and Wien: Böhlau, 1985), 29.

16. Cf. especially WA 51, 539, 4–10.

17. WA 51, S. 539, 32–540, 14.

18. Friedrich Myconius, Geschichte der Reformation, ed. von Otto Clemen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1914), S. 22.

19. Cf. Bucer’s late “Iudicium de Luthero,” in Kaufmann (ed.), Reformatoren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 36f.

20. On the arguments for Flacius’s saying “nihil esse adiáphoron (Greek.) in casu confessionis,” see Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation. Magdeburgs “Herrgotts Kanzlei” (1548–1551/2) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 99f. n. 239.

21. WA 48, 280; WA 48, RN, 115; WATR 3, 390, 18; WATR 1, 410f.; WA 35, 597f.; WA 30/III, 279, 18f.; WA 30/II, p. 339f. n. 3; additional witnesses in: Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 210f. n. 10.

22. See Kaufmann, “Reformationsgedenken in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 107 (2010): 285–324, 293f.

23. Christof Schubart, Die Berichte über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis (Weimar: Böhlau, 1917, No. 25), 27.

24. Cf. Andreas Ohlemacher, Lateinische Katechetik der frühen lutherischen Orthodoxie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 107.

25. Hans-Christoph Rublack, “Lutherische Predigt und soziale Wirklichkeiten,” in Ders. [ed.], Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1992), 344–395, esp. 383ff.

26. Cf. Johannes Wallmann, “Vom Katechismuschristentum zum Bibelchristentum. Zum Bibelverständnis im Pietismus,” in Ders., Pietismus-Studien. Gesammelte Aufsätze II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 228–257.

FURTHER READING

Bayer, Oswald. Martin Luther’s Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

Brady, Thomas A. German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Brady, Thomas A., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.) Handbook of European History 1400–1600, 2 vols. Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 1994/5.

Dixon, Scott C. The Reformation in Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Edwards, Mark U. Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Helmer, Christine. The Global Luther: A Theologian for Modern Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Hendrix, Scott H. Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization. Louisville, KY and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Hillerbrand, Hans-Joachim (ed.) The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hillerbrand, Hans-Joachim The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century. Louisville, KY and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

Kaufmann, Thomas. Der Anfang der Reformation. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012.

Kaufmann, Thomas. Geschichte der Reformation in Deutschland. Neue Ausgabe, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2016; French edition: Histoire de la Reformation: Mentalités, religion, société. Genf: Labor et Fides, 2014.

Kolb, Robert (ed.) Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture 1550–1675. Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2008.

Kolb, Robert Irene Dingel, and L’ubomir Batka (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Leppin, Volker and Gury Schneider-Ludorff (eds.) Das Luther-Lexikon. Regensburg: Bückle & Böhm,2 2015.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Early Reformation in Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pettegree, Andrew (ed.) The Reformation World. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Rublack, Hans-Christoph (ed.) Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992.

Schilling, Heinz. Martin Luther. Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs. Munich: Beck, 2012 (English translation in preparation).

CHAPTER 9

THE SWISS REFORMATIONS
Movements, Settlements, and Reimagination, 1520–1720

RANDOLPH C. HEAD

THE Reformations of the sixteenth century—Catholic and Radical as well as Protestant—were emphatically pan-European movements that spilled over into many other parts of the world. The changes in religious doctrine and practice that “reformation” brought with it discomforted many Europeans, who also grappled with the sense that a perceived religious consensus that they valued (despite the deep religious diversity that actually characterized medieval Europe) was breaking down. Yet in responding to these challenges to assumptions deeply embedded in their everyday lives, European individuals always did so in a particular local context, as part of a perceived community and in relation to specific governors, neighbors, teachers, and family members. This chapter probes how Reformation events developed in one such context: the Swiss Confederation.[1]

Close consideration of the Swiss case offers important perspectives on the larger process of Western European religious change. First, certain features of Switzerland allowed it to become an important early center of both evangelical and radical movements. Zurich in particular became a focal point where the widespread desire for religious reform turned into action. Swiss developments also influenced regions as distant as Hungary and Scotland in successive generations, since the early Reformation involved learning processes that affected religious movements’ paths elsewhere. Second, the Reformation in Switzerland provides an important comparative case for modern analysis. Comparison allows us to discern which pathways of change were shared among the different Protestant movements, and indeed between the old and new churches, and which depended on local conjuncture. Reformation developments in Switzerland were idiosyncratic in some ways, but both their idiosyncrasies and the features they shared with other European movements serve to clarify the underlying causes and complex evolution of the European Reformations as religious, cultural, social, and political transformations.

The Swiss Confederation emerged as a distinct political system in the fifteenth century, and took on its lasting early modern shape to a considerable extent through the religious divisions of the early sixteenth.[2] By 1520, it consisted of an alliance of thirteen communal entities—including both prosperous city states and self-governing rural regions—along with various allies. While the factors favoring the consolidation of urban and rural communes and the formation of alliances among them had notable parallels both south and north of the Alps, the Confederation itself did not. In the 1420s, Swiss acquisition of a series of condominia—lordships seized, mostly from the Habsburgs, and administered jointly—encouraged systematic deliberation among the allied cantons, while a bitter civil war in the 1450s established that no single member of the Confederation could conduct its affairs with complete autonomy. Later in the fifteenth century, astonishing military successes, notably against Charles the Bold in the 1470s and against the Habsburgs in 1499, tightened the alliance’s cohesion while also bringing it closer to France and the Papacy.[3] Around 1500, the Swiss appeared to be emerging as a European power, feared and courted by princes seeking unbeatable Swiss mercenaries. This mirage soon came crashing down, however, after a series of significant military defeats. Instead, the Confederation took on political functions similar to those that princely states took on in other parts of the empire, providing the primary framework for political conflict and collaboration across a sizable region.

The Confederation’s distinctive political culture and distribution of social and political power were significant preconditions for evangelical movements’ early successes there. Swiss thinkers and politicians generally avoided direct challenges to the (increasingly fictive) feudal hierarchy of the Holy Roman Empire, preferring instead to rely on an umbrella of privileges from the emperors to justify their autonomy from noble dominion. Nevertheless, important changes in political culture and imagination accompanied the emergence of confederal institutions and military power. Notably, a body of myths around William Tell and the “Three Eidgenossen” first recorded around 1450 grew into a proto-national narrative of liberation and identity. The political culture nurtured by these myths stressed collective decision-making, even though the exercise of political, social, and economic power in cities such as Zurich and Bern was just as restricted to a small group of families as in other imperial cities. Self-perception as “virtuous peasants,” along with the Swiss cities’ close association with rural polities along the Alpine spine, thus set the Confederation apart from its neighbors just as the early Reformation was unfolding.[4] As a result, the charismatic preachers who became active across Switzerland in the early 1520s—notably Ulrich Zwingli—faced a different context than their peers in German cities.

This chapter explores the path that ultimately led to a single magisterial Reformed church in Switzerland (oriented theologically to Geneva but politically dominated by the cities of Bern, Basel, and Zurich), along with the emergence of radical movements with Anabaptist or spiritualist tendencies. The discussion will proceed in three phases. The first will consider Swiss evangelical movements, concentrating on the parallel and nearly simultaneous articulation during the 1520s of what became Reformed and Anabaptist ideas, most notably in Zurich and its surroundings. The second will trace how increasingly defined movements with territorial and political backers led, in the Confederation as in the empire, to an urgent search for settlements. Even though religious conflict remained framed by the language of orthodoxy and heresy, the Confederation’s existing mechanisms for diffusing political conflicts provided pathways that prevented irreconcilable religious differences from undermining the political order. The Confederation’s Diet in Baden took up the “religious question” early, and functioned right through the two civil wars of 1529 and 1531 to preserve the Confederation, despite the mutual hereticization of its emerging churches. The third section will begin in the 1530s, when bi-confessional settlements triggered a long process of reimagination during which the reality of schism forced communities and individuals to reconsider how they worshipped and lived as Christians. They responded both by changing their practices and by changing how they understood old practices they were unwilling to abandon, leading to new configurations of faith, doctrine, and community. The discussion here will concentrate on how politics, the family, sacrality, and community took on new implications in specifically Swiss contexts until about 1720. The resulting micro-cultures of confessional belonging (Konfessionskulturen) shaped not only the Confederation’s place in Europe, but also the trajectories of the major post-Reformation religious denominations in the region.[5]

REFORMATION AS A MOVEMENT IN THE SWISS CONFEDERATION

A defining feature of the early Protestant Reformation was the way engaged individuals catalyzed an existing desire for spiritual and ecclesiastical reform. Martin Luther’s background—among Observant Augustinians, in a new university committed to nominalism, and as a subject of a German elector—conditioned the way he became a leading voice for religious change in the empire. In the German southwest, different preconditions shaped the path taken by Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), together with his peers Joachim “Vadianus” von Watt (1484–1551) and Johannes “Oecolampadius” Huszgen (1482–1531), and by a spiritually engaged group including Conrad Grebel (1498–1526) and Balthasar Hubmaier (ca. 1480–1528) who helped form Anabaptism in the region. The Swiss evangelicals built their movements in a fragmented political milieu characterized by high urban autonomy with ties with strong rural communes; the nearby borders with Italian- and French-speakers also shaped the movement, especially in the 1530s and beyond.

Zwingli himself embodied many of the region’s features.[6] Proudly Swiss, he was born an abbatial subject of St. Gallen in the Toggenburg; after education in Basel and Vienna, where both Humanism and the scholastic via antiqua flourished, he took office as parish priest in rural Glarus. During his decade there, his service as field preacher for Glarnese troops during mercenary campaigns in northern Italy made him a firm opponent of further Swiss military engagements. He also undertook disciplined self-education, in which the Humanist Erasmus’s work, especially his edition and translation of the Greek New Testament, played a major role. Zwingli intensified this engagement during nearly three years spent at the major Swiss pilgrimage site and abbey of Einsiedeln. Like other engaged intellectuals in the German lands, he was by 1520 a participant in the vibrant movement known as Christian Humanism, which aimed at deep-seated reform of the existing church’s institutions and practices, though without contemplating major changes in Christian doctrine. While in Einsiedeln, Zwingli learned of Luther’s attack on indulgences—a practice Zwingli also preached against—and began to read Luther’s writings on justification and increasingly direct attacks on Rome. Zwingli’s 1519 appointment in Zurich as Leutpriester (public preacher, a highly visible appointment made by the city council) allowed him to preach about religious transformation, and his sermons soon generated an evangelical movement separate from, though parallel with, the Lutheran movement in Saxony.

Two groups of Zwingli’s contemporaries shaped the Swiss evangelical movement. The first included other reformist clerics and elite intellectuals in the cities of the Confederation and southwest. Sebastian Hoffmeister in Schaffhausen, Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel, and Vadianus in St. Gallen were early partners in Zwingli’s efforts to promote reform, and then to build a new, purified church once it became clear that supporters of the existing church would resist their efforts. Educated rural magistrates, such as Gian Travers in the Engadine, also furthered evangelical preaching and reform in their areas. The second group consisted of spiritually driven individuals who shared Zwingli’s concern—characteristic for all of the evangelical movements of the 1520s—for deriving doctrine directly and exclusively from the Bible, but who resisted Zwingli’s program of creating a new institutional church backed by local magistrates. This socially heterogeneous second group included members of Zurich’s most powerful families, such as Grebel; rural clerics such as Balthasar Hubmaier and Georg “Blaurock” Cajakob; and laymen such as the bookseller Andreas Castleberger and Felix Manz, son of a Grossmünster canon.[7] The divergence between these groups led, very early on, to the emergence of two distinct religious reform movements in the Confederation, each with its own agenda and debating points, both theological and social.

Ulrich Zwingli began preaching directly from the Gospel of St. Matthew on January 1, 1519 in the Zurich Grossmünster, just as a first wave of enthusiasm for religious reform was cresting across the Holy Roman Empire. Zwingli’s sermons unleashed powerful responses from his audiences, which included Zurich’s population, rich and poor, and clergy and laity from the surrounding areas.[8] Among those who listened and acted on his words, significantly, was Katharina von Zimmern, abbess of the Fraumünster abbey and, as such, nominal lord of the city. Her decision in December 1524 to transfer the abbey to the city council and become a simple citizen enabled the city to build a new church, legally and financially. We lack sufficient studies concentrating on other audiences—especially female audiences—but the broad (though by no means unanimous) support Zwingli’s movement enjoyed by 1525 suggests that many listeners found his sermons persuasive.[9] Zwingli’s impact was amplified by a number of Bible-study circles that formed in Zurich, whose participants often became proselytizers for increasingly bold reform projects.

A first major turning point—one that drew Zurich’s magistrates into the course of reform—took place during Lent, 1522, when the printer Christoph Froschauer demonstratively served his apprentices sausage, violating the Lenten fast. Zwingli, who attended the meal without partaking, then preached a sermon attacking dietary restrictions that relied on several New Testament passages dismissing Jewish dietary laws. Such external efforts to purify oneself, Zwingli argued, contradicted the freedom of every Christian from worldly bonds—though Christians might still observe some rules out of charity to their neighbors and to avoid disorder.[10] Froschauer’s act and Zwingli’s defense of it brought matters of daily life into theological focus, thus setting the stage for some of the most intense debates of the early Reformation era.[11] The Zurich city council not only refrained from prosecuting Froschauer after this sermon, but also allowed Zwingli to defend the act and his sermon before a delegation from the local bishop. The council’s arrogation of spiritual authority expanded further when it ordered a public disputation between Zwingli and his critics on January 29, 1523, after which the council ordered him to continue preaching “according to Scripture” despite protests from around the Confederation.[12] Zwingli’s preaching and the religious sentiments of those around him thus created a movement, backed by the city’s small council and in contact with parallel if less vigorous movements in Schaffhausen, St. Gallen, Basel, Bern, and other areas in the Confederation.[13]

The same circles for Bible study in Zurich also gave rise to the early Anabaptist movement in the region.[14] A pivotal early figure was Grebel, son of a small council member and close friend of Zwingli’s, but other individuals—many pushed out of their native regions or drawn to Zurich because of its reputation as a center for reform—joined these circles or formed their own. During the sausage episode of March, 1522, these movements had not yet separated, but as evangelical challenges to existing practice expanded, two distinct directions emerged, characterized by different views about the proper relationship between the civil and the spiritual. Among the most pressing issues were clerical celibacy, the use of images in ceremonies, and the economic obligations of the laity to the church, especially tithes. Already in 1522, the reading circles around Manz and Grebel questioned tithes, and in the summer of 1523, the preacher in Höngg (just outside Zurich) declared to the village council that the peasants owed no tithes at all.[15] Later that year, Klaus Hottinger (a sausage-eater in 1522) helped tear down a public cross in the village of Stadelhofen, leading to his arrest.

The city council called a second public disputation, which advanced issues on which Zwingli sought changes, such as the abolition of the traditional Mass, while simultaneously rejecting the more sweeping demands for change that the radicals favored. The Zurich evangelical movement had become two movements, which swiftly diverged. A third disputation in January 1525 specifically addressed adult baptism, which was emerging as a key feature of the radicals’ practice. The city council backed Zwingli’s interpretation of the scriptural passages involved, and endorsed his view that those who rejected pedobaptism represented a danger of rebellion. Consequently, the council declared adult baptism unacceptable, and forbad its administration. The first Anabaptist baptism in Switzerland, of Georg Blaurock by Conrad Grebel, took place shortly after this decree. Other members of the movement also continued to baptize, including Felix Manz, who became the first Zurich martyr, executed early in 1527.[16]

The issue of tithes highlights the growing importance of rural actors in shaping the Swiss Reformation. German peasants were in ferment by late 1523, combining resentment of seigniorial burdens with enthusiasm for the local, frugal, and communally controlled church that they perceived in the teaching of evangelical preachers.[17] In Switzerland, many rural communes had already gained considerable autonomy and control over local churches, thus becoming substantial political players.[18] Across the Confederation, communal assertions of religious control sometimes led to violence, as when Thurgau peasants sacked the monastery at Ittingen in July 1524 after a spiral of conflict that included iconoclasm, tumultuous gatherings, and the arrest of an evangelical preacher by the Swiss bailiff.[19] Similar unrest emerged in other Swiss regions, as local assemblies demanded political and ecclesiastical reform. Nevertheless, the massive violence of the German Peasants’ War of 1525 affected the Confederation only tangentially, since modest concessions forestalled the emergence of a military revolt.[20] In the neighboring III Leagues in the Grisons, pressure from the rural communities led to new constitutional documents in 1524, 1525, and 1526, which gave each commune the power to appoint or dismiss clergy. This solution, putting religious identity into the hands of local authorities (whether communal or noble), foreshadowed later settlements in Switzerland in 1531 and in the empire in 1555.[21]

Although evangelical preaching found strong resonance across the Confederation, it did not gain a dominant position during the 1520s. Even in Zurich, Zwingli’s position depended on the small council, which protected him and those persuaded by his preaching. In Basel and Bern, the magistrates’ suspicion of a turbulent popular movement combined with patrician interests in church property and benefices; consequently, religious change came slowly in both cities, until strong support among the guilds eventually allowed the movement to break through. Evangelical preaching in other Swiss cities faced even higher hurdles, especially where mercenary entrepreneurs played a large political role.[22] When the evangelicals sought to mobilize Swiss rural communes in the sub-alpine heartland of Inner Switzerland, finally, they faced intense condemnation from a population that viewed both the emerging evangelical and Anabaptist movements as heresies.

Diffuse desire for religious reform thus took on a new shape when Zwingli’s preaching unleashed an organized movement to transform the church. In Zurich, this movement swiftly differentiated into an evangelical wing supported by Zurich’s magistrates and an Anabaptist wing with growing support among peasants, particularly in the east. Religious divergence then forced the entire Confederation to negotiate how it would proceed on religious questions. The complex patchwork of the political Confederation, with its old rivalries and new tensions, made the councils of the individual cantons one vital site of decision, while their assembly at the confederal Diet in Baden became the other.

Hopes for religious reform—reformatio—were a durable feature of medieval European culture, and historians have long probed the individuals who sought to act on such hopes, including Luther, Zwingli, and the first Anabaptists. Yet these actors’ inner convictions come into the historian’s purview only when they sparked movements that demanded changes in institutions and society. This is certainly true for Zwingli, even though his acts had momentous consequences. How do we reconcile Zwingli the modest Christian Humanist with the self-proclaimed prophet who led his city into war against its own allies? Equally, the question why Zwingli rather than another reformer became this movement’s figurehead can never be fully answered. We can trace critical steps, such as his 1519 appointment to preach in Zurich, that gave his preaching greater reach than others, but the contingency of his influence must be recognized. Similarly, the fragmented Swiss political landscape made it easier for the early Anabaptist movement to survive, but is not sufficient to explain the extraordinary passion of some early exponents of that movement. What we can say is that the emergence and survival of these movements made it inevitable that settlements would follow, although the nature of such settlements—ranging from extermination to hegemony—long remained uncertain in Switzerland, as they did across Europe.

REFORMATION SETTLEMENTS IN SWITZERLAND

Reformation settlements from the 1520s through the eighteenth century took many forms and involved many actors. Rather than ending Reformation confrontations, moreover, settlements often generated learning processes that led to new conflicts and constant pressure for revisions. Not only did most parties continue to pursue their goals even after formal settlements had been reached, but the very meaning of each settlement remained open to interpretation as conditions changed. Even iconic settlements such as the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Edict of Nantes (1598) reframed processes of religious conflict that continued despite the nominal peace. In Switzerland, the existence of a First (1529), Second (1531), Third (1656), and Fourth (1712) Landfrieden (religious peace) illustrates how settlement operated as a process. Even where explicit settlements did not emerge, moreover—as in the evangelicals’ and Catholics’ ongoing persecution of Anabaptist communities—implicit practices of coexistence grew in importance as magistrates and dissidents learned how to deal with the inescapable presence of religious others.[23]

Settlements in Switzerland depended both on the institutional and political environment created by the Confederation as a heterogeneous association of communal entities and on the larger Holy Roman Empire, which remained relevant well into the eighteenth century. This section will first review the growing ecclesio-political conflicts of the 1520s and their high point in the war and peace of Kappel in 1531, and then turn to other settlements, explicit and implicit, that shaped the post-Reformation environment, including the failed attempt at a settlement between the Swiss and Saxon Reformation movements that took place in 1529 at Marburg. A review of the consequences of settlement (or failed settlement) for the post-Reformation period will set the stage for the following section on the reimagination of religious cultures in the confessional era.

Once the evangelical movement had established itself in Zurich, Bern’s choices became particularly important for its future, since it was the most populous and powerful member of the Confederation. Zwinglian preaching in Bern also gained considerable sympathy among the city’s burghers and in some of its rural dependencies; the ruling aristocrats were more cautious, however, seeing potential rebellion in the rapid spread of evangelical ideas. Bernese magistrates did not participate in the early disputations in Zurich, and the city remained formally neutral in the Confederation’s discussions well after 1525. Popular opinion increasingly favored the new teachings, however, and in 1528 the magistrates introduced Zwinglian reforms in Bern after new elections and a public disputation, also imposing the new faith on the more reluctant countryside.[24] In Basel, too, enthusiasm for the Zwinglian movement appeared first among the guilds, whereas the city council took a cautious approach, temporizing and calling for public peace about religion. Eventually, public pressure and the city’s alliance with Zurich and Bern led Basel to adopt the new ideas, also in 1528, and to appoint Johannes Oecolampadius to lead the new church and to draft appropriate doctrinal and organizational principles.[25]

In the Confederation’s other major cities, including Fribourg, Solothurn, and most importantly Lucerne, the magistrates stayed loyal to the existing church hierarchy and ultimately suppressed evangelical preaching. Most of the rural cantons also stayed Catholic, forming a solid bloc in central Switzerland.[26] Only Glarus and Appenzell experienced strong Zwinglian movements that produced divided populations, and corresponding political uncertainty. Not until the second half of the century did partitioned governance stabilize in Glarus, while the ultimate division of Appenzell into two half-cantons stretched out until nearly 1600. Among the heterogeneous associate members of the Confederation, meanwhile, the Zwinglian and Anabaptist movements experienced wildly diverse outcomes, ranging from politically potent Reformed movements in the Grisons and Biel to firm adherence to the Old Church in Valais and Rottweil.

The most difficult situation emerged in territories jointly ruled by various combinations of the XIII full members of the Confederation, especially the Thurgau and the Aargau. Gaining control over these had been key to the Confederation’s consolidation in the fifteenth century, and their governance became intensely contested in the sixteenth, especially after Zwinglian congregations emerged in many of them late in the 1520s.[27] Many of these congregations survived the civil wars of 1529 and 1531 to become key drivers of Confederation-wide conflict for two centuries. An existing movement in the Francophone Vaud became the dominant church after Bern’s conquest of the region in 1536, though some Catholic congregations survived, especially in areas where Catholic Fribourg continued to share in dominion.[28] In the Italian Ticino, in contrast, a lively evangelical movement connected to Italian reform was eventually suppressed by the Catholic ruling cantons, leading to an exodus of exiles to Zurich and elsewhere.[29]

After 1523, religious disputes increasingly occupied the Diet’s agenda. Although well-established practices existed for dealing with conflict among its members, the nature of religious schism—evoking deeply held beliefs and practices on both sides—made compromise extremely difficult. For the Catholic majority, moreover, the emergence of Anabaptist movements, which they saw as closely associated with the massive peasant rebellion to the Confederation’s north in 1525, made religious change seem deeply threatening. From 1525 to 1529, tension rose and polarization increased every time another canton embraced or rejected Zwinglian forms of worship and church organization.

Zwingli himself continued to publish works articulating his theological positions and conception of the church, which gained resonance well beyond the Confederacy. Notably, his work influenced the parallel movements emerging in south German cities such as Augsburg, Ulm, Constance, and particularly Strasbourg. In the latter city, evangelical thinkers including Wolfgang Capito and the younger Martin Bucer worked to bring about religious change in close correspondence both with Luther and his Saxon colleagues and with Zurich. Strasbourg was friendly with the Swiss city states, and abolished the traditional Mass in 1529, in close synchrony with nearby Basel. It was more vulnerable to imperial pressure than the Swiss cities, however, and Bucer and his colleagues also rejected some of Zwingli’s theological positions. In the Confessio Tetrapolitana of 1530, which also drew support from Augsburg and Constance, Bucer laid out positions that differed from both Luther and Zwingli; ultimately, however, Strasbourg was unable to maintain an independent position, and moved into the Lutheran bloc in the empire, though close connections with Swiss evangelical cities, especially Bern, remained.[30]

In Zurich, Zwingli’s conviction of his calling as a prophet grew in proportion to his influence in the city: the urgency of his cause and the importance of reforming Christian society led him to demand political as well as spiritual action to spread the faith. Meanwhile, seeing the enforcement of religious orthodoxy as their obligation, magistrates both evangelical and Catholic sought to bolster the true church in the territories they ruled or had influence over. Once it had struck a Zwinglian path, for example, Bern energetically supported evangelical preachers in the Francophone Vaud and in Geneva, neighboring Savoyard territories where it also saw opportunities for territorial expansion.

As the Zwinglian movement grew more coherent, the Catholic cantons responded to halt its spread across the Confederacy. In 1522, the Diet called on the magistrates in Zurich and Bern to ban the printing of “those new books [sölicher nüwen büechlin]” spreading the new teachings. The Diet increased pressure on Zurich through 1523 and 1524, and issued its own reformist agenda in 1525, calling for economic and jurisdictional reforms in the church while leaving theology and religious practice untouched. In 1526, the Diet ordered a confederal disputation in Baden, inviting Johannes Eck to lead a charge against the evangelical position defended by Vadianus and Oecolampadius. The subsequent mandate in favor of traditional religion clarified the division between Zwinglian movement and the church. Aside from Zurich, which did not participate, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen also refused to endorse the mandate’s conclusions, demonstrating the depth of the religious breach across the Confederation.

Events on the ground continued to favor evangelical expansion. The cities allied with Zurich increasingly formed a bloc, supported by strong evangelical movements in Glarus, the Grisons, and in the subject territories. As the fronts among positions became clearer, the Reformed cities also established a defensive alliance reaching beyond the Confederation into southern Germany to bolster their cause. In response, the Catholic cantons headed by Lucerne—long a political rival of Zurich—established a military alliance with the Habsburgs, who promised to defend the Catholics in exchange for the right to recruit 6,000 troops. Matters reached a first breaking point in February 1529, when the city of St. Gallen seized its abbey as abbot Franz von Gaisberg lay dying, and introduced Zwinglian worship in the abbey’s rural territories. When the Catholic cantons objected, Zurich’s magistrates declared war on them in July 1529, although only Zurich and Schwyz mobilized their troops. As the belligerent forces moved near the village and cloister of Kappel on their border, negotiations continued, since the rest of the Confederacy opposed a war. Historical myth maintains that the troops fraternized as they waited, although no contemporary source reports that they shared a soup of milk and bread from a cauldron placed between the two camps.[31]

On June 26, 1529, an agreement, the First Kappeler Landfrieden, was reached, and each side withdrew its forces. In this Landfrieden, all cantons agreed to avoid coercion in matters of faith, and allowed communities in jointly ruled territories to choose by majority vote whether to keep the traditional church or accept the new teachings. This pioneering solution built on the Confederation’s existing mechanisms for managing conflict, which often relied on balancing the members’ internal autonomy against the whole Confederation’s interests. Treating religious adherence as an internal matter for each member to determine, however, represented a major step away from the late medieval assumption that magistrates were obliged to support orthodoxy. Indeed, the treaty represented an even more transformative step than the Zurich council’s adjudication of the first Zurich Disputation (in which secular magistrates decided what was orthodox), because it empowered magistrates to choose among religious possibilities.[32] By 1529, the Catholic cantons had thus accepted the evangelicals’ assertion that regulating religion was a matter for secular magistrates, and not reserved for the “first sword” of the church itself.

Although this assertion prevailed in all later religious settlements in Switzerland, it left unsolved the more difficult problem of regulating religion where cantons of different confession shared political authority. The first Landfrieden’s turn to majority voting by the subjects in such situations thus represented another if less successful attempt to resolve religious division by drawing from Swiss political culture. In the end, the first Landfrieden of 1529 stabilized matters only briefly. The Zurich council, following Zwingli’s increasingly militant lead, encouraged parishes in the Thurgau to vote to accept the new church and to attach themselves politically to the city, while Catholic bailiffs elsewhere pressured communities to retain the Old Church.[33] Meanwhile, growing religious tensions across the Holy Roman Empire drew in the Swiss, who were seen as desirable allies on all sides.

Inside the Confederation, Catholic frustration and Zurich’s pressure for further concessions ultimately triggered violent confrontation. In May of 1531, Zurich and its Reformed allies banned sales of grain from their markets to the neighboring Catholic cantons. This existential threat provoked Schwyz to declare war again, and to move its troops toward Zurich. The resulting battles brought devastating defeat for Zurich and for Zwingli’s supporters. Zwingli himself died at the Battle of Kappel on October 11, 1531, and the city experienced a second defeat on the Gubel on October 24. Since Bern and the other Reformed cantons refused to support further hostilities, while Schwyz and its allies were in no position to besiege Zurich, another negotiated settlement became the only possible outcome. The Second Kappeler Landfrieden sealed on November 20, 1531, favored the victorious religious traditionalists, but still recognized the existence of two faiths and set out guidelines for their coexistence. Crucially, each canton remained free to choose either the “true undoubted Christian faith” of the Catholics or the “faith” of the Zwinglians. The peace was thus a moderate document that reaffirmed the principle that sovereigns enjoyed a choice among Christian confessions—a principle that later spread to the entire Holy Roman Empire.

The maneuvering that produced the two Kappel treaties in the Swiss Confederation took place primarily in the political sphere, even though religion lay at the heart of contention. Similar shifts can be observed all over Europe: when reform impulses crystallized into movements, their survival or suppression became a political issue, though always shaped by key actors’ convictions. Additional settlements also emerged within movements (in the form of negotiated confessions of faith) and between movements as they grew and differentiated. In Switzerland, too, religious change proceeded through interplay of internal and external settlements, each driven by what had been learned since the last: this process began during the differentiation of the Anabaptist from the Reformed movement, and continued well into the eighteenth century.

In the mid-1520s, Swiss evangelicals’ relationship to the Lutheran movement to their north became a critical issue. In addition to theological differences among the leading thinkers, tactical considerations also differentiated the largely urban movements in the southwest from the more princely evangelical churches in the northeast. The iconic moment of differentiation took place at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, when Luther, Zwingli, and many other evangelical leaders spent three days trying and failing to overcome one doctrinal difference, the question of the “real presence” in the Eucharist. Although the colloquy was not the last effort to establish concord between the Saxons and Swiss, the sharp disagreement that arose between the two crucial figures, Luther and Zwingli, turned the real presence into a polarizing point that spurred both sides to find other issues on which they could not agree. The resulting dynamic of disputation and rejection cemented the formation of two separate “Protestant” churches over the subsequent generation.

Similar processes were at work within the nascent Swiss Reformed church. During the 1530s and 1540s, in particular, multiple actors struggled to determine how the theological and ecclesiological debates of the 1520s would shape new institutions and power structures. In the Confederation, three axes characterized this long process. First, and most obviously, relations between Protestants and Catholics became a central issue in the Confederation’s politics. The small size and geographic entanglement of the Swiss cantons and their associates made real religious coexistence unavoidable, given the Kappel settlement. This issue will be discussed in detail below. The second axis involved the internal evolution of the emerging Swiss Reformed church. Here, critical turning points included Bern’s seizure of the Vaud and Geneva in 1536, the emergence of a second focal evangelical movement when Jean Calvin became the leader of the Genevan church, and a struggle over alleged Lutheranizers in the Bern and Basel churches.[34] These interlocking developments eventually generated a series of increasingly formal confessions of faith, which in turn framed later conflicts: they included a Consensus Tigurinus between Jean Calvin in Geneva and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, and most definitively, Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession of 1566.[35] Finally, both Reformed and Catholic Swiss confronted heterodox movements, including indigenous Anabaptists and several waves of primarily Italian religious refugees. The repression and exclusion of the radicals also shaped the way conformity was imposed on orthodox communities of Catholics and Reformed Protestants.

The nature of Reformation settlements in the Swiss context was thus complex. For both contemporaries and subsequent scholars, the Second Landfrieden of 1531—something that became part of the complex of agreements known as “confederation law” (eidgenössisches Recht)—represented a key point of reference for the Catholic–Reformed axis of conflict. The events of the following decades, however—driven by major developments outside Switzerland, but always mediated by the Confederation’s own complex structure—required constant revision of what this and other settlements meant. Despite the diverse conflicts that characterized late medieval Europe and Switzerland, public discourses long emphasized the centrality of a single Christian commonwealth under one God. Even in 1577, the Zurich divine Josias Simler could write in his description of the Swiss republic: “And God the Lord selected powerful and wise men around the whole circle of the world, by whom humans—who were still dispersed like wild animals—were assembled into particular communities, taught how to worship God, and ruled through good courts and regulations.”[36] The transition from this vision of multiple communities flourishing under the dual umbrellas of imperial and papal sovereignty to a politicized nation divided by faith as well as by language, alliance, and interest, was profound. The next section of this chapter turns to the ways the Swiss responded to this change. Although exemplary studies over the past generation have begun addressing how old concepts were reinscribed in new situations, or new practices grew out of emerging disjunctions, the study of post-Reformation reimagination promises to remain a rich vein into the future.

REIMAGINING KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE IN THE SWISS CONFEDERATION: THE PATH TO CONFESSIONAL CULTURES

A process of polarization driven by religious difference eventually affected every aspect of life in sixteenth-century Switzerland, from politics to family life to the definition of sacred space. The Confederation’s distinctive texture of religious difference, ranging from homogeneous blocs such as Catholic Inner Switzerland and the Reformed Bernese territories (including Vaud) to side-by-side Catholic and Reformed congregations sharing a single village church, as in the Grisons and the Thurgau, shaped this polarization and the new practices it provoked. Even in religiously homogeneous territories, however, contact across confessional lines was frequent, since all sorts of economic and social connections crossed the boundaries of confession. Regional market towns such as Zurich, for example, remained vital for Catholic as well as Reformed hinterlands. For clerical and secular authorities, the resulting mingling became a source of constant anxiety as they struggled to teach and discipline their populations; yet it also meant that everyone in the Swiss lands interacted with people with differing religious views, often at very close range.

In this context, many medieval assumptions about hierarchy, orthodoxy, and authority no longer applied, it seemed to many contemporaries, even as the realities of religious difference and coexistence raised new problems and possibilities. The adjustments the inhabitants of post-Reformation Switzerland made often took the form of reinscribing older categories and values onto new circumstances, or of adapting practices familiar in one area to the management of new conflicts. Most challenging, perhaps, were the challenges to authority that the evangelical movement’s success brought to the fore. Thus, Zwingli and his peers justified their claims to speak sacred truth in part by appealing to the authority of conscience, of texts, and of communities; in rejecting the authority of the existing church to speak definitively, they expanded on other existing ideas to justify their new movements.

Reimagining authority also meant rethinking many practices of everyday life, as well. If marriage was not a sacrament, then communities and families had to find new ways to understand the relationships among spouses and their kin. Who could regulate—and perhaps dissolve—marriages and the ties between families that they created? Who, if not the clergy, should sanction adultery or manage charity? If individuals reading Bible texts could question pastors and magistrates, then the Word too took on an expanded role in many situations. If mutually hereticizing congregations shared a space for worship, that sacred space was no longer the same. Because religion was deeply embedded in every institution of early modern Europe, changed religious understandings required change in every aspect of life.

Addressing such questions within the politically complex and religiously heterogeneous Swiss landscape shaped the answers in lasting ways. In a recent analysis, Thomas Maissen noted that the process of cultural and social reimagining provoked by the Reformation settlements in Switzerland was long lasting, and can be “effortlessly traced into the era of the Sonderbund [1840s] and the Kulturkampf [1860s–1890s].”[37] He therefore argues that historians need to go beyond the confessionalization paradigm of the last generation of research, which emphasizes how Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics participated in fundamentally similar processes of political and cultural modernization. Instead, it is time to pay equal attention to how diverging Christian churches helped generate distinct local “confessional cultures” with their own practices and attitudes.[38] The Swiss territories, Maissen notes, “offer themselves almost ideally for such studies of religious practice in everyday life, because here comparisons on an intimate scale can be observed.”[39] The remainder of this chapter will consider examples of such confessional cultures as they emerged in the Swiss context.

At the heart of the evangelical movements of the 1520s lay a challenge to existing authority: the authority of the Pope to define doctrine, the authority of the church to prosecute dissent, and the authority of the emperor and magistrates to suppress heresy. Different reformers appealed to the Bible, to the community, and even to the Holy Spirit as privileged and authentic sources of authority for their rejection of the status quo. Once they undermined existing sacred authority, however, the role of rulers and magistrates also came into question. This helps explain why determining who should decide questions of religious adherence and practice became a key issue addressed in the settlements of the 1520s and 1530s. Beginning in the Grisons in 1526, when the individual communes declared their right to appoint and dismiss pastors, political authorities in the Confederation became the arbiters of religion. Even in victory, the Catholic cantons in 1531 did not seek to reimpose the authority of Rome over the defeated Protestants, but accepted their authority to choose their own faith.

After 1531, the question of religion in areas where multiple cantons ruled became—and long remained—the most difficult one facing the Confederation. The Second Landfrieden of Kappel devoted an entire paragraph to such domains, but translating the provisions of the treaty into practice remained intensely contested. In just one Thurgau town, Bischofszell, for example, settling the ownership of religious property took five years of direct negotiation among the cantons, which produced a minutely detailed settlement. The parties agreed that the local college of canons’ secular jurisdiction would end, provided that converted canons could be assigned as pastors to Reformed parishes, transferred nine-tenths of the parish income to the Reformed congregation, and established a new endowment, divided half and half between the religious parties, to support two schoolmasters. Bischofszell’s Catholics obtained used of the town church on Sunday mornings until 7 a.m. (8 a.m. in winter), and retained possession of the baptismal font, which they had to share with the Reformed congregation. Similar fine-grained settlements emerged around the Confederation in many places where members of both confessions mixed in daily life.[40]

At moments of high tension, voices on each side insisted that the bi-confessional Confederation should be abandoned. After the catastrophe of 1531, Zwingli’s successor as head of the Zurich evangelical church was Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575). Bullinger confronted internal skepticism about the path taken by the new church, but was much more worried about the Catholic Swiss cantons. Indeed, he even appealed, without success, to the Zurich council to abandon the Confederation, since he mistrusted the Catholic cantons’ willingness to accept Reformed worship in Zurich as the Kappel treaty provided. International tensions later led the Catholic cantons to sign a treaty with external Catholic powers in 1586, the Goldener Bund, that explicitly put faith before their confederal alliances, but they ultimately shied away from acting as the Bund demanded. In the 1630s, Schwyz’s delegation to the Diet suggested dividing the condominia, rather than continuing to rule them together.[41] Yet at each juncture, enough voices sought to maintain unity despite religious divisions that the alliance survived. When Catholics and Protestants in 1592 sought to establish separate graveyards in Üsslingen (Thurgau), for example, the Zurich council rejected the idea: “If we should be divided from one another by our burials upon our deaths, then we would also lose our living commonality (Gemeinschafft) with one another.”[42] By re-emphasizing principles central to their political culture when facing religious conflict, the members of the Confederation ultimately found a post-confessional modus vivendi that preserved their polity without resolving the religious divide.

The Confederation’s traditions thus provided a framework for contentious survival, but when Catholics and Protestants lived side-by-side, the resulting friction required rethinking the meaning of community as well. Such rethinking took place in two primary contexts: regions where religious adherence was prescribed by the magistrates, such as most of the XIII sovereign cantons; and areas of mixed confessional adherence, which included the cantons of Glarus and Appenzell, the associated Grisons, and some of the condominia, including Aargau, Thurgau, Orbe-Eschallens, and various others. For the sovereign cantons, repeated conflicts arose over the meaning and reach of religious homogeneity. A detailed local study of Bernese villages by Heinrich Richard Schmidt shows how difficult the imposition of religious uniformity was in the largest Reformed cantons. Even though by the 1560s local leaders shared their Bernese overlords’ concerns about family and community discipline, they showed no hesitation in ignoring or actively subverting parts of the Reformed agenda that threatened community cohesion or their sense of entitled tradition. Excessively zealous pastors found it impossible to impose their will in matters ranging from tithe collection to prohibitions on dancing.[43]

Local zeal could also trump political prudence on the part of more cautious magistrates. In both 1656 and 1712, pious peasants among Lucerne’s subjects pressured the city to take an aggressive stance in a religious civil war—successfully the first time, but with disastrous consequences the second. In the heart of Reformed bastions such as Basel, meanwhile, the community of pastors and professors after 1675 so undermined a key Reformed doctrinal statement of that year, the Formula of Consensus, that the city’s magistrates first ignored transgressions against it, then ultimately rejected it altogether.[44]

In territories that were religiously mixed and jointly ruled by Catholic and Protestant cantons, struggles over the meaning of community became especially complex. Some congregations and pastors struggled incessantly to improve their faith’s position at the expense of the other, taking every dispute right up to the confederal Diet. Yet many individuals seemed little concerned about spiritual purity, and some even took advantage of religious differences to advance their own agendas. During the first generation after the Reformation, the provision of clergy to congregations was the greatest concern of both magistrates and people in divided communities. Struggles over clerical endowments and appointments could go on for decades, even though a single cleric sometimes continued to provide services to both faiths, as in Glarus into the 1540s, or else one group worshipped in a neighboring church of their own confession, like the Protestants in Zizers, Trimmis, and Undervaz until 1610. Where congregations shared a church—not uncommon in some parts of the Confederation—conflicts over graveyards, church bells, and baptismal fonts led to extended lawsuits, sometimes interrupted by one side or the other by riots or faits accomplis. Despite the reams of heated rhetoric in the archives, however—coming, above all, from local clergymen—outright violence was relatively rare before 1600. Even when riots did break out, as in Thurgau in 1608 or in Grisons from 1613–1616, they often reflected village factional disputes as much as theological disagreements.[45]

Across Europe, the Reformation movements had profound effects on family life. In the bi-confessional Swiss Confederation, the regulation of the family became a site of intense institution formation as well as ongoing conflict, as both magistrates and citizens struggled to redefine deeply embedded principles and practices. The Reformed cities all created new civil courts to regulate marriage and moral behavior, making marriages in particular a fertile field for both maneuvering and conflict.[46] The new courts allowed divorces, but made it harder for young people to marry against their parents’ wishes. They also prosecuted adultery and other sexual offenses much more systematically than had been the case before the Reformation and, as Susanna Burghartz showed for Basel, increasingly sought to enforce sexual and marital discipline, and in ways that disadvantaged the women involved in the conflicts they judged. Yet judges also recognized human weakness, and sometimes showed surprising flexibility. In Geneva, the heart of Calvinist discipline, Robert Kingdon found examples of forbearance and pastoral care, as well as punishment, in the treatment of adultery and divorce.[47]

After the Council of Trent (1562), Catholic clergymen also pushed for tighter regulation of marriage and sexuality, paying special attention to the clergy. Surprisingly, however, priests in several cantons complained in 1569 when ordered to set aside their concubines, and stop living with any unrelated women. In addition to rejecting the papal nuncio’s authority, they argued that priests without concubines might be a greater risk to honorable women, a line supported by local authorities in several cantons.[48] In the Thurgau, local subjects even found ways to exploit religious differences to their own advantage. Reformed doctrine allowed no dispensations for marriages between close cousins (which was often a strategy for preserving family property), in contrast to the flexibility that the Catholic Church showed on this issue. Some Thurgau Protestants, who were subject to the Zurich marriage court, learned in the late sixteenth century that the threat of converting to Catholicism would force the court to yield. Conversions and mixed marriages became additional points of conflict—and of negotiation—in the seventeenth century, often bringing confessional politics into family disputes in the process.[49]

Finally, recent research has probed how the very understanding of sacrality changed after the Reformation. Reformers bitterly attacked the entire system of sacred objects, actors, spaces, and behaviors that characterized late medieval piety. Nevertheless, both spaces and objects continued to hold spiritual meaning for Swiss Reformed worshippers, who built new religious practices largely by reconfiguring pre-Reformation elements. In addition, because Catholics and Protestants disagreed about how objects and spaces could be sacred, efforts to establish, monopolize, or deny sacrality came to act as a form of symbolic communication, directed not only at God but also at the other party.

Daniela Hacke and Bruno Z’Graggen both provide vivid examples of such communication (and its frequent rupture) from Switzerland after 1550. Hacke, for example, traces several years’ debate over placing a second baptismal font in the church of Zurzach (Aargau), which involved repeated cycles of communication between Zurich and the Catholic cantons who shared political authority in the Aargau. Each side insisted that its actions were compatible with the Landfrieden. Their arguments about the placement of the font(s) revealed that the interior of the church was not only a sacred space with differing conceptual architecture for Protestants and Catholics, but that it had also become a space of political conversation: demanding to put a font in the chancel or behind the church door became a statement about power, law, and tradition.[50]

Swiss bi-confessional regions were particularly rich in such conversations because no actor—neither the Catholic or Protestant overlords, nor the Catholic or Protestant inhabitants—could unilaterally impose their own wishes on churches. Indeed, each party not only had to act tactically, but also had to constantly adjust its communications strategy as the situation evolved. This can be seen clearly in Zurich’s changing rhetorical strategies as it struggled with its Catholic co-regents of the Thurgau. Until 1600, simple evocations of the Landfrieden seemed a sufficient defense of its position to Zurich’s government, but as the legal context changed, city magistrates turned to interviewing retired pastors of Zurich churches, who could testify about earlier customs. When the city’s rivals rejected such testimony as irrelevant to the law, its magistrates abandoned such testimony in the 1630s in favor of close interpretation of the exact words of the Landfrieden.
[51]

Detailed local studies are important because they undermine an older picture in the literature of “confessional rigidity” in Switzerland after about 1575. Bi-confessional regions in particular reveal ongoing change that constantly undermined the positions that the confessional blocs sought to defend. Such fluidity can also be seen within the confessionally uniform full members of the Confederation. Francisca Loetz has closely studied how authorities in Lucerne and Zurich responded to accusations of blasphemy on the part of their subjects. While neither the formal definition nor the actual punishment of blasphemy changed drastically from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, both individuals’ reasons for making blasphemous statements and magistrates’ understanding of what they were punishing (or ignoring) showed steady shifts, until the category ultimately lost its potency. Blasphemous statements were prosecuted with fines or dishonorable punishment before 1675 (though very rarely with execution), but Swiss courts by the early eighteenth century stopped regarding misuse of God’s name as a crime at all.[52]

Twice, in 1656 and in 1712, the ongoing struggle among the Confederation’s elites over religion—communicating, defying, blocking, enabling, or ignoring their religious rivals’ wishes—broke down, leading to short civil wars. In 1656, a spiral of accusations that began with Schwyz’s apprehension of a group of crypto-Anabaptists—some of whom were executed, others exiled—led to ill-considered aggression on Zurich’s part. Embarrassingly defeated in its military goals, Zurich and the Swiss Reformed had to settle for a restatement of the status quo in the third Landfrieden (after 1529 and 1531). Two generations later, ill-considered aggression by Lucerne, spurred in part by its own zealous subjects who forced action against the city magistrates’ better judgment, led to a second brief war and a fourth, slightly modified Landfrieden that established parity for Protestants in the subject territories. Ironically, such restatement of a treaty already in effect for nearly two centuries shows how reinscription of old language (about confederate unity and the right of each canton to choose its faith) in new situations allowed the Confederation to adapt to shifting currents of power and wealth, even while maintaining the appearance of static divisions and relentless gridlock.

CONCLUSION

While regionally differentiated, the Reformation movements that transformed worship and religious knowledge in Europe were not in themselves local phenomena, nor did they correlate directly with national or proto-national developments. Insofar as most Europeans around 1500 imagined their church as a universal and transcendent institution, it is thus a misnomer to speak of a Swiss (or German, or English, or Italian) Reformation. Yet that universal institution was inevitably instantiated in local contexts, subject to regional political pressures and to the concerns of Europeans whose horizon (beyond the church) was often very local indeed. The course of religious change in the Swiss lands very much depended on the cultural, social, and political conditions that prevailed there, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate. We can bridge these two perspectives by comparing the trajectories of movement, settlement, and reimagination that appeared across Europe during the sixteenth century. Movements started locally, in the actions of one or a few individuals, but could enter larger circuits of knowledge and action in the form of sermons or pamphlets. In this larger context they could grow or fail, could accept or reject new impulses from other actors and locales—but all ultimately reached moments of settlement.

Settlements inevitably involved politics, including in the specific sense of action on the part of empowered actors and institutions. Some movements thrived and compelled settlements in their favor, others compromised, and others still faced forces too powerful to overcome and were persecuted and, in some cases, entirely silenced. Switzerland’s settlements in the form of political treaties mandating and organizing coexistence belong to one range of possibilities, shared by the Peace of Augsburg (1555) in the empire and the Edict of Nantes (1598) in France. Indeed, the Swiss managed to reach and formalize this kind of solution for their evangelical movements (a solution that drew on rich Swiss political antecedents with parallels across the Continent) before any other region although there is no reason to believe that their Landfrieden became a direct model for settlements elsewhere.

Reimagination, finally, is a fundamental aspect of all kinds of cultural and institutional change. Humans routinely reshape past knowledge and practices to cope with new conjunctures. Even where they were locally suppressed, therefore, the various Reformation movements forced rethinking on the part of all involved. In the Swiss case, reimagination carefully preserved certain fixed points of reference—the Confederation of XIII members and their associates, collective political institutions dominated by narrow family groups, and a militant mythology combined with cautious and prudent interactions with the larger powers around them—while adjusting practice and revising values so that the powerful changes taking place within and around the Confederation could be accommodated. Very little, it turns out, was truly fixed: neither authority, nor the family, nor the sacred itself was unaffected by the chain of settlements and learning processes that the early Reformation triggered. In this, the Swiss Reformation was entirely European.

NOTES

1. Geneva was another vital center of the Protestant Reformation movement. In the 1520s, however, Geneva was not part of the Swiss Confederation, and it remained only a loose ally politically after military intervention by Bern and Fribourg in 1536. For this reason, discussion of Geneva and its place in the Reformed movement appears in Chapter 11.

2. For an overview of the Confederation’s political history, Clive Church and Randolph C. Head, A Concise History of Switzerland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Standard works in Swiss languages include Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte, 2 vols. (Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1972–1977); Comité pour une Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse (ed.), Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses, 3 vols. (Lausanne: Payot, 1982–1983); Georg Kreis (ed.), Geschichte der Schweiz (Basel: Schwabe, 2014).

3. Magisterial for fifteenth-century Switzerland: Bernhard Stettler, Die Eidgenossenschaft im 15. Jahrhundert: Die Suche nach einem gemeinsamen Nenner (Zurich: Markus Widmer-Dean, 2004).

4. A well-known Zurich drama from 1515 stated that “peasants are the real nobles, while the nobles have become peasants.” Friederike Christ-Kutter (ed.), Das Spiel von den Alten und Jungen Eidgenossen (Bern: Franke, 1963).

5. The currently important term Konfessionskulturen is refined for the Swiss context by Thomas Maissen, “Konfessionskulturen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft: eine Einfühurung,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007): 225–246. As has been the case in Germany, research in Switzerland has recently turned away from the confessionalization paradigm originally proposed by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, favoring cultural approaches, as seen in the work of scholars such as Daniela Hacke and Francisca Loetz (see notes 44 and 51, below). At the same time, a turn back to theological analysis has thrived recently, led by Emidio Campi at the Zurich Institute for Reformation Research, Bruce Gordon, now at Yale Divinity School, and Amy Nelson Burnett at the University of Nebraska. See e.g., Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon, and Christian Moser (eds.), Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) for representative contributions. The recent historiography is reviewed in André Holenstein, “Reformation und Konfessionalisierung in der Geschichtsforschung der Deutschschweiz,” Archive for Reformation History 100 (2009): 65–87; Max Engammare, “Des pasteurs sans pasteur: Historiographie de la Réforme en Suisse romande, 1956–2008,” Archive for Reformation History 100 (2009): 88–115.

6. On the course of the evangelical movement and Reformation in Switzerland through the 1540s, see Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchster University Press, 2002). Biographies of Zwingli include Robert C. Walton, Zwingli’s Theocracy (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto, 1967); Urlich Gäbler, Huldrych Zwingli: His Life and Work (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1986); Gottfried Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981); W. P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

7. This group, the nucleus of the Swiss Radical Reformation, had parallels in the empire in such figures as Thomas Münzter and Clement Ziegler. Key new interpretation in Andrea Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli: Die frühe Täuferbewegung in der Schweiz (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003); in addition see George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 366ff.

8. Detailed records of his sermons exist only after 1522. Handbuch, 438–439.

9. Irene Gysel and Barbara Hebling (eds.), Zürichs letzte Äbtissin Katharina von Zimmern (Zurich: NZZ, 1999). On women and preaching in the larger region, see Tom Scott, “The Collective Response of Women to Early Reformed Preaching: Four Small Communities and their Preachers Compared,” Archive for Reformation History 102 (2011): 7–32.

10. Ulrich Zwingli, “Von Erkiesen und Freiheit der Speisen,” Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Schwetschke, 1905), 88–136 <http://www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?n=Werk.8> (accessed May 15, 2015); see esp. the summary on pp. 129–134.

11. Strübind, Eifriger, 125, captures this important dimension in her analysis of the 1522 events: “Wie bei allen folgdenden Aktionen der Reformanhänger wurde die geforderte Erneuerung der Kirche bzw. der Bruch mit den alten kirchlichen Ordnung stets in ihren äußeren Symbolen oder Bräuchen sichtbar gemacht.”

12. Fabrice Flückiger, “Le choix de religion: Le rôle de l’autorité politique dans les disputes religieuses des années 1520,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 60 (2010), reviews the significance of such political choices.

13. Detailed review of the local movements in Handbuch, I: 466–488.

14. In Radical Reformation, Williams sets the Swiss movement in larger context. Strübind, Eifriger, provides the most recent and critical analysis of the early movement within Switzerland (and specifically around Zurich).

15. Handbuch, I: 456.

16. Urs B. Leu and Christian Scheidegger (eds.), Die Zürcher Täufer 1525–1700 (Zurich: TVZ, 2007), 18–52.

17. Peter Blickle has characterized this confluence as a Gemeindereformation or communal Reformation, in Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).

18. Rosie Fuhrmann, “Christenrecht, Kirchengut und Dorfgemeinde. Überlegungen zur historischen Entwicklung kommunaler Rechte in der Kirche und deren Bedeutung für eine Rezeption der Reformation auf dem Lande,” Itinera 8 (1988): 14–32; Immacolata Saulle Hippenmeyer, Nachbarschaft, Pfarrei und Gemeinde in Grabünden 1400–1600 (Chur: Desertina, 1997).

19. Peter Kamber, Der Ittinger Sturm: Eine historische Reportage (Ittingen: Stiftung Kartause Ittingen, 1997).

20. Otto Clavadetscher, “Die Bauernunruhen im Gebiet der heutigen Eidgenossenschaft,” in Fridolin Dörrer (ed.), Die Bauernkriege und Michael Gaismair (Innsbruck: Tiroler Landesarchiv, 1982), 153–160.

21. Oskar Vasella, “Bauernkrieg und Reformation in Graubünden,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Geschichte 20 (1940): 1–65.

22. Zurich’s strong anti-mercenary position, preached as well by Zwingli, helped cement the position of anti-evangelical elites, particularly in Luzern and Fribourg. André Zünd, Gescheiterte Stadt- und Landreformationen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der Schweiz (Basel: Schwabe, 1999).

23. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) examines such situations across Europe.

24. Handbuch, I: 480–485. On rural Bern, Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Dorf und Religion: Reformierte Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1995); Peter Bierbrauer, Freiheit und Gemeinde im Berner Oberland, 1300–1700 (Bern: Historischer Verein, 1991).

25. Hans R. Guggisberg, Basel in the Sixteenth Century: Aspects of a City Republic before, during and after the Reformation (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982); Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

26. Zünd, Gescheiterte Stadt- und Landreformationen, provides a systematic comparative analysis. See Gordon, Swiss Reformation, 86–119 for the regional variants, with reference to additional literature in German, French, and Italian.

27. On these territories, see Head, “Shared Lordship, Authority and Administration: The Exercise of Dominion in the Gemeine Herrschaften of the Swiss Confederation, 1417–1600,” Central European History 30 (1997): 489–512.

28. James Blakeley, “Aspects de la confessionalisation durant l’introduction de la Réforme en Pays de Vaud,” Revue Historique Vaudoise 119 (2011): 127–138; and “Pilgrims, Idolaters and the Devout: The Transgression of Religious Boundaries in the Territory of Vaud, 1536–1580,” in Thomas Kaufmann, Anselm Schubert, and Kaspar von Greyerz (eds.), Frühneuzeitliche Konfessionskulturen (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 2008), 101–117.

29. Emidio Campi, Il protestantesimo di lingua italiana nella Svizzera: Figure e movimenti tra Cinquecento e Ottocento (Turin: Claudiana, 2000).

30. Lorna Jane Abray, The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500–1598 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Burnett, The Yoke of Christ: Martin Bucer and Christian Discipline (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Publishers, 1994).

31. Georg Kreis, “Die Kappeler Milchsuppe: Kernstück der schweizerischen Versöhnungsideologie,” in Vorgeschichten zur Gegenwart (Basel: Schwabe, 2003), I: 148–165.

32. Olivier Christin, Le paix de religion: L’ autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

33. Head, “Fragmented Dominion, Fragmented Churches: The Institutionalization of the Landfrieden in the Thurgau, 1531–1630,” Archive for Reformation History 96 (2005): 117–144.

34. The Calvinist movement is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 11. On Lutheranizers, see Burnett, “The Myth of the Swiss Lutherans: Martin Bucer and the Eucharistic Controversy in Bern,” Zwingliana 32 (2005): 45–70.

35. Gordon, Swiss Reformation, 175–187.

36. Josias Simler, Regiment Gmeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft (Zurich: Froschauer, 1577), A iiv. See Thomas Maissen, Die Geburt der Republik: Staatsverständnis und Repräsentation in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008).

37. Maissen, “Konfessionskulturen,” 236; the term Konfessionskulturen cited from Thomas Kaufmann, Dreissigjähriger Krieg und Westfälischer Friede. Kirchengeschichtliche Studien zur lutherischen Konfessionskultur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 7.

38. Maissen, “Konfessionskulturen,” 238.

39. Maisen, “Konfessionskulturen,” 231.

40. Bischofszell discussed in Head, “Fragmented Dominion”; see also Frauke Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis. Reformierte Rituale in der gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt Bischofszell im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

41. On Bullinger’s suggestion in 1531: Hans Ulrich Bächtold, “Bullinger und die Krise der Zürcher Reformation,” in Ulrich Gäbler and Erland Herkenrath (eds.), Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–1575: Gesammelte Aufsätze zum 400. Todestag (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1975), 269–289, esp. 283–288; André Holenstein, “Reformatorischer Auftrag und Tagespolitik bei Heinrich Bullinger,” in Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz (eds.), Heinrich Bullinger: Life—Thought—Influence, 2 vols. (Zurich: TVZ, 2007), 177–232. For 1586, see Albert Müller, Der Goldenen Bund von 1586 (Zug: Geschichtsfreund, 1965); Rudolf Bolzern, Spanien, Mailand und die katholische Eidgenossenschaft. Militärische, wirtschaftliche und politische Beziehungen zur Zeit des Gesandten Alfonso Casati (1594–1621) (Lucerne: Rex, 1982); Schwyz’s demands of the 1630s have not been studied systematically; some background in Frieda Gallati, Die Eidgenossenschaft und der Kaiserhof zur Zeit Ferdinands II. und Ferdinands III. 1619–1657: Geschichte der formellen Lostrennung der Schweiz vom Deutschen Reich im Westfälischen Frieden (Zurich: Leeman, 1932).

42. “Söllent wir tod von einandern Inn der begrebtnuß syn gesünderet, So habe man glych lëbendig ouch khein gmeinschafft mitt einanderen.” Staatsarchiv Luzern, F1 161 (1592).

43. Schmidt, Dorf und Religion.

44. On Lucerne, Martin Merki-Vollenwyder, Unruhige Untertanen. Die Rebellion der Luzerner Bauern im Zweiten Villmergerkrieg (1712) (Lucerne: Rex, 1995); on Basel, Camilla Hermanin, Samuel Werenfels: Il Dibattito sulla Libertà di Coscienza a Basilea agli Inizi del Settecento (Florence: Olschki, 2003).

45. Literature includes Hacke, “Church, Space and Conflict: Religious Co-Existence and Political Communcation in Seventeenth-Century Switzerland,” German History 25 (2007): 285–312; Head, “Religious Coexistence and Confessional Conflict in the Vier Dörfer: Practices of Toleration in Eastern Switzerland, 1525–1615,” in John C. Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (eds.), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 145–165; Bruno Z’Graggen, Tyrannenmord im Toggenburg. Fürstäbtische Herrschaft und protestantischer Widerstand um 1600 (Zurich: Chronos, 1999).

46. The institutional history in Walther Kohler, Das Zürcher Ehegericht und seine Auswirkung in der Deutschen Schweiz zur Zeit Zwinglis (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1932); major contributions in Thomas Max Safley, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest, 1550–1620 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1984).

47. Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit, Orte der Unzucht. Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999); Robert Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

48. Dominik Sieber, Jesuitische Missionierung, priesterliche Liebe, sakramentale Magie: Volkskulturen in Luzern, 1563–1614 (Basel: Schwabe, 2005), 75–105.

49. Frauke Volkland, “Gemeine Herrschaft und ehegerichtliche Zuständigkeiten: Zur Macht der Beherrschten im Thurgau des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Itinera 21 (1999): 53–64. On conversions, Heike Bock, Konversionen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft: Zürich und Luzern im konfessionellen Vergleich (Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academica, 2009); Volkland, Konfession.

50. Hacke, “Church, Space and Conflict”; and “Der Kirchenraum als politischer Handlungsraum: Konflikte um die liturgische Ausstattung von Dorfkirchen in der Eidgenossenschaft,” in Susanne Wegmann and Gabriele Wimböck (eds.), Konfessionen im Kirchenraum: Dimensionen des Sakralraums in der Frühen Neuzeit (Korb: Didymos, 2007), 137–157.

51. Head, “Collecting Testimony and Parsing Texts in Zurich: Documentary Strategies for Defending Reformed Identities in the Thurgau, 1600–1656,” in Robin Barnes and Marjorie Plummer (eds.), Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 289–305.

52. Loetz, Dealing with God: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zurich to a Cultural History of Religiousness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

FURTHER READING

Burnett, Amy Nelson. Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and their Message in Basel, 1529–1629. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Burnett, Amy Nelson and Emidio Campi (eds.) A Companion to the Swiss Reformation. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2016.

Campi, Emidio and Peter Opitz (eds.) Heinrich Bullinger: Life—Thought—Influence, 2 vols. Zurich: TVZ, 2007.

Church, Clive and Randolph C. Head. A Concise History of Switzerland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Engammare, Max.“Des pasteurs sans pasteur: Historiographie de la Réforme en Suisse romande, 1956–2008,” Archive for Reformation History 100 (2009): 88–115.

Gordon, Bruce. The Swiss Reformation. Manchester: Manchster University Press, 2002.

Gordon, Bruce and Emidio Campi (eds.) Architect of Reformation: An Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504–1575. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004.

Guggisberg, Hans R. Basel in the Sixteenth Century: Aspects of a City Republic before, during and after the Reformation. St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982.

Hacke, Daniela. “Church, Space and Conflict: Religious Co-Existence and Political Communcation in Seventeenth-Century Switzerland,” German History 25 (2007): 285–312.

Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte, 2 vols. Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1972–1977.

Head, Randolph C. “Fragmented Dominion, Fragmented Churches: The Institutionalization of the Landfrieden in the Thurgau, 1531–1630,” Archive for Reformation History 96 (2005): 117–144.

Holenstein, André. “Reformation und Konfessionalisierung in der Geschichtsforschung der Deutschschweiz,” Archive for Reformation History 100 (2009): 65–87.

Loetz, Francisca. Dealing with God: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zurich to a Cultural History of Religiousness. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

Maissen, Thomas. “Konfessionskulturen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft: eine Einfühurung,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007): 225–246.

Stephens, W. P. Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Walton, Robert. Zwingli’s Theocracy. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1967.

Wandel, Lee Palmer. Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

CHAPTER 10

THE RADICALS

C. SCOTT DIXON

IN 1699 a book appeared in Frankfurt that divided Protestant opinion. Some scholars embraced it as a work of exceptional learning and deep piety. At the University of Halle, the seedbed of German Pietism, a student remembered the year when it first appeared: “What joy there was in Halle,” he wrote, “no meal was complete without a member of the theology faculty reading something out of the book. It was recommended to the students, indeed, heartily encouraged, to go out and purchase a copy.”[1] But not all reviews were favorable. For the Gotha superintendent Ernst Salomon Cyprian (1673–1745), for instance, an Orthodox Lutheran who would spend over thirty years preparing a refutation, it was the worst book since the birth of Christ. Other Lutheran scholars agreed. Within two years of its appearance, there were at least eight folio-sized denunciations in print, including a five hundred page critical deconstruction by Johann Friedrich Corvinus that accused the author of being a liar, a fabricator, a biased historian, and a patron of heretics. The name of the author was Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), Lutheran clergyman, latter-day Pietist and historian, and the book was his Nonpartisan History of the Church and of Heretics (1699/1700). Despite its size it became an immediate best-seller, said to have earned its publisher Thomas Fritsch enough money to purchase a house made entirely of stone.

A few reflections on Arnold’s History of Heretics (as it was popularly known) is a useful place to start a survey of Protestant radicalism in the early modern period, for it was the first work to raise the issues that still occupy historians today. It was the first attempt at a historical timeline, for instance. Arnold began his survey with the age of the Apostles, but the second volume was devoted entirely to the radicals from the rise of the Reformation to the year 1688. In his view, the movement spanned the entire early modern period, and it stood in a very close relationship with the Reformation. This was a story most mainstream Protestants did not think should be told. According to Cyprian, revealing too much about the “allegations of sectarianism, endless quarrelling over words, the fabrication of heretics, and similar accusations,” as Arnold was doing, would awaken doubts about the orthodox church and overthrow the Protestant order.[2]

In addition to these historical dimensions, the History of Heretics was also the first work to touch on the deeper historiographical issues. Above all, it was the first systematic attempt to find a place for the radicals in traditional interpretations of Protestant history. To that point, the central purpose of a work of Protestant history had been to preserve the idea that the Reformation was divinely inspired, brought into being through the words and actions of mainstream Reformers such as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Arnold, however, rejected this idea, holding that all church history was necessarily a history of decline, an inevitable result of the in-creeping of fallen humanity. Instead, he placed his focus on the faith and the conduct of a few enlightened souls who had surfaced on occasion throughout history, including those Christians who had separated from the churches built in the image of the mainstream confessions. Counted among these so-called “witnesses of the truth” were many of the radicals of the Protestant Reformation. This was an inversion of traditional interpretations, and one that made the radicals the main subject of Christian history.

Once we leave aside Arnold’s teleology of religious decline, much of the history and many of the associated historiographical problems in the History of Heretics seem familiar. There is still no general consensus, for instance, about the history of the radical movement, where it begins or where it ends and whether we should think of it in terms of a single narrative or a series of separate histories that are only joined in retrospect. Of equal ambiguity is the issue of context. How should we understand the radical tradition in relation to the history of the mainstream Reformation? Does it belong to the Protestant narrative that originates in Wittenberg and Zurich or is it better conceived in separate terms, as a movement with its own leaders, its own beliefs, and its own sacred sites of origin? And then there is the question of definition, one that stumped even Arnold. What was the essential difference between a Protestant radical and a mainstream Lutheran or Calvinist? What sort of beliefs and practices set them apart?

In order to provide some answers to these questions this survey will group its thoughts around four main themes. It will begin with a history of Reformation radicalism, which has been pieced together on the basis of our current state of knowledge. It will then turn to an exploration of the historiographical issues, primarily the study of terms, forms, and types, and follow this with a survey of some of the main theological ideas, which will help to situate the movement in relation to the mainstream Protestant faiths. The survey will end with a few reflections on the importance of the radicals for the history of the Reformation and indeed the history of Protestantism tout court.

THE ORIGINS OF PROTESTANT RADICALISM

The history of Protestant radicalism begins with the Wittenberg movement, a period of unrest and reform that lasted from October 1521 to February 1522. It originated in the Augustinian monastery under the direction of the resident clergyman Gabriel Zwilling (1487–1558), who declared his allegiance to the evangelical party by referring to the Catholic service as a “devilish work,” interpreting the Mass in a symbolic sense, encouraging the monks to abandon the cloister, and offering communion in two kinds (sub utraque specie), which quickly became one of the defining features of Lutheranism. In short order both Philip Melanchthon and Andreas Karlstadt followed suit by ministering communion in two kinds, and they soon gathered widespread support in the town. Archival documentation makes reference to public unrest, armed students heckling and abusing the clergy, and small-scale public rituals of inversion. And the tensions just intensified when the so-called Zwickau prophets arrived in December, three men from the borders of Hussite Bohemia who claimed to be guided by the Spirit and preached the need for further changes, including, rather ominously, an end to infant baptism. For a time the movement won the support of the authorities. On January 24, 1522, the town council issued a new church order that reduced the number of private Masses, instituted communion in two kinds, founded a common chest to put an end to begging, and called for the removal of images and altars.[3]

The Wittenberg movement did not last long. Increasingly alarmed at the pace and ambition of reform, the elector and his officials intervened and reversed the innovations. Perhaps even more fateful, however, was the return of Martin Luther (1483–1546). Once back in Wittenberg following his exile at the Wartburg, Luther denounced the changes. In a series of Invocavit sermons preached in the parish church, Luther counselled moderation and gradual reform. The change of hearts and minds, he advised, must precede the change of ritual and reform. No doubt Luther had sharp words for all of the men involved in this episode, Melanchthon included, but he directed most of his wrath at Karlstadt, who had emerged as the leader. And Luther singled out two things in particular for criticism: first, Karlstadt’s unnatural fixation with the reform of “ceremonies and external forms,” which Luther likened to a type of legalism; and second, his readiness to push through his own notions of reform without waiting on those of weaker conscience. The Wittenberg episode, in Luther’s view, was proof that Karlstadt aspired “to become everybody’s magistrate, and to institute his ordinances among the people on his own authority”, regardless of how many souls might be at risk.[4] With his leadership re-established, Luther convinced the authorities to put an end to Karlstadt’s efforts. Karlstadt was forbidden to preach, forbidden to publish, and eventually exiled from the town.

Despite its fleeting impact, the Wittenberg movement was an important event in the history of Reformation Christianity. Viewed retrospectively, this was the first incarnation of the inner dynamic of early modern Protestantism: namely, the conflict between the mainstream forms of the faith such as Luther’s Saxon prototype, which became one of the public churches of Protestant Europe, and the so-called radical forms of Reformation Christianity that remained on the margins. Neither one of these forms existed in any meaningful sense in 1521, but the episode was a prefiguration of the struggle over the meaning and the limits of reform that gnawed at the heart of Protestantism throughout the early modern period.[5] It was also the moment when two men of particular importance for the radical tradition started to influence the course of events. One was Karlstadt, the Wittenberg ringleader, and the other was the Saxon clergyman Thomas Müntzer, who was hatching similar notions of reform in the town of Zwickau, the home of the prophets. Both men were marked out by their teaching and charisma, and both became figureheads of the movement.

Once exiled from Wittenberg, Karlstadt moved on to the parish of Orlamünde and pressed on with his experiments in apostolic reform. Karlstadt emptied the church of its images, ministered in the vernacular, preached against infant baptism, stressed the symbolic meaning of the Eucharist, read Scripture from the pulpit, and worked up his own German service replete with congregational songs and liturgy. He also started to challenge some of the foundation principles of early Lutheranism, in particular the idea of the ministry, the interpretation of Scripture (which he thought was open to all men on equal terms if guided by the Spirit), and Luther’s theory of justification. For Karlstadt, justification implied more than just the one-time imputation of unmerited grace. Righteousness before God was something that had to be achieved, incrementally, over the course of a lifetime by way of the indwelling Spirit of Christ.[6] Like the medieval mystics before him, Karlstadt tended to speak in terms of sanctification rather than justification. In time this would become one of the main watchwords of the radical tradition.

As revolutionary as were Karlstadt’s ideas, they paled in many respects to the theology being developed by Thomas Müntzer (ca. 1489–1525) in the Saxon parishes of Zwickau, Allstedt, and Mühlhausen. Müntzer was not a Wittenberg insider in the manner of Karlstadt, but he had spent some time in the town and he had been an early supporter of Luther and the evangelical movement. In all likelihood it was Müntzer who had dispatched the Zwickau prophets. Over time, however, Müntzer started to turn away from Luther, famously terming him “Doctor Liar” and “the soft-living lump of flesh of Wittenberg,” the implication being that the Reformer had pawned the Gospel for a life of courtly ease. Like Karlstadt, Müntzer lectured directly from Scripture, and he favored a literal reading of the Bible, one which led him to reject both infant baptism and the real presence. He denounced the reliance on images, externals, and “idols” of the church and sought the pure form of Christianity once practiced by the Apostles. He also expressed a deep concern with lay religiosity. During his time in Allstedt Müntzer introduced vernacular translations of medieval hymns, vespers, and matins, and a rule for the Mass that remained in use until 1533. In two very significant ways, however, Müntzer parted company with Karlstadt, or at least went in directions that Karlstadt was not willing to go. First, while still acknowledging the importance of the Word for the rebirth of the faith, Müntzer started to preach of the need to move beyond the “dead letter” of Scripture and seek an awareness of God that could only be acquired through experiential fear and suffering. Second, like Karlstadt, Müntzer preached reform without tallying for the magistrate, but he was more than willing to take up the sword if the magistrates tallied for too long.[7]

Neither of these men became the leader of a Reformation church in any meaningful sense. Indeed, Müntzer was tortured and executed after the Battle of Frankenhausen in May 1525, where his League army had been slaughtered by the combined forces of Saxony, Hesse, and Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Karlstadt, in contrast, had a better end. Eventually he settled in Switzerland and returned to his former life as a clergyman and a scholar, ending his career as professor of Hebrew at Basel. But he did not found a church. Nevertheless, the ideas of both men lived on as did the ideals of the lay Christianity they had developed in their Saxon parishes. In this regard both men may be considered the founders of the radical tradition in Germany.

In the beginning, the followers of Karlstadt and Müntzer tended to gravitate around the lands of south-central Germany and Habsburg Austria. In the absence of fixed confessions, churches, or a clerical estate, believers would simply gather in secret and listen to charismatic preachers. The movement’s revolutionary force was thus fed by the deep and volatile subjectivism of its inspired leaders, self-proclaimed prophets who moved from parish to parish preaching in the open air, ministering in the fields and forests, and baptizing followers in private households. Hans Hut (1490–1527), the main missionary in the south-German lands, was a preacher in this mold. Having escaped the slaughter of Frankenhausen, Hut, a former bookseller, embarked on a life preaching and baptizing in Franconia, Thuringia, Austria, and Moravia. With Hut we can identify a line of continuity reaching from the Saxon Anabaptists back to the revolutionary armies of the Peasants’ War. We can also recognize Müntzer’s note of Spiritualism and experiential religiosity, as in Hut’s claim that “no one may attain the truth unless he follows in the footsteps of Christ and his elect in the school of every grief, or at least has consented partly to this, according to the will of God and in the justification of the cross of Christ.”[8]

Other prominent radicals in southern Germany included Balthasar Hubmaier, Hans Denck, Melchior Rinck, and Hans Römer, all of whom had been active in the Peasants’ War of 1525 before going underground and pursuing a life in the service of the faith, moving through the parishes of south-central Germany, Habsburg Austria, and eventually the lower Rhine and the Low Countries. One particularly important figure to emerge out of this tradition was the Franconian visionary Melchior Hoffman (1495–1543). Hoffman would spread the message in northern Germany and the Netherlands, his millenarianism eventually providing the foundations for the most important event in the early history of Protestant radicalism, the rise of the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster in 1534

After Münster, the main theater of development shifted to the north. Radical evangelicals continued to gather, often at great personal risk. Because adult baptism was a capital crime, many believers suffered death through burning, beheading, and drownings in the local rivers. Despite the hazards, however, the radicals survived, and indeed by the 1530s and 1540s some groups, all claiming some degree of descent from the Anabaptists of Münster, had become well-established enough to identify with particular leaders. First among equals were the Münsterites, the Batenburgers, the Melchiorites, and the Obbenites. In an attempt to overcome the “identity crisis” facing the heirs of Melchiorite Anabaptism, small-scale forms of confessionalism did take hold, and new leaders emerged as well, perhaps the most important being Menno Simons (1496–1561), who became in effect the heir of the Münsterite legacy. Simons changed the course of Anabaptist history by founding and consolidating a tradition based on non-violence, separation from worldly affairs, and the semblance of a fixed ecclesiological form. It was a declaration of the new impulse to ground a faith that had affinities with the magisterial order. Thus although Simons preached rebirth and sanctification, as well as the need for a community “without stain or wrinkle,” he also stressed the need for the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Above all, he set the framework for a dialogue about the need for public confessions and ecclesial forms that continued to shape Anabaptism long after his death.[9]

The other birthplace of Protestant radicalism was the southern empire, particularly the Swiss lands adjacent to Zwingli’s Reformation in Zurich. Developments in Saxony may have played a role in this history. Both Karlstadt and Müntzer received letters from Swiss radicals, and Karlstadt’s symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist clearly resonated in the works of Zwingli and others.[10] But the rise of the Swiss radicals was no less a product of local circumstances than the rise of Karlstadt or Müntzer in Saxony, and in many ways the same conditions obtained. Zwingli, having championed communal autonomy and the primacy of Scripture, started to project his idea of reform exclusively in terms of a covenant with the civic authorities. Very soon, as a consequence, he was faced with a group of dissenters, men he referred to as “arrogant,” “quarrelsome,” and “divisive,” who claimed that Zwingli had made a Faustian pact with the Zurich authorities at the expense of the Gospel.[11] The three main figures were Conrad Grebel (1498–1526), who had once been Zwingli’s closest ally, Simon Stumpf, and Felix Mantz, and they all insisted that reform must follow the Word of God without conceding anything to the authorities or the weaker conscience. Although the dissenters did not originally preach full separation, they made it clear that there could be no hope of association with those Zurichers who did not measure up to their ideals of reform. Furthermore, there was no place for those teachings that did not meet their readings of Scripture, and that included Zwingli’s defense of infant baptism, his lax notions of discipline, his willingness to tolerate traditional forms of worship, and above all his readiness to compromise in order to secure the backing of the secular authorities.[12]

What is unique in the Swiss context was the readiness of these men to turn their ideas into practice. By the early 1520s there is evidence of incipient radical congregations in the parishes of Höngg, Witikon, Zollikon, Tablat, and Teuffen, where self-proclaimed “upright, Christian people” looked to recreate apostolic Christianity on the basis of Scripture. Innovations included the abolition of the Catholic Mass and institution of a vernacular alternative in the symbolic mode, the destruction of images and “idols,” the laicization of the priesthood and the extension of the hermeneutic community, the introduction of adult baptism, and community of goods. These were voluntary churches, self-regulating, self-fashioning congregations of Protestant Christians, the first of their kind.[13]

Like the followers of Karlstadt and Müntzer in south and central Germany, the Swiss radicals began to spread beyond the original sites of reform. Grebel first sought refuge in the Zurich countryside before taking his vision of reform to the Swiss communes of Zollikon, Schaffhausen, and St. Gallen. Johannes Brötli and Wilhelm Reublin, following on from their reform experiment in Witikon, also became missionaries in the parishes of Switzerland, spending time in Klettgau, Hallau, Schaffhausen, and Waldshut, where Reublin is reputed to have baptized sixty parishioners, including the local evangelical pastor Balthasar Hubmaier, who went on to become one of the most important Anabaptist theologians of the age. Other Zurich radicals became hedgerow preachers of a similar kind, moving through the parishes of northern Switzerland, Alsace, South Tyrol, and Swabia, as well as large cities such as Basel and Bern, teaching their version of apostolic Christianity and baptizing followers.[14] In these early years there was no established corpus of belief, nor was there a single leader to ground or unite the communities. As a consequence, the communities tended to take on the names of their charismatic leaders and divide and subdivide in march with the unfolding plurality of their ideas. The spiritualist historian Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490–1561) remarked on this, claiming that
one could write a large chronicle about the many and manifold sects among the Anabaptists, each condemning the other and often for ridiculous reasons. Obviously it cannot be the spirit of unity … I have informed myself of their opinions for the most part. There are Swiss, Hutterites, Gabrielites, Pilgramites, Netherlanders, Friesians, Mennonites, Hoffmanites, etc … No soul agrees with the other in the faith.[15]

This tendency to subdivide and multiply only increased once the Swiss radicals found a safe haven in the lands of Moravia, where under the protection of sympathetic nobles they were able to put down roots. Moravia was quickly perceived as the promised land. Jacob Hutter, for instance, whom we will meet again as the founder of the Hutterites, made his way to the Moravian town of Austerlitz because he had heard that “God had gathered a people … to live as one heart, mind and soul, each caring faithfully for the other.”[16] By the time Hutter had arrived there were already numerous Anabaptist communities in close proximity. The German radicals Hubmaier and Hut, for instance, had gathered a congregation of followers in Nicolsburg, where they practiced believers’ baptism and strict congregational discipline. Over time a group of believers broke away from this community and settled in Austerlitz, and from there another breakaway group moved on to Auspitz, where, under the leadership of Philipp Plener, refugees from Swabia, the Palatinate, and the Rhineland were able to gather until scattered by renewed Habsburg efforts. The radical propensity to multiply made it difficult to establish lasting communities or to create any sort of overarching confessional unity or identity. As late as the mid-1560s the Italian weaver Marc Antonio Varotto (Barotto) claimed that Austerlitz was made up of “many faiths and so many sects, the one contrary to the others and the one condemning the others, all drawing up catechisms, all desiring to be ministers, all pulling this way and that, all wishing to be the true church.”[17]

Despite the variety of faiths and forms, over time the Swiss branch of radicalism began to experience degrees of confessionalism. The descendants of the Swiss Brethren started to group around, and take their names from, charismatic figures. Thus the Philippites, who found refuge in Moravia, were followers of the Philipp Plener mentioned above; Gabriel Aschermann’s community of believers, who settled in neighboring Silesia, were termed the Gabrielites; the Hutterites, who practiced community of goods, were led by Jacob Hutter. By mid-century, just as Menno Simons had been able to establish a fairly broad sense of community in the north, the lay preacher Pilgram Marpeck (d. 1556), a one-time mining magistrate, had acquired a theological reputation substantial enough to unite many of the southern communities. The binding agent was the pliability of his thought. In some ways he was a moderate, almost mainstream: he defended the humanity of Christ, rejected the antinomianism of the Spiritualists, and was convinced of the need for a visible church founded on the sacraments of communion and baptism. But in other articles he was clearly a radical, rejecting infant baptism, preaching separatism, foregrounding congregational discipline, and warning against violence, luxury, and the corruptions of the world. Most communities could accommodate his main teachings.[18] Marpeck’s attempt at harmonization was important, for it brought home the advantages of solidarity. Working with his memory still fresh in their minds, the Swiss Anabaptists came together and drafted the Strasbourg Discipline (1568), an ecclesiological and ethical blueprint that would serve as a common point of reference for over three centuries. The fact that the Swiss Brethren remained a presence in the parishes of Germany, Austria, and the Swiss Confederation owed much to these early efforts at dialogue and cooperation, though as ever the main strengths remained the depth of conviction and the willingness to suffer for their faith.

NAMES, FORMS, AND TYPES

The first problem facing any historian of the radical tradition is the issue of names. Unlike the Lutherans and the Calvinists, who shared enough of a common identity to speak in terms of a confessional genus, the radicals as a whole did not recognize a universal confession or a single founding father of the faith. This historical dilemma is made even more complicated by the historiographical issues bound up with perspective. Given the ultimate outcome of Reformation history, by which is meant the fact that Lutheranism and subtle variations of Calvinism emerged as its dominant forms, it is easy to treat the radicals as outliers and underdogs and their forms of religion a deviation from a confessional norm. And yet viewing them as somehow different or unique against a standard of Protestant “orthodoxy” inevitably colors our reading of their past. By definition they become exceptions to the rule, with the consequence that we need to understand them in different terms.

Modern historians can take some comfort in the fact that naming was no less problematical for contemporaries. Although Luther, no doubt, knew a radical when he saw one, he was very imprecise in his use of language, preferring to group all of his evangelical opponents together (Zwingli included) under the German term Schwärmer (enthusiasts), a word that evoked medical theories relating to “fluttering thoughts” that swarmed and stung the mind.[19] In addition to Schwärmer, Luther also referred to them as heavenly prophets and Sacramentarians, while in the southern empire they were labeled Spiritualists, Anabaptists, and, more generally, the Swiss Brethren. For the most part the Reformers, and the authorities after them, characterized the radical groups by the features that set them apart from their own magisterial traditions. That is why the name Anabaptist, derived from their belief in adult baptism (ana being the Greek prefix for “again”) was so widespread, for this seemed to capture the core article of their faith. Mainstream Protestants comprehended the movement in this way, defining it against those features that stood in a negative or inverted relationship to their own set of norms, with the consequence that the term constantly took on meaning as more and more was learned. In one of the earliest attempts at definition (1528), the Lutheran Reformer Johannes Brenz spoke of it as a faith
which, on the basis of a false understanding of baptism, observe[s]‌ and teach[es] [the idea] that infants, due to their incapacity and lack of awareness, should not be baptised. Such a baptism is worthless, which is why they let themselves be baptised again as adults. In addition, they hold their property in common and refuse to carry swords or render oaths and vows to the secular authority. They also hold that Christians might not take up arms, along with other articles, all derived from a misunderstanding of Holy Writ.[20]

Already we can see some of the main principles that distinguished the radical groups caught up in the Peasants’ War of 1525. By the end of the century, however, the list of “errors” had grown. In his Catalogi Haereticorum (1597–1599), for instance, a work extending to thirteen volumes, Conrad Schlüsselberg was able to provide a much more detailed morphology of radical beliefs, even though the emphasis on rebaptism and the perceived anti-social and anti-authoritarian teachings remained.[21]

Needless to say, the radicals did not necessarily think of themselves in the terms invented by others. Some groups, as we have seen, gravitated around inspirational preachers and took their names from these men. But the majority of the radicals simply thought of themselves as Christians. None of this offers much help to historians in understanding the essence of the movement or how it sits in relation to the Reformation. To do this, different methods of analysis are required, approaches to the subject that reveal both the inner workings and the broader differences with the mainstream traditions. Modern scholars have come up with a range of options.

The broadest, and certainly the most tenacious, conceptualization of the radical tradition is that derived from the work of Max Weber (1864–1920) and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923). Their work first posited the sociological schematization of Reformation movements into church types and sect types, the former taking in the Lutherans and the Reformed, the latter the various radical strains. Over time scholars have refined these two categories, though without shifting the poles of Protestant modality. The two main categories in modern scholarship are the magisterial type and the radical type. Broadly speaking, the magisterial type was based on fixed confessions with universal ideals, an objective church with a monopoly on grace and salvation, clerical authority, obligatory membership, orthodox modes of sacrament and liturgy, and a close affiliation with the structures of rule. For Troetsch, this was essentially “the Catholic theory of the Church, only purified and renewed,” and it “implies that Christian piety and holiness do not consist in the subjective achievement and activity of individuals, but in the objective Divine nature of the wealth of grace which belongs to the institution as such.” The radical type, sociologically speaking, was the opposite of this. In general terms, its members avoided association with the state and did not let considerations of the secular world influence religious affairs. There was less concern with liturgical forms and fixed confessions and a tendency to rely on inspiration and very personal readings of Scripture. The churches gathered voluntarily, without a well-defined hierarchy or a trained clerical estate, and salvation was sought through personal piety and ethical action rather than the ministrations of the public church. According to Troeltsch, the main reason Luther condemned the radicals was precisely due to this rejection of objective forms and the readiness with which “they regarded the basis of salvation and the bond of fellowship as consisting in obedience to the Law of God and therefore in subjective attainment.”[22]

Historians have added further precision to the history of the radical tradition since the days of Weber and Troeltsch, though their dichotomy of types still holds sway.[23] In an early work of classification, for instance, the historian Harold Bender synthesized the so-called “Anabaptist vision” with reference to three principles of apostolic Christianity, namely: ideals of discipleship, separation, and devotion to love and pacifism. Some scholars took issue with Bender’s suggestion that pacifism was a general Anabaptist trait, most notably Albert Fredrik Mellink, while Franklin H. Littell, by reducing the entire Anabaptist vision to a “primitivist” view of Christianity derived from their readings of the New Testament, seemed to collapse all of Bender’s categories into the broader frame of biblicism.[24] But the debate itself was joined by the common theme of religious beliefs, and in that sense it took its lead from Bender. Within this internalist approach, the most influential survey to appear was George Huntston Williams’s The Radical Reformation (1962). Williams treated the radical tradition (as he termed it) as a distinct movement with its own theological principles. Amid the diversity, he distinguished three broad groupings: Anabaptists, joined by the theory and practice of adult baptism; Spiritualists, those who believed in direct intervention of the Spirit above the mediation of Scripture or the sacraments; and evangelical rationalists, such as the Socinians and the Antitrinitarians, speculators on issues such as the nature of the Godhead and immortality. These three groupings were then dissected further: the Anabaptists, for instance, were reduced to the revolutionary heirs of Münster, the mystics, and the evangelicals, while the Spiritualists were separated into revolutionary, rationalist, and evangelical.[25] By cutting through the diversity of beliefs in this fashion and placing the focus on certain core ideas, such as the teachings on baptism, morality, free will, or the relations between church and state, Williams was able represent the radical movement on its own terms rather than just a curious gloss on the magisterial strain.

The other great advance made by Williams’s Radical Reformation was its social and geographical range. Not since Arnold’s History of Heretics had a work taken in so many different lands. Here too historians built on these foundations. Claus-Peter Clasen and Hans-Jürgen Goertz, for instance, were among the first scholars to focus on the social history of the movement, picking apart its modes of organization and community-building, the social and economic background of its membership, and its relations with society. Neither scholar’s results lent much weight to Williams’s suggestion that the movement was a Reformation in its own right. Clasen’s Anabaptists were poor and marginalized, their religion “no more than a small separatist movement,” while Goertz concluded that the heritage “consists only of the individual Anabaptist movements, rather than a collective Anabaptism.”[26] But this type of research helped to establish new categories of analysis. Instead of grouping the communities around core beliefs, it now became common to think in terms of social makeup or with reference to ideas on politics and community. Once placed in the context of the Peasants’ War, for instance, the followers of Müntzer were perceived differently, as were the Hutterites when viewed in relation to the long Christian history of community of goods.

In the same spirit, historians also began to categorize the sects according to area. Previously it had been common to associate the communities with the birthplace of their ideas. Bender thus tied the Anabaptists to Zurich, while Williams singled out Zurich, Nuremberg, and Amsterdam, with each city corresponding to his trilogy of types. In 1975, however, James Stayer, Werner Packull, and Klaus Deppermann proposed a “polygenesis” model of origins that emphasized the importance of place in broader terms. According to their model, which used the empire as the framework, the early movement originated in three areas: first, the Swiss lands influenced by Zwingli, where there was a pronounced emphasis on adult baptism and the ethical dimensions of the faith; second, the southern German and Austrian lands area, which was marked out by its early radicalism and its mysticism; and third, the area of the lower Rhine and the Low Countries, where the faith became more speculative in nature and eventually put down roots.[27] In its basic outline, this is the framework used in the opening narrative of this essay.

At present there is no common research agenda in radical Reformation studies, “no clearly established paradigm” to help with the direction or the conceptualization of future research.[28] The best works are often a mix of methodologies, combining the insights of theologians and church historians with the latest trends in social and cultural history. Similar to Reformation history in general, the study of the radical tradition has started to embrace the protean nature of the movement and pay more attention to “lived religion,” which is more concerned with praxis, tradition, communication, and contexts of religiosity than religious ideas in the strict sense. Some recent promising lines of inquiry in this historiographical mode include the study of the relationship between Anabaptists and wealth, the fabrication and preservation of the history of martyrdom, the rise of identity, interdenominational (and inter-congregational) communication and exchange, the historical linkages between the Reformation and the different strands, and the literary and artistic legacies, which includes the study of hymnody and devotional literature. Historians are still concerned with exploring the essence of the movement, but there is now a much greater willingness to embrace plurality and concede that the study of the radical tradition is “not a simple march in one direction.”[29] The social and cultural complexity of the movement has started to weaken the explanatory power of the older dichotomies, though contrasting the beliefs and religious habitus of the radicals with the magisterial tradition is still a useful hermeneutical approach. There was good reason why the mainstream Reformers thought that the Anabaptist religion was an altered image of their own.

Representative of this shift in historiographical priorities is growth in the study of gender relations among the Anabaptist and Spiritualist groups. Although this too reflects the broader tendency in Reformation studies—and indeed early modern history as a whole—to treat gender as a cultural and social construct and trace its formation through place and time, the study of men and women in the radical Reformation has provided scholars with particularly interesting material. As a consequence, some of the most innovative explorations of the role of women during the confessional age have been close, source-based studies of the households and extended communities among the Mennonites, Hutterites, the Anabaptists of Tyrol, or the Spiritualists in the Netherlands. The results are mixed. Although there are examples of women who emerged as preachers or prophetesses, such as the sixteen-year-old girl who preached a sermon on the punishment of sin in Münster, for the most part women served in supporting roles, such as the Mennonite deacons of Holland or the women who served (informally) as Hutterite missionaries. This might afford a handful of women an elevated status in the workings of the church, but the radical tradition did little over the longer term to challenge the patriarchal foundations of early modern society. Peter Riedemann (1506–1556), for instance, one of the founding fathers of the Hutterities, was no less convinced than Luther or Calvin that since “woman was taken from man and not man from woman, man has lordship and woman has weakness, humility and submission.”[30] In light of the ubiquity of the patriarchal mindset in this period and the implausibility of a gender rethink in modern terms, historians tend to look for more subtle shifts in relations between men and women brought on by the radical implications of Anabaptists and Spiritualist teaching, such as the idea that baptism was a covenant applied to all believers in equal terms or that the spiritual marriage to Christ took precedence over any earthly bonds. Thus while recent research tends to suggest that, on the whole, the Anabaptist communities mirrored and endorsed the gender relations of their day, there were some very interesting deviations from the norm.[31]

RADICAL RELIGION

Contrasting the thought of the different radical groupings with the thought of the mainstream traditions inevitably distorts the subject to some degree. South-German Spiritualists did not think of themselves as “reformed” Lutherans any more than the Swiss Brethren claimed to be enlightened Zwinglians. Each group derived its theology from its own exegesis, and each group thought of itself as the one and only true form of apostolic Christianity. Nevertheless, for the purposes of historical analysis, it makes sense to draw the contrast with the Reformations of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, if only because the early movement was so closely bound up in this history. It is also a useful way of demonstrating why the mainstream Reformers considered them such a threat. The radicals did not worship a different God or venerate other holy texts in the manner of the Jews or the Turks. On the contrary, they emerged from within the general discourse of the early Reformation, addressing the same themes and citing the same biblical passages, and yet drawing different conclusions.

In very broad terms, the radicals either challenged or went beyond the thought of the magisterial Reformers in the following ways.[32] First, for those who derived their teachings from Scripture, they were generally more literal in their approach to the text. Grebel first moved away from Zwingli, for instance, because he thought Zwingli had betrayed the principle of sola scriptura. Second, many of the radical Reformers, particularly in the early days, preached an aggressive form of anticlericalism, against both Catholics and Protestants. In the heady days of the Peasants’ War it was directed at the clergy as an estate, the Anabaptist Simon Stumpf going so far as to proclaim that a Reformation would not take hold until “all the parsons were beaten to death.”[33] This extreme radicalism passed in time, but the radicals retained their critical distance to all forms of clericalism, preferring to trust in the power of charisma or signs of the Spirit. Third, partly by circumstance and partly by design, most radical communities believed that pure Christianity could only be achieved in separation, both from the state and any churches that did not meet their ideas of religious purity. This idea of voluntary separation was forcefully stated in the Schleitheim Articles (1527), an early confession of the Swiss Anabaptists. In the words of article four: “Concerning separation, we have agreed that a separation should take place from the evil which the devil has planted in the world. We will simply not have fellowship with evil people, nor associate with them, nor participate with them in their abominations.”[34] Fourth, generally speaking, the radicals were much more likely to interpret Scripture tropologically, by which is meant they thought that religious ideas should have consequences for daily life. All of the radical Reformers set out to renew Christian society, and all believed that there was (and must be) a direct and dependent relationship between the norms of the Gospel and social reality. In the words of Felix Mantz, the movement’s first martyr, “everyone would receive remission of his sins, if he believed in him [Christ], changed his life, and did suitably righteous works.”[35] Finally, common to most of the radical communities in this early period was a deep suspicion of secular society and its forms of power and control. For this reason, most Anabaptists refused to play a role in government and advised their brethren, at the risk of damnation, to avoid the temptations of worldly affairs.

On the basis of beliefs such as these the radical communities developed characteristics that set them apart from mainstream Protestant society. The combination of biblicism and a deep suspicion of secular society, for instance, meant that Anabaptists refused to swear oaths, pay tithes, take on the role of magistrates, bear arms, render judgment in secular courts, or participate in assemblies. In the context of sixteenth-century Europe, these were more than just quaint customs. Behavior such as this, as Hans-Jürgen Goertz has noted, “attacked the foundations of the spiritual and temporal social form of the corpus Christianum,” making it very difficult to find a place for these communities in the social and political order.[36] This point can be further illustrated with reference to three forms of radical belief that historians have identified as particularly threatening in the eyes of the authorities: their teachings on baptism, the notion of community of goods, and the thought of the Spiritualists.

To the mainstream Protestants, the most conspicuous sign of radicalism was the theory and practice of adult baptism. Since all Christians in this age were baptized at birth, this meant that adult believers had to be re-baptized, which of course implied that the original act had been meaningless (or worse). The rejection of infant baptism was based upon a reading of Scripture, particularly Matthew 7:14, which implies that the narrow route to salvation relies on conscious choice; but other proof texts were used as well, as was the fact that there is no straightforward reference to infant baptism in the Bible. Not all of the radical Reformers agreed on the details, but all rejected infant baptism in theory, which is one of the reasons why it became the distinguishing mark of the tradition. Karlstadt, Müntzer, and the Zwickau prophets were the first to preach in favor of adult baptism, though there is no evidence of its practice. To judge by the sources, this distinction belongs to the Swiss Brethren, who performed the first adult baptisms in the parishes of Zurich in 1525. Other radical congregations soon followed their example, though not always for the same reasons. But whatever the theory behind the relationship between faith and act, all of the radicals agreed that infant baptism had no warrant in Scripture and that adult baptism was a necessary sign that the believer had chosen to unite with a congregation of the elect in obedience to Christ. In the words of Menno Simons, “here we have the Lord’s commandment concerning baptism, when and how it should be performed and received according to God’s ordinance; namely that one must firstly preach the Gospel, and then baptise those who believe in it.”[37]

It is not difficult to see why this seemed threatening to the first generation of mainstream Protestant Reformers. For Luther, who was trying to distance his own ideas of reform from the Peasants’ War, the rejection of infant baptism was the final proof that the Anabaptists were the Devil in disguise. In Luther’s view, Scripture provided unassailable proof that infant baptism had been commanded and instituted by God. It was his symbolic intervention into the life of the community, a sign of the promise of salvation and thus victory over death, forgiveness of sins, the grace of Christ, and the gifts of the Spirit. But more than this, baptism was a sacramental act. God worked through the rite; his creative power permeated the blessed water and had the power to save even infants, who were themselves born in sin. To suggest otherwise, to propose that baptism was contingent on the judgment of the individual believer, was to challenge the very sovereignty of God and his promise of salvation.[38] In addition to the theological objections, the Protestant authorities also raised a number of social and political reasons why the practice threatened the Christian order. Not only was adult baptism a capital crime, and thus by its very existence a menace, but for a society such as that in early modern Europe, which was held together by oaths, custom, and compliance with the ancient bond of rule and religion, the suggestion that baptism was a matter of individual choice had revolutionary implications.

Similarly threatening to mainstream ideas of social and political order was the idea of community of goods. This was an ancient Christian ideal, derived from the Acts of the Apostles (above all, Acts 2:24–37) and sporadically revived in the medieval period, not least among the Franciscan friars. And yet beyond a few isolated experiments it had never become a reality. The ideal remained, however, and over time it was realized in practice—most alarmingly by the Anabaptists of Münster, but most profoundly by the Hutterites of Moravia.

The Hutterites, as we have seen, took their name from Jacob Hutter (1500–1536), a wandering lay preacher who made his way to Moravia in search of pure Christianity. After having served as chief elder, Hutter emerged as the leader of an Anabaptist conglomeration with ties to the Swiss diaspora. In time, he started to pull away from the broader tradition, due in part to quarrels over disciplinary issues, but more specifically due to the Hutterite devotion to community of goods. For Hutterites the elimination of private property and the institution of community of goods was not just one aspiration in the search for the apostolic ideal. In the thoughts of Hutter, and after him the elders Peter Riedemann and Peter Walpot, the proper distribution (or redistribution) of wealth was one of the foundations of the divine covenant. As Riedemann put it in a work he drafted while in prison, it was proof that the faithful were guided by the Spirit and stood in a right relationship with God. It had become an article of faith touching on salvation: the union of faith and form. To quote a Hutterite article of 1547:

Those who have withdrawn, foresaken and surrendered temporal things for the sake of Christ no longer have property. Whoever is driven by the Spirit into this poverty and Gelassenheit belongs to the spiritually poor, who can expect heavenly goods and salvation. Those who do the opposite will not be saved.[39]

On the basis of this belief, the Hutterites were able to build up small-scale communities of worship reckoned by some contemporaries to have numbered up to seventy settlements (Brüderhöfe), each having between four hundred and six hundred residents, living, working, producing for local markets and engaging in handwork (from craft weaving and ceramics to clock making and metallurgy), raising families in common, and worshipping together in a cloistered environment. Although continued persecution would reduce the number of settlements to a tenuous minority, send others into exile, and effectively put an end to early modern communalism, at its peak (ca. 1553 to 1591) the Hutterites were enough of a presence to exercise the magisterial mind.

In contrast to the Hutterite devotion to a religious form, some radical Protestants did not think that salvation was necessarily bound to any means of earthly mediation at all. These were the so-called Spiritualists, Christians who delved so deeply into the Gospel they moved beyond the text altogether, declaring that their insight flowed from the Spirit and required no mediation by clergy, commentaries, or the “dead letter” of the biblical text. Medieval mystics had voiced claims of this kind before, but these men had been providentially marked out as mediators of the divine, and most of them had the imprimatur of the church. The Spiritualists of the radical Reformation, however, were self-proclaimed prophets, men and women who, as the Stuart satirist Thomas Nash would unfavorably describe them, were no more than “cobblers and curriers,” and “thought they knew as much of God’s mind as richer men.”[40] Nash was writing of the Münsterites, but the Reformation tradition began as early as the Wittenberg movement with the Zwickau prophets and, more importantly, with the teaching of Thomas Müntzer, who made repeated claims to divine insight and heaven-sent dreams. Against the objections of the Wittenberg Reformers, who took him to task for his refusal to pay heed to the writings of Luther or (as they saw it) the clear text of Scripture, Müntzer began to claim that his own beliefs, like the beliefs of any among the elect, rested upon “an invincible testimony from the Holy Ghost, who gives sufficient witness to our spirits that we are the children of God.”[41]

The Spiritualists were not a gathered community in the same sense as the Hutterites, Gabrielites, or Mennonites. Despite Müntzer’s early importance, no shared beliefs or charismatic figure held them together. Referring to someone as a Spiritualist was simply to draw attention to their tendency to rely on inspiration rather than Scripture or the teaching of the Reformers, and in fact Luther coined the term Schwärmer precisely in order to capture this trait. Despite the deeply personal and anarchic nature of the movement, however, they represented an important strain of the radical tradition. Realizing this, many of the mainstream Reformers wrote against them. And yet they survived, and indeed in numbers. According to Sebastian Franck (1499–1543), himself a Spiritualist, they were the fourth and final strand of the Protestant family (after the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists), unique in the fact that it was a religion that would
dispense with external preaching, ceremonies, sacraments, bann and office as unnecessary, and which seeks solely to gather among all peoples an invisible, spiritual Church in the unity of the Spirit and of faith, to be governed wholly by the eternal, invisible Word of God, without external means, as the apostolic Church was governed before its apostasy, which occurred after the death of the apostles.[42]

Numbered among the Spiritualists of the Reformation were men of real intellectual distinction. Not surprisingly, given the nature of their faith, they tended to be idiosyncratic thinkers, but any account of Protestant Spiritualists throws up some impressive names. A roll call of early evangelical Spiritualists would include the German historian and geographer Sebastian Franck; the nobleman Caspar von Schwenckfeld, who began as an early supporter of Luther before turning inward in the quest for the rebirth of Christ in man; the itinerant physician and occultist Paracelsus (1493–1541), who rejected all association with the churches of his day and spoke of a vision of pure Christianity, charged through with the metaphors of alchemy and the theory of correspondences; the German pastor Valentin Weigel (1533–1588), theologian, philosopher, and mystic, whose spiritualist writings circulated widely in manuscript and influenced generations of readers with their focus on religious individualism; and the Silesian shoemaker Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), whose writings on the new birth and the mystical, theosophical union of God with the heavenly Sophia (or wisdom, reason) eventually circulated throughout northern Europe and would exercise a powerful influence on the radical English thinkers of the seventeenth century. In his own day, Böhme was not a notable figure, and this holds true for many of the Spiritualists, Paracelsus being the exception to the rule in this respect. The Protestant Spiritualists would first emerge as celebrated thinkers in the seventeenth century, particularly after the early Pietist Johannes Arndt rediscovered the works of Franck, Paracelsus, and Weigel and interpreted them for later generations.[43]

THE RADICAL LEGACY

Two episodes of the early Reformation decided the fate of the radical movement. The first was the Peasants’ War of 1525, a wave of unrest that swept through most of the German lands, including Alsace, Franconia, Thuringia, Upper Swabia, Switzerland, and Tyrol, when rebel bands took up arms in a series of extended sieges and regional conflicts in defense of what they claimed to be ancient rights.

Rebellions of this kind had occurred before, most notably in the form of the Bundschuh movement (1493–1517), and the demands were generally the same as the late medieval uprisings, namely access to woodlands and water, a reduction in fees and labor services, and a general loosening of feudal bonds. One marked difference in the Peasants’ War of 1525, however, was the sudden prominence of religious demands, most of which had been derived from the message of the early evangelical movement. In the context of the revolution, however, the ideas of Luther, Zwingli, and the other magisterial Reformers had been driven to radical extremes. Justifying their demands with reference to Scripture, some peasant bands called for the destruction of the Catholic Church and its clergy, communal forms of Christianity, an end to feudal relations, and a society built in the image of New Testament teaching, which included community of goods. It was not difficult to detect the radical voice in these demands. Many of the leaders of the south-German movement were instrumental in directing the course of the revolution, including Müntzer, Hut, and Hubmaier. And the same holds true for the Swiss lands. In the estimation of James Stayer: “In the Upper Rhine area and south of Lake Constance, spreading Anabaptism and the spreading Peasants’ War indisputably intermingled, particularly in border areas between the Swiss Confederation and the empire—Waldshut, the Schaffhausen territories and the lands of the abbey of St Gallen.”[44]

The other fateful episode was the rise of the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster. In 1534, motivated in large part by the preaching of Melchior Hoffman (whom we met in the section on the origins of the radical movement in the discussion of north-German radicalism), hundreds of Anabaptists made their way to the Westphalian city of Münster and wrested control from the Lutheran council. They had been inspired to do this through the preaching and prophecies of Hoffman, who had long been raising fears about the Apocalypse in the Baltic lands. Hoffman had declared that Münster would be the site of the New Jerusalem (once his prediction that Strasbourg would take on this role had proven false), with the result that large bands of Anabaptists, many of whom were deeply influenced by the millenarianism circulating in parts of northern Germany and the Netherlands following the defeat of the rebels in 1525, made their way to the city. By February 1534 the radical faction was in power. Catholics, Lutherans, Zwinglians, and all residents who would not accept baptism into the community were driven out of the city. Led first by the prophet Jan Matthijs (1500–1534) and then by the self-proclaimed messianic king Jan Beukelsz (1509–1536), the Anabaptists worked to shape Münster in the image of ancient Israel. Inspired by the Spirit, a strict model of biblical rule was imposed on the commune, including government through twelve elders with power running without impediment between the secular and spiritual realms, an extreme form of community of goods, a harsh disciplinary code that punished without appeal transgressions of the Decalogue, and, once the reign of Beukelsz had reached its final stage, the reinstitution of polygamy as practiced by the patriarchs. But it was short-lived. In June 1535 the Kingdom came to an end when the town fell to the armies camped outside of its walls. In January 1536 Beukelsz and his followers were tortured and executed, and their bodies placed in steel cages and hung from the steeple of St. Lamberts Church.[45]

These episodes had a profound effect on the history of the radical movement. Direct association with the forces of unrest and revolution necessarily brought with it the wrath of the secular authorities. Close association with unrest also worked as a godsend for the magisterial Reformers, for they now had plenty of evidence to support their case against the radical tradition. In the view of Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, and later Calvin, the authorities now had the social and religious obligation to root out the radicals. As a result, the long era of persecution and martyrdom began, one that was not recovered in detail until the appearance of Arnold’s History of Heretics. But this was not the end of the radical tradition, nor did it mean that these communities no longer played a role in Reformation history. On the contrary, both the continued presence of the radicals and the memory of these two episodes exercised a powerful and lasting influence on the course of mainstream Protestant development.

By way, as it were, of negative example, both the Peasants’ War and the rise of the radicals in the 1520s worked as catalysts for the rise of the first state churches in Lutheran Germany. Both developments forced the hands of the authorities at a stage when there was not yet a clear vision of reform. Both transformed the discourse of the evangelical movement from a war of words over faith to a discourse about social and political order. And, related to this, both provided a justification for secular intervention into religious affairs by equating false faith with civil disobedience. Luther initially encouraged religious freedom and congregational autonomy; however, with the rise of the radicals and the Anabaptists, first in Zwickau, Wittenberg, and Allstedt, and then throughout the lands of northern and western Thuringia, he began to call on the secular authorities to intervene. Having turned on Müntzer, he advised the elector that, as the instrument of God’s will, it was his duty to suppress the preaching of the radicals, for, as he put it, the Devil “intends through these emissaries to create rebellion and murder (even if for a while he carries on peacefully), and to overthrow both spiritual and temporal government against the will of God.”[46] Partly out of a fear of the radicals and the possibility of further unrest, Luther and the Wittenberg Reformers thus turned to the prince for the upbuilding of their church. The so-called princely Reformation followed in train.[47]

If the legacy of the radicalism of the 1520s was its influence on the establishment of the first Protestant churches, the legacy of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster was rather its effects on the Protestant mind. Mainstream Protestantism never recovered from the shock of Münster, and not so much because they feared a repeat of the events. The fear of Münster was rather due to the awareness that the radical faction was not an external threat in the mold of the Catholics or the Turks but a movement that had emerged from within the very heart of the Reformation. Its leaders may have reached different conclusions about Christianity, but they reached these conclusions using the same language, the same modes of interpretation, and many of the same theological principles as the magisterial Reformers.[48] As a consequence, the ghosts of Münster would haunt mainstream Protestants for centuries. Whenever the clergy wanted to warn against the specter of revolt or raise suspicions of heterodoxy or heresy, they raised the cry of Münster.

To give a few English examples: when the theologian Richard Hooker wanted to play up the dangers of extreme Puritanism, he did so by claiming it was marching in the direction of Münster. Years later, in his work Gangraena (1646), the heresiographer Thomas Edwards made a similar allusion in his attempt to describe the radicalism of the Civil War, fearing that England had “become already in many places a chaos, a Babel, another Amsterdam … and in the high way to Münster.” Even in the New World the Münsterites were bogeymen. When the New England Puritans wanted to cast aspersions against any of the perceived rebels in their midst, whether Baptists, Gordians, Quakers—even witches—they made reference to the Anabaptists of Münster. When memories of the Anabaptist kingdom started to fade in the late seventeenth century, the Boston clergy issued an English translation of Guy de Brès’s work on the Münsterites, first written in French over a century before, to remind their parishioners of the dangers.[49]

Despite the efforts of the Protestant and Catholic authorities, the radical communities lived on. Indeed, by the seventeenth century they would embark on a stage of growth and systematization that would ultimately lead to the formation of new Christian churches—which were, in effect, the first-born of the family tree of modern Protestantism. For this reason there are grounds for speaking of a resurgence or a rebirth of the radical tradition in the seventeenth century, even if the rebirth owed as much to historical circumstance as to any inbuilt momentum of its own. Having effected some degree of unity and cooperation through the efforts of Marpeck and the generation that followed him, the descendants of the Swiss Anabaptists remained a presence in the parishes of southern Germany, Austria, and the Swiss Confederation. Further subdivisions occurred, the most famous subsequent breakaway group being that led by Jakob Ammann (1656–1730) and his followers (later termed the Amish), who decided to separate from the Emmentaler Brethren. But the communities endured, and over time, as persecution became more sporadic, the radicals were seen as less of a threat, and they emerged as exemplars of a deep and inspirational faith.[50] In the north, in a similar manner, Anabaptist communities began to go their separate ways over questions of discipline, preaching, and the use of excommunication. Fortunes fluctuated, but by the mid-seventeenth century there were numerous Anabaptist communities in the Netherlands, East Friesland, and the north of France that had survived over a century of exclusion and persecution. In fact, by the late seventeenth century many of the Dutch Mennonites had distinguished themselves as “good citizens” during the wars against England, and in any event they seemed much less of a threat to the Christian order than Collegiants, Spinozists, Cartesians, and other practitioners of the new philosophies spreading throughout the northern lands and challenging the very foundations of the social and political order.[51]

But the radicals also had a more direct influence on mainstream Protestant history, one that in a sense closes the circle that originated with the Wittenberg movement. In the later seventeenth century, in the lands where Pietism took hold, the voice and the ideals of the radicals assumed a much more prominent place in public religion. Pietists such as Philipp Jacob Spener (1635–1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) consciously worked to integrate radical ideals into mainstream religion, their most prominent innovations being the collegium pietatis (or conventicle), where men and women would meet and discourse on the Bible, the theory of rebirth (Wiedergeburt), which emphasized the process of sanctification, the calls for communities of the elect, and the renewed stress on the priesthood of all believers, which Luther had promised at the start of the Reformation but no magisterial church had actually ever realized. The emphasis was placed firmly on the individual rather than the church. Stress on the inner man, spiritual rebirth, lay religiosity, on faith rooted in the individual independent of the institutional and theological order of the magisterial church—all of these ideas had been at the heart of the radical tradition.[52] By the late seventeenth century, by way of the Pietist movement, radical religiosity had begun to work its way into the orthodox order. The dichotomy that had emerged with the Reformation had begun to fall away and it became easier to realize these ideals within the context of the mainstream churches. The result was the transformation of Protestantism, both in Europe, where the magisterial order began to relinquish its hold, and in the New World, where colonies such as Pennsylvania became havens for radical Protestants and eventually crucibles for new syntheses and modern forms of the faith. Radicalism was no longer a parallel or marginal movement, but a historical force at the very heart of the mainstream Protestant dynamic.

NOTES

1. Quoted in C. Scott Dixon, “Faith and History on the Eve of Enlightenment: Ernst Salomon Cyprian, Gottfried Arnold, and the History of Heretics,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 1 (2006): 34–35; on Arnold and the radical Pietist tradition see Douglas H. Schantz, An Introduction to German Pietism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 147–179; Hans Schneider, “Der radikale Pietismus im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Martin Brecht (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), vol. 1, 391–421.

2. Dixon, “Faith and History,” 49.

3. Jens-Martin Kruse, Universitätstheologie und Kirchenreform (Mainz: Phillip von Zabern, 2002), 279–374; Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–29; Brecht, Martin Luther, trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), vol. 2, 1–56; Nikolaus Müller, Die Wittenberger Bewegung (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1911), 20–210.

4. James S. Preus, Carlstadt’s Ordinaciones and Luther’s Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 66, 7–85; Brecht, Martin Luther, vol. 2, 157–171; Kruse, Universitätstheologie und Kirchenreform, 330–390.

5. This idea is developed in Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

6. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, “Karlstadt, Müntzer and the Reformation of the Commoners, 1521–1525,” in John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (eds.), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 5–20; Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1969), 49–155.

7. Goertz, “Karlstadt, Müntzer and the Reformation,” 20–41; Richard van Dülmen, Reformation als Revolution (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), 39–55; Rupp, Patterns of Reformation, 157–350.

8. Michael G. Baylor, The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 154; Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 61–92, 107–122; Gottfried Seebass, Müntzers Erbe (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 2002), 161–280.

9. Piet Visser, “Mennonites and Doopsgezinden in the Netherlands, 1535–1700,” in Roth and Stayer, Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 299–345; Samme Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), 126–339; Goertz, The Anabaptists, trans. Trevor Johnson (London: Routledge, 1996), 32–33.

10. Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92–114.

11. C. Arnold Snyder, “The Birth and Evolution of Swiss Anabaptism 1520–1530,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (2006): 429.

12. Andrea Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003), 121–291; Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 191–227.

13. Werner O. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 43–45; Fritz Blanke, Brüder in Christo (Zurich: Zwingli Verlag, 1955), 21–55.

14. Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli, 202–291; Gordon, Swiss Reformation, 191–227; Visser, “Mennonites and Doopsgezinden,” 299–315.

15. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 55.

16. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 63; Snyder, “Birth and Evolution of Swiss Anabaptism,” 623–629.

17. George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), 1068–1069; Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 55.

18. Roth, “Marpeck and the Later Swiss Brethren,” 348–388.

19. Claire Gantet, “Dreams, Standards of Knowledge and Orthodoxy in Germany in the Sixteenth Century,” in Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen (eds.), Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 78–79; Thomas Kaufmann, “Nahe Fremde—Aspekte der Wahrnehmung der ‘Schwärmer’ im frühneuzeitlichen Luthertum,” in Kaspar von Greyerz et al. (eds.), Interkonfessionalität—Transkonfessionalität—binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 2003), 182–185.

20. Quoted in Päivi Räisänen, Ketzer im Dorf (Konstanz: UVK Velagsgesellschaft, 2011), 19.

21. Kaufmann, “Nahe Fremde,” 196–205.

22. Quotations from Ernst Troeltsch The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), vol. 2, 479, 500, 482; see the literature and debates in Lori Pearson, Beyond Essence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 125–162.

23. For the overview of the literature, see Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 88–95; Räisänen, Ketzer im Dorf, 9–53; Anselm Schubert, Astrid von Schlachta, and Michael Driedger (eds.), Grenzen des Täufertums (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 2009), 395–416; Michael Driedger, “Anabaptism and Religious Radicalism,” in Alec Ryrie (ed.), The European Reformations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 212–231; Stefan Ehrenpreis and Ute Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 52–61; Goertz, Religiöse Bewegungen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1993), 59–107; Williams, Radical Reformation, xxiii–xxxi.

24. Harold S. Bender, “The Anabaptist Vision,” Church History 13 (1944): 3–24; Franklin H. Littell, The Anabaptist View of the Church (Boston, MA: Starr King Press, 1958), 1–45; Albert Fredrik Mellink, De wederdopers in de noordelijke Nederlanden 1533–41 (Groningen: Wolters, 1954), 25–38.

25. Williams, Radical Reformation, xxiii–xxxi; a recent refinement of Williams’s Spiritualist typology is R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Reformation Spiritualism: Typology, Sources and Significance,” in Goertz and Stayer (eds.), Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), 127–140.

26. Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 29; Goertz, The Anabaptists, 132; see also Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1972).

27. Klaus Deppermann, Werner Packull, and James Stayer, “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis: The Historical Discussion of Anabaptist Origins,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 49 (1975): 83–121; see the discussions in Driedger, “Anabaptism and Religious Radicalism,” 217–222; Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli, 26–31; Ehrenpreis and Ute Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, 52–61.

28. See the reflections on future research in Schubert, von Schlachta, and Driedger, Grenzen des Täufertums, 395–416, here 406; McLaughlin, “Radicals,” in David M. Whitford (ed.), Reformation and Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 2008), 80–120; Driedger, “Anabaptism and Religious Radicalism,” 212–231.

29. Stayer, “Introduction,” in Roth and Stayer, Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 119–161, xix.

30. Cited in Sigrun Haude, “Gender Roles and Perspectives among Anabaptist and Spiritualist Groups,” in Roth and Stayer, Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 433.

31. Haude, “Gender Roles and Perspectives among Anabaptist and Spiritualist Groups,” 425–466; Katherine Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 167–198; Mirjam van Veen, Piet Visser, Gary K. Waite, Els Kloek, Marion Kobelt-Groch, and Anna Voolstra (eds.), Sisters: Myth and Reality of Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Doopsgezind Women ca. 1525–1900 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014); Katharina Reinholt, Ein Leib in Christo werden: Ehe und Sexualität im Täufertum der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); Marion Kobelt-Groch, Aufsässige Töchter Gottes: Frauen im Bauernkrieg und in den Täuferbewegungen (Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 1993).

32. This paragraph is primarily based on Goertz, The Anabaptists, 6–110; Goertz, “Radical Religiosity in the German Reformation,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 70–85; Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 1997).

33. Goertz, The Anabaptists, 39.

34. Baylor, Radical Reformation, 175; Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli, 547–568.

35. Goertz, The Anabaptists, 62.

36. Goertz, The Anabaptists, 129.

37. Goertz, The Anabaptists, 83; Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli, 255–331; Stayer, “Swiss-South German Anabaptism,” in Roth and Stayer, Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 83–118.

38. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 138.

39. Stayer, German Peasants’ War, 139–159, here 154–155; Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, 187–318; Andrea Chudaska, Peter Riedemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 2003), 216–255; Astrid von Schlachta, Hutterische Konfession und Tradition (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003), 190–201. Gelassenheit denotes a sense of abandon or inward calm.

40. Thomas Nash, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (London: Penguin, 1985), 278.

41. Rupp, Patterns of Reformation, 176.

42. Quoted in Rufus Matthew Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1914), 49.

43. Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 33–36, here 35; McLaughlin, “Spiritualism: Schwenckfeld and Franck and their Early Modern Resonances,” in Roth and Stayer, Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 119–161; Brecht, “Das Aufkommen der neuen Frömmigkeitsbewegung in Deutschland,” in Brecht Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 1, 113–130.

44. Stayer, German Peasants’ War, 63.

45. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Temple Smith, 1970), 272; Mellink, De wederdopers in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 25–38.

46. James M. Estes, Peace, Order and the Glory of God: Secular Authority and the Church in the Thought of Luther and Melanchthon, 1518–1559 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 190.

47. See the broader discussion in Dixon, “The Politics of Law and Gospel,” in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds.), The Impact of the European Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 37–62.

48. Ernst Laubach, “Das Täuferreich zu Münster in seiner Wirkung auf die Nachwelt,” Westfälische Geschichte 141 (1991): 123–150.

49. Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), vol. 1, 111–113; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “ ‘Riches and Honour were Rejected by Them as Loathsome Vomit’: The Fear of Leveling in New England,” in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (eds.), Inequality in Early America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 46–52.

50. Roth, “Marpeck and the Later Swiss Brethren,” 381; compare Hanspeter Jecker, Ketzer, Rebellen, Heilige (Liestal: Verlag des Kantons Basel-Landschaft, 1998), 406–528.

51. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 157–328; Israel, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63–201.

52. Dixon, Protestants, 184–205.

FURTHER READING

Baylor, Michael G. The Radical Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Clasen, Claus-Peter. Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972.

Dipple, Geoffrey. “Just as in the Time of the Apostles”: Uses of History in the Radical Reformation. Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2005.

Freisen, Abraham. Erasmus, the Anabaptists, and the Great Commission. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.

Goertz, Hans-Jürgen, trans. Trevor Johnson. The Anabaptists. London: Routledge, 1996.

Goertz, Hans-Jürgen. “Radical Religiosity in the German Reformation.” In A Companion to the Reformation World, edited by R. Po-Chia Hsia, pp. 70–85. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Oyer, John S. Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1964.

Packull, Werner O. Mysticism and the Early South German–Austrian Anabaptist Movement, 1525–1531. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977.

Packull, Werner O. Hutterite Beginnings. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Roth, John D. and James M. Stayer (eds.) A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007.

Rupp, Gordon. Patterns of Reformation. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1969.

Snyder, C. Arnold. Anabaptist History and Theology. Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1995.

Stayer, James M. The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.

Stayer, James M. “The Radical Reformation.” In Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, vol. 2, edited by Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, pp. 251–278. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996.

Williams, George Huntston. The Radical Reformation. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1962.

CHAPTER 11

CALVIN AND REFORMED PROTESTANTISM

MACK P. HOLT

DEFINITIONS

WHAT is Reformed Protestantism? It is not as straightforward a question as might seem at first glance. The Reformed part is easier to define than Protestantism, though there are pitfalls even there. But the word Protestantism did not exist in the sixteenth century—at least not as an -ism—nor did the more generic term Protestant Reformation. Indeed, the very idea of a collective noun to unite all those Christian groups that broke away from the Roman Catholic Church—Protestantism—just like the idea of a Protestant Reformation, is usage that dates from a much later period. The word Protestant was used in the sixteenth century, however, though not by Lutherans, Calvinists, or others who rejected the authority of the Roman Church as a way to form a trans-Protestant collective identity. Indeed, the term Protestant first appears to have been used by moderate Catholics as a more polite and neutral way to refer to Huguenots—members of the French Reformed church. Its usage would become more frequent in the seventeenth century, however, as Huguenots and Catholics tried to learn how to live together in peace after the Edict of Nantes.

The modern connotation of the word Protestant—a collective noun to describe all those groups who broke away from the Roman Church in the sixteenth century—would have horrified both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564). While Luther referred to Anabaptists as “sectarians” and “fanatics,” Calvin disapproved of their “errors, malice and wickedness” and “labyrinth of incredible dreams.” This was a reference to the Anabaptists’ belief that God’s revelation through the Holy Spirit had been of equal authority with the Bible, thus rejecting Luther’s and Calvin’s insistence on the primacy of Scripture—sola scriptura—as the only basis for doctrinal authority. Equally serious for Calvin was that Anabaptists also rejected the secular authority of magistrates, which he thought was “to put all to disorder.”[1] Finally, the destructive and iconoclastic regime of the Anabaptists in the city of Münster led by John of Leiden tainted the reputation of all Anabaptist communities after 1535. In no sense did Calvin believe that the faithful of his church and the Anabaptists shared anything in common, even the term Protestant.[2]

The term “Reformed” however, was commonly used in the sixteenth century by those we normally associate with Reformed Protestantism. Indeed, their preferred epithet for referring to themselves was as members of the Reformed church, or even as just Christians, though not as Protestants. The term Reformed was used so often by the followers of Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), Calvin, Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Martin Bucer (1491–1551), et al., that French Catholics even mocked the term by referring to them constantly during the French Wars of Religion as those of “the so-called Reformed religion (la religion prétendue réformée).” So, unlike the term Protestant, at least the use of Reformed was adopted by its practitioners and its critics alike. But what did it really mean? How did Reformed Protestants differ from other Protestants such as Lutherans? And is it fair to use Reformed Protestantism as a synonym for Calvinism as so many of even its own members do?

ORIGINS

Often labeled as the Calvinist Reformation, because of the impact and shape given to this community by its most dominant voice in the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s, the Reformed version of Protestantism in fact predated John Calvin. There is no question that Calvin was the most significant of all its early founders, but in many ways he reshaped and molded a Reformed church that had already been in existence in various guises for two decades before he arrived permanently in Geneva in 1541. If we consider the family tree of the Reformed church, we have to start with four distinct branches emanating from four different places—Zurich, Basel, Strasbourg, and Geneva—all of which predated Calvin’s final arrival in Geneva in 1541. In this sense it is fair to say that Calvin was not the founder of the Reformed church, nor did he contribute very much to it in the way of original theological ideas. His greatest contribution was in fusing these individual branches together into a more coherent whole, based firmly on social and moral discipline, at the same time providing a Protestant alternative to Lutheranism that would eventually spread far beyond the boundaries of Lake Geneva to much of eastern and western Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century and eventually to North America and southern Africa in the seventeenth century. Above all, Calvin gave Reformed Protestantism a new identity. But he did not create it.

The story of the Reformation in Zurich founded by Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) and the Reformation in Basel founded by Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) have been recounted in Chapter 9, “The Swiss Reformations.” Zurich, Basel, and Strasbourg forged a very different relationship with the secular magistrates in their cities than the arrangement Luther established between his church and the ducal state in Saxony. Basel and Strasbourg were free imperial cities with independent city councils that converted to Reformed Protestantism and established close working relations with the churches, in Basel even taking over full administration of the church. The point here is that these urban congregations established a foundation that Calvin would later strengthen and implement more fully in Geneva.

Yet the Reformation also predated Calvin’s initial stay in Geneva from 1536 to 1538. This was largely the work of Guillaume Farel (1489–1565), the other father figure in addition to Bucer, who was responsible for Calvin’s development as a theologian and supporter of the Reformation. Farel had studied in Paris with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536), the Humanist and biblical scholar, and he was attracted to the evangelical community at Meaux outside Paris in 1521. The Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet (1472–1534), had been preaching for a moderate reform of the church from within since 1518 and had attracted a number of followers, including Marguerite d’Angoulême (1492–1549), the sister of King Francis I (1494–1547). But Luther’s Reformation in Saxony offered a more radical alternative, which appealed to Farel, and in 1523 he departed Meaux for Basel. Over the next decade he traveled to Montbélliard, Metz, Strasbourg, Lausanne, and eventually Neuchâtel, where in 1530 he convinced the citizens of that town to adopt the Reformation. Only in 1532 did Farel make his first visit to Geneva. He was not welcome initially, though after several visits over the next three years he eventually persuaded the General Council of the city of Geneva on May 21, 1536 to adopt the Reformation. Two months later, in July, Farel persuaded the young John Calvin to join him in helping to reform the city. Thus, the groundwork for the Reformation in Geneva was laid by Guillaume Farel before Calvin had even arrived.

CALVIN’S GENEVA

Calvin’s first visit to Geneva in July 1536 was not even planned, and like much of his career might seem entirely fortuitous, though he later came to believe that God had led him there. Calvin was born in Noyon in the province of Picardy in northern France in 1509, and because his father was a trustee for the cathedral chapter in Noyon, he seemed destined for a career in the church. Both Calvin and his older brother were provided benefices by the chapter to study theology in Paris. But Calvin’s father soon parted company from the cathedral chapter in Noyon, with his son deciding to abandon the study of theology. In 1526 Calvin moved to the University of Orléans to study law instead, and then to the University of Bourges in 1529. This change in career plans brought him into direct contact with an explicitly Humanist curriculum and opened up new vistas for the young Calvin, who was strongly attracted to the ancient languages and the new learning that had come out of Italy. He was especially attracted to Andreas Alciati, a Humanist lawyer and one of his teachers in Bourges. Calvin received his license in law in 1532 and moved to Paris the following year to continue his study of Latin and Greek as well as classical and Christian antiquity at the newly founded Collège Royal, where both Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples had strongly influenced many of the faculty.

Sometime that same year—1533—Calvin experienced a conversion to the Reformation and left the Catholic Church. Details of his conversion are sparse, as Calvin only chose to comment on it very briefly a long time after the event in question. At the same time he abandoned any thought of practicing law for the rest of his life and turned toward theology, though not the scholastic theology of the medieval church. Later that year a close friend of his, Nicolas Cop (1501–1540), gave an inaugural lecture as the newly appointed rector of the University of Paris. Cop was accused of Lutheranism and forced to resign, while Calvin’s association with him forced him to flee Paris for Basel, where he found the Reformed community there much to his liking. He spent the next two and a half years composing his most well-known writing on theology, The Institution of the Christian Religion, which was published in Latin in Basel in 1536. Calvin would continue to revise and reprint this great work several times over the remainder of his life, and it provided the most extensive and most systematic explanation of justification by faith and predestination, among other things, than any other Reformation text. And Calvin was in the process of moving to Strasbourg in July of that same year when Farel persuaded him to join him in Geneva. It was a fortuitous moment for Calvin’s career as well as for the Reformed church.

Although Calvin was completely self-taught in theology and had no formal ecclesiastical training of any kind, Farel got him appointed as “lecturer in Holy Scripture” in Geneva. To be fair, Calvin’s Humanist education as well as his biblical studies in Paris had given him a very solid foundation for his theological ideas. And there is no doubt that both Farel and Bucer, his elder mentors, considered the young Calvin as their superior in terms of his knowledge of Scripture. Perhaps Farel’s single biggest accomplishment was to convince Calvin to become a preacher, and the novitiate took to preaching like a duck to water. Calvin also immediately set out to write a catechism for the Reformed church in Geneva as well as the “Ecclesiastical Ordinances” concerning the organization of the church. Above all, these ordinances set up a consistory to police the morals and social discipline of the city and expel those who either would not or could not strive to live up to the high ideals of a kingdom of Christ on earth. The lay politicians of Geneva’s civil government were unwilling to concede the power to excommunicate citizens to the pastors, and they refused to adopt the “Ecclesiastical Ordinances.” Because of their very vocal opposition to this decision—both Farel and Calvin refused to accept the subordination of the church to the authority of the city fathers—they were themselves expelled from Geneva in May 1538. Thus, Calvin’s first sojourn in the city lasted just under two years. Geneva had opted for a Reformation, primarily to escape the jurisdiction of Charles III, Duke of Savoy, though this was not the Reformation that Calvin had envisaged.

This sudden reverse in his life did allow Calvin to finally visit Strasbourg, however, where he came under the influence of the older Bucer. Bucer invited Calvin to become the pastor of the French refugee church in Strasbourg, and during the three years that Calvin spent in Strasbourg—maybe the happiest period of his entire life—he undertook a regular regime of preaching, lecturing on Scripture at the Strasbourg Academy, and revising his Institution of the Christian Religion for a second edition to be published in French. He also published his first biblical commentary, on the book of Romans, and this established a pattern that he would continue for the rest of his career after he returned to Geneva for good in 1541. He would first develop a lecture to present to ministerial candidates for each book of the Bible, after which he would revise and publish the lecture as a more formal biblical commentary. Bucer’s influence on Calvin was especially great in his emphasis on reforming the local community as well as the church. Although there was no formal consistory in Strasbourg, Bucer had assigned a small group of laymen in each congregation, called Kirchenpfleger (church guardians), whose role was very similar to that of the pastors and elders of the consistory that Calvin and Farel had attempted to introduce in Geneva. This experience proved to Calvin that a reform of moral discipline throughout the community was possible as long as there were institutional means of enforcing it.

Bucer’s influence on Calvin had little to do with theology or doctrines of salvation in the next world, but was based much more on the vision he had of how a Christian society ought to operate in this world. Thus, Bucer made it very clear to Calvin that reforming the church was useless unless lay society was also reformed. Building a kingdom of Christ on earth and transforming this world through the close oversight of discipline and morals of all members of the community thus became a primary duty for Calvin. Whereas Luther was content to leave the policing and enforcement of proper morals and discipline to the secular state, Bucer and Calvin asserted that this was necessarily the role of the church. And while Bucer’s fullest statement of the policing of morals, his De Regno Christi (On the Kingdom of Christ), would not be published until 1550 at the very end of his life—a book John Bossy has called “the ur-text of Reformation disciplina”[3]—its values and principles were already being implemented in Reformation Strasbourg in the 1530s. And they would become even more visible in Geneva in Calvin’s introduction of the consistory in the new Reformed church in that city after his arrival there for good in 1541. Whereas Luther had wanted to substantially redraw the boundaries between the sacred and the profane established by the medieval Catholic Church, with the church policing the former and the state policing the latter, Bucer and Calvin sought essentially to eliminate these boundaries altogether, making all of Christian society sacred, with the church policing the whole. Bucer never managed to achieve this in Strasbourg, and he ultimately came to accept the Lutheran compromise there, before eventually departing Strasbourg for England when Charles V’s victory in the Schmalkaldic War in 1547 introduced the Augsberg Interim and brought the Catholic Mass back to the cathedral and other Strasbourg churches. Calvin would achieve even greater success in eliminating the boundaries between the sacred and the profane once he returned to Geneva.

CALVIN’S RETURN TO GENEVA

The city fathers in Geneva did eventually recall Calvin in 1541, however, and on Calvin’s terms. When he returned to Geneva for good on September 13, 1541, Calvin received a promise that his ideal Reformation would be implemented in the city. On November 20, 1541, the General Council of Geneva formally adopted Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which outlined four orders of ministers to serve the city: pastors were to preach and administer the sacraments; doctors were to instruct the city’s citizens in the true faith; elders were to supervise the social and moral discipline of the city; and deacons were to care for the poor and needy. The ordinances also established the consistory, or ecclesiastical court composed of the elders and pastors, whose function was “to have oversight of the life of everyone, to admonish amicably those whom they see to be erring or to be living a disordered life, and, where it is required, to enjoin fraternal corrections themselves and along with others.”[4]

Calvin’s arrival in 1541 transformed not only the Genevan church, however, as his goal was much more ambitious than this. He wanted to transform the entire city completely. The consistory was just one means of achieving this goal. Composed of the church’s pastors and lay elders elected annually by Geneva’s Small Council, this group of about two dozen men radically transformed the city’s manners and morals. Having won the power to excommunicate the most egregious and repetitive offenders, the consistory was spectacularly successful in maintaining discipline in the community. One measure of the consistory’s efficacy was that after 1555 the annual rate of illegitimate births in the city fell to 0.12 percent and the annual rate of prenuptial conceptions fell to 1.0 percent, the lowest rates by far of any recorded elsewhere in Europe in the sixteenth century.[5] To be sure, many Genevans were less than pleased to have their every action and utterance potentially scrutinized by the elders and pastors, and indeed many left the city because of it. But far more men and women were attracted to Geneva as an asylum and place of refuge from outside the city. Though they came from all over Europe, a majority were skilled artisans from France—especially printers—and wealthy merchants from Italy. Indeed, the population of Geneva more than doubled from 8,000 to 10,000 in 1536 at the time of Calvin’s first sojourn in the city to the year of his death in 1564, when the population had swelled to more than 20,000. And nearly all of this growth was due to immigrants from outside moving into the city, in essence a gathered community attracted by the Reformation Calvin had established there. We also know that Calvin’s teachings strongly appealed to women. Not only were they freed from their bonds with the priesthood, but they were encouraged to read the Bible and study Scripture along with their husbands. Moreover, in church services they were encouraged to sing the Psalms and participate in the liturgy more directly and actively than in the Catholic Church. Finally, the practice of clerical marriage not only equalized men and women ever so slightly, but it made clear that Calvin thought women could be worthy companions to a minister of God’s Word. Indeed, many women were attracted to the Reformation before their husbands, whom they helped to convert.[6]

A second means of transforming the city was through sermons, and Calvin personally preached approximately 4,000 sermons during his twenty-five year stay in Geneva. Most of these were preached from the pulpit of his parish church of St. Pierre, but Calvin was also a regular preacher in the city’s other two parish churches. Given that the Ecclesiastical Ordinances required twenty-six sermons a week by the city’s preachers in the three parish churches, Calvin himself normally preached a minimum of several sermons during the week, as well as on Sundays. To be sure, Calvin never intended these sermons to be recorded for redistribution, so the fact that as he delivered them nearly every one of them was copied down verbatim by a small group of students and supporters and later published is surely a boon for historians. For Calvin it was no accident that the pure preaching of the Word was the first sign of the true church, and he personally made it a lifelong duty to preach the Word as often as possible. And he was uncommonly successful as a preacher, partly because of his Humanist training in rhetoric while in law school, but largely because he knew how to play on the congregation’s emotions and admonish them without making them feel powerless or impotent. Above all, he persuaded them that to create a kingdom of Christ on earth in Geneva, the city on a hill that was to serve as a beacon to all, required more moral discipline from them than they ever believed was possible.

Calvin was so well-known as a preacher, in fact, that non-residents of Geneva regularly flocked to Geneva just to hear him preach. Indeed, even some Catholics were so curious to see Calvin for themselves in the pulpit that they attended his sermons. One such Catholic was a soldier from Languedoc called the Sieur de Clairé, who was passing close to Geneva on his way home from his garrison in Savoy and wanted to see Calvin preach in the flesh. As Florimond de Raemond tells it, once in the church
the Sieur de Clairé, letting his eye run over the troop of women sitting close to the pulpit, spotted his own wife. He was astonished; was he dreaming? Did his eyes deceive him? But the more he looked the more he became certain that it was indeed his wife, and his daughter.[7]

Thus, to Protestants and Catholics alike Calvin was known in his lifetime not primarily as the author of the Institution of the Christian Religion, but as a prodigious and indefatigable preacher of the Word of God.

A major focus of Calvin’s sermons was of course the Bible, of which Calvin had already demonstrated his mastery to both Bucer and Farel. And if Calvin was best known in his own day for his sermons, his biblical commentaries came a close second. The first was his commentary on Romans published in 1540, and the last were his commentaries on Joshua and Ezekiel, which were published posthumously in 1564 and 1565 respectively. In between came commentaries on most of the books of the Old Testament (except Deuteronomy, Job, and Samuel) and New Testament (except II John, III John, and Revelation). These commentaries began as lectures to theology students that Calvin taught in small groups at the Genevan Academy, which not only provided an education to local youth, but attracted hundreds of students from France, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, the German Empire, and elsewhere. His students copied down these lectures; only later did Calvin revise them for publication. Indeed, Calvin’s biblical commentaries and sermons grew to become the most voluminous of all his writings over the course of his lifetime, filling up thirty-two of the fifty-nine volumes of his published works.[8] The commentaries explained the meaning of the text of the Bible as well as the relevance each passage had to their own lives. And following the lead of such Humanist biblical scholars as Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, as well as earlier reformers such as Luther and Zwingli, Calvin insisted on an historical—or literal—reading of the Bible. This begged an obvious question, however: Whose literal interpretation, since a literal interpretation was still an interpretation? For Calvin, who in general agreed with the biblical readings of Erasmus and other reformers, it was his own interpretation that mattered most. Like Luther, Calvin had a monumental and unshakeable confidence in his own prophetic ability to understand Scripture, and he tolerated no opposition at all to his interpretations.

DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION

It was the doctrine of predestination, of course, that would come to overshadow the theology of Reformed Protestantism and forever be associated with it. Although Calvin has sometimes been credited with creating this doctrine, he would have been the first to admit that this was not the case. Indeed, Calvin, like Luther and Bucer before him, traced the idea back to St. Augustine, and his view of the doctrine differed hardly at all from theirs. Moreover, predestination was hardly a dominant feature of Calvin’s teaching and preaching. As Irena Backus and Philip Benedict have reminded us, predestination “was not particularly central to Calvin’s thought, much less its organizing principle.”[9] If anything, it was the one doctrine that would eventually divide Reformed Protestantism, as its opposition by Jerome Bolsec (d. 1584) and others in Geneva in the 1550s made clear. To be sure, Calvin offered the most systematic analysis of the doctrine in the Institution of the Christian Religion, and his discussion of predestination expanded with each successive edition. But the Institution was a work of his youth, and the doctrine did not feature prominently in the sermons and commentaries that dominated most of his career. Simply put, predestination was the logical extension of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. Salvation could only be achieved by God’s grace through faith, not by any good works of human endeavor, such as participating in the sacraments as the Catholic Church required. For St. Augustine predestination simply meant that God foresees how everyone lives their lives and whether before they are even born they choose with their own free will to follow God or reject him. But St. Augustine also stressed the requirement of following the Christian Church, and by extension its sacraments, for salvation, as indeed the only path from the earthly city of mankind to the heavenly city of God.[10]

But Calvin rejected this notion, like Luther and Bucer before him. For these reformers, faith alone was the requirement for salvation. But it could neither be sought after nor acquired by any human achievement, for that was simply another good work. It could only be acquired as a gift from God alone to those whom he had predestined to salvation. Thus, salvation was not a reward for good living that could be earned; it was a free gift from God destined explicitly for those whom he had chosen as the elect. No human being could of his/her own free will choose to follow God without God’s grace. And Calvin made it very clear that predestination was not to be confused with God’s foreknowledge of all events. “We, indeed, place both doctrines [foreknowledge and predestination] in God, but we say that subjecting one to the other is absurd.” God knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will happen, because “to his knowledge there is nothing future or past, but all things are present.” Thus, argued Calvin, God gave every individual free will to act as he or she wishes while on earth, and God’s foreknowledge of those actions does not take away anyone’s free will in those decisions. But for life in the next world, all are subject to God’s will alone and are predestined to be either among the elect or among the damned.

Just as clearly, however, Calvin’s idea of predestination was a doctrine with a central contradiction. If God’s Son died for all mankind, why did God only allow a select few into the heavenly city? Moreover, if God alone decided who was worthy of being among the elect and who would be punished among the damned, and he made that decision based not on how each person lived his or her life, then what was God’s justice based on? This was precisely the query that Bolsec had first put to Calvin in 1551, when he challenged the very principle of predestination and was banished from Geneva for his efforts. Calvin’s only response was that God has a higher justice concealed from human sight and comprehension, which will always remain mysterious to us: “we should not investigate what the Lord has left hidden in secret.”[11]

The other major controversy during Calvin’s tenure in Geneva was his role in the arrest, conviction, and execution of Miguel Servetus (1509–1553), a Spanish theologian and polymath who had denounced in print the Trinity, infant baptism, and Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. He had been sought after by both Protestant and Catholic authorities alike, and when he turned up in Geneva in 1553, to hear Calvin preach no less, he was seized and arrested. Calvin’s apologists have argued—and continue to argue—that Calvin only wanted to reconcile with Servetus and had no intention of seeing him executed. Indeed, they stress that Calvin warned Servetus that he should leave Geneva as his safety could not be guaranteed. On the other hand, some of them even suggest that Servetus himself was mentally unbalanced and thus entirely responsible for his own fate. In the end, they conclude that Calvin “was not legally responsible for the execution of Servetus; only the city magistrates could perform such acts.” Moreover, they claim that because he asked the authorities to behead rather than burn Servetus, “a much more humane means of execution,” Calvin was not really as intolerant as many of his critics have maintained.[12] But a more even-handed reading of the evidence shows that Calvin was explicitly implicated in the arrest, conviction, and execution of Servetus in Geneva, and indeed, that he actively pushed for this end. Not only was Calvin’s personal secretary, Nicolas de la Fontaine, the civil plaintiff in Servetus’s trial in Geneva, but Calvin himself, who had been in correspondence with Servetus for some time, actually provided the court with some of his own letters from Servetus, which proved crucial in determining Servetus’s guilt. And when the independent reformer, Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563), denounced in print the use of force to punish false belief in general and the execution of Servetus in particular, he used the term “Calvinist” as “a synonym for those who favored the execution of religious dissenters.”[13] And Servetus would forever remain an albatross around the neck of Calvin and his followers.

There is no denying, however, that Calvin transformed Reformed Protestantism, gave it a permanent foundation, and made Geneva, just one of many small, provincial cities upon his arrival, into the heartbeat of the Protestant Reformation itself. Calvin sent pastors trained in the Geneva Academy to all parts of Europe to disseminate his goal of not just a thoroughly Reformed church, but for a more Godly and morally disciplined society, a kingdom of Christ on earth.

THE SPREAD OF REFORMED PROTESTANTISM: FRANCE

John Calvin had never intended for the Reformation that he and others had introduced in Geneva to be a purely local phenomenon. Indeed the founding of the Geneva Academy in 1559 was motivated by the need to train more pastors to spread the Reformed church outside of Geneva. Calvin and Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Calvin’s lieutenant and chosen successor after Calvin’s death in 1564, had obviously been teaching theology and training pastors long before 1559, but the foundation of the academy was evidence that Reformed Protestantism was always intended to be an international movement. The earliest success was in Calvin’s own country of origin, France. The linguistic link as well as its proximity, of course, made France an obvious target for spreading the Reformation. Research by Philip Benedict, Nicolas Fornerod, and others has shown that the academy sent close to 500 pastors to France, and by 1562 these pastors had established 816 churches with approximately two million members—out of a French population at the time of maybe 18 million people—more than 10 percent of the entire kingdom.[14] This spectacular growth in just a few years meant that by 1562 there were one hundred times as many Reformed Protestants across the border in France as there were in Geneva itself. Moreover, this explosion of Reformed expansion in such a short time allowed many pastors and lay Protestants in France to think they really were God’s chosen people in this world as well as in the next. Calvin had already pointed out in his Institution of the Christian Religion the obvious link that the elect had to God’s first chosen people, the Hebrews of the Old Testament. Indeed, he said there was no difference whatsoever “between the covenant that the Lord made of old with the Israelites before Christ’s advent, and that which God has now made with us after his manifestation.”[15] And this early success in France only reinforced the belief that God would soon convert the entire French kingdom to Reformed Christianity. As Calvin himself wrote to a group of Protestants in Paris in 1557, with God on our side “our enemies will not be able to resist [us].”[16] He was convinced that he was leading a total victory of the true religion over idolatry, and his followers believed they would be eternally saved as a consequence.

Yet these 816 Reformed churches were widely scattered over most of the kingdom from Paris to the Mediterranean. So far removed from both Geneva and each other, many of these churches were totally dependent on provincial noble support by men and even some noblewomen for their survival. Moreover, their explosive emergence produced a serious Catholic backlash against the movement, both at court and in the kingdom at large, which eventually led to the outbreak of the religious wars in 1562. And the seemingly exponential growth of the early years simply could not be sustained. Why not? One factor is that virtually the entire judicial and legal arm of the monarchy—best exemplified by the judges in the Parlement of Paris and the seven regional parlements—had already by 1560 participated with the kings of France in reforming the French church—not to mention the relationship between the French church and Rome—after the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438. By appropriating political theory derived from canon law, French kings not only legitimated their absolute power to rule politically, but the judges in the parlements saw it is an essential duty and responsibility to protect the French Gallican church—and by extension, the entire kingdom of France—from heresy. In short, the very appellate courts where all heresy trials in France took place were staffed by men whose identity was resolutely Catholic. Thus, there was already a significant structural brake on Protestant growth in place long before any Reformed pastors trained in Geneva ever arrived in France.[17] A second major factor was that although large numbers of the French nobility did indeed convert to the Reformed faith in these early years, a majority of the princely houses were unwilling to publicly oppose the crown once fighting broke out in 1562, wishing instead to try to steer a middle course between the militants on both sides of the confessional divide. As Stuart Carroll has recently demonstrated, Protestant princes such as Jean IV, Count of Luxembourg (1537–1576), or Léonor d’Orléans, Duke of Longuville (1540–1573), and perhaps most famous of all, Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, were “Protestant loyalists” who refused to take up arms against the King of France at the outbreak of the religious wars. Indeed, instead of joining the Huguenot forces led by Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (1530–1569) they actually fought against their co-religionists in the civil wars. Thus, a majority of the leading princes of the new religion in France were unwilling to toss away their governorships in order to lead a rebellion against the crown.[18] The King of Navarre has come in for especially strong abuse from historians of French Protestantism, who have seen him as either a dupe of the Guise family and the King of Spain, or as a feckless, fickle, and weak leader.[19] What Calvin as well as the other Protestant nobles and Reformed pastors who had invested so much in Navarre failed to realize was that he and the other “Protestant loyalists” were unwilling to allow their identities as Reformed Protestants to completely overshadow their equally powerful identities as princes of the realm.[20] The same was also true of most Catholic princes, as would be demonstrated later in the religious wars during the period of the League.

The 816 Reformed churches in France that did exist by 1562 were hardly identical copies of the Genevan model, as their political circumstances were so vastly different. For a start a significant portion of the Reformed churches outside the cities and towns were what was known as “home churches,” that is, usually dependent on a local noble who allowed Reformed worship services to take place in a private chapel on his estate. Almost none of these churches had consistories, so the emphasis on moral discipline and the goal of creating a kingdom of Christ on earth took a back seat to survival in these years. Moreover, the peace settlement ending the first civil war in 1563 explicitly limited Reformed churches to one church per bailiwick throughout the kingdom, which severely handicapped the large urban churches that had provided the main source of dynamic growth of Reformed Protestantism since 1555. Protestant nobles could still maintain their “home churches,” but this was a decisive blow to Reformed growth in the kingdom.

The most decisive assault on Reformed growth and expansion in France was the St. Bartholomew massacres that began on 24 August 1572 in the capital of Paris and spread to a dozen provincial cities in the following weeks. All told upwards of 4,000 to 6,000 French Protestants were killed in the massacres. Not only did the massacres prevent any further growth of the new religion, but large numbers of Protestants after 1572 abjured their faith and converted—or for many, returned—to Catholicism, especially in northern and central France. Whereas French Protestants made up perhaps more than 10 percent of the population of France at the start of the religious wars, by their end in 1598 there were significantly fewer of them. Moreover, the settlement of the Edict of Nantes in 1598, although it did recognize the legal right of Protestants to exist in France, ensured that for most of the kingdom outside the cities in the Midi, where Reformed Protestantism was still vibrant, public life in France would be entirely Catholic. Thus, French Protestants, who had long hoped for and believed in a total victory for God’s chosen people, were forced to accept that they were officially second-class citizens in their own country.

REFORMED PROTESTANTISM IN THE NETHERLANDS

The history of the expansion of Reformed Protestantism to the Netherlands is a very different story. Much more urbanized than France—indeed, perhaps the most urbanized region of Europe—many of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands showed great interest in first Lutheranism and then in the Reformed faith. The attempted suppression of heresy by first Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and then his son King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598), however, forced many Protestant-leaning Netherlanders to flee abroad for their safety. Between 1523 and 1566 more than 1,300 inhabitants of the Netherlands were put to death for their support of the Reformation. Thus, these exiles—who formed their own churches in London, Wesel, and Emden—were the true founders of the Dutch Reformed Church. Whereas the first and largely Lutheran Reformation had failed, the second, which was Calvinist, would succeed because of the efforts of the exiles. The first such community was established in 1545 in Wesel by a French-speaking group of exiles from Tournai, while a larger church with two congregations—one Dutch-speaking and one French-speaking—was established in London five years later, led by the Polish reformer, John à Lasco. When the Catholic Queen Mary (1516–1558) succeeded her half-brother Edward VI (1537–1553) to the English throne in 1553, however, all of the exile congregations, called “stranger churches” in London, were shut down, and the exiles were forced to flee once more. In 1554 they eventually landed in the German port city of Emden just across the border from the Netherlands. All the while, these exiles were biding their time until they could return home and properly establish the Reformation in their homeland.

Many returned home in the spring of 1566, when Philip II’s governor in the Netherlands since 1559, Margaret of Parma (1522–1586), called a temporary halt to the persecution of heresy. The immediate result was that dozens of hedgerow preachers—that is, preaching not in churches but outdoors among the hedgerows and fields—stirred up a more radical response: an iconoclastic purification of Catholic churches of crucifixes, statues of saints, and other Catholic ecclesiastical monuments. This popular violence backfired badly, as Margaret renewed the persecution of heresy, while Philip II ultimately decided to dispatch a Spanish army to the Netherlands to restore order. The recently returned exiles were thus forced to take flight once more. It was only then that the Dutch Calvinists in exile realized that they had to join forces with William of Orange (1533–1584), stadtholder of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland in the north, if they were ever to establish a Reformed Protestant church in their homeland. When an army led by Orange invaded the Netherlands in 1572 to confront the Spanish army, a bridgehead for Calvinism was established in the maritime provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Orange himself, who had remained a Catholic up to this point, converted to Calvinism in 1573, and the province of Holland quickly became the focal point for resistance to Spain, and eventually, the foundation of Dutch independence. Most of the exiles abroad returned to the Netherlands after 1572 and established Reformed congregations in the seven northern provinces that ultimately declared their independence from Philip II in 1581, forever linking the Dutch Reformed Church with the Dutch Revolt.

The nature of the Dutch Reformed Church that emerged in what would later become the Dutch Republic—officially the Republic of the United Netherlands—resembled neither the Reformed Church in Geneva nor the Huguenot churches in France. For one thing, in the Dutch Republic the magistrates who governed the provinces and towns insisted on an official policy of toleration of other denominations, including Catholics. Although the Dutch Reformed church was the only church allowed to have public services, clandestine Catholic churches existed in most cities and towns, hidden in plain sight. The Dutch magistrates thus maintained what Benjamin Kaplan has called “fictions of privacy” for those Dutch Protestants and Catholics who were not members of the Dutch Reformed Church.[21]

Dutch Reformed ministers grumbled and complained loudly about this policy, as they sought to emulate Calvin’s Geneva by making church membership mandatory for the entire population. But, as employees of the state, Reformed ministers were forced to accommodate themselves to the official policy of limited toleration. Indeed, though maybe half the population of the Dutch Republic attended Reformed services on Sundays, only about 10 percent chose to become full members and thus submit themselves to the discipline of the church. This was a far cry from Calvin’s Geneva, but it did make very clear that Reformed Protestantism had to adapt to very different local circumstances everywhere it expanded. And in the Netherlands this meant accommodating the church to a confessionally mixed and very diverse population. Moreover, the Dutch Reformed Church expanded globally in the seventeenth century as the Dutch Republic established a global empire. The Dutch East India Company established a church in Ceylon in 1642, and it thrived, eventually becoming the official state church of the island. A decade later in 1652 Jan van Riebeeck, also an employee of the Dutch East India Company, established a church on the Cape in South Africa. It also thrived and became the official state church of the colony on the Cape for European settlers, even after the British occupation of the colony in 1806.

REFORMED PROTESTANTISM IN THE GERMAN EMPIRE

When Reformed Protestantism expanded into the German-speaking areas of the Holy Roman Empire, Lutheranism was already very well established in many parts of the empire. Indeed, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 expressly limited all public worship to either Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism. Thus, although the German states had won the right of religious self-determination, they did not have recourse, at least not legally, to introduce Reformed Protestantism. This changed in 1561 when the Elector of the Rhenish Palatinate, Frederick III (1515–1576), abruptly converted from Lutheranism to Calvinism, and in 1563 after the publication of the Heidelberg Confession he formally introduced Reformed Protestantism as the officially sanctioned religion in the Palatinate, notwithstanding the legalities of the Peace of Augsburg. The University of Heidelberg quickly became a center for Reformed teaching, and the new religion soon spread into other smaller German states. To be sure, Frederick’s successor Elector Ludwig VI (1539–1583) reintroduced Lutheranism as the official state religion in 1576. But Calvinism would return for good in the Palatinate in 1617. Elsewhere in the empire both Lutheran and Catholic states tended to resist Reformed Protestantism for the remainder of the sixteenth century. Evidence of this resistance was the reaction to the conversion to Calvinism of John Sigismund, Margrave of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, in 1613. His efforts to introduce Reformed Protestantism as the officially sanctioned religion in Brandenburg were sternly resisted by both laity and clergy alike, with the result that Calvinism never did flourish outside the court and the university. Thus, Brandenburg–Prussia became a bi-confessional state with the duke’s subjects given the choice of being Lutheran or Calvinist.

REFORMED PROTESTANTISM IN EASTERN EUROPE

In Eastern Europe Reformed Protestantism established itself in both Hungary and Poland in the sixteenth century. It was Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich who first introduced Reformed Protestantism into Hungary with the Second Helvetic Confession in 1567. Although the new church never became dominant there, Calvinism would retain a strong and permanent presence in Hungary. In Poland the reformer John à Lasco returned to his homeland after leading the Dutch exiles in London and Emden and consolidated an already burgeoning Reformed community there. Although he died shortly after returning to Poland, his influence was significant, and Calvinism continued to prosper after his death. By 1600 there were 200 Reformed churches in Poland and another 200 in Lithuania.[22]

ARMINIANISM AND THE EVOLUTION OF REFORMED PROTESTANTISM

It has already been demonstrated that Calvin’s own ideas evolved over the course of his lifetime, and it is thus hardly surprising that Calvin’s church in Geneva would continue to evolve after his death. While his chosen successor, Theodore Beza, ably continued the work of his mentor, the questions and contradictions of the doctrine of predestination remained unresolved. Did Christ die for all humankind, as Calvin had suggested in the Institution of the Christian Religion? Or, as some including Beza surmised, was Christ’s sacrifice only for the elect? Others wondered whether God had decided who would be saved and who would be damned among all humankind before Adam and Eve had sinned, or afterwards, which had implications for this issue. Most members of the Reformed church had long accepted Calvin’s two major organizing principles of the church—a congregation independent of secular control and a means of achieving a more morally disciplined society—even if outside of Geneva one or both of these goals sometimes proved difficult to achieve. On theological matters, however, Calvin’s successors never achieved the same kind of unanimity. If even the pastors and doctors themselves could not entirely agree on the questions posed above, how could ordinary lay Calvinists be expected to do so? Whereas Calvin had the authority needed simply to banish those who dared disagree with him—like Bolsec in 1551, who refused to accept Calvin’s view on predestination—Beza proved more open to questioning and discussion of theology. But the nagging questions surrounding the doctrine of predestination simply refused to go away. They were finally brought to a head by an academic and theologian in the Dutch Reformed Church.

A professor of theology at the University of Leiden, Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) had studied with Theodore Beza in Geneva and received a glowing recommendation from his mentor when he finished his studies in 1587 and applied for a position as pastor of a church in Amsterdam. In his preaching on Romans 7 and 9, the very same chapters that had led Luther and Calvin to their views on predestination, Arminius began to have doubts about whether every Christian had to live in bondage to sin as the earlier reformers had claimed. When he moved to Leiden in 1603 to teach theology at the university, he was forced to enter into formal debates to defend his views. This led to an appearance before the States of Holland in October 1608, where he was refuted by an elderly colleague at the university, the very man who had appointed him five years earlier. The magistrates in the States of Holland desperately wished to avoid a controversy within the Dutch Reformed Church, but they were eventually forced to convoke a synod to settle the debate. Though Arminius had died by the time the Synod of Dort met in Dordrecht in 1618, his views undermining Calvin’s doctrine of predestination had acquired a number of important followers in both the church and the university. And although the canons of Dort ultimately rejected Arminius’s ideas, reinforcing the traditional Reformed doctrine of predestination for the Dutch Reformed Church, the theological unity of that church was shattered both in the Netherlands and internationally.

CONCLUSION

It should be stressed again that its theology in general and predestination in particular were never what defined the Reformed version of Protestantism. What made it stand apart from Lutheranism and other versions of Protestantism were its commitment to remain as independent of the secular state as far as possible as well as a constant goal of increasing moral discipline to create a kingdom of Christ on earth. That identity survived everywhere Reformed Protestantism spread, despite the theological differences that remained. To be sure, a majority of Reformed Protestants continued to believe in the doctrine of predestination despite differences of opinion on some of the specifics. Some rejected it entirely. And others continued to use the term predestination while simply defining it as God’s foreknowledge, a doctrine that shared much in common with traditional Catholic teachings. Nevertheless, Reformed Protestantism continued to grow, and by the end of the sixteenth century it had become the most successful of all the Protestant reformations in terms of numbers of members. All of its churches had to adapt to local political circumstances everywhere it expanded, so there were no carbon copies of Calvin’s Geneva anywhere, even in Geneva itself after Calvin’s death. But Calvin’s imprint on this church was unmistakable in all its various forms and adaptations. Scholars are still debating many of the same aspects of Reformed Protestantism that proved so controversial in the seventeenth century, namely the role that predestination played in the various Reformed congregations after the Synod of Dort as well as what really defined Calvinism post-Calvin. And this is especially true of those called “Puritans” in both old and New England, those groups of saints who proudly claimed to be the true heirs of Calvin himself. Most though not all scholars now accept that the Puritans’ role in the Church of England was greater than once thought, at least until the Restoration in 1660, while Puritanism in New England is now understood to be much less dominant than once thought, as there it was just one strain of Calvinism competing against many others—Baptists, Separatists, and Congregationalists, among others.[23] Nevertheless, it is still true that Reformed Protestantism and many other churches claiming intellectual roots in Calvin’s teachings have survived in many guises and continued to grow in the centuries since Calvin’s own lifetime. This is perhaps the Protestant Reformation’s greatest success.

NOTES

1. G. R. Potter and Mark Greengrass (eds.), John Calvin (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 113–115.

2. See Chapter 10 on “The Radicals” in this volume.

3. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 180.

4. “Draft Ecclesiastical Ordinances, September and October 1541,” in J. K. S. Reid (ed. and trans.), Calvin: Theological Treatises (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1954), 63.

5. Philip Benedict, “Calvin and the Transformation of Geneva,” in Martin Ernst Hirzel and Martin Sallmann (eds.), John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009), 11.

6. Natalie Zemon Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 65–95.

7. Alastair Duke, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew Pettegree (eds. and trans.), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1610: A Collection of Documents (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 37–38.

8. Guillaume Baum, Edouard Cunitz, and Edouard Reuss (eds.), Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, 59 vols. (Brunswick and Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke and Sons, 1863–1900). The sermons and commentaries are in vols 23–55, and the entire collection is now available on line thanks to the Reformation Institute at the University of Geneva: <http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/vital/access/manager/Repository/unige:650?query=calvin&f0=creator%3A%22Calvin%2C+Jean%22>.

9. Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (eds.), Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 12.

10. See St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei contra Paganos (The City of God), Book 14, chaps. 26–27; Book 18, chaps. 46–54.

11. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2:925.

12. Richard C. Gamble, “Calvin’s Controversies,” in Donald K. McKim (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197. Gamble agrees with and cites another apologist for Calvin, T. H. L. Parker, John Calvin: A Biography (Philadelphia, PA: Westiminster Press, 1975), 118.

13. Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 11–12 (quote on p. 12).

14. Benedict and Nicolas Fornerod, L’Organisation et l’action des églises Réformées de France (1557–1563): synodes provinciaux et autres documents (Geneva: Droz, 2012), ix.

15. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:429 (Book 2, chap. 10, para. 1).

16. Baum et al., Calvini opera, 16, col. 633.

17. See Jonathan Powis, “Gallican Liberties and the Politics of Later Sixteenth-Century France,” The Historical Journal 26 (1983): 515–530, and especially the more recent and fascinating book of Tyler Lange, The First French Reformation: Church Reform and the Origins of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

18. Stuart Carroll, “ ‘Nager entre deux eaux’: The Princes and the Ambiguities of French Protestantism,” Sixteenth Century Journal 44 (Winter 2013): 985–1020.

19. See especially N. M. Sutherland, “Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and the French Crisis of Authority, 1560–1562,” in J. F. Bisher (ed.), French Government and Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban (London: Athlone Press, 1973), 1–18; and more recently Pettegree, “Calvinism in Europe,” in Hirzel and Sallmann (eds.), John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society, 35–48; Hugues Daussy, Le parti huguenot: Chronique d’une désillusion, 1557–1572 (Geneva: Droz, 2014), 770–771.

20. Although writing about a slightly later period, also see Greengrass, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

21. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 172–197.

22. Pettegree, “Calvinism in Europe,” 47. Also see Chapter 6 on “Geographies of the Protestant Reformation” in this volume.

23. On England, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) as well as Chapter 12 by Felicity Heal on “The English, Scottish, and Irish Reformations” in this volume. For New England, see Charles L. Cohen “The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 695–722, as well as Chapter 17 on “Protestantism Outside Europe” in this volume.

FURTHER READING

Backus, Irena and Philip Benedict (eds.) Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Benedict, Philip. The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 1600–1685. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Benedict, Philip, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, and Marc Venard (eds.) Reformation, Revolt, and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1999.

Burnett, Amy Nelson (ed.) John Calvin, Myth and Reality: Images and Impact of Geneva’s Reformer. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011.

Diefendorf, Barbara B. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Gordon, Bruce. Calvin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

Hirzel, Martin Ernest and Martin Sallmann (eds.) John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society, 1509–2009, trans. David Dichelle and Victoria Mendham. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009.

Kingdon, Robert M. Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563. Geneva: Droz, 1956, 2nd ed. 2007.

Kingdon, Robert M. and Thomas Lambert. Reforming Geneva: Discipline, Faith and Anger in Calvin’s Geneva. Geneva: Droz, 2012.

Manetsch, Scott M. Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Mentzer, Raymond A. Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994.

Naphy, William G. Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Parker, Charles H. The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Pettegree, Andrew. Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Pettegree, Andrew. Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Sunshine, Glenn S. Reforming French Protestantism: The Development of Huguenot Political Institutions. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 12

THE ENGLISH, SCOTTISH, AND IRISH REFORMATIONS

FELICITY HEAL

IN 2012 Diarmaid MacCulloch read a paper to the Ecclesiastical History Society entitled “Changing Historical Perspectives on the English Reformation: The Last Fifty Years.” In its concluding section he celebrated the development of Reformation studies. He particularly noted the stimulating diversity of approaches to religious history now undertaken. Regions and communities are studied alongside the religious politics of the nation. The influence of continental thought has been given proper weight, and the study of doctrine has been restored a central role from which previous preoccupation with politics and social history threatened to displace it. The attempt to understand the beliefs of ordinary people has extended to the study of their religious education, their material culture, and even their understanding of the sacred landscape. Above all, he concluded, we have tried “to see the Reformation in its own terms and not what people in our own age would like it to have been.”[1] Religious conflict was above all about changing views of faith, not some justification for social or political objectives. MacCulloch was speaking of England but much the same argument could be applied to Scotland and its religious revolution, now the subject of a rapidly developing and rich historiography. And, though the objective circumstances of religious upheaval in Ireland were so different from those of Britain, distinguished historians of Protestant belief and behavior like Alan Ford and Raymond Gillespie have done much to move research into the minority community in some of the same directions as those adumbrated.[2] It was certainly right to celebrate the richness and diversity of the research culture: conferences on religious change attract record numbers of participants in the second decade of the twenty-first century, major research projects such as that on national prayer are funded, and new ways of thinking about belief and behavior are nurtured.

Such largesse presents a problem for historians seeking to trace the development of British and Irish Reformation studies. It is difficult to encapsulate the direction of recent historiography in any linear or concise way. In a short overview this can only be answered by the briefest of surveys of earlier historiography and then selecting from a number of current approaches some strands of research that offer challenge and promise.

CHANGING INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BRITISH REFORMATIONS

Institutional labeling can be a powerful indicator of the ideological assumptions of earlier academic generations. Established British chairs of the history of religion in the twentieth century were usually labeled ecclesiastical: the oldest regular conferences in this field are those of the Ecclesiastical History Society.[3] While in practice the occupants of the chairs have always ranged quite widely over the map of religious history, their fons et origio was in the confessional world of Anglican or Scottish Presbyterian ecclesiology, underpinned by assumptions about the hegemonic role of the national churches. There were by the mid-twentieth century an increasing number outside these institutional tents, writing for example from a Catholic or a secular, especially Marxist, perspective.

But only from the 1960s did the debate on the English Reformation undergo a fundamental shift. This was the decade when the local archives of the English church became more generally accessible, and the questions that could be asked of its disciplinary and organizational records grew exponentially. When A. G. Dickens published his English Reformation in 1964 the archival beavering of a generation of graduate students was given its imprimatur in the claim to understand how the English people felt about religious change—largely, according to Dickens, positively. Of course, as it turned out, this was only the opening salvo in a long debate about the impact of the Reformation, which pitted defenders of a short, fast pattern of accepting religious change against those who argued that the Tudor monarchy’s ideology was enforced on a reluctant population and amounted to little more than an act of state.[4] In an interesting inversion of the specifics of the English debate Irish historians spent the 1980s moving away from a Catholic confessional model that made the triumph of the old faith inevitable, to one which stressed contingency and circumstance in the failure of Tudor attempts to convert the island to Protestantism.[5]

The “fast–slow” Reformation controversy was a gift to those historians, and especially to their undergraduates, who liked arguments to be neatly classified into a confrontational engagement that could be scored as if it were a game of tennis. It has, however, been more productive as a way of stimulating the pursuit of new forms of evidence and ways of reading than in offering solid conclusions on the thinking of individual men and women in the Tudor pew. The excitement of debate also had negative consequences in a loss of focus on some of those themes that already had a respectable historiographical pedigree. Politics, society, and the behavior of the people were privileged over ideology: a lack of interest in the content of belief reflecting in part the wider research agendas of social history in these decades. Because doctrine was rarely given sustained attention, the continental connections that forged the British reformations were also little researched, except for those moments when significant numbers of Englishmen lived in exile as a consequence of conflict at home. The Scots provided a notable exception to this generalization, since the Calvinist roots of the Scottish Reformation were always of key importance in its historiography.[6]

So what of the last two decades, when much of the heat and fervor of the debate initiated by Dickens has cooled? There is now no one model around which controversy can be focused: though an entity called post-revisionism is sometimes espoused by historians in pursuit of a language of synthesis. But several new directions of research have emerged as a result of the stimulus provided by the earlier debates. There are the local sources that were already targeted by the post-Dickens generation: here it is often parish records such as churchwardens’ accounts that have superseded the focus on diocesan records and ecclesiastical discipline. From the sober financial accounts of the parish it has been possible to study the implementation of national orders for the destruction, or restoration, of the material fabric of worship, and to find some evidence of local response to religious change. Then there are the printed sources, most effectively explored by Eamon Duffy in Stripping of the Altars, where the popularity of pre-Reformation Catholicism is tested through the impact of works of instruction and piety.[7] And finally the acceptance that the Reformation did not easily or swiftly make Englishmen into Protestants has led to the study of the “long Reformation.” That change is now generally accepted to have taken much of Elizabeth I’s reign, and many argue that much of the seventeenth century must also be incorporated into the study of creating a Protestant nation.[8] In the cases of Ireland and Scotland the longer time frame is essential because of the different trajectory of religious politics and because the type of local sources taken for granted in England only become available in abundance after the turn of the sixteenth century.

Other current developments reflect the changing nature of historical engagement. One, already mentioned, is the reincorporation of ideology. While the study of systematic theology still tends to be left to theological specialists, there has been a resurgence of historical studies which place belief and religious knowledge once more at the heart of investigations of early modern religion. A major interest of historians here lies in the way in which ideology, especially the stern doctrines of justification and predestination, was communicated to, and assimilated by, congregations and individuals.[9] The Puritans as first studied by Patrick Collinson in the 1960s could sometimes appear almost as devoid of clear doctrinal engagement as their “conformist” counterparts—not because they were so but because the emphasis was on religious politics and the consequences of belief rather than its content. Though recent studies have not neglected the religious politics that were so central to Collinson’s Elizabethan Puritan Movement, they have focused more explicitly on how the demands of this zealous faith were translated into everyday experience.[10]

Research into the spiritual life of the laity has burgeoned in parallel with revived interest in doctrine. Historians in pursuit of lay religious culture have been the beneficiaries of the engagement of literary scholars with Reformation texts: the Bible, catechisms, and works of piety. Above all the content of sermons, and their spoken performance, have been analyzed closely.[11] The interest in culture, defined in its anthropological sense, has led historians in other distinctive directions, exemplified in three influential recent books. Margo Todd’s The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland is the most ambitious of several pieces of research that invoke symbolic and performative anthropological ideas to interpret religious forms of behavior, especially those involving worship and the congregation. The result is a rich vision of a society which is able to assimilate the austere demands of Calvinist worship into a more general culture of discipline and social harmony. Tara Hamling, in Decorating the “Godly” Household, applies her study of material culture to the domestic environment and shows how the Protestant household expressed faith through the representation of biblical stories in painting and other decorative arts. This provides a very important corrective to the frequent assumption that Protestantism was inherently hostile to the visual. Matthew Milner’s The Senses and the English Reformation also shows how individuals experienced religion in the centuries of Reformation change through all of the senses, and not only through hearing and understanding, the conventionally assumed routes to Protestant belief.[12] These diverse examples all in some measure pursue the idea of faith experienced. There is, perhaps, greater caution than in some earlier studies about assertions of how people felt about their faith. The quest for an understanding of interiority, of the almost impossible task of asking what ordinary individuals believed, has been replaced by the examination of how they expressed themselves in the new and fractured world of the post-Reformation. In contrast Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain marries the history of the emotions and cultural insights to argue for the integration of behavior and belief: for the holistic nature of the Protestant experience for the ideologically committed.[13]

What is absent from these examples is much concern for the national politics of religious change, a key preoccupation of much earlier historiography. My own writing on religious reform in Britain and Ireland has previously argued for the centrality of political and ecclesiastical choices.[14] Protestantism came to England, Wales, and Ireland largely as a consequence of the political fiat of the crown, and even in Scotland the role of the magistracy and the political elite was crucial in securing obedience to the new faith. The reformation of the Church in England was inherently hierarchical, and has to be understood through the lens of political power. But the study of religious politics provides a necessary, rather than sufficient, way to explain the changes in belief of the period between the 1530s and the civil wars. So in what follows I have set aside religious politics to concentrate instead on individual and group experience, to ask how Protestantism was assimilated into the lives of ordinary men and women in this challenging period. This involves looking first at the individual and the process of conversion, before moving to ways in which the societies of Britain and Ireland were gradually changed and challenged by the new form of faith.

REFORMATION AND CONVERSION

When we turn from the historiography to the experience of contemporaries we need to consider both the process of change and the consolidation of reform. Change first necessitated rejection: a denial of the authority of the papacy, and of the role of the existing Catholic Church as the intermediary between man and God. The landscape of new belief and behavior was less immediately assured, in the British Isles as elsewhere. For some, and in some circumstances, the appeal to sola scriptura was the core of new faith, and the test of all truth. For others, the denial of a works-based understanding of salvation led via the Lutheran affirmation of justification by faith alone to a belief in God’s purposes in predestining some men to election and some to reprobation. The identification with continental reform might, as in Scotland, or Presbyterian England, be deep and intimate while for those who followed the idiosyncratic path of the established Church in England the pattern of religious behavior was intensely national. Some of these differences were reflected in the difficulty that contemporaries experienced in labeling their new religion. In Henry VIII’s reign enthusiasm for access to the vernacular Scriptures made evangelicals a convincing descriptor: other circumlocutions such as “favourers of the true religion” also characterized the first half of the sixteenth century. Only slowly did the continental usage of “Protestant” gain currency as the polar opposite of Catholicism: and then the language of Puritanism became a necessary usage to distinguish the zealous from the rest.[15]

It was certain that there could be no new beginning, no convincing turning to the new faith, without a process of conversion both of individuals and society. The experience ideally begins with self-aware conversion, that process of “sealing” an individual to new faith, without which the claim to be Protestant was seen as mere conformity. While the precise ideological nature of the faith to which the convert moved varied in time and space—Henrician evangelicals were not Jacobean Calvinists or Scottish Presbyterians—the essential mission of the preacher was to persuade his auditors to reject false truth and to embrace newness of life. For the first reforming generation this involved a rejection of a doctrinal past and a fundamental change in which, to quote William Tyndale, the Bible translator, “the Spirit entereth the heart, and quickeneth it, and giveth her life, and justifieth her.”[16] The individual was seized by divine grace and reborn to new faith. By the time that Protestantism was the established faith of the three kingdoms conversion was more likely to be expressed in terms of repentance and renewal where, says John Dove, men that “have fallen away from the truth of religion to Heresie or Idolatrie … (as well as from virtue to sinne) … afterwarde turne againe to God.”[17] Repentance became, for the godly, synonymous with conversion. It was a means of entering into covenant with God, and of promising amendment of life in the future. It could occur at any moment; even on the edge of the scaffold, as it did for the Scottish Lady Wariston condemned for the murder of her husband in 1600, or on the deathbed, where ministers strove to bring the hard-of-heart to atonement.[18]

While the centrality of the topos of conversion in Reformation evangelism is incontrovertible, there is less agreement among historians about how this played out in process and outcomes. Preachers and writers were often disposed to use the Pauline image of sudden assault by divine grace proving irresistible to the sinner and securing “effectual calling.” Robert Bolton, a Northamptonshire Puritan minister of the early seventeenth century, was described as being converted “in terrible tempests and thunder, the Lord running upon him as a gyant, taking him by the neck and shaking him to peeces.”[19] This seductive narrative of instantaneous movement from darkness to light was acknowledged even by contemporary authors to be an ideal construct. Conversion was often described as being a lived process, a slow movement from providential awareness of sin, though repentance, to an awareness of divine deliverance.[20] Resistance to grace, what Hugh Latimer, the great Henrician and Edwardian preacher and reformer, called the blindness that was “so corporate in me,” was a partial explanation of slow conversion, but so was access to the means of understanding, the Bible, preaching, and conference with the converted.[21] And even the godly were often uncertain of the cathartic moments of change. Richard Baxter, seventeenth-century non-conformist minister and author, for example, described his early religious experience in very cautious language: “whether sincere Conversion began now, or before, or after, I was never able to this day to know.”[22] Historians are even more disposed to see descriptions of Pauline conversion as convention, as process by which the devout responded to the normative biblical narrative, explaining and justifying the experience of religious change in the light of this paradigm.[23] The nature of that experience varied: in the early years of Reformation in England and in Scotland, and in later conversions from Catholicism, it involved the rejection by the individual of false belief, and the concomitant growth of true understanding via access to the Bible. Later generations, already credal Protestants reared in reformed orthodoxy, articulated conversion as repentance for immoral pasts, and commitment to the struggle to amend life. This latter construct might become a key element in that separation of “professors of the gospel” from the rest who had not articulated the experience of illumination.

The performance of conversion involved the senses and emotions of the individual, as well as the intellectual understanding of man’s nature and God’s message. Reason alone could not save the corrupted will: there needed to be a seizure of all the faculties by divine grace. Robert Sibbes, the Puritan preacher, expresses this clearly: God “infuseth grace into the will and affections, into the whole inward man.”[24] Those who claimed to have experienced conversion lived with this intensity, struggling through prayer and daily practice to maintain assurance, to avoid hardness of heart and spiritual despair, and to open themselves to renewed edification and divine illumination. Practitioners of the new history of the emotions stress that these labors of the godly were an integral, indeed central, aspect of religious behavior. “Emotion,” says Alec Ryrie, “was a form of revelation.”[25] Puritan preachers and spiritual counselors sought to harness the emotional energy of their flock to maintain the vitality of the conversion experience and to sustain the promised amendment of life. Since intensity of religious life was the mark of the godly this emphasis on the emotions as its expression seems appropriate. Seventeenth-century Puritans can sound as ecstatic as any Catholic mystic. Archibald Johnston of Wariston, a leading Scottish Presbyterian politician of the mid-seventeenth century, wrote in his diary of a day when he was both “transported out of thy body by love, by hope, by joy” and then “heavily cast doune and melted before God.” Weeping as a demonstration of joy, as well as the more predictable groaning or tears to display penitence for failings, was an integral part of the quest for assurance of salvation. They were also a partial protection against the recurrent fear that the hypocrite could claim to be converted. Richard Rogers warned his congregation that “wee cannot discerne or set downe the very moment when faith is wrought in the heart,” but saw a characteristic emotional pattern as indicating true inward acceptance of Christ’s grace imputed to the individual sinner.[26]

The relationship between the emotions and conversion narratives should not, however, be allowed to displace other ways of thinking about acceptance of changed faith. In particular we lose sight both of collective experience of conversion, and the intense debate about the means by which the multitude might be shown the possibility of salvation. It is in post-Reformation Scotland that conversion, in the sense of repentance and promise of amendment of life, was most clearly focused on the congregation. Margo Todd calls conversion “the central act of faith” in reformed belief, and it was an act of faith that was regularly expressed and performed communally through the disciplinary mechanisms of the Kirk. The elaboration of the rituals by which sinners were placed upon the stool of repentance, were required to promise reformation of life, and were then reborn in their reconciliation with the congregation, ensured that both individuals and communities were constantly affirming their covenanted faith and their collective calling.[27] Even in the territories that were most challenging for Protestantism—the Gaelic speaking Highlands—the slow organization of kirk sessions meant that by the mid-seventeenth century there was evidence of communal affirmation of faith. In the absence of full congregational discipline in the English church these forms of conversion to new life were left to non-conformist groups, such as the independent churches of the civil war period, where narratives of conversion were an essential part of the application for membership. A group of these collected by John Rogers, Independent minister of Christ Church, Dublin, in the 1650s follow a patterned awareness of sin, repentance, and providential deliverance.[28] Richard Baxter’s congregation at Kidderminster, Worcestershire, at the end of the Interregnum had about 600 “professors” of faith out of a possible adult communicant population of around 1,800: all of these men and women were deemed worthy of full church membership after experiencing true conversion.

Conversion narratives, of their nature, tell of sinners who had been awakened to their sins and resolved upon the acceptance of grace. But, as Eamon Duffy long ago argued, the task that godly preachers had in principle to set themselves was that of awakening the multitude. There was always tension in Puritan minds, both because of the conviction that many were inevitably reprobate and damned, and because of the need of those who seemed to have been fully edified to consort together and to separate themselves from the majority of the population. The paradigm of the faithful unto Christ, who as a suffering remnant preserved true religion against persecution and the corruption of the world, had deep roots in the early Reformation and was reinforced by the Calvinist ideology in the later sixteenth century.[29] It would have been easier, as the preachers wearily remarked, to leave most men mired in their sins: instead most felt bound to “cry aloud … and tell them of their sin and danger … and yet we cannot get them to awake, nor hear us like men that have the use of reason.” Much ministerial energy was therefore bent to trying both to awake the devotion and to improve the understanding of their auditors. The most enthusiastic among them set about to “pull and snatch … sinners, as brands out of the fire,” by any means at their disposal.[30] Their success or failure has been the subject of one of the longest-running historiographical debates on the English Reformation. Its fault line is best expressed by Christopher Haigh’s assertion that “the English people could not be made Protestants,” because ignorance and resistance to preaching precluded any internalization of conversion by the majority, and Arnold Hunt’s claim that as by 1600 most people had an understanding of basic Protestant doctrine, the preacher’s task was to make them better and more committed.[31] There are plenty of laments by ministers about both ignorance and hardness of heart, and a powerful case can be assembled for resistance to unpopular messages and hostility to attacks on plebeian culture. There is also much evidence that the slow development of a preaching ministry changed attitudes. Even the godly were not always pessimistic: William Hinde, comparing the mid-Elizabethan years with the reign of James thought that “the Borders of the Church are much enlarged, the number of beleevers wonderfully increased.”[32] Preachers may not, to quote Duffy, always have “brought the tepid to the boil,” but the spiritual environment of early seventeenth-century England was such that they had more chance of producing significant numbers of committed Protestants than pessimistic historical estimates suggest.[33]

The importance of this positive cultural environment for conversion of individuals and communities is thrown into sharp relief by its opposite, the situation in Ireland. By the early seventeenth century the Protestant Church in Ireland had lost whatever chances it had once possessed of persuading the people to turn from Catholicism. While a largely graduate parish ministry was becoming established in England and Scotland, in parts of Ireland there were few clergy of any kind. In Munster, for example, visitations in the early 1590s showed that between a third and half of all livings were vacant. Sermons were a rarity, and since much of the population refused to attend there was little chance that they would be an instrument for conversion. The obduracy of much of the population gave growing credibility to hard-line Protestant sentiment. If efforts to persuade to church attendance were spurned then, following St. Augustine’s attitude to the Donatist heretics, the civil power must be invoked to enforce conformity. Of course, for Protestant clerics, as for Augustine, conformity was distinct from conversion, the latter, as we have seen, always the consequence of the gift of divine grace. The hope, made explicit in a sermon by Henry Leslie, dean of Down, in 1622, was that, whereas compulsion was at first necessary, once men had been forced into conformity they would, like the Donatists, afterwards profess “only for devotion.”[34] Since the civil authorities only intermittently chose the route to compulsion, the convictions of Irish Protestants were never fully tested. Instead much of their dynamic quality of belief and behavior came from a turning within, the construction of a minority church perceiving itself as a beleaguered remnant of the truly converted.

BEING PROTESTANT

The process of conversion was never complete for the devout Protestant; it was relived and experienced again and again throughout the godly life. Nevertheless, there were many stages in the life of the individual after the first moments of illumination, when the label of true believer had first been internalized. This experience was always the prerogative of a minority. However, in post-Reformation England and Scotland the regular experience of public and communal worship, slowly constructed labeling and identity of a distinct kind, making the religious structure of the nation Protestant. Both the routine use of liturgy, and the preaching, prayer, and thanksgiving that spoke of collective godliness, directed men and women in the pew into an awareness of their part in this national project. One of the most interesting aspects of this growing consciousness was the extended use of special public prayers and fasting, either to avert divine wrath in times of crisis such as plague or invasion, or to give thanks for dangers escaped. These traditional forms of observation, inherited from the medieval church, became a distinctive expression of a Protestant awareness that all men must actively participate in petitioning the deity and must accept responsibility for the sins of the people. In Scotland these rituals of atonement quickly assumed the form of the eight-day fast, ordained nationally, or sometimes by the regional kirks. In England the fast was only one aspect of a complex pattern of days of penitence or thanksgiving, many ordained by crown or bishops, but some, like the celebrations of Elizabeth’s accession day, commencing as a popular expression of political and religious loyalty to the new order. Through celebratory bonfires and bells the commitment to the Protestant settlement could spill from the church onto the street As so often, Ireland proves an exception: very little is known of the special observations ordained there by authority, and only when the Scottish form of fasting, sometimes transmuted into revivalist communion ceremonies, occurred do we see any evidence of support for these forms of Protestant identity.[35]

Special prayer might alert ordinary parishioners to the nature of the Protestant nation, but routine collective expressions of faith inevitably focused on the liturgy, either in its Cranmerian or more constrained Scottish form. Puritan critiques of Thomas Cranmer’s liturgy, and the conflicts generated by the Laudian movement of the 1630s for “beauty of holiness” in worship, have led some historians to a rather negative evaluation of the spiritual experience of the man or woman on the early modern pew or prayer bench.[36] The visionary hope expressed by the Homily for the repairing and keeping clean of churches which urged that “the whole multitude of God’s people in the parish … with one voice and heart call upon the Name of God” was idealistic, as was William Harrison’s assertion that “the whole congregation in one instant pour out their petitions unto the living God.”[37] Yet over the century between the first Book of Common Prayer and the Civil War much of the understanding of Protestantism in England inevitably derived from the words heard weekly in the church. The liturgy required men to speak both in a “communal register,” acting with peace and charity, and with individual spiritual awareness. When more than silent assent was demanded, as in the reception of communion, both these sets of norms were brought into play. Communion was a relative rarity; only in the post-Restoration period did monthly observation become reasonably common in England, and in Scotland it was usual to celebrate only once a year. But when the full liturgy was undertaken there was often a serious attempt in England to ensure that those participating understood the basic catechism, and in Scotland those who failed in understanding or probity of life were deliberately excluded.[38]

So, by the early seventeenth century, religious politics and the quotidian round of worship had constructed populations in England and Scotland that at least largely identified themselves as Protestant. The obvious contrast with Ireland, and its minority church, need hardly be underlined. But official adherence to the established faith in England was insufficient for the godly. At one level this was because of what the English liturgy did, and did not, do. It sustained well-known “popish” symbolism: the cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, prayer in the burial service. It did not adequately identify worship with preaching. Even the Scottish Book of Common Order made allowance for the absence of a full sermon, but worship was geared overwhelmingly to be a prelude to preaching. The English service, in its formal structure, gave sermons and homilies—the latter read from the official volume produced by the bishops—equal status, leaving the church hierarchy to enforce the obligation for at least quarterly sermons. Only after the end of the sixteenth century could English parishioners be reasonably confident of hearing regular preaching in their own parish. There was also a potential doctrinal tension between the Calvinist preoccupation with predestination and election, and the relative silence of the Book of Common Prayer on the issue of divine judgment. When Cranmer’s liturgy speaks of grace and assurance it sometimes does so in language of pastoral comfort. The burial service, for example, holds out the promise that the departed were “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life,” allowing the congregation to infer that Christ died for all and not only for the elect.[39]

Nevertheless, public worship held the promise of more sustained Protestant devotion through the medium of preaching. Preaching was often accorded preeminence among the various ways in which initial conversion, instruction in the faith, and the assurance of righteousness could be achieved. The bonds between auditor and speaker were more immediate and stronger than those established between reader and text. A common topos employed by Puritan ministers when it suited their purposes was that reading alone was a dead experience. As one seventeenth-century Dublin minister expressed it “there is as much difference between reading and hearing, between a lively word and breathless lines as much as is between cold meat and hot.”[40] Of course, reading in a variety of modes was an essential part of the godly life, but ministers concerned for the experimental faith of their flocks privileged the spoken word as the way to move to amendment of life and new understanding. The abundance of recent secondary literature on the form and impact of the sermon across Britain and Ireland in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has reinforced the sense that engagement with the words of the preacher can be found everywhere. English Puritans “gadded” to the best preachers; in Scotland great Presbyterian ministers such as Robert Bruce were said to have an “imperishable love for the work of preaching” that was endorsed by their congregations; and, lest the Puritans should be thought to have all the best tunes we find Richard Hooker, conformist writer and divine, endorsing sermons as “keyes to the kingdome of heaven” the best way of teaching the faith.[41] Where there were major impediments to good preaching—everywhere in the early Reformation, in Ireland throughout the period because of the inadequacy of the ministry—it was understood that significant conversion was unlikely and that the faith of the laity could not readily be developed or sustained.

Preaching was the preeminent genre through which the ministry sought to educate “carnal Protestants” and turn them towards lively faith. Through the learning of the preacher men could acquire understanding: “we must know [God] in our heads before we know him in our hearts,” said one of the popular Scottish clergy. Edmund Bunny summarized the point in his The Whole Summe of Christian Religion (1576): “See thou have a pattern of sound doctrine: that thou maist always be ready, to give an ansere to every man.” While ideally this came through preaching, the end mattered more than the means, and other instruments such as catechizing were accepted as the necessary supplement to the hearing of effective sermons. Ordinary parochial catechizing and instruction might not lead to full doctrinal fluency, but it was a key means of improving the knowledge of the ignorant. William Crashaw, a Puritan minister who was one of the many clerics who wrote his own catechism, prefaced his text with the observation that without this form of instruction “all our labour in Preaching is lost in many of our hearers.”[42] The Scots adopted a characteristically rigorous approach to instruction. They required regular attendance at catechizing, and made the ability to repeat the lessons learned a test for admission to communion. By the end of the sixteenth century the English evidence shows widespread use of forms of question and answer catechisms, though historians debate their efficacy in constructing Protestants. The Prayer Book catechism might, as Eamon Duffy has argued, “have been written at any time since 1215,” lacking distinctively Reformed Protestant features, and there is doubt about how far parish clergy were able to enforce attendance on the majority of their people.[43] Contemporary commentators, however, often accepted that a basic understanding of key doctrine had been inculcated into ordinary parishioners by these means. Catechizing through the formal educational system, usually using one of Alexander Nowell’s texts borrowed extensively from Calvin’s, was an important means of influencing a range of English opinion. Once again the failure of reformed efforts in Ireland shows the problems of not reaching the people through these forms of instruction. The Prayer Book catechism was translated into Irish by John Kearney in 1571, but the established church struggled to reach the general population, and spiritual education fell progressively into the hands of Catholic missioners.[44]

The other medium for education was, of course, reading. John Whitgift, in his controversy with Thomas Cartwright, argued that the reading of Scripture in church week upon week was as efficacious a means of promoting Protestant understanding as preaching.[45] Cartwright and the zealous dissented. Yet Puritans also acknowledged that reading of all kinds was central to the development of doctrinal understanding among the laity. Andrew Cambers has shown the plurality of ways in which reading defined and displayed the godly community. It provided a key element in Puritan self-definition both in the solitary reading and meditation that occurred in closet, chapel, and study, but also in collective and social settings such as the great household and the informal study group. For those who were already strongly committed to Puritan forms of piety, orality and literacy were self-reinforcing: sermons were heard and notes taken; passages of those notes were discussed among the godly and were related to appropriate scriptural texts. Biblical literacy became the core of those devotional practices that linked individual prayer and meditation to the practices of the godly household and public worship.[46]

Knowledge was a central weapon in the attempts of the reformers to transform British culture. Richard Baxter spoke for his fellow clergy in describing education as “God’s ordinary way for the Conveyance of his Grace.” The danger was always that the Word read could become dead: that a wholly logocentric approach to knowledge killed the spirit and subverted the ability of the heart to be open to the truth. So the term most frequently used to describe this process of growing individual enlightenment was edification. While edification comprehended understanding of the faith, as we have seen it also involved the process of moving the heart to respond. Readers of the Scriptures were enjoined to “labour to understand what you read, and to feel it; read it as God’s word, and above all, bring to it a serious resolution of practising what you read.”[47] Study and the spiritual guidance provided through preaching were expected to develop the skill sets necessary for the lived pursuit of assurance of salvation.

And the center of that relationship was the quest for assurance, the promise that you are among the elect through God’s covenant to his people. What Ryrie calls the “almost narcissistic” concern for signs of election is a dominant feature of spiritual diaries and autobiographies throughout the period, but especially from the early seventeenth century onwards. Individuals hunted for assurance of divine favor both in their inner lives of prayer and reading, and in the daily experiences of work and family interaction. They meditated on their sins and God’s mercy in all situations, including walking in fields, woods, and gardens. They sought in words that Jane Dawson takes from James Melville’s advice to his Scottish people to be “hamely with God.”[48] They talked of special revelation given to the faithful, and the joy that came from feeling that they had been touched by God, though equally of the struggle to sustain that confidence in the face of external tribulation and inner spiritual lassitude. When personal tragedy or the more general threats of war and plague threatened their existence, the faithful drew strength from the assurance of God’s providential care. The intensity of the spiritual lives of the godly, and their often painful quest for comfort, meant that ministers needed to sound notes of caution to their flocks. While spiritual illumination might be a deeply supportive part of the godly life, as William Perkins, the greatest of the late sixteenth-century Puritan divines, argued, “in case of affliction we must not live by feeling but by faith.” The life of prayer and self-examination, conducted in the light of proper knowledge of the divine covenant, could sustain the individual and bring joy. It could also present the possibility of despair, particularly on the deathbed, where the conviction that “an holy and happy life, bringeth always an holy and happy death” proved insufficient, and godly ministers had to employ all their pastoral skill to comfort those who had temporarily lost their faith in salvation.[49]

The challenge of the private spiritual quest led believers back to community, to the support that household, ministers, and chosen parishioners could offer. When Ralph Josselin, minister of Earls Colne in Essex during the Civil Wars, struggled with an indifferent congregation and his own sense of cold-heartedness before God, he turned to conference with the local “saints” “mutually praying for one another, with much sweetnes, unity and unanimity for which I bless our god.”[50] Affective piety, underpinned by Calvinist doctrinal understanding, proved a potent combination in both the Scottish and English Reformations, finding its visible expression in the worshipping household and the godly congregation. Ministerial leadership was of course of central significance. It provided preaching, and printed expositions of the faith and pastoral guidance, but it was the laity who actively sustained the new religious order. Inevitably we identify this full integration of belief and life with the Puritan minority in England: those who were willing to construct their identity around Bible reading, fasting and prayer, and strict observation of the Sabbath. In Scotland this list of religious behavior was fully enjoined by the Kirk and became the societal norm; in Ireland it became the marker of Ulster Protestant settlement in the early seventeenth century. Revivalist days of fasting, prayer, and communion provided a dramatic version of this lived faith in Ulster and in Scotland. Even in England fast day assemblies, like in the famous Wisbech fast observed in the 1580s by the imprisoned Catholic priest William Weston, became an important element of Puritan culture. Sermon gadding and congregational psalm singing, supported by the active devotional life of the household, provided some counterweight to the recreations of the wider society.[51] Culture, in a broader use of that term, can be seen in the all-embracing experience of being a committed Puritan. The godly sometimes chose to mark out names for their children as a manifestation of their piety, or more generally to use the distinctive language of brotherhood.

PURITANS, INCLUSION, AND NATIONAL CHURCHES

There are two dangers in this analysis of godliness: that of eliding Protestant and Puritan and that of misinterpreting the forms of separation between the zealous and the rest. The first can be dealt with in a summary way. Protestantism beyond its official confessional form existed on a spectrum of behavior and belief. We might take household worship as exemplary. Diaries and biographies give us some access to the quotidian activity of some families: the Hoby household in Yorkshire at the end of the sixteenth century was dominated by the cycle of religious observation required by Lady Margaret and accepted by her husband; the household of John Bruen in Cheshire was described as another church or seminary of religion, and a center for the conversion of the wider community.[52] Other sources—household ordinances, advice literature, or domestic decoration, for example—point to spiritualization of the family. When the household of Erasmus Dryden, of Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire, worshipped together, for example, they had before them a wall painting of themselves kneeling at prayer with the Tetragrammaton (Hebrew lettering) representing God the Father above.[53] Then there is the evidence of the popularity of domestic devotional practices from best-selling books. Lewis Bayly’s The Practise of Pietie, was an all-time best-seller in the seventeenth century, running to fifty editions between 1612 and 1640 and translated into a number of other languages. It is rightly described as a work of Puritan piety, full of guidance for the godly household, but it is comprehensive and safe rather than spiritually ambitious. And there is the famous example of the devotional work of Robert Persons, the Jesuit, being lightly “Protestantised” by Edmund Bunny, and becoming a remarkable success.[54]

Issues of inclusiveness or exclusiveness are more difficult to evaluate, since much depends upon circumstance and context. Many of the godly were in principle committed both to conversion and to accepting the need to live in the visible church with the unregenerate. Their agendas could coincide with those of the national church, as in the days of fast and thanksgiving. Moderates could also temper their singularity in public worship to prescribed public order “not breaking the bounds of comelinesse” as Joseph Bentham, minister of Boughton, Northamptonshire, in the 1630s, put it.[55] Getting along with less committed, or even hostile, neighbors may not be thought a Puritan attribute but social circumstances often involved compromise that looked to inclusivity in the community. Even in the circumstances in which a whole community was regulated by militant Protestants, as in Elizabethan and early Stuart Colchester or pre-Civil War Dorchester, campaigns against the unregenerate, and the divisions that they generated, were in some degree eased by the construction of a well-funded godly ministry, and generous support of charitable institutions for the whole town. The ability to do this more routinely in post-Reformation Scotland hardly led the Kirk to tolerate backsliders, but it did open the possibility of symmetry between church and society that was relatively inclusive.[56] Another form of inclusiveness has been given much attention in recent historiography: that of shared cultural beliefs that transcended confessional boundaries. Belief in divine providence revealed in the world can be found throughout society: God’s purposes were revealed in nature, in disasters, in wonders, in prophecy, and in miracles. Popular beliefs were matched by writing and preaching of Protestant ministers. Gillespie has argued that in Ireland these ideas were central to the shaping of Catholic and Protestant religious communities throughout the seventeenth century. Puritans invested in these deep forms of understanding the world: while they might inhabit a religious system centered on the Word, they were also particularly sensitized to God’s providential, and often dramatic, intervention in their everyday lives.[57]

These forms of sharing and getting along do not, however, disguise the religious fractures either between different sorts of Protestant or within society. To be an earnest Puritan was to accept that the ungodly would hate you. By the early seventeenth century the stage-based charges of writers such as Ben Jonson against Puritans as self-righteous, covetous, and above all hypocritical, were echoed in popular libels and in the resentments that surfaced in local disputes about order and discipline. The godly riposted with their own charges of hypocrisy, not only against the worldly, but against the established church which, to quote William Perkins, had permitted men to worship without test of their convictions, a “temporarie faith … grounded on temporarie causes.”[58] This legitimated the quest to seek comfort in the idea of the church of the elect. Albeit only individuals could have full assurance of God’s promise to them, and therefore none could fully know that others were among the chosen, the fruits of faith were manifest in religious and cultural behavior: the saints could, and often should, be set apart from the rest.

It is important not to overstate the significance of viewing the world in such sharply binary terms. In neither Scotland nor England did it lead to an abandonment of the idea of a national church: a church coterminous with the state in which the regenerate and unregenerate worshipped together. The political Protestantism of this visible church was frequently in tension with the desire to identify and isolate the “saints,” whose godliness separated them from the rest of society. This is not just a feature Elizabethan sectarianism or Civil War Independency: in every generation from the 1520s to the end of the Interregnum there were thinkers who questioned the merit of “tarrying for the magistrate,” or accepting that the whole polity could properly be accommodated within a visible church.[59] Most, however, stopped short of acting on these separatist impulses; instead the local kirk sessions in Scotland, or the congregation gathered around a Puritan preacher in England, endeavored to enact spiritual kinship and community informed by a profound belief in God’s purposes for his chosen.

Becoming and being Protestant in Reformation Britain and Ireland involved both a public and national confession of faith, and a personal piety that sought direct access to the divine through prayer, reading, and preaching. Individual Protestants sought to instill a greater awareness of God’s immanence in the world into their own societies, even as they accepted that most men could not be saved. They no doubt reaped their own reward in the spiritual solace of assurance of election and the consolation of like-minded Christians. Their collective influence depended, however, on an ability to go with the grain of the culture. In Ireland the established church languished: the evangelization of the Gaelic population was a clear failure, and only the Ulster Protestant settlers of the early seventeenth century were able to construct strong communities of the godly.[60] In England a complex pattern of acceptance of, and resistance to, zealous Protestantism, was complicated by the shifting patterns of public policy and monarchical and episcopal control. Thus, for example, the attempt to establish a form of local congregational discipline through the Presbyterian movement of the 1580s foundered on the hostility of crown and bishops and was only partially supported by local magistrates. Only in Scotland did reformers labor successfully, though certainly not unopposed, to turn the people into a nation of Protestants, or even Puritans, characterized by social discipline and a passionate conviction in the righteousness of the Calvinist interpretation of faith.[61]

NOTES

1. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Changing Historical Perspectives on the English Reformation: The Last Fifty Years,” in Peter D. Clarke and Charlotte Methuen (eds.), The Church on its Past, Studies in Church History, 49 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), 282–302, quotation at 302.

2. Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland 1590–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997); Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

3. Sarah Foot, “Has Ecclesiastical History Lost the Plot?” in The Church on its Past, 1–3.

4. For a fuller coverage of these debates see Rosemary O’Day, The Debate on the English Reformation, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).

5. Karl S. Bottigheimer and Brendan Bradshaw, “Revisionism in the Irish Reformation: A Debate,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000): 581–592.

6. See, for example, Ian Cowan, The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982); James Kirk, Patterns of Reform: Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989).

7. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England ca.1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

8. This longer time span is now regularly incorporated into accounts of the English Reformation. Its clearest justification remains Nicholas Tyacke’s article in his edited England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1997), 1–32.

9. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590–1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and the excellent analysis in Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

10. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). For examples of more recent approaches see Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy,” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); and especially Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The same issues have been addressed for Scotland by Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

11. Examples of the “literary turn” in the study of religion are Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Lori Anne Ferrell, The Bible and the People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). On the experience of sermons, Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) are particularly important. For Scotland see Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan (eds.), Literature and the Scottish Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

12. Tara Hamling, Decorating the “Godly” Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

13. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 13–14.

14. Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

15. Peter Marshall, “The Naming of Protestant England,” Past & Present 214 (2012): 87–128.

16. Cited by Carl Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and the English Reformers 1525–1556 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 99.

17. John Dove, The Conversion of Salomon (London, 1613), 3.

18. Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 96–97.

19. Mr. Bolton’s Last and Learned Worke of the Foure Last Things (London, 1632), sig. B5r.

20. Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 60–63.

21. G. E. Corrie (ed.), Sermons of Hugh Latimer, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), i, 333.

22. Reliquiae Baxterianae, or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times (London, 1696), 3.

23. Marshall, “Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII,” in Marshall and Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19–22, 30–34; Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 122–141.

24. Alexander Balloch Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, 7 vols. (Edinburgh, 1862–1864), vi, 525.

25. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 40.

26. George Morison Paul (ed.), Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, 1632–1639 (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1911), 24–25; Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises Leading and Guiding to True Happiness (London, 1603), 20.

27. Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 175–180, 14, 44. Jane Dawson agrees that there was a slow pattern of change, though she credits preaching rather than the kirk sessions, which were difficult to organize: Jane Dawson, “Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland,” in Andrew Pettegree, Alistair Duke, and Gillian Lewis (eds.), Calvinism in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 231–253.

28. Gillespie, Devoted People, 42.

29. Duffy, “The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England,” The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 1–55. For the early period see Catharine Davies, “ ‘Poor Persecuted Little Flock’ or ‘Commonwealth of Christians’: Edwardian Protestant Concepts of the Church,” in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds.), Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 78–102.

30. Mr. Thomas Wadsworth’s Last Warning to secure Sinners… To which is prefixed an epistle of Mr Richard Baxter (London, 1677), sig. C3v–4r; Samuel Clarke, Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons (London, 1683), pt. 1, 165.

31. Christopher Haigh, “The Church of England, the Catholics and the People,” in his The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 213. Haigh has made this assertion more nuanced, but his pessimism about conversion remains; Hunt, Art of Hearing, 243.

32. William Hinde, A Faithfull Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (London, 1641), 217.

33. Duffy, “The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitude,” in Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 33–55, quotation at 42.

34. Alan Ford, “ ‘Force and Fear of Punishment’: Protestants and Religious Coercion in Ireland, 1603–33,” in Elizbethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds.), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 91–130, quotation at 102.

35. Natalie Mears, “Special Nationwide Worship and the Book of Common Prayer in England, Wales and Ireland, 1533–1642,” in Mears and Ryrie (eds.), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 31–57; Ryrie, “The Fall and Rise of Fasting in the British Reformations,” in ibid., 89–109; David Cressy, Bonfire and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Natalie Mears, Alasdair Raffe, Stephen Taylor, and Philip Williamson (eds.), National Prayers: Special Worship since the Reformation, vol. 1 (Church of England Record Society, 20, 2013), lxxii–lxxxviii.

36. See, with very different conclusions, Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathway, 218–227; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 317–329.

37. Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (Oxford, 1802), 228; Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1587), i, 138.

38. Arnold Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” Past & Present 161 (1998): 41–55; Heal, Reformation, 448–449; Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 85–98.

39. Hannah Cleugh, “Teaching in Praying Words: Worship and Theology in the Early Modern English Parish,” in Worship and Parish Church, 11–30.

40. Robert Chambers introduction to his catechism, quoted in Gillespie, “Preaching the Reformation in Early Modern Ireland,” in Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 287.

41. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 190–207; Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 17; Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, v. 22.1; v. 22.17.

42. Scottish quotation from a Glaswegian sermon notebook: Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 51; Edmund Bunny, The Whole Summe of Christian Religion (London, 1576), title page; William Crashaw, Milke for Babes: or North-Countrey Catechisme, 5th ed. (London, 1628), sig. A3r.

43. Duffy, “The Long Reformation,” in Tyacke (ed.), Long Reformation, 43.

44. Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c.1530–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 62, 83, 362–366; Raymond Gillespie, “Church, State and Education in Early Modern Ireland,” in Maurice R. O’Connell (ed.), O’Connell: Education, Church and State (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1992), 45, 49–50.

45. John Ayre (ed.), The Works of John Whitgift, D.D., 3 vols. (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1843), iii, 30–32.

46. Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscripts and Puritanism in England, 1586–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For this “literacy” in action see Jeremy Schmidt, “ ‘In my Private Reading of the Scriptures’: Protestant Bible-Reading in England, 1580–1720,” in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds.), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 189–210.

47. Reliquiae Baxterianae, 7; John Billingsley, The Believers’ Daily Exercise (London, 1690), 13.

48. Dawson, “Hamely with God: A Scottish View of Domestic Devotion,” in Martin and Ryrie (eds.), Private and Domestic Devotion, 33–52.

49. William Perkins, First Part of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1604), 104; Richard Rogers, The Practice of Christianitie: Or an Epitome of Seven Treatises (London, 1635), 642. For a detailed study of the ars moriendi see Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, 303–349.

50. Alan MacFarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, new series 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 244.

51. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, 1955), 64–65; Patrick Collinson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture,” in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1720 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 32–57.

52. Dorothy M. Meads (ed.), The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (London: Routledge, 1930); Hinde, Life of Bruen, 99–101, 113–114.

53. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 359–374; Hamling, Decorating the “Godly” Household, 93–120. The wall paintings were quite recently uncovered (pers. comm. Dr. Kathryn Davies).

54. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 283–284; Robert Persons, A Booke of Christian Exercise, ed. Edmund Bunny (London, 1584).

55. Joseph Bentham, The Christian Conflicte: A Treatise Shewing the Difficulties and Duties of this Conflict (London, 1635), 264.

56. Mark Byford, “The Price of Protestantism: Assessing the Impact of Religious Change on Elizabethan Essex: The Cases of Heydon and Colchester, 1558–1594,” D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford (1988), esp. chap. 5; David Underdown, Fire under Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 90–118; Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 402–406.

57. Ryrie, “Hearing God’s Voice in the English and Scottish Reformations,” Reformation 17 (2012): 49–74; Christopher Carter, “Meteors, Prodigies and Signs: The Interpretation of the Unusual in Sixteenth-Century England,” Parergon 29/1 (2012): 107–133; Gillespie, Devoted People, 40–62; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8–32.

58. Peter Lake, “ ‘A Charitable Christian Hatred’: The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s,” in Culture of English Puritanism, 156–174; Cambers, “Reading Libels in Early Seventeenth-Century Northamptonshire,” in Nadine Lewsky and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Essays in Honour of W. J. Sheils (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 115–131; William Perkins, Workes, 3 vols. (London, 1631), i, 123.

59. The point that even pre-Elizabethan generations of Protestant thinkers were deeply distrustful of compromise with political power over the church is made forcefully in Karl Gunther, Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

60. Ford, Protestant Reformation, 127–154.

61. Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher (eds.), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–1590 (Church of England Record Society, 2003), xxvi–ci; Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 402–404; Michael Lynch, “A Nation Born Again? Scottish Identity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Dauvit Broun et al. (eds.), Image and Identity: The Making and Remaking of Scotland through the Ages (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998), 82–104.

FURTHER READING

Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscripts and Puritanism in England, 1586–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Duffy, Eamon. “The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitude.” In England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800, edited by Nicholas Tyacke, pp. 33–55. London: UCL Press, 1997.

Durston, Christopher and Jacqueline Eales (eds.) The Culture of English Puritanism 1560–1700. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996.

Ford, Alan. The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997.

Ford, Alan. “‘Force and Fear of Punishment’: Protestants and Religious Coercion in Ireland, 1603–33.” In Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, edited by Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben, pp. 91–130. Farnham: Ashgate, 2006.

Gillespie, Raymond. Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Haigh, Christopher. The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Heal, Felicity. Reformation in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Marshall, Peter. “The Naming of Protestant England.” Past & Present 214 (2012): 87–128.

Martin, Jessica and Alec Ryrie (eds.) Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Mears, Natalie and Alec Ryrie (eds.) Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Mullan, David George. Scottish Puritanism 1590–1638. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ryrie, Alec. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Todd, Margo. The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 13

PROTESTANTISM IN THE AGE OF CATHOLIC RENEWAL

PHILIP M. SOERGEL

OVERVIEW

IN textbook narratives sixteenth-century religious developments have often been characterized as if they were a drama in two acts. In the first Luther and Zwingli and the various reform movements they inspired in Germany and Switzerland take pride of place. In such accounts the events of the first generation of the Reformation seem to march with historical inevitability toward the establishment of new churches and theologies, and finally to the legal recognition given Lutheranism in the Peace of Augsburg (1555). In the second act, however, a resurgent Catholicism and a buoyant international Calvinism move to center stage, the competition between them becoming one of the primary motors of religious change. As a result, Lutheranism, embattled from within and without, often vanishes from the accounting.

Although such broad narratives distort by simplifying, it is certainly true that political momentum did largely favor the reform-minded during the first half of the century, while in the years following the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563 Protestantism faced a renewed challenge from a resurgent Roman Catholicism. Even as this competition heated up, a second dynamic—the contest between Calvinism, a fervent minority in most places, and state-supported religions like Lutheranism and Anglicanism—further complicated developments. This chapter treats these two dynamics—the resurgence of Catholicism and its overheating skirmishes with Protestant churches on the one hand and the increasingly intense competition between different forms of Protestantism on the other. It examines the ways in which the forces this religious competition unleashed came to produce distinctive religious cultures in the wake of this “second wave” of reform. Ultimately, the increasing competition that developed between these religions produced a legacy of religious war, first in the Netherlands and France in the late sixteenth century and then in England and Central Europe in the seventeenth. Beyond the dismal toll that religious disagreement exacted, the changes of the later Reformation era often involved governments in church affairs and religious life more persistently than ever before.

The long-standing competition between church and secular state, a central concern of political theorists, statesmen, and ecclesiastical officialdom in the later Middle Ages, was thus often decided in Europe’s largest kingdoms in the early modern period in favor of the state. Kings stepped in to define religious policy and even to supervise their clergy. Elsewhere state direction of religious life may not always have been so pervasive, but everywhere in Europe the changes manifested by religious competition helped produce an increasingly divergent religious landscape, so that by 1700 large cultural differences separated the various Catholic and Protestant territories and kingdoms from one another. In this process religion became a potent marker of identity and division, helping to separate European societies of different confessions from each other until modern times. While these divisions were pervasive, post-Reformation Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Calvinism came as well to share certain common features, including an increased emphasis on the enforcement of doctrinal purity, moral discipline, and liturgical uniformity. In this way vast distance came to separate these post-Reformation religions from the world of late medieval Christendom.

CATHOLIC REFORM AND THE POST-TRIDENTINE CHALLENGE

Despite its initially confused and inchoate response to the Protestant challenge, Roman Catholicism possessed many wellsprings of devotion in both the later Middle Ages and the early modern period. The popular surge in veneration of the saints, evident everywhere in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe in mass pilgrimages, the foundation of new shrines, and the deepening affection for Mary and other saints, is just one of many features that point to the continuing vitality of traditional devotion.[1] Other signs, both of continuity and innovation, abounded. In Italy, the late fifteenth century saw the establishment at Genoa of the reform movement known as the Oratory of Divine Love, a confraternity that dedicated itself to spiritual discipline, individual perfection, and communal prayer; the study of the church fathers; and the renewal of the church. Elsewhere in the Catholic world the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw the formation of new religious institutions that were to shape Catholic piety and devotional life for several centuries to come.[2] The foundation of many penitential confraternities in fifteenth-century France and Italy, for instance, demonstrates that long-revered ascetic disciplines like prayer vigils, fasting, flagellation, and the wearing of hair shirts retained their appeal in the later Middle Ages; their continuing popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries points to no decline in enthusiasm for traditional penitential rituals.[3]

Many new orders also appeared in the sixteenth century, and their foundation was, in fact, most prolific in the years when Protestantism was gaining steam and consolidating its position in Northern Europe. In 1524, for instance, Gaetano dei Conti di Tiene (subsequently known as Saint Cajetan (1480‒1547)), together with three associates, founded the order that would become known as the Theatines, an organization dedicated to renewing the spiritual life of the clergy and to fostering Christian perfection among the laity. Like many of the religious institutions that developed in early modern Catholicism, Cajetan’s Theatines combined the rigors of the traditional religious disciplines of monks and friars with a dedication to service to the laity that was more typical of parish clergy. They were soon followed in 1528 by the Capuchins, a reform order of Franciscans, by the female teaching order of the Ursulines in 1535, and by the Society of Jesus or Jesuits in 1540.[4]

It was this last group that was to have the most far-reaching effects in the Catholic world in the years to come.[5] The Jesuits quickly came to play a role in Europe by founding numerous secondary schools, even as they, together with the Theatines, were often entrusted with managing the diocesan seminaries the decrees of the Council of Trent imagined as institutions to train priests. In South and Central America they shared the mission field with Franciscans, Dominicans, and Capuchins, but in the Far East, they were almost always unrivaled. Already in 1542, the Jesuit’s founder Ignatius Loyola’s close associate, Francis Xavier, had made his way to the Portuguese colony of Goa, before moving on to Malacca in the Malay Peninsula in 1545, and to Japan in 1549. Subsequent missions to Japan and China came to be celebrated in the Jesuits’ “Letters from the Far East,” dispatches the society’s missionaries sent home, which were translated into many European languages and published in urban centers throughout the Continent. These newsy accounts, filled with tales of conversions, spiritual feats, and wonders the Jesuits had worked in Japan and China, became widely consumed propaganda for the Roman Church’s late sixteenth-century renewal.[6]

Affection for the saints and pilgrimage, a surge in confraternal piety, a taste for penitential rituals, the foundation of new religious orders, and the swell in missionary zeal—these are just a few of the features scholars have pointed to in the past several decades to support the notion that the three centuries following 1500 witnessed a distinctive “Catholic Reformation” throughout Europe.[7] Much of this renewal occurred independently of the Protestant challenge and was not motivated solely by the desire to condemn or “counter” opposing religious teachings. At the same time a decided and concentrated response to the outbreak of the Reformation in Northern Europe had often been missing in the first generation after the onset of Luther’s and Zwingli’s critiques of the church. Traditionalists had, to be sure, condemned the doctrines of Luther and the Reformers that came after him, but mere prohibitions had had little effect, especially so since many moderates throughout the church insisted on the necessity of reform, too, and hoped for constructive engagement with the ideas and practices of the Protestants. For more than two decades the papacy resisted the call for a church council to address the issues the Reformers raised, and when Paul III (r. 1534‒1549) finally convened a council at Trent in 1545, it was at first a decidedly small and mostly Italian affair. But over the course of the council’s three sessions that followed (1545‒1547, 1551‒1552, and 1561‒1563), support for reform grew within the church, and its pronouncements were eventually to attain an authoritative status in shaping the contours of Catholicism until modern times.[8]

The Tridentine decrees took a noticeably negative tone toward Protestant teachings and innovations. They rejected the primary Reformation formulations of justification by faith, the authority of the Scriptures over tradition, and the priesthood of all believers. In their place, Trent reiterated the necessity of faith and works in working out salvation and the authority of the church to interpret Scripture and doctrine and to define church discipline. At the same time, an underlying assumption of the Tridentine fathers was that the Protestant Reformation had resulted from clerical indiscipline within the church, and so it stipulated a number of reforms in the episcopate and the training of priests as well as measures that were designed to stamp out heresy and to discourage its reappearance. These included, among others, the foundation of seminaries that were to train priests in the essentials of Catholic doctrine and the repetition of prohibitions that had long existed against the holding of multiple offices. Trent further sanctioned more recent innovations like the Index of Prohibited Books, an office that had been founded in Rome in 1559.[9] The Index was to enjoy a long life, lasting until its abolition in 1966. Its periodic publication of a list of works that Catholics were forbidden to read did have a chilling effect on science and humanistic inquiry in Italy and other places where it was vigorously enforced. The spread of local inquisitions in Spain, in Rome, and elsewhere throughout the Catholic world also intensified long-standing medieval prohibitions against promulgating heretical doctrines, but this was a development that occurred independently of the Council of Trent’s decrees.

Many of the reforms Trent envisioned required several generations to accomplish. The prohibition of multiple benefices, a long-standing demand of the medieval church, could not be effectively established in most places without a revolution in church finance, since the livings associated with certain church offices had been depleted by the inflation of the later Middle Ages and were often insufficient to support a priest’s or a bishop’s household. The elimination of priests keeping concubines proceeded slowly as well, particularly in those places like southern Germany where both governments had tolerated concubinage for several decades and priests and parishioners had grown to expect that the Roman Church would soon allow clerical marriage.[10] By the 1550s, for instance, the majority of the clergy in the region may have kept mistresses.[11] The enforcement of Trent’s reiteration of the principle of priestly celibacy thus faced an uphill battle in these places in the decades following the council’s conclusion. Other Tridentine requirements, including the stipulation that all priests attend seminary in their diocese before embarking upon the cure of souls, required an immense infusion of new financial resources and an increase in theologically educated teachers to accomplish, and these took time to assemble.

Other factors slowed the adoption of Tridentine policies, too. The council’s decrees required official promulgation in the many territories and kingdoms of Europe to be effectively established and enforced, and while many states like Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Italian territories, and the Catholic polities of Germany adopted the Tridentine program relatively quickly, France, the largest country with a Catholic majority in Northern Europe, did not. Religious wars and a strong Calvinist minority prevented the French state from pursuing a counter-reforming program until the late seventeenth century, although individual dioceses throughout France were often home to such efforts long before the state pursued the Tridentine program. Mere promulgation of Trent’s decrees, too, did not ensure that a state became an effective counter-reforming force, or even that it might act decisively to root out heterodox ideas. The Tridentine decrees were promulgated in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania as early as 1564, but the state remained a haven of religious toleration for much of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Only sporadic efforts to root out heterodoxy occurred, and the Commonwealth tolerated not only Lutherans and Calvinists, but also more exotic groups of Unitarians and other radicals who ventured there from throughout Europe.[12] For these and other reasons, the reform of the church’s priesthood and ecclesiastical structures that Trent envisioned need to be seen as long-term campaigns that required several generations to complete, since in many places Trent’s provisions were only successfully established by the end of the seventeenth century.

The council’s conclusion in 1563 nonetheless heralded a sea change throughout Europe, as rulers who were firmly committed to Catholic truth and religious uniformity now possessed a clear picture of the essentials of the church’s teaching to enforce in their territories. Trent’s call for clerical reform, too, provided a set of disciplinary goals that the devout in both church and state might aim to establish. The example of Bavaria, a large and geographically consolidated state in the German southeast, provided a model for other leaders anxious to enforce a uniform Catholicism in their states. In part, the reform measures that its staunchly Catholic dukes adopted were inspired by the example of Spain, a country in which the church had already been largely reformed in the decades preceding Trent through a partnership between crown and ecclesiastical officialdom. Yet to this, the Bavarians also added their own innovation, and, in turn, their counter-reforming program inspired Catholic princes elsewhere in Germany and Europe anxious to cultivate a uniform Catholic faith.

Chief among the new institutions the Bavarian Duke Albrecht III envisioned to war against Protestantism was the duchy’s clerical council, an institution he founded in 1570.[13] This body was charged with inspecting local clergy and with certifying the orthodoxy of the state’s officials. It came to play a key role in the reform of Bavaria’s church. Ultimately, it transformed the duchy’s priesthood into functionaries who served as officials within a state church. In this regard, Bavaria’s priests were expected to vouch for the attendance of their parishioners at confession and the Eucharist and they testified to the catholicity of those seeking state offices through giving out certificates that assured a person had participated in the sacraments.[14] In turn, local officials, the clergy, and a system of spies kept a close eye out for those who expressed heretical ideas or Protestant sympathies. “Wandering out” (Auswanderung), a common custom in sixteenth-century Central Europe in which people traveled across territorial borders to attend the religious services of other confessions, was also prohibited. The journeys of merchants, too, were closely monitored, as was the book trade, and house searches undertaken to ferret out forbidden texts occurred as well.[15]

Religious pluralism, almost universally distrusted everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, thus contributed to an increase in the state’s coercive powers, as institutions like customs and border patrols, censorship boards, and privy councils took on the task of insuring doctrinal purity within a state’s borders. At the same time the chronic weaknesses of the early modern state—inadequate revenues, shortages of trained personnel, poor infrastructure, and widespread illiteracy—could not insure a modicum of doctrinal uniformity without support from the people. And so a “softer” sell emerged at the same time that aimed to rekindle allegiance to Catholicism and affection for the church through schooling, the arts, music, and popular religious devotions like processions, pilgrimages, and confraternal piety. Prohibition and cultivation thus mingled with the emerging missionary zeal of early modern Catholicism to produce a truly broad-based resurgence.

MORAL DISCIPLINING

As the Catholic resurgence gathered strength, several interrelated changes can be observed on the religious landscape of many late sixteenth-century Protestant states. First, a wave of new reforms aimed to discipline the populace and to enforce morality, often in more intrusive ways than either the late medieval or early Reformation churches had done. Second, most Protestant churches embraced the technological possibilities that print and typographical fixity offered to standardize their liturgies and cultivate orthodox beliefs through prayer and service books, catechisms, confessional formulae, and in the most determined states, even the texts of the clergy’s sermons. As they moved to promote correct belief, Protestant state and clerical officials often embraced prohibitions and persecution to root out heterodoxy in ways similar to their Catholic opponents. In the most integrated and efficiently administered polities, a marked tendency was evident for the Protestant churches to become state institutions in which religious allegiances were relied upon to foster patriotic affection for king and country. Greater social discipline and patriotic allegiances to the state were thus implicated in many places in the expansion of state power in the early modern period. Whether one lived in an intrusive state that was concerned to establish moral perfection and unitary belief, or in a polity that was more tolerant of religious difference, the processes of religious change from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries fashioned distinctive identities for the post-Reformation churches that created divisions which affected Europe until modern times.

The first of these tendencies—the growth of moral and social disciplining in early modern Protestantism—frequently marked a departure from the conventions and mores of the traditional church. In the later Middle Ages town and ecclesiastical officialdom had frequently been tolerant of prostitution, perceiving it preferable to other greater evils, and the sexual ethic of the church was often seen more as a desideratum than a realizable goal.[16] The widespread practice of late marriage meant that many men faced large portions of their lives without licit sexual companionship. Consequently, as the marriage age lengthened throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages, tolerance for forms of municipalized prostitution grew, since many feared the consequences of unfulfilled male lust more than the violation of the church’s teachings concerning the evils of sex outside marriage. Fornication with a prostitute, in other words, was preferable to rape, sodomy, adultery, bestiality, and the deflowering of virgins.

Such moral equivocation became less tenable in the sixteenth century. The appearance of syphilis after 1494 was one factor that may have prompted a reassessment of traditional moral attitudes.[17] The sixteenth-century Reformers, both Protestant and Catholic, were to attack long-standing capitulation to practices like prostitution as morally abominable. Behind their distaste, fear of the disease prostitutes now spread is certainly evident. Martin Luther, for instance, described the prostitute as “stinking, syphilitic, scabby, seedy, and nasty,” and went on to denounce “the whore [who] can poison 10, 20, 30, 100 children of good people, and is therefore to be considered a murderer, worse than a poisoner.”[18] Luther envisioned a new sexual ethic in which the long-standing idealization of chastity would be expunged, prostitution would be eliminated, and the sexual appetites of the young would be freely indulged through early marriage, an unachievable goal given social realities. Throughout Europe, many shared Luther’s fears about the polluting nature of municipal prostitution, and a wave of closures of public brothels occurred in both Catholic and Protestant cities after the mid-sixteenth century.[19]

In many Protestant towns and territories, the elimination of municipal brothels was merely the first salvo in a war against all sex outside marriage. At Augsburg, for instance, the town council shuttered its brothel as early as 1532. Lyndal Roper has shown that a steadily intensifying campaign occurred against all sex outside marriage in the decades that followed. Eventually, it was not just prostitutes who were prosecuted, but any woman of easy virtue. In this offensive parents might be brought to task if their daughters led scandalous lives, and men and women who flouted the prohibitions against sex outside marriage faced a city discipline court and a town council that was now more concerned than ever before to establish sexual purity.[20]

Among the new measures that appeared, those designed to stamp out premarital sex among the young frequently enjoyed widespread support from fathers and mothers. The social and demographic transformations of the sixteenth century, evident in the “long century” of population expansion and the inflation and lengthening of marriage age it caused, produced greater numbers of men and women who would never marry. As land and other goods grew dearer, the costs of establishing a new household grew; both illegitimate pregnancies and clandestine marriages that occurred without parental consent and pre-negotiated dowries thus threatened family patrimony.[21] State requirements that children’s marriages have parental consent, that marriages be publicized for several weeks in advance through the reading of banns, and that parishes keep registers of marriages, births, and in-migration and out-migration of subjects—these measures ultimately granted the family elders greater control over whom their children married. They were also perceived as tools that addressed long-standing problems of desertion and bigamy.[22]

The logic of the late-Reformation shift toward moral disciplining aimed to outlaw all sex outside the bounds of marriage. As a consequence, harsher punishments and more dogged attempts to root out crimes like sodomy and adultery became common in many Protestant states in the later sixteenth century. Capital punishments, not unknown in the later Middle Ages for these crimes, were now given out more frequently than in the fifteenth century. Still, sexual crimes were more often punished through banishment, fines, public flogging, or shaming. And even as intolerance for illicit sexual activity grew, complex questions about the precise nature of the sex act, the age of the suspects, and the flagrancy of the offense could play a role in mitigating punishment.[23]

THE WAR AGAINST DISORDER

The regulation of sex, marriage, and family life may be the most persistent areas in which Protestant states and churches aimed to effect greater discipline, but other measures also aimed to achieve religious uniformity and to enhance state control. In highly confessionalized states, where rulers were concerned to establish religious uniformity, members of the clergy served as the face of royal and princely authority on the local level. Members of the clergy were, in other words, the “king’s men,” and consequently charged with reporting sedition, heresy, libel, and other crimes against the public peace and the state to the government. Rebellion, like so many crimes in early modern Europe, had not only a political connotation, but a moral and religious dimension as well. It was widely perceived as a sin, since a challenge to the ruler’s authority was an attempt to usurp power that had been divinely ordained. Domestic peace within the state, most moralists whether Protestant or Catholic agreed, was a “jewel beyond compare,” if precisely because it was often lacking. Many likely approved of the many measures that occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that expanded the power of the state because they offered the promise of addressing disorder.

ESTABLISHING UNIFORMITY OF BELIEF AND WORSHIP

Although no Protestant church or state established an institution comparable to the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, the printing industry and the book trade were nonetheless closely monitored and controlled, with institutions of censorship developing in some Protestant territories that were often similar to those in Catholic regions.[24] Printing, more generally, came to exert an enormous influence on the development of Protestant societies through the proliferation of catechisms, confessions, and prayer books. John Bossy has seen this development as producing a tyranny of print over religious experience,[25] since in many Protestant states, legally sanctioned prayer or service books meant that on any given Sunday all subjects were literally on the same page, praying the same prayers, and reading the same biblical texts. In some places the standardization of print even extended to the sermon, as books of approved homilies were circulated among pastors in an effort to cultivate orthodoxy and to discourage freethinking.[26]

In establishing uniformity of worship, Protestant states were often more precocious than their Catholic counterparts. In Germany, evangelical towns and territories began in the 1520s adopting church ordinances that stipulated the service order for the Mass and other church ceremonies.[27] These were often modeled on Luther’s adaptation of the medieval Latin Mass of 1523 and his 1526 translation of the Mass into German.[28] In Scandinavia, the Swedish Church Ordinance of 1571 helped to define Lutheran liturgy for much of the Nordic region throughout the early modern period, while in England, the Book of Common Prayer was just beginning to exert its enormous influence over the English language and Anglican piety in the second half of the sixteenth century. First issued under Edward VI in 1549, the book was revised along more puritanical lines in 1552, before being suppressed during the reign of Mary Tudor. Reissued in a new irenic edition under Elizabeth I in 1559, it survived again until being discarded during the Puritan Commonwealth. In 1662, in the Stuart Restoration, it reappeared and that version was to endure until the late twentieth century. Even before the 1662 edition, though, the stately prose crafted for the book, presumably by Cranmer in the 1540s and 1550s, had significantly influenced the English language. More generally, the trend toward the adoption of Protestant prayer and service books represented an area in which the Reformation churches were in the vanguard, since it was not until 1614 that the Catholic Church prescribed a single liturgical style through the adoption of the Roman Ritual.

Many of the church ordinances promulgated in sixteenth-century Protestant states stipulated that schools be established to train children to read so that they could master the catechism.[29] For most of the sixteenth century, such educational schemes proceeded slowly and formal primary schooling was common only in larger towns and cities. Still the clergy did conduct classes to teach the young their catechisms, though the education undertaken in these village sessions appears to have been largely conducted through rote memorization. The evidence suggests that the rise in literacy was modest in the sixteenth century, and that great differences separated male and female rates of reading knowledge. In the seventeenth century, however, literacy expanded more quickly, particularly in the Protestant northwest of Europe. Although precise estimates are notoriously unreliable and have now been subjected to increasing scrutiny and debate for more than a generation, as many as half of all males may have been able to read by the second half of the seventeenth century in Protestant England and the Netherlands. Rates were lower in the German territories, but still appear to have been significantly above those of the Catholic Mediterranean. Female literacy rates in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant lands, however, were likely about half those of men.[30]

THE CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES OF PROTESTANT RELIGIOUS CHANGES: ARCHITECTURE

While significant differences separated Calvinism, Anglicanism, and Lutheranism, Protestant ideas about art, aesthetics, and culture were often remarkably similar. Of these three traditions, only Lutheranism preserved much space at all for the production and consumption of religious art, and even here, art’s role was circumscribed.[31] Eventually, the Protestant churches of Northern Europe did produce great architectural masterpieces, too, but in the later sixteenth century, most parishes continued to inhabit buildings inherited from the medieval church. These spaces were often “reformed” according to the demands of evangelical, Calvinist, or Anglican teachings. Generally, this meant that prominence was given to the pulpit and the proclamation of the Word. In Lutheran churches, an altar painting might survive, but usually the rich ornamentation of interior spaces with murals, frescos, and stained glass was curtailed as a result of the change in teaching. Lutheran worship spaces, though, were often more richly decorated than other Protestant churches.

Two Protestant churches, the Dutch Reformed Church at Willemstad in Holland (1607) and the evangelical Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Wolfenbüttel near Braunschweig (1608), stand as some of the first purpose-built Protestant churches in Northern Europe, and their contrasting styles reveal much about the differences between Calvinism and Lutheranism. Commissioned by the Stadtholder, Maurice of Orange and constructed between 1597 and 1607, the Willemstad church was built as an octagonal structure so that it appeared as a traditional central style church. Such a plan afforded everyone a good view and hearing of the minister’s sermon, cementing in architecture the importance the Reformed church placed on the proclamation of the Word. While the interior was a fine space, it was largely unadorned, filled with light, and without representational art. By contrast, the interior of the parish church in Lutheran Wolfenbüttel, at the time the capital of the small, but important Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, was more decorative and its clear focal point was the choir with its richly carved central altar and pulpit. Its handsome ornamentation underscored the church’s importance as the parish home of the Brunswick ducal family.

Completed in 1608, one year after the church at Willemstad, the building was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and its space evoked the importance the evangelical church continued to place on a traditional, albeit simplified liturgy, the celebration of communion, and the preaching of the Word. Its chancel’s pulpit, for instance, was richly carved with statues of the Apostles and it sported reliefs that told the biblical story that produced the Gospel. A life-sized Moses stood as the proclaimer of the law below the pulpit’s elevated speaker’s platform, while the altar, completed in 1623, was a richly carved, multi-storied confection that reproduced scenes from the life of Christ. A crucifix served as its main focal point, while above, a sculpture of John the Baptist watched over the entire scene like a sentinel. The “high” church sentiments expressed in the architecture of the Wolfenbüttel parish church were thus typical of the one direction in which Lutheranism and Protestantism traveled in the seventeenth century. The use of elaborate decoration similar to that at Wolfenbüttel was particularly common in the Lutheran churches of Denmark and Sweden, where essentially conservative state reforms of religion ventured few innovations and worship retained many medieval practices. Here the region’s church architecture also diverged little from that of the Catholic world, and visitors sometimes noted the similarities between Scandinavian churches and their Catholic counterparts.[32]

At the other end of the spectrum, Willemstad might be said to represent the drastic simplifications a Reformed aesthetic produced in church building in the Calvinist churches of France, Switzerland, Brandenburg, Scotland, and the Netherlands. In most places, though, Protestants continued to worship in places inherited from the Middle Ages, which were now often remodeled, whitewashed, or redecorated according to the new demands of the Reformation’s teachings. Occasionally, older architectural and artistic practices resurfaced, as in the 1630s, when the Anglican Archbishop William Laud reintroduced medieval rood screens in English churches to shield the consecration of the host and the celebration of the Mass from the congregation’s view.[33] But the momentum was most often toward the creation of a new kind of space filled with light that made preaching and the service more easily comprehended.

In time, the Protestant churches of Northern Europe did produce great architectural masterpieces like the churches Sir Christopher Wren and other architects designed for the rebuilding of the City of London in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666. Wren’s massive rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral, too, is a structure that can stand alongside the most imposing ecclesiastical monuments of baroque Rome. But for much of the seventeenth century in Northern Europe, the persistence of religious wars depressed church building in both Catholic and Protestant regions.

A FONDNESS FOR SERMONS

The greatest monuments the early modern Protestant world produced, though, were not brick and mortar constructions. They were fashioned instead from words. Sermons, histories, devotional works, and spiritual diaries were among the most common genres to which the Protestant clergy and moralists contributed.

Sermons were common in every part of the early modern Christian world, but it was in the Protestant churches where the form most often came to be developed into a high art that was universally enjoyed. This was one consequence of the dramatic simplification of ritual that usually accompanied Protestant reforms. In Calvinist churches, in particular, the absence of much liturgy meant that almost all attention fell upon the minister’s sermon. In the Reformed churches of France, for instance, Calvinists spoke no longer of going to Mass, or even to “worship” on Sundays. Instead they went to “preaching.”[34] The central object of worship among Calvinists, sermons also came to play a vital role in all the Protestant churches. Members of the Catholic devout might join confraternities and engage in rigorous disciplines that involved ascetic regimens like prayer vigils, fasting, flagellation, frequent processions, and pilgrimages. Or they might attend the Mass, confession, and the Eucharist frequently. Devout Protestants, by contrast, listened to sermons, and these were preached in towns and cities on all kinds of occasions, usually on every day of the week. Sermons were also used to commemorate births, deaths, natural disasters, storms, and marriages.

Perhaps one of the most visible testimonies to the importance early modern Protestants placed on sermonizing was the development in the German-speaking world of the funeral sermon.[35] Sermons had been preached at the death of Luther and of other Protestant luminaries like Melanchthon, but at its origins Lutheran preachers had often refused to eulogize the dead, insisting instead that the burial was a time for proclaiming the Gospel’s promise of the Resurrection to Eternal Life. By the end of the sixteenth century, though, evangelical funeral sermons had grown to include a Lebenslauf, a vita of the deceased’s life, and this came more and more to resemble a eulogy in the seventeenth century. In the weeks following the funeral, the pastor’s remarks were given to printers to be published and printed versions of the funeral sermons were distributed to those who had attended. Thus the German funeral sermon served a role as a lasting tribute to the departed, a memorial carved in words, and as a source of consolation to family and friends. Funeral sermons became such a common way to commemorate the passing of a loved one that German territorial governments regulated the fees pastors could charge for delivering them, and the income they provided helped to supplement the often meager livings of pastors. The popularity of these customs is well attested by the 300,000 printed editions of funeral sermons that survive from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.[36]

The funeral sermon may be one of the more prominent ways in which an early modern Protestant community relied upon their pastors to provide eloquent words to mark life’s important passages. But all life-changing events could become the occasion for a sermon. Preaching was a prized skill, and since a sermon might last for an hour and a half, those who held their audiences spellbound were counted among the most successful clerics in their churches. Preferment and wealthy livings sometimes accrued to those who were popular preachers and great dynasties of preachers—families that produced excellent speakers over several generations—were common. While the devout avidly consumed sermons—many even kept their own libraries of individual or collected homilies—everyone was forced to listen to sermons on Sundays, the one day of the week that attendance at church was obligatory for most Christians. As a consequence, preachers often played to their congregations and the sermon became a performance designed not only to edify, but also to inform and entertain.

DEVOTIONAL LITERATURE

A rich diversity of devotional genres also flourished in the Protestant regions of Northern Europe. In Germany, many books treated family life, and the origins of these can be traced to Luther’s own writings on marriage and the family and to the impetus that Philip Melanchthon gave to the development of the practice of keeping commonplace books (loci communes). Luther’s various statements concerning the roles of fathers in the household and piety in the home helped to inspire an entire genre of Hausväterbücher, or fatherly advice books. Like many Protestant genres, they were often compiled out of wisdom culled from the ancients, the fathers, the Reformers, and Christian moralists. They aimed not only to edify and to carve out a private space in which the paterfamilias could contemplate religious, moral, and ethical truths, but also to inform about problems of animal husbandry, estate management, and other practical issues that affected the family’s finances. These books envisioned the pious head of the Protestant household as analogous to a king or prince in his domain, and taught that the proper moral leadership of the family encompassed attention to good management as well as concern for eliminating moral evils and cultivating piety in the home.[37] Although German, books of fatherly advice like these had their counterparts in most of the Protestant regions of Northern Europe, as the custom of keeping commonplace books filled with wisdom culled from one’s reading came to be adopted in places throughout the early modern Protestant world. But fatherly counsel was not the only advice to flow from Protestant presses; similar works of piety, edification, and household management appeared for wives, daughters, and sons, too.[38]

DIARIES AND SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

The great expansion that occurred in the printing of books in Protestant Northern Europe between 1550 and 1700 confirms steady growth in the number of readers. The consumption of books bred certain habits of mind among the literate. Perhaps most notably, those who spent time habitually in devotional reading might cultivate a spirit of inward examination of conscience. Literacy, as a consequence, encouraged men and women to keep their own journals or diaries. In some cases, too, these works evolved into spiritual autobiographies that recounted the Christian’s inner trials and tribulations. Like the forthright honesty of St. Augustine’s Confessions, many of these texts related their authors’ deepest, inmost feelings about their conversion experience. Diaries and spiritual autobiographies flourished most decidedly among Calvinists, since the absence of most liturgical practices in that tradition and the emphasis on internal examination bred mindfulness about the life of the spirit. But as the seventeenth century progressed, the stirrings of early Pietist impulses evident in the popularity of the writings of Johann Arndt (1555‒1621) and Jakob Böhme (1574‒1624), as well as translations of Calvinist and Puritan works into German, bred similar patterns of self-examination among German Lutherans.[39] This search for a relevant and satisfying internal piety was a common theme in seventeenth-century religion, as Catholic Jansenists and quietists often expressed longings and sentiments that were remarkably similar to their Calvinist and Lutheran counterparts.

Diary keeping and devotional writing provided an outlet for emotional release for the devout, even as the publication of spiritual autobiographies often popularized certain notions about the Christian life to a broader audience; these works also propagandized for one faith over others and urged readers to imitate an author’s own efforts to achieve moral perfection and certainty of salvation. German Pietists, for instance, often spoke of a spiritual crisis in their works, a Busskampf, a kind of dark night of the soul that preceded conversion and certitude.[40] The notion of a salvific struggle and of a specific conversion “event” allowed Protestant writers to identify with Saints Paul and Augustine as well as Martin Luther. In many quarters, the Busskampf came to play an important role in the ways in which the pious understood the workings of the processes of redemption. For some, this struggle followed by a redemptive release and certainty of salvation became the sine qua non of spiritual experience. The notion, frequently discussed in the autobiographies and diaries of Puritans, Lutherans, and Calvinists, functioned much like a spiritual seal of approval, marking one’s entry into the elect.

HYMN SINGING

Not everyone aspired to such an intensely inward religious life, but a final area of endeavor—hymn singing—offered both the possibility of deploying the emotions to pious ends even as it presented the opportunity for communal engagement. Hymn singing, and more generally church music, was enthusiastically embraced in the Lutheran churches of Germany and Scandinavia, initially rejected in the Reformed Church at Zurich, and cautiously integrated into the life of Calvinist churches in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland. In Anglicanism, varied attitudes toward church music flourished, with some churches, particularly those connected to the crown, favoring elaborate service music and others accepting the more dour and cautious attitudes that were typical of Calvinism toward the medium.

Just as Lutheranism was alone among Protestant churches to carve out at least some uses for the visual arts in the church, the tradition came also to develop the richest and most highly ornamented musical life. Luther himself had been an avid singer, and unlike Zwingli, who was also a musician, he envisioned a large role for music in the liturgy of the church and in family life, perceiving of music as second only to theology in its ability to express the Gospel’s truths. By contrast, Calvin was to reject the use of polyphony and part-singing in the church, though he thought it might flourish in the home. Calvin insisted, too, that the most suitable texts for service music were to be found in the Psalms, and psalm singing consequently became a readily identifiable practice of Calvinists. The Genevan psalter, with psalms first rendered by Calvin into French and later revised and augmented with new settings by the great French poet Clément Marot and the theologian Theodore Beza, became the definitive hymnal of Calvinist churches throughout Europe. The psalter was translated into many languages and used by Calvinist churches throughout the Continent, exerting a standardizing influence over congregational singing in the Reformed tradition. It was only in the Reformed churches of Hungary that other types of hymns came to be used in worship, but everywhere else the singing of the Psalms was the only music allowed in Calvinist services.[41]

The uses of music in the evangelical tradition were quite different. From the early Reformation, evangelicals embraced the singing of bold chorales, of which Luther’s own composition, “A Mighty Fortress” (Ein feste Burg), was the most famous. In most German Lutheran churches in the later sixteenth century, the congregations first sang the chorale in unison, before the choir performed it in a contrapuntal setting. Eventually, such practices were to give birth to the rich evangelical tradition of cantata performance in city churches. In these, chorales often alternated with richly complex polyphonic variations of hymn tunes and choruses sung by the choir and solo aria-styled performances of individual singers.

Unlike their Calvinist counterparts who rejected the use of instruments in church as “graven images,” Lutherans happily embraced the use of organs and other instruments in the performance of service music, even as they freely allowed the authors of hymn texts to set their words to readily recognizable secular songs. The building of pipe organs, among the mechanical wonders of seventeenth-century Europe, consequently took a different turn in Protestant Germany, for there these instruments had by necessity to support congregational singing as well as play a role in the performance of more complex cantata and solo works. Thus organs produced in the region embraced a broader array of sounds, mimicking stringed, reed, and brass instruments as well as the traditional sounds of pipes, so that they might play their various roles in the performance of sacred music.[42]

The popularity of a broad spectrum of hymn singing can be witnessed in the steady expansion of evangelical hymnals in use throughout the Lutheran Church in the course of the seventeenth century. At Dresden, for instance, the 1622 hymnal reproduced 276 hymns, but by 1673, a new edition included 1,505 compositions, while at Lüneberg, the 1635 hymnal reproduced 355 hymns, but by 1695, the number had grown to 2,055.[43] Hymn singing was one of Lutheranism’s great success stories. It involved everyone in the parish in a confident affirmation of the faith, spoke affectively to the emotions, and aided the expansion of both musical and textual literacy. Chorales, in particular, provided congregations with a truly popular expression of the Reformation’s teaching, and thus they were readily imitated as evangelical reform moved beyond the borders of Saxony and German-speaking territories. As evangelicalism found a home in Denmark and its dependency, Norway, and in Sweden and its Finnish colony, older forms of plainchant and Latin service music lived on. Hymn singing, though, was soon grafted on to the essentially conservative reformations that took hold in Scandinavia.[44]

In the Lutheran world, music also offered an avenue for social advancement. In the largest evangelical cities, choir schools, of which the St. Thomas Church School in Leipzig is the most famous example, provided education to young boys who were musically gifted. Elsewhere adult choirs in towns and parishes were some of the only institutions that brought together people from society’s various ranks in a common cause of adorning the church’s services. Music’s widespread popularity is often confirmed in seventeenth-century parish records, which sometimes show that as much as half of parish income went to supporting music’s role in the parish’s services.[45] Beyond the Lutheran confession, too, others admired evangelicalism’s embrace of music. In Augsburg, a confessionally divided city, Catholic officials were frequently frustrated in the late sixteenth century by their parishioners’ insistence on singing Lutheran chorales; the development of a rich, Catholic musical tradition came as a consequence to be seen as a necessity of the Roman Church’s counteroffensive against Protestantism.[46]

CONFESSIONALIZATION OR A COMPLEX DIALOGUE?

Highly charged competition in the period between the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618‒1648) undoubtedly produced greater differentiation between the post-Reformation religions. In recent years historians have debated how best to characterize the impact of these trends. Among scholars of Germany and Central Europe, the theory of confessionalization has developed as one way to explain the momentous religious and social changes that the Reformation produced. This theory was first hinted at in the works of the Catholic historian Ernst von Zeeden in the 1950s, but was eventually fully outlined in the scholarship of Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling in the 1970s and 1980s.[47] Although each historian’s precise argument concerning the processes of confessionalization or confession building were different, as a group they argue that both church and state cooperated in the century after 1555 to enforce greater discipline and establish religious conformity. These processes served to strengthen the power of the state and were a necessary precondition for the modernization of society.

The advantages the theory of confessionalization affords have been quite evident to many Reformation scholars, particularly in Germany where the emergence of the territorial state has long been seen as one of the most important historical developments of the period. The theory of confessionalization, too, has been particularly useful in reintegrating the history of Catholicism into a larger picture of the history of the Reformation era. Older histories, for instance, had often characterized “Counter Reformation” Catholicism as an atavistic resurgence of the medieval church. Confessionalization, though, provides a way to treat the emergence of early modern Protestantism and Catholicism as essentially similar events, both of which were modern in their implications.

In its emphasis on the role of the state, though, confessionalization is most suitable to explain religious, social, and political changes that occurred in large, powerful, and well-governed territories like Catholic Bavaria or Lutheran Württemberg. In much of Central Europe, tiny states faced chronic weakness, and were not able to discipline their subjects in the way that the largest and most powerful territories did. In these small states (Kleinstaaten), efforts to enforce moral discipline, to root out heterodoxy, and to establish religious uniformity were less frequent and draconian than in Europe’s largest polities. But even in these places—places without persistent campaigns of moral disciplining—distinctly popular Catholic and Protestant identities developed nonetheless. Thus a theory of confessionalization that emphasizes the power of the state as the primary creator of all religious difference cannot explain all circumstances.

Some states, moreover, resisted the trend toward a “hard-edged,” confessionalized Christianity, even though they were large and by the standards of the time relatively powerful. The Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania comes to mind as one Catholic state where relative tolerance allowed evangelicals, Reformed, Unitarians, and Catholics to coexist. Such islands of toleration were not unknown throughout Europe. State churches, moreover, were not always interested in establishing pure teaching. The national churches of Scandinavia, for instance, adopted the central tenets of Lutheranism and reformed some of their practices along evangelical lines. At the same time their liturgies, church architecture, and ceremonies continued to echo customs and beliefs common to the medieval world. Saints’ days, pilgrimages, and other medieval rituals lived on for many years to come. And though church officials tried to wean Nordic parishioners from older beliefs in cunning folk and magic, they were largely unsuccessful in altering the bedrock of popular belief. Even in Denmark, the state where Luther’s close associate, Johannes Bugenhagen, initiated a reform most similar to Wittenberg’s, it was an “anti-doctrinal” form of Lutheranism that took hold and flourished throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, the Danish kings resisted radical reform, and discouraged theological controversy and debate.[48]

This chapter has argued, then, that the sources that forged distinct Protestant identities were more complex and varied than the theory of confessionalization allows. These forces of change flowed both from the “top down,” that is, from state and ecclesiastical officialdom, and from the “bottom up” and they were composed of elements of prohibition and popular enthusiasm. Efforts to discipline morals, to subject laypeople to the “tyranny of print,” and to censor and root out opposing religious views all played their part in creating a landscape, particularly in Northern Europe, that was more varied, complex, and confessionally divided than ever before. The fault lines and cleavages these innovations created across European societies were real and long-lasting. By 1700, great distances separated Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Catholics from each other. In this process religion had come to be differentiated more as an intellectual and a doctrinal system than it had been previously in medieval times. At the same time, the great appetite of Protestant societies for sermons, devotional literature, and music points to some continued shared experiences, even as these features of Protestant praxis demonstrate an enduring affection for cultural forms that expressed and defended the Reformation’s teachings.

NOTES

1. See esp. Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 15–43.

2. Williston Walker, History of the Christian Church (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 503–504.

3. For an introduction to the history of penitential confraternities, see Andrew E. Barnes, The Social Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Devotional Change in the Penitential Confraternities of Marseilles, 1499–1792 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994); and Barnes, “The Transformation of Penitent Confraternities over the Ancien Régime,” in John Donnelly and Michael Maher (eds.), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 44 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1998), 97–120.

4. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25–42.

5. The literature on the early modern Jesuits is vast. For an introduction, see esp. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); O’Malley, The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present (London and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); and Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, esp. 29–32, 161–170, 180–184.

6. M. Howard Rienstra, Jesuit Letters from China, 1583–1584 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), reproduces a selection of translated versions of the letters from a critical point in the history of the Chinese mission; Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. 3 (1983–1999) includes a bibliography of the letter editions.

7. See Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, for a summary of the relevant historiography.

8. Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1957–1961 (German ed. 1947‒1949), 2 vols.

9. Gigliola Fragnito (ed.), Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 13–49.

10. Michael Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 29–68.

11. A visitation conducted in the diocese of Regensburg in 1548, for instance, found that the majority of priests were keeping concubines. Josef Staber, Kirchengeschichte des Bistums Regensburg (Regensburg: Habbel, 1966), 120.

12. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2003), 340–344.

13. The institution’s long history is treated in Richard Bauer, Der kurfürstliche geistliche Rat und die bayerische Kirchenpolitik, 1768–1802 (Munich: Stadtarchiv München, 1971).

14. Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 178.

15. Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 77–80.

16. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40–41; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 101–102.

17. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “Early Modern Syphilis,” in John C. Fout (ed.), Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 11–28.

18. Martin Luther quoted in Merrie Wiesner, “Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys,” in James K. Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael Samuel (eds.), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 295–308, here 301.

19. Peter Schuster, Das Frauenhaus, städtische Bordelle in Deutschland (1350–1600) (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1992); Roper, Holy Household, 91–93; Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 134–162.

20. Roper, Holy Household, 76–82.

21. Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

22. This campaign is well treated in Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

23. Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 27–30.

24. Alyson Creasman, Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648: “Printed Poison and Evil Talk” (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Cyndia S. Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

25. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 102.

26. The most famous examples being the First (1547) and Second (1571) Book of Homilies published in England during the reign of Edward I, which were intended to provide model sermons as well as injunctions that were required to be read on certain Sundays throughout the liturgical year.

27. The ordinances are reproduced in Emil Sehling (ed.), Die Evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr, 1902‒2015), 21 vols.

28. Luther, Formula missae et communionis pro ecclesia Vuittembergensi (Wittenberg, 1523); Luther, Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts (Wittenberg, 1526).

29. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in Reformation Germany (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Strauss, “The Social Function of Schools in the Lutheran Reformation in Germany,” History of Education Quarterly 28 (1988): 191–206.

30. Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History 69/2 (2009): 409–445; David Cressy’s Literacy and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) presents a contrary point of view by arguing that literacy decreased in mid-seventeenth-century England as a result of the upheavals of the Civil War.

31. Andrew Spicer (ed.), Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). This collection reviews the architectural and artistic cultures that flourished in Lutheran territories across Europe.

32. Brigitte Johannsen and Hugo Johannsen, “Reforming the Confessional Space: Early Lutheran Churches in Denmark, ca.1536–1660,” in Spicer (ed.), Lutheran Churches, 241–277, here 262–263.

33. Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3–7.

34. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 497.

35. Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006); Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

36. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead, 81–83.

37. Julius Hoffman, Die “Hausväterliteratur” und die “Predigten über den christlichen Hausstand”: Lehre vom Hause und Bildung für das häusliche Leben im 16., 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Weinheim: Beltz, 1959); Harrington, “Hausvater and Landesvater: Paternalism and Marriage Reform in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 25 (1992): 52–75.

38. Merrie Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 148–151; Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion, and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2014), esp. 106–125; Jennifer Hillman, Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 78–85; Moore, The Maiden’s Mirror: Reading Material for German Girls in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987).

39. Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

40. F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965).

41. Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 496.

42. Matthias Range, “The Material Presence of Music in Church: The Hanseatic City of Lübeck,” in Spicer (ed.), Lutheran Churches, 197–220.

43. Soergel, Arts and Humanities through the Eras: The Age of Baroque and Enlightenment (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson/Gale, 2004), 371.

44. Marion Lars Hendrickson, Musica Christi: A Lutheran Aesthetic (New York: Lang, 2005), 44–49.

45. J. Andreas Loewe, “Why Do Lutherans Sing? Lutherans, Music, and the Gospel in the First Century of the Reformation,” Church History 82 (2013): 69–89.

46. Alexander J. Fisher, Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004).

47. All three historians have been quite prolific, but the most important works are Ernst Walter Zeeden, “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe,” Historische Zeitschrift 185 (1958): 249–299; Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung. Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1981); and Wolfgang Reinhard, “Konfession und Konfessionalisierung in Europa,” in Reinhard (ed.), Bekenntnis und Geschichte. Die Confessio Augustana im historischen Zusammenhang (München: Vögel, 1981), 165–189; and Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–251.

48. Ole Peter Grell, “Introduction,” in Grell (ed.), The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalization of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7.

FURTHER READING

Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Brown, Christopher Boyd. Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia. Social Discipline in the Reformation. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Kaplan, Benjamin. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation. New York: Penguin, 2003.

O’Malley, John. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Robisheaux, Thomas. Rural Society and the Search for Order in Reformation Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Willis, Jonathan. Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

CHAPTER 14

PROTESTANTISM AND NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

ANDREW COLIN GOW AND JEREMY FRADKIN

THE period bookended by Luther’s famous 95 theses (1517) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was one of unprecedented European engagement with a wider world. This period, which we now call “early modern,” witnessed a series of transformative changes that had important consequences for early Protestantism and its relationship with non-Christian religions, peoples, and cultures. This was the age of growing Humanist linguistic scholarship of Hebrew and even Arabic, rapidly increasing contact between Latin Christendom (writ large) and the Islamic world, the gradual revival of Jewish populations in parts of northern and western Europe after a prolonged era of mass expulsions, and voyages of “discovery” and colonization in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through this combination of new scholarship, sail, and settlement, Protestants by the mid-seventeenth century had the opportunity to know much more about non-Christian religions than their predecessors in Luther’s time.

Yet for the most part, this new knowledge did not result in any sudden or fundamental changes to Protestant assessments of the beliefs, practices, and characteristics of these religious groups. The all-important work of interpreting Holy Scripture, together with the reiteration of longstanding medieval traditions, formed the basis of such attitudes. Protestants in 1648 and beyond continued, as Luther had, to rail against Jews, “Mohamedans,” heathens, and all enemies of the true Christian faith. Even the most strikingly unusual views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were primarily theological. Some Protestants, for example, declared that the Jews would soon gather to reconquer Palestine from the hated “Turk” and establish a new kingdom of Israel, in which the resurrected Christ would reign as king. This peculiar brand of “millenarianism” was the product of elaborate scriptural interpretation and the belief that the end-times were imminent, rather than any new contact with Jews or Muslims.

With this theological and polemical focus in mind, the chapter will establish the broad outlines of early Protestant discourses regarding non-Christian religions, in particular Judaism and Islam. It will also provide the reader with a general sense of the approaches taken in the study of these topics by modern scholars, and it will make some suggestions regarding the enduring modern legacies of these late medieval and early modern discourses. Of course, a survey such as this can only paint a picture in broad strokes. Individual professions of interest, kindness, or enmity toward non-Christians ought to be examined in light of their immediate historical context. “Philosemitism” or anti-Judaism might go hand-in-hand with desired mercantile policy. Bellicose rhetoric against “the Turk” could signal one’s political views regarding a rival Catholic power. However, these varying uses of what were largely negative discourses concerning Jews, Muslims, and “heathens” only serve to emphasize their centrality to the general world view of early modern Protestantism—that of a besieged faithful minority living in a faithless world near the end of days, where the true religion of God was singular, but the snares of the Devil were various and innumerable.

The first part of this chapter will examine the place of Judaism in Protestant theology and polemic. We will see that for Luther and most German-speaking Reformers, the Jewish question revolved primarily around theological concerns. This was true even as they repeated centuries-old topoi sustained by medieval urban hostility to those Jews who received the legal protection of the Holy Roman Emperor. These German Protestants—it must be noted—were the most likely Protestants in the sixteenth century to have direct contact with Jewish populations without traveling to exotic destinations. Therefore, Lutheran attitudes toward Jews cannot be understood without attention to the social and political situation of German Jewry at the turn of the sixteenth century. By contrast, the Reformed tradition, following John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and others, developed primarily in areas without substantial Jewish populations. As a result, the place accorded to Jews and Judaism in Reformed theology and polemic was even more explicitly theological. Reformed writers, who understood themselves as “Israel,” consistently referred to the central role of the Jews in the long drama of sacred history—especially regarding “Covenant” and Apocalypse—but this did not prevent them from echoing Luther’s persistent denigration of contemporary Judaism.

The second section, on Protestantism and Islam, will show that Protestant characterizations of Islam, or “Mahomedanism,” were less ambiguous. The religion of the “Turks” and “Saracens” received universal condemnation from early modern Protestants of all stripes. This condemnation drew on longstanding medieval discourses, which imagined the prophet Muhammad as an arch-heretic, impostor, and inversion of Christ. It was, however, further reinforced by contemporary fears of the Ottoman military advance in Eastern Europe. For Luther, the Turks were “God’s whip,” and later Protestants agreed that the Ottoman threat to Christendom possessed apocalyptic significance. Protestants repeatedly dismissed Islam as a nonsensical, chaotic mixture of doctrines and practices pilfered from Christian heresies, Judaism, and pagan religions. However, fear and religious hatred did not define all encounters between Protestant and Muslim in the early modern world, and we will briefly consider more positive appraisals of Islam in diplomatic exchanges and captivity narratives.

Taken together, these two sections reveal that Protestant references to Judaism and Islam were frequently deployed in the service of confessional polemic against the Church of Rome. The central claim here was that Catholics were repeating the same mistaken “Jewish” obsession with “externals” that Jesus and the Apostles had so strongly condemned in the New Testament. Reformers thus inveighed against Jews, Muslims, and “Papists” alike for privileging the body over the spirit, works over faith, law over grace, and ceremonial performance over inner conviction. This “falling away” from the true faith had been initiated by two great impostors and tyrants—the Pope and Muhammad—who had subverted Western and Eastern Christendom, respectively. This chapter therefore concludes by suggesting that the Protestant move to equate “popery” with a ceremonial, legalistic, superstitious Judaism or “Mahomedanism” provided a framework for the conceptualization of false religion as a broad intellectual category. This category would then inform the Enlightenment assault on “priestcraft” as a characteristic of all “false” religions invented by human authorities for material gain.

PROTESTANTISM AND JUDAISM

Martin Luther famously began his public reforming career with a number of German pamphlets addressed to a lay audience in the 1520s. His main concern was the church and salvation, but he also had a lot to say about Jews and Judaism. He drew on a deep vein of writing, theology, polemics, and intra-Christian controversy on the topic of Judaism that had only recently come to a head.[1] These controversies centered on a number of issues. The first was the status of Judaism in the Holy Roman Empire. Jews had long been treated as the personal property of the emperor, to be taxed, used, or discarded as he saw fit. But in the later Middle Ages, many German cities had bought or acquired the rights to tax and govern Jews from the cash-starved emperors. In many cases, this led to confiscations and expulsions. The second was the status and contents of the Talmud. A poisonous controversy had rocked the empire in the 1510s, when the Talmud (a repository of Jewish religious thought and learning) came under attack by the Cologne Dominicans. The third regarded questions of expulsion (e.g., from the cities) and coercion: hundreds of thousands of Jews had been forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal between 1391 and the eve of the Reformation, and there was some question whether this policy should be extended beyond those places.

A further intellectual context for Luther was the late medieval rivalry at the universities and elsewhere between the exponents of scholastic method and theology, and a new generation of German and Dutch “Humanists.” On the scholastic side were those scholars, largely Dominican, who insisted that the Latin (Vulgate) translation of the Bible remained the genuine and authoritative text for Christians and for all interpretations of Scripture. But the northern Humanists, like their Italian counterparts, were coming to new historicist understandings of textual traditions and were insisting on the humanistic principle ad fontes: go to the sources. In this case, going ad fontes meant relying not on translations, but on the Hebrew and Greek originals of Holy Scripture.[2]

The immediate background to the Protestant approach to Jews and Judaism consisted of an attempt by a Dominican inquisitor, Johannes von Hoogstraaten, together with a Jewish convert to Christianity, Johannes Pfefferkorn, and his Dominican sponsors at the University of Cologne, to have the Talmud and other Jewish books banned, confiscated, and burned throughout the Holy Roman Empire, on the grounds that the Talmud was “blasphemous” and contained a number of disobliging passages regarding Christianity. The pioneering south German Humanist Johannes Reuchlin successfully argued (e.g., in his Augenspiegel of 1510) that knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, was necessary for Christians to understand their own faith and sacred books, and that the Talmud contained much of value for that project. Reuchlin’s writings and activism stayed the hand of the emperor and averted catastrophe for the Jews of the empire.[3] In 1514, Luther contributed an expert opinion on the case in a letter to the Humanist Spalatin. He argued that the Talmud should not be banned as doing so would provoke the Jews to even greater blasphemies. They were stubborn, “incorrigible,” and should simply be left alone.[4]

Luther’s 1523 pamphlet “That Our Saviour Jesus Christ was Born a Jew” in turn took what might be called a philosemitic perspective.[5] Luther argued that Jews had been so mistreated by the corrupt Roman Church that it was no wonder they had not converted to Christianity—yet. He made an appeal to Christians to speak persuasively, not with threats, to Jews and to try to convert them by kindness and a good example, rather than by edicts and commands. It turned out over the course of the next two decades that the nascent reform movement did not prove any more attractive to Jews than the “Old Church” (i.e., “Catholicism”) had been, to Luther’s great annoyance. Nonetheless, this argument which blamed Roman Catholicism for the Jews’ refusal to accept Christ would have a long life in Protestant thought.

However, such “philosemitism” can also be directed against Judaism, and so it was in Luther’s case, as his much more notorious pamphlets of the 1540s demonstrated. In one of them, “On the Jews and their Lies,” of 1543,[6] he demanded that Jews, having had the opportunity to hear the pure Gospel of Christ that had been preached openly by Reformers for two decades, convert immediately or be subject to expulsion or worse. Luther, Melanchthon, and the Swiss/south German magisterial Reformers (for example, the Swiss Reformers Ulrich Zwingli [who died in 1531] and Heinrich Bullinger, and the Strasbourg Reformer Martin Bucer[7]) agreed fairly unanimously that Jewish law had been abrogated once and for all by the advent of Christ. They were all following Augustine’s lead in seeing the Jews as an enduring witness to Christian truth who must be allowed to exist (if not precisely favored) until the “Last Days” dawned. In the “Last Days,” all or a portion of them would convert and thus fulfill a number of prophetic projections contained in Christian Scripture. Luther’s call for conversion or expulsion in the 1540s was arguably more radical than anything the Augustinian tradition advocated. However, it was neither a complete break with that tradition, nor a break with previous Western rulers’ Jewish policies to allow Jews to exist, but not to flourish except when and where it suited their overlords.

Thomas Kaufmann has argued that Luther was responding, in 1543, to an influx of Jewish refugees into Saxony after the lifting of a decree (in 1539) prohibiting them to enter or cross the territory, and that his motives had to do with protecting his fledgling movement, under constant diabolical threat in the context of what he understood as the approaching “End Time.” This seems like a very local issue, unlikely to have sparked so general a condemnation of the Jews as Luther made in 1543. Johannes Heil argues more plausibly that the 1543 treatises left exegesis and theology far behind, reflecting an overarching view of apocalyptic real-world enemies of the (Lutheran) “true Church of Christ” ranging from the Jews to the Turks, but with the papacy at the center.[8] This secularized rendering of Christendom’s enemies is why Luther’s 1543 recommendation to compel Jews to convert or to expel them had particular resonance for National Socialists and other xenophobes four hundred years later. Certainly the Nazis in Germany, and their American counterparts before World War II, the Silvershirts, distributed cheap, modernized/translated versions of “On the Jews and their Lies.” Protestant ideas about Jews and Judaism are not merely of historical interest, therefore, but vital for understanding recent and contemporary anti-Semitic attitudes as well.

Anti-Judaism in the Absence of Jews

Luther was, increasingly, preaching into a void. While since the thirteenth century Germany had been at the core of European Jewish life and very important for the Jewish world since the tenth century, the Jewish presence in Germany rapidly diminished in the fifteenth century. The waning of imperial power and the rise of the cities meant that the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire, formally and legally serfs belonging to the emperor, found themselves on the wrong side of a long-term power struggle. Late medieval piety had become markedly more anti-Judaic after the Black Death. The number of systematic attacks on Jews and expulsions rose dramatically. Wealthy cities increasingly made deals with the emperor to expel their Jewish populations for both pious and commercial reasons: some of the most important examples include Augsburg (1437/1438), Magdeburg (1493), Nuremberg (1498/1499), the entire territory of Brandenburg (around Berlin, in 1510), and Regensburg (1519). Debts to Jews were canceled; a percentage of the canceled debt went to the imperial treasury, and the annual tribute Jews had paid their direct lord, the emperor, was either bought out or continued to be paid annually by the city. Markus Wenninger has argued that the expulsion and fragmentation of Germany’s Jewish communities from the most important German cities had begun with the Black Death.[9] According to Wenninger, the development of educational, institutional, and economic infrastructure made Christians less reliant on the specialized services and functions offered by Germany’s largely urban and literate Jews.[10] There are many other explanations for the eventual expulsion of Jews from most German cities and many territories, including theological, cultural, and social explanations concerning the Jews’ “otherness” and the rise of confessional states that enforced uniformity.

Whatever the reasons may have been—and clear answers still are not available—as the number of Jews living in German cities diminished, concerns other than direct economic and social competition between Jews and Christians seem to have become more important. Thus for Luther and most continental Reformers, the Jewish question revolved more around theological than social, economic, or political issues. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that Luther and the magisterial Reformers were also continuing a centuries-long tradition of urban (lay and clerical) hostility to the emperor’s Jews, who possessed special imperial rights to live and do business in cities, especially the Free Imperial Cities. Nuremberg, with one of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish communities in the empire in the fifteenth century, organized itself to buy up the imperial rights to tax and govern the Jews there (the regalia) over the period 1475–1499. After purchasing those rights, the city council and the church cooperated to confiscate the property of the expelled Jews, and to build a new church dedicated to Mary where the synagogue had stood (much the same thing happened in a number of other German cities, including Würzburg, Magdeburg, and Regensburg).

By around 1520, the only major Jewish communities left in the empire were in Frankfurt, Prague, and Vienna. The Jews expelled from hundreds of other German towns tended to migrate eastward into Poland and Hungary, taking advantage of the relatively more open policy of Central and Eastern European rulers looking to develop cities and commerce in their largely agricultural territories. Yet many Jews also remained in Germany, not so much in hiding as scattered less conspicuously into hundreds of smaller settlements, often just outside the major cities from which they had been expelled.[11]

Luther was merely repeating a topos of medieval anti-Jewish propaganda when he cast Judaism as obsolete and “fleshly,” and Jews as obsessed by “law” in their religious observances and concerned with the physical rather than with the “spirit.” He disapproved, for example, of the continued circumcision of male Jewish infants. For Luther, only the spiritual “circumcision of the heart” as described in the New Testament was of any value.[12] It was convenient that this sort of critique could always also serve as a veiled or explicit critique of Catholicism, with its many relics, ceremonies, and grand churches. The Protestant commonplace that Judaism (along with, or standing in for Catholicism) was merely “fleshly” and Reformed Christianity correctly “spiritual” took on its definitive form in the early years of the Reformation (roughly 1519–1537) and changed but little over the next four centuries.[13]

Thomas Kaufmann and others have astutely suggested that Luther’s and Protestant ideas about Judaism in general had more to do with casting the Roman Church as “Jewish” or “fleshly,” and in using anti-Judaic categories and terms of abuse against their primary opponents, “old believers,” “papists,” or “Romans” than with actual Jews and Judaism proper, whom Luther never really addressed directly. The Roman Church, past and present, occupied much more space in Reformers’ pamphlets, sermons, and daily lives than Jews and Judaism did. Images or stereotypes of “fleshly” Jews and Judaism seem to have been useful for many German Reformers to compare their main (Roman) opponents unfavorably to the most despised members of late medieval society.[14] Yet despite the expulsion of most of the large imperial Jewish communities, and the increasing distance between Germans and Jews, it was largely within the German-speaking lands that Protestants might encounter Jews—so Judaism was also somewhat more real for them than for other early Protestants, such as those in France and England.

Indeed, for most Reformed Protestants in the sixteenth century, “the Jew” was even more imaginary than real—an adaptable theological device that could be wielded for polemical, typological, or eschatological purposes. Luther’s denigration of Judaism as a fleshly, legalistic religion quickly became an enduring staple of Reformed Protestant polemics against Catholicism. This was particularly striking in England, where there had been no substantial Jewish population since the expulsion of 1290. John Foxe’s influential martyrological history Actes and Monuments (the “Book of Martyrs”) denounced Roman Catholic doctrine and worship as the degeneration of Christianity into “Juishness,” upholding a religion that was overly carnal, ceremonial, and legalistic. Reformed polemicists indicted Catholicism both for hindering the conversion of the Jews and for being itself contaminated with Jewish heresy. Yehuda “Nathaniel” Menda, the London Jewish convert to Protestantism, argued (following Luther) in his 1577 confession of faith that the “great and manifold idolatry” of non-Protestant Christianity had long prevented Jews from embracing Christ. John Napier’s work on the Apocalypse (1593) condemned the Church of Rome as a mix of pagan idolatry and Jewish superstition.[15]

Moreover, during a period of unmistakable Spanish political and military ascendancy, Reformed Protestant polemicists in Western Europe began to inveigh against Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism in particular as the fruit of miscegenation and thereby contaminated by Judaism and Jewish blood. For the Huguenot historian Louis de Mayerne Turquet (1583), the forced conversion of Jews “did beget infinite apostasies, sects and heresies in Portugal” and had polluted the blood and religion of the Spanish nobility. The influential Scottish reformer John Knox took an even more extreme position in 1558, claiming that “the odious nation of Spaniards” were the literal descendants of Christ-killing Jews, persecuting true Christians just as their forefathers had crucified Jesus.[16] These Reformed attacks on Iberian Catholicism as tainted not only by Jewish heresy, but even by Jewish (and Moorish) blood, suggests that the paucity of actual Jews in Reformed Protestant areas may have encouraged a racialized notion of northern Christian purity defined against a powerful but morally corrupt Spain. Indeed, such pronouncements mirrored the infamous limpieza de sangre statutes in sixteenth-century Castile, which barred the baptized descendants of Jews and Muslims from certain professions, effectively identifying them as permanently debased by their impure genealogy.[17]

Beginning with John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), the Reformed tradition produced a trifocal assessment of the Jews, defined temporally—past, present, and future—by dispensation: before Christ, since Christ, and at the Apocalypse. There was an increasing idealization of the ancient Hebrew past as the only historical example of a truly “elect” nation, living and worshipping according to rules that God, as their sovereign, had established. And there was a growing expectation that the Jews, despite all appearances, were in fact Christians-in-waiting, and that the end of days would be preceded by a miraculous Jewish conversion to Christianity to assist the saints in the battle against the forces of Antichrist. But this growing Reformed Protestant idealization of the Jewish past and future coexisted with the persistent denigration of contemporary Jews and Judaism as diabolical, carnal, deceitful, hypocritical, usurious, obstinate, and fundamentally contrary to the truth of Christianity. The future glory that many Reformed Protestants envisaged for the Jewish people therefore required the absolute renunciation of the Jewish religion.

Covenants

The typological view of a Protestant Israel re-enacting the history of ancient Israel had a wide appeal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most Reformed Protestants followed John Calvin in casting themselves as Israel. In the Institutes, Calvin insisted that “the covenant made with all the patriarchs is so much like ours in substance and reality that the two are actually one and the same yet they differ in the mode of dispensation.” Thus for Calvin, the covenant with Israel was still in effect; the Gospels had simply revealed it more fully, allowing for a redefinition of “Israel” and a changed understanding of the function of the law.[18] It also meant that the great biblical narratives of Israel’s captivity and redemption—Egypt and Babylon—proved especially popular with Reformed Protestants in England and the Netherlands. Both during the Dutch Revolt and after, the princes of Orange were depicted as David, Moses, or Hezekiah, fighting a Spanish Goliath, Pharaoh, or Sennacherib. In England, the Geneva Bible’s commentary likened the reign of Mary I to Israel’s exile in Babylon, and John Foxe’s eagerness to denounce Roman Catholicism for its “Juishness” was matched by his readiness to draw parallels between ancient Israel and the Protestant churches.

By the seventeenth century, English and Scottish Calvinist theology was dominated by this notion of a covenant between God and the “elect.” Fast sermons during the English Revolution of the 1640s were saturated with prophetic admonitions to Israel seeking deliverance from Egyptian or Babylonian bondage. New England Puritans described their migration to America in the same language. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop preached aboard the Arbella in 1630, adding: “The eyes of all people are upon us.” The Reformed belief in a “new Israel” could even express imperial aspirations. John Knox likened England and Scotland to the two biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and hoped for the emergence of a Davidic dynasty to rule them together. James VI of Scotland cultivated this image upon obtaining the English crown. On the other hand, as Achsah Guibbory has recently stressed, there was a “dark side to the English identification with Israel. For Israel was a complex, ambiguous figure, chosen and rejected, blessed with a special Covenant and ‘Covenant-breaking’.” Many typological sermons rebuked Israel for its wickedness, lifting passages directly from the Hebrew prophets. Israel’s blessings, they warned, could turn to curses for failing to live up to high expectations.[19]

For some Protestants, this sense of election and of being a new Israel accompanied calls to imitate the worship, law, and politics of God’s original chosen people, the ancient Hebrews. While Luther and Melanchthon had stressed the complete abrogation of Mosaic laws and political institutions, Calvin’s views on the validity of the Old Testament for Christians were comparably ambivalent, due to his insistence that the two covenants were “one and the same.” Martin Bucer and John Knox argued that a godly Christian magistrate, as a successor to Moses, ought to strive for the reformation of Christian society based on the laws and political structures of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth.[20] In late sixteenth-century Hungary, where unique political circumstances allowed Unitarian churches to flourish, a radical group of Unitarians began to observe the Saturday Sabbath and adopt Mosaic laws. Repeated efforts to suppress this group continued into the mid-seventeenth century, as Calvinist synods and diets heard evidence that these “Sabbatarians” held celebrations with unleavened bread and denied that the New Testament was divinely inspired. A similar sect of Saturday-Sabbatarians was suppressed by the religious authorities in early seventeenth-century England. The English revolutionary period of the 1640s and 1650s saw a litany of calls for the implementation of Mosaic law. Even the Laudian clergy in England justified Tridentine-inspired ecclesiastical reforms by referring to the temple worship of the ancient Jews.[21]

Judaizing

This subject of Protestant interest in the “Hebrew commonwealth” has recently come to the forefront of research among historians of Renaissance thought. Intellectual historians have elegantly demonstrated the importance of Hebrew philology and Judaic studies for the great Protestant Humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in the last fifteen years, we have also seen an assortment of studies examining the implications in the first half of the seventeenth century of this Hebraic scholarship for Protestant political theory. Bonaventure Cornelius Bertram’s De politica judaica tam civili quam ecclesiastica (1574) was the first in a series of Protestant works in this mold, citing several rabbinical authorities in what was otherwise a typical Renaissance contemplation on the best and worst forms of government. Multiple works of Hebraic political theory followed in Latin and the vernacular by early seventeenth-century scholars in England, Germany, Scotland, and the Netherlands. Other recent scholarship has examined those New England Puritan leaders who worked to establish legal codes and judicial systems that drew closely on the Pentateuch. In 1644, for example, the General Court of the New Haven colony ordered that “the judicial laws of God, as they were delivered by Moses … shall be accounted of moral equity and generally bind all offenders, and be a rule to all the courts in this jurisdiction in their proceeding against offenders.”[22]

However, this surge of interest in the biblical Hebrews and occasionally their later rabbinic commentators provoked Reformed divines to accuse one another of that ancient Christian heresy—Judaizing.[23] In 1538, Luther had written an entire treatise against “Sabbatarians” who were reported to have been Judaizing in Silesia and Moravia, lending legitimacy to such charges. This serious accusation continued to be leveled on the Continent by both Protestants and Catholics, particularly against anti-Trinitarians such as the Spaniard Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva in 1553, and the Hungarian preacher Ferenc Dávid, who died in prison in 1579 after being arrested for Judaizing. Orthodox Calvinist ministers in the Netherlands derided their Arminian opponents as “rabbis.” During a 1572 dispute, the English Presbyterian theologian Thomas Cartwright’s use of the Mosaic law to argue for the execution of heretics and recusants led John Whitgift, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, to rebuke him for Judaizing and “play[ing] the Jew.” In 1636, the High Church Anglican Peter Heylyn railed against the strict Sunday observance of the Puritans as a “Jewish and rabbinical” practice disguised as Christian piety.[24]

This concern with Judaizing reminds us that while some Reformers idealized the ancient Hebrews, they continued to see contemporary Jews and Judaism in an overwhelmingly negative light. John Calvin maintained in the Institutes that Jews, “papists,” and “Turks” (Muslims) professed to worship God, but were enemies of Christian truth.[25] In a homily “Of the Right Use of the Church” (1562), the English theologian John Jewel praised the diligent worship of the ancient Jews, but nonetheless noted that “we abhorre the very name of the Iewes when wee heare it, as of a most wicked and ungodly people.” Stock medieval charges against Jewish superstition, usury, and ritual murder were repeated by English Protestant writers, although iconoclastic Protestants tended to omit the old charge of image desecration. Preaching at a rare public London conversion of a Jew to Christianity, John Foxe in 1577 railed against the Jews for their “intolerable scorpion-like savageness, so furiously boiling against the innocent infants of the Christian Gentiles,” and other “heinous abominations, insatiable butcheries, treasons, frenzies, and madness.” The ritual murder allegation would be repeated multiple times in seventeenth-century England by figures ranging from John Donne to William Prynne.[26]

Apocalypse

Yet while such condemnations of Judaism were typically linked with a polemic against Roman Catholicism, the place of the Jews in Reformed Protestant eschatology was markedly different from that of the “Papists.” The same apocalyptic tracts that looked forward to the destruction of the papal Antichrist also expected, to varying degrees, the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity before the Last Judgment. Here the influence of the Geneva Reformers, especially Theodore Beza, was paramount. From the mid-sixteenth century, the Reformed tradition attached significant importance to Paul’s declaration in Romans 11 that “all Israel will be saved.” The majority of Dutch Reformed theologians followed Beza in interpreting this to mean Israel “according to the flesh”—that is, the Jews—and thus in expecting a large-scale future conversion. The Geneva-educated Huguenot Franciscus Junius (1545–1602), Professor of Theology at Heidelberg and Leiden, affirmed that the unbelief of the Jews could not annul “that privilege or advantage” granted to them by God, who patiently awaits their conversion. The same view was propagated in England by the Geneva Bible’s commentary on Romans 11, which argued that Paul “sheweth that the time shall come when the whole nation of the Jews, though not every one particularly, shall be joined to the Church of Christ.”[27]

For radical Protestant millenarians of the early seventeenth century, not only was the Jewish national covenant with God still in effect, but their future conversion to Christianity would be accompanied by the restoration of a Jewish kingdom in the Holy Land. Historians have devoted much attention to the millenarian works of Thomas Brightman (1562–1607) and Joseph Mede (1586–1639), which circulated widely in seventeenth-century England. Brightman called for proselytizing to bring about “the full restoring of the Iewish Nation” while Mede believed that only Christ himself could effect such a miraculous transformation, just as he did with Paul. Brightman, Mede, and other millenarians saw Jewish conversion and restoration as crucial to defeating the Turkish Antichrist in the Holy Land. As Nabil Matar has observed, this “Restorationist” position required the renunciation of Judaism as a religion, and called for a Holy War against Islam. Yet Matar goes too far in his claim that “after the Restoration, there were to be no more Jews, only Protestant Christians with allegiance to England.” These millenarians viewed the conversion and restoration to Palestine not as an erasure of Jewish difference, but as the true fulfillment of that difference—a Jewish people without Judaism, recognizing Christ as the true Messiah and building a messianic kingdom in Israel. Millenarians therefore emphasized the providential importance of Jewish difference as a people set apart, sometimes claiming that the converted Jews would have sovereignty over Gentile Christians in the millennium.[28]

Real Jews

Yet by the time Protestant millenarianism reached its zenith in the mid-seventeenth century, it had become much easier for Reformed Protestants in northwestern Europe to interact with living, practicing Jews. Trade companies that sent English and Dutch merchants and chaplains to the Mediterranean expanded rapidly. Portuguese Jewish settlement in Amsterdam had begun in earnest from the 1590s. These Jews had lived as baptized Catholics in Castile and Portugal, and the vast majority was involved in maritime trade; their presence was thus encouraged by commercially minded Dutch burgomasters. By the mid-seventeenth century this community numbered perhaps 2,500 in Amsterdam, and was increasingly joined by Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Orthodox Dutch Calvinists sometimes fulminated against Jewish “blasphemy,” demanding a stop to Jewish immigration and the refutation of Jewish “errors,” but most seventeenth-century Dutch polemical theology was directed against Anabaptists, Arminians, and Socinians, not Jews. Some members of this community, notably the rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and the excommunicated philosopher Baruch Spinoza, achieved international prominence in Christian intellectual circles, an extraordinary feat for an unconverted Jew in Reformation Europe.[29]

Historians remain divided regarding the precise role played by Reformed Protestant millenarianism and “philosemitism” in the readmission of the Jews to England. This occurred in the mid-1650s during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector. As in Amsterdam, this community began as a small group of Portuguese merchants but became larger and more diverse by the turn of the eighteenth century. It is clear that the strongest support for Jewish readmission came from a vocal minority of radical preachers who believed it was their duty to initiate the millennial reconciliation of Jews and Christians through kindness and evangelization. But this was met with fierce opposition from clergymen, lawyers, and merchants who thundered against Jewish blasphemy, usury, and unceasing thirst for Gentile blood.[30] After a polarizing debate, the readmission itself was a quiet executive decision, made by Cromwell and the Council of State, to protect a small group of Spanish and Portuguese merchants in London who professed to be members of the Jewish “Nation” oppressed by Iberian Catholic cruelty. The most important context for Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews, therefore, was the Anglo-Spanish War of 1654–1660, which London propagandists presented as a godly crusade to liberate Europe and the West Indies from Spanish “cruelty” and “popery.” The Portuguese Jews were seen as possible allies in this endeavor in three interrelated ways: as fellow victims of Spanish Catholic cruelty, as well-connected overseas merchants who could weaken Spanish commerce and strengthen England, and as future converts to Protestantism in the final battle against the papal Antichrist.

PROTESTANTISM AND ISLAM

As Matthew Dimmock has put it, for most early modern Christians “there was no Islam or Muslims, only Mahomet and Mahometans.”[31] The prophet Muhammad was imagined in the later Middle Ages and early modern period as an arch-heretic, impostor, and inversion of Christ. The religion he founded represented the negation of true faith, and the sordid details of his life—as recounted by Christians—constituted an inverted hagiography. Many of the common accusations made against Muhammad by medieval Christians were repeated by Protestant polemical writers. These included epilepsy, lust, violence, witchcraft, false miracles, and a failed attempt at resurrection.[32] His religion and its foundational text, the “Alcoran,” were seen as a chaotic, nonsensical, and even monstrous mixture of various preexisting doctrines and heresies.[33]

Luther’s attitude toward “the Turk” and the “Mahomedan faith” was relentlessly negative. The Ottomans had conquered much of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 and were at the gates of Vienna in 1529, in what seemed to be an unstoppable advance, though it in fact turned out to be the high-water mark of Ottoman military extension westwards. While Luther at one point opined that he would rather live under the rule of the sultan than of an emperor who forced his conscience, he saw the Turks as “God’s whip,” and as part of a cosmic war between God and the Devil: “the Turks are certainly the last and most furious raging of the Devil against Christ … after the Turk come judgement and hell.”[34] He saw them as inhumanly violent, treacherous, and demonically lascivious. Their religion he characterized as one of “works-righteousness” (and therefore, like Catholicism and Judaism, inadequate and deluded).[35] Although he knew that “Mahomedans” revered Jesus as a prophet, he deplored their refusal to acknowledge the divinity of Christ, which he saw as their main failing. He followed medieval critiques of Islam in accusing “Mahomedans” of sexual “perversion,” including polygamy, divorce, and concubinage with slaves; gruesome propaganda images of impaled prisoners and captured children proliferated via the printing presses of the sixteenth century.[36] German Lutherans and Catholics alike continued to hold such attitudes over the course of the early modern period, with the next (and last) Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 serving only to reinforce negative stereotypes and old enmity.

Yet compared to his attitudes toward the papacy and Jews, whom he saw primarily as anti-Christian religious phenomena, Luther’s general attitude toward the Turks as people and the Ottoman Empire was rather more complex. In 1529, just before the Diet of Augsburg, he wrote against calls for a crusade against the Turks in Vom Kriege wider die Türken (“On War against the Turks”), arguing that Christians should “[l]‌et the Turk believe and live as he will, just as one lets the papacy and other false Christians live.”[37] For Luther, the Catholic emperor does not represent or lead Christianity, nor does the sultan represent or lead his faith (claims to the caliphate notwithstanding!). Rather, the Turks and their sultan may be in error, but it is not the proper role of true Christians to attack them, only to defend against them should they (with God’s permission) attack Christendom.

Lutheran hymns, however, such as “Erhalt uns, Herr, bei Deinem Wort” (Lord, keep us steadfast in your Word, 1541) preserved for centuries a strong sense of the Turkish menace. It was first published with the notation “A children’s song, to be sung against the two arch-enemies of Christ and of his holy church, the Pope and the Turk.”[38] Although a verse about averting the pope and Turk has since been dropped, this hymn influenced generations of German Lutherans, most of whom never had any contact with Turks or Muslims of any kind. This hymn was only one of a sudden flood of published texts about Turks and the Turkish menace from this period. Of the 2,460 “Turkish prints” that appeared in Europe in the sixteenth century, 1,000 were in German.[39] This lasting preoccupation was also to be seen in France, where in the period 1480 to 1609, twice as many books about Turkey and the Turks were printed as about the Americas.[40]

Reformed Protestant churchmen echoed this Lutheran notion of an anti-Christian equivalency between “Pope” and “Turk,” characterizing both as the result of human invention masquerading as revealed truth, seducing believers away from the true faith. John Calvin declared the “Turks” to be “Christian bastards just like the papists,” deceived by Muhammad just as Catholics had been deceived by the papacy. For Calvin, both “Turks” and papists “draw water from the same dirty old well” of ancient superstition, adding their own inventions to the Gospel.[41] William Fulke argued in 1577 that Muhammad was to the “East” what the Pope was to the “West”; they were joint seducers of the world with their “most detestable heresie.”[42] Similarly, Reformed Protestant accounts of the Apocalypse frequently involved the destruction of the “Turks” or “Saracens” alongside the papal Antichrist. In his commentary on Revelation, John Bale identified the “Romish Pope & Mahomete” with Gog and Magog, “gathered … together into one wicked consent against god & his christ.” From 1570 onward, every edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments included a “Prayer Against the Turks”:

O lord God of hosts, grant to thy church strength and victory against the malicious fury of these Turks, Saracens, Tartarians, against Gog and Magog, and all the malignant rabble of Antichrist, enemies to thy Son Jesus, our Lord and Saviour. Prevent their devices, overthrow their power, and dissolve their kingdom.[43]

Moreover, in popular printed works, Reformed Protestant writers characterized both “Mahomedans” and “Papists” as singularly obsessed with the flesh. Both religions, it was alleged, held to a doctrine of justification by works, valued earthly dominion above the spiritual kingdom, and promised a carnal afterlife filled with sensual pleasures. Some likened the Islamic afterlife, as well as the acceptance of polygamy, to “Romishe stewes.” Just as sixteenth-century Protestant polemicists excoriated “Romish priests” for their “abominable sodomitical lusts,” it became commonly reported in early modern Britain that sodomy was sanctioned by the Qur’an. Even Samuel Purchas (1613), who asserted that sodomy was contrary to Islamic law, nonetheless maintained that its practice was “rife” among Muslims. Alison Games has shown that British travel narratives described the Mediterranean—both Catholic and Islamic—“as a place where all sorts of appetites could be satisfied and all sorts of domestic living and sexual arrangements were sanctioned, whether homosocial communities of men, women gathered under the protection of eunuchs but the sexual partners of a single man, or homosexual relations.” Nabil Matar has argued that illicit sexual behavior is present in every single seventeenth-century British text touching on the Islamic world. This obsession with “Islamic sex” allowed early modern British writers an opportunity to discuss the “open secret” of homosexuality without making reference to their own society.[44] But Matar does not put this overwhelming belief in Muslim sexual deviance into conversation with those internal religious “Others” regularly demonized as sodomites and whoremasters by English Protestants—namely the Roman Catholic clergy, Anabaptists, the “Family of Love,” and other sectarians.

Yet if many Reformers depicted Muslims as lascivious, malevolent, and fundamentally anti-Christian, Reformed Protestants in Britain and the Netherlands also looked to the Islamic world for allies against their shared Catholic enemies, particularly the Spanish Habsburgs. There was, of course, nothing uniquely Protestant about anti-Habsburg diplomacy. The famous alliance between the (Catholic) French King Francis I and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman in 1536 against the Habsburgs, decried at the time as “the impious alliance,” was probably one of the first such non-ideological diplomatic alliances in European history. It lasted (formally, at least) until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Calvin’s condemnations of the Turks in the Institutes were thus not made in a political or theological vacuum: he was critical of the French crown on this and many other topics, placing religious principle ahead of political expediency and admonishing the French king for his “impious” policies.

For Calvin’s English and Dutch followers, the Ottoman threat felt distant in comparison to the immediate and existential danger posed by Spain in the late sixteenth century. Like Francis I, they were acutely aware that the entire Holy Roman Empire stood between them and the sultan. In 1589, with Anglo-Spanish hostility at a fever pitch, Elizabeth I’s ambassador to Istanbul went so far as to praise the Ottoman sultan as raised up by God to fight “Papist” idolaters. That same year, in Marrakesh, anti-Spanish sentiment was so powerful that a mob of Dutch, French, and Moroccan men joined the celebrations of jubilant English merchants upon the news of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. During the revolt against Spanish rule, the Dutch naval mercenaries (geuzen) decorated their ships with Turkish emblems, including the crescent, and adopted the slogan “Rather Turkish than Papist.”[45] The possibility of a Dutch–Moroccan military alliance was among Philip III’s reasons for the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609, fearing that these ostensibly Catholic descendants of Spanish Muslims could act as a fifth column. After the expulsion, it appears that some Morisco refugees resided temporarily in Amsterdam and were quietly permitted private worship, although they did not settle permanently as the Jewish conversos did.[46]

Diplomatic discourse between Protestants and Muslims regularly went beyond purely political concerns, and invoked a shared hatred of Catholic “idolatry.” Francis Bacon, for instance, defended Elizabeth’s pro-Turkish policy by claiming that Muslims preferred Protestantism because they abhorred the Catholic worship of images. Elizabeth had presented herself in her correspondence with Sultan Murad III as “the most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kinde of idolatries, of all that live among the Christians.” For their part, some Muslim diplomats and rulers approved of the Reformers for their iconoclastic spirit. The Ottoman Sultan Murad III sent a letter to “the members of the Lutheran sect in Flanders and Spain” congratulating them for their attack on religious images and for seeking the “true faith.” The Moroccan court scribe Abd al-Aziz al-Fishtali hailed the English victory over the Armada in 1588 as divinely ordained. For al-Fishtali, Philip II was “the tyrant of [Castile] who is today against Islam and who is the pillar of shirk,” while Elizabeth and the English people had “renounced the religion and law of the Christians” and had been turned against the tyrant by God himself. Ahmad Ibn Qāsim al-Hajarī, a Morisco who returned to Islam and served as Moroccan envoy to France and the Netherlands from 1610–1613 praised the Dutch as allies against papist idolatry, although he noted that Calvinists persisted in the Trinitarian error of the Catholics.[47]

The Mediterranean—polyglot, multicultural, bustling with commerce, and fraught with danger—was the main site of Dutch and English contact with Islam. Travelers were well aware of the dangers of piracy and captivity; Christians and Muslims were regularly taken captive and enslaved by one another. Nabil Matar has shown that narratives of Protestant captivity in the Islamic Mediterranean did not depict Muslims as a satanic horde; several accounts described them as pious, obedient, and submissive to the will of God. And these were the stories of those who returned; it was widely known that hundreds of Christian captives—Catholic and Protestant—converted to Islam to improve their situation, and made new lives for themselves in a different culture. Others arrived returned to Christendom and confessed their apostasy. The return of one such English “renegado” inspired Archbishop William Laud to introduce a new church ritual in 1637, titled A Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado or Apostate from the Christian Religion to Turcism.[48]

Yet the most direct encounter between Protestantism and Islam in the Reformation period took place in Hungary. Despite the valuable work of Graeme Murdock and I. G. Tóth, this remains an understudied subject in English-language scholarship. Ottoman-occupied Hungary represents the first time a substantial Protestant population came to live under Muslim rule. Calvinist kings in Transylvania served as vassals to the sultan. While conversions to Islam were rare, there is little doubt that the fortunes of Protestant evangelization in Hungary and Transylvania were closely tied to the circumstances of the Ottoman conquest and rule. Protestant churches multiplied after the Battle of Mohács, at least in part as a result of the Turkish advance, which had weakened the traditional structure and authority of the church. Anti-Trinitarian churches flourished in Ottoman-occupied Hungary to an unusual extent, as Muslim officials were less interested in policing Christian heresy. By 1600, more than 75 percent of over 5,000 total parishes across Hungary and Transylvania were Protestant. Ottoman administrators recognized that confessional conflict among the majority Christian population could reduce the chances of a united uprising against their rule. Still, the situation of Protestant communities varied greatly depending on the inclination of local Ottoman officials. Some churches were confiscated, or their activities strictly controlled, while others were able to hold services and choose ministers largely undisturbed. Yet Reformed clergymen only rarely interpreted such latitude as benevolence; attitudes toward the Muslim world were still largely negative, dominated by fears of forced conversion to Islam or further Turkish advancement to the north.[49]

There was a gradual but discernible increase in Protestant knowledge about Islam during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Elizabethan travel accounts noted that Persian Muslims followed “Haly” (Ali) in addition to Muhammad, but the theology and history of Shi’a Islam were still largely unknown. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, thought this a parallel to the Catholic–Protestant divide, and William Percy’s play Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) dramatized the “schisme” between Shi’a and Sunni to lament the human consequences of Reformation violence. This greater awareness of the Islamic world in Protestant Europe was accompanied by the increased study of Arabic and a wider print readership for Islamic scripture translated into Latin. In the seventeenth century, printed translations of the Qur’an began to appear in European vernacular languages, and by 1660 it was available to Protestant readers in German, French, English, and Dutch. Early modern Qur’anic translations tended to be laced with anti-Muslim polemic, as Christian commentators proclaimed the overt falsity and inferiority of the Islamic faith and its holy text. These refutations of Islam also allowed Protestant and Catholic Humanists to attack their theological foes by comparing them with Muslim “heresies.” But others discovered that Islam was, in fact, a theologically sophisticated faith. The Dutch scholar of Arabic, Thomas Erpenius, had “frequent discussions about religion” with the Moroccan envoy Ahmad Ibn Qāsim. Writing to the Huguenot philologist Isaac Casaubon, Erpenius noted that the Qur’an was supplemented by the much lengthier Sunna, containing “the deeds, sayings and responsa of Muhammad.” As a result, Erpenius explained, Islamic doctrine was “not so easy to refute as many people imagine.”[50]

OTHER RELIGIONS AND “PRIESTCRAFT”

While the sixteenth century saw Spanish and Portuguese Catholic missionaries, merchants, colonists, and conquerors mapping distant regions of the globe and encountering a wide range of religious practices outside Christianity and Islam, the experience of their Protestant contemporaries with regard to non-“Abrahamic” religion was decidedly insular by comparison. A trickle of English and Dutch travelers, merchants, diplomats, and chaplains began to visit India in the later decades of Elizabeth’s reign, and permanent Protestant settlement in East Asia and the Americas began in earnest only in the seventeenth century. From the Protestant point of view, what they encountered in these places was generally not “religion” in any true sense, as they saw it, but rather the absence of religion: “paganism,” “heathenism,” superstition, and idolatry—the signs of degenerate humanity in the clutches of the Devil. Ralph Fitch, an English traveler to India during the 1580s, described it as “a rich and prosperous country inhabited by cruel and credulous Gentiles” who worshipped cows and were “the greatest idolators that ever I sawe.” Noting the diversity of sects among the Indian population, the English chaplain Edward Terry concluded in the early seventeenth century that “Satan (the father of division) [is] the seducer of them all.” London sermons in 1609–1610 called for evangelization in Virginia to convert the Americans “from the divel to God,” and English depictions of American Indians as demonic multiplied after the 1622 massacre of Virginia colonists and the Pequot Wars of 1636–1637. Georgius Candidius, an early Dutch missionary to Formosa (Taiwan), complained in 1625 about the “superstitious idolatry and malpractices” of the local Sirayan priestesses, citing in particular their practice of abortion.[51]

While virtually all European accounts of the Far East from this period refer to “Gentiles” practicing an idolatrous and superstitious polytheism, the cause of this perceived religious degeneration was not only Satan but a corrupt priesthood that was sometimes compared with Jews. Ralph Fitch called the Indian Brahmins “a kind of craftie people, worse than the Jewes,” while Edward Terry likened them to superstitious, hypocritical “Pharisees” and ancient Hebrew priests. Such a comparison was not limited to Protestants; the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) compared Brahmins to Levites. Some European observers thus represented Hindu religion not only by dismissing it as pagan idolatry, but also through a transferral of existing anti-Jewish prejudice, which in the Protestant context was conceptually connected to anti-Catholic polemics against superstition, “popery,” and unquestioning obedience to tradition.[52]

The pejorative English term “priestcraft” emerged in this context of ever-increasing English Protestant contact with Jews, Muslims, and other religions and cultures in Asia, Africa, and America. “Priestcraft” was better suited than “popery” for a generalized attack on all sacerdotal religion, Christian and non-Christian alike, and would become central to the anticlerical philosophy of the high Enlightenment. Deists and freethinkers went so far as to declare the sufficiency of “natural religion,”[53] which required no clergy and no revealed truth, and characterized most forms of religious authority as the result of subversion by a “crafty” priesthood. Brahmins in the eighteenth century were said to have attained an esoteric and essentially Unitarian “natural religion,” but continued to feed the masses on polytheism, ritual, and superstition. Priests everywhere were thus impostors and manipulators, inventing ceremonies, mysteries, and a plurality of gods in order to gain and maintain political power. This became the foundation of much French Enlightenment thought regarding religion, as in Diderot’s essay “On the sufficiency of Natural Religion” (1746), which declared all religions, including Christianity, to be schismatics from the authentic “natural religion.”

This is not to draw a straight line in European history from “Reformation” to a specifically Protestant “Enlightenment,” but rather to underscore that Enlightenment approaches to religion were grounded in habits of mind forged in response to the particular concerns of Reformation and post-Reformation Christianity. The radical Protestant attack on “priestcraft” first sprang from the conviction that the only foundation for true Christianity lay in the pure interaction between Scripture and spirit; all human intercession was popery. The early Protestant move to equate “popery” with a ceremonial, legalistic, superstitious Judaism or “Mahomedanism” provided a framework within which Protestants could conceptualize the distinction between a false “worldly” religion (traditions generated by men, works performed by the body) and the true “spiritual” religion (revelation generated by God alone, faith granted to the spirit). This framework was then extended and transformed in the Enlightenment to understand Brahmins, Shamans, and ultimately all human religious authorities as foisting superstition onto the credulous masses.[54]

In his recent magisterial history of Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg has argued that “Judaism” signifies much more in the history of Western thought than simply “the religion of specific people with specific beliefs.” It has been, throughout Western history, “a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world.”[55] To some extent, the material surveyed in this chapter affirms Nirenberg’s sweeping thesis. Reformation confessional polemics against Catholicism, and the subsequent condemnation of “priestcraft” and “imposture” in all human societies, were unquestionably shaped by “thinking with” Judaism. Yet a full investigation into the category of religious “imposture” in the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, must also mean moving beyond a Christian–Jewish binary. It requires us to consider Christian denigrations of the “false” prophet “Mahomet” alongside the denigration of “Pharisees” and “rabbis.” To what extent did anti-Judaism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Islam converge in Reformation and post-Reformation thought? To what extent did they diverge? And to take the question further—what is the relationship between existing Protestant discourses regarding, or encounters with, Jews or Muslims, and the development of Protestant colonialism and empire? In innovative and provocative ways, Nabil Matar and Alison Games have suggested that the early English colonial project, and its relationship with American indigenous peoples, was shaped by encounters with the Islamic Mediterranean. Without succumbing to the triumphalist narratives of Protestant exceptionalism or “Whig history,” there is still a need to position the Reformation—a subject paradoxically both parochial and universalist—within the turn toward “imperial” and “global” history that continues to take hold in early modern studies. Fuller consideration of early Protestant engagement with the non-Christian world might offer the opportunity to do precisely that.

NOTES

1. The main recent works on Protestantism, Jews, and Judaism in early modern Germany, in chronological order of publication, are Heiko A. Oberman, Wurzeln des Antisemitismus. Christenangst und Judenplage im Zeitalter von Humanismus und Reformation, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1981); Hans-Martin Kirn, Das Bild vom Juden im Deutschland des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989); Paul Gerhard Aring, “Die Theologie der Reformationszeit und die Juden. Unbewältigte Tradition—Enttäuschte Erwartung—‘Scharfe Barmherzigkeit,’” in Günther Bernd Ginzel (ed.), Antisemitismus (Bielefeld: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1991), 100–123; Edith Wenzel, “Martin Luther und der mittelalterliche Antisemitismus,” in Alfred Ebenbauer and Klaus Zatloukal (eds.), Die Juden in ihrer mittelalterlichen Umwelt (Vienna: Böhlau, 1991), 301–319; Friedrich Battenberg, Die Juden in Deutschland vom 16. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001); Achim Detmers, Reformation und Judentum: Israel-Lehren und Einstellungen zum Judentum von Luther bis zum frühen Calvin (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2001); Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (eds.), Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006); Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Johannes Heil, Gottesfeinde—Menschenfeinde. Die Vorstellung von jüdischer Weltverschwörung (13–16. Jahrhundert) (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2006).

2. See Erika Rummel, The Humanist–Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Erasmus’s 1516 translation of the New Testament into Greek, though deeply flawed, was an important first step.

3. See David H. Price, Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

4. D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar, 1883 ff.; hereafter WA), Briefe 1, No. 7, 23–30.

5. WA 11, 314–336. This theme already appears in his 1521 commentary on the Magnificat: WA 7, 601 ff. The main recent works on Luther and the Jews are Helmar Junghans, “Martin Luther und die Juden,” in Michael Beyer, Günther Wartenberg, and Helmar Junghans (eds.), Spätmittelalter, Luthers Reformation, Kirche in Sachsen: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 162–189; Andreas Späth, Luther und die Juden (Bonn: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2001); Peter von der Osten-Sacken, Martin Luther und die Juden—neu untersucht anhand von Anton Margarithas “Der gantz Jüdisch glaub” (1530/31) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2002); Anselm Schubert, “Fremde Sünde. Zur Theologie von Luthers späten Judenschriften,” in Dietrich Korsch and Volker Leppin (eds.), Martin Luther—Biographie und Theologie (Philadelphia, PA: Coronet Books, 2010), 251–270; Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism: Against His Better Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012); Thomas Kaufmann, Luthers “Judenschriften”: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer historischen Kontextualisierung, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); Thomas Kaufmann, Luthers Juden (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2014).

6. WA 53, 417–552.

7. See Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 111. Bucer advocated expulsion of all Jews, and failing that, strict limitations, in his advice to the Elector Philip of Hesse.

8. Kaufmann, Luthers “Judenschriften,” 116–124 and n. 148; Heil, Gottesfeinde—Menschenfeinde, 308–369.

9. Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr. Ursachen und Hintergründe ihrer Vertreibung aus den deutschen Reichsstädten im 15. Jahrhundert. Beiheft zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 14 (Vienna-Cologne-Graz: Böhlau, 1981). Wenninger’s argument is a bit one-sided and relies on a certain amount of speculative reconstruction. If bishops, for example, had needed to rely on Jews from the Carolingian period onward to administer their territories, incomes, and property, they were increasingly able to hire educated Christian laymen to take over those roles as grammar schools, universities and their curricula, and enrollments expanded over the course of the Middle Ages. Whereas it was mainly Jewish merchants who had the skills, contacts, and credit strategies to engage in long-distance trade in the early Middle Ages, burghers in the Free Imperial Cities, the Hanseatic towns, and elsewhere were developing those abilities by the thirteenth century and had in many cases surpassed their Jewish neighbors by the fifteenth. While all of this is true enough on a large scale, local circumstances were endlessly more complex. The burgher elite of Regensburg, for example, usually defended “their” Jews from imperial exactions, popular riots, and ecclesiastical hostility until the later fifteenth century, when it found its advantage was strongest among opponents of imperial power, and seized the opportunity afforded by the interregnum after the sudden death of Emperor Maximilian I in January of 1519 to seize the goods, accounts receivable, and property of the Jews of Regensburg and to expel them on very short notice.

10. See also Toch, “The Economic Activity of German Jews in the 10th–12th Centuries: Between Historiography and History,” in Y.-T. Assis, O. Limor, J. Cohen, and M. Toch (eds.), Facing the Cross: The Persecutions of 1096 in History and Historiography (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000), 32–54 (Hebrew, Eng. summary).

11. Toch, “Aspects of Stratification of Early Modern German Jewry: Population History and Village Jews,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), In and Out of the Ghetto: German–Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77–89. It is also clear that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jews gradually moved back into many of the larger cities from which their ancestors had been expelled; that movement was not from distant lands but from the surrounding smaller towns and villages where Jews had found refuge, often under the protection of lesser princes, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

12. Throughout his voluminous lectures and commentaries on Christian Scripture and on Hebrew Scripture, e.g., his commentary on Genesis, see Andrew Gow, “Christian Colonialism: Luther’s Exegesis of Hebrew Scripture,” in Robert Bast and Andrew Gow (eds.), Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History. Essays in Honor of Heiko Augustinus Oberman on his 70th Birthday (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 229–252.

13. This Protestant “pneumatology” (theory of spirituality) also informs current critiques of organized religion in Christian and non-Christian traditions, including Judaism and Islam.

14. David Nirenberg has recently argued that anti-Judaism has been fundamental to Western Christendom’s self-definition, as well as that of its secularizing successor societies in Europe and the Americas. Thus, Protestant reformers may only have been deploying a more focused version of tropes more or less universal in Western Christendom. See Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

15. Sharon Achinstein, “John Foxe and the Jews,” Renaissance Quarterly 54(1) (2001): 105; Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25, 59–60; James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 18–22, 141–142; Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1979), 24.

16. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 18–22; John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558), 48–49.

17. On the relationship between sixteenth-century Spain’s own anxieties regarding its Jewish and Moorish heritage, and the concurrent “orientalization” of Spain by its European rivals through charges of miscegenation, see Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), intro. and chap. 5.

18. Quoted in John Hesselink, “Calvin’s Understanding of the Relation of the Church and Israel Based Largely on his Interpretation of Romans 9–11,” Ex Auditu 4 (1988): 59–69.

19. Guibbory, Christian Identity, chap. 1. For an overview of “covenant theology” see J. von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 105; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 93–125; G. Groenhuis, “Calvinism and National Consciousness: The Dutch Republic as the New Israel,” in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands VII: Church and State Since the Reformation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 118–133; Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993), chaps. 3–4; Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, 15.

20. P. D. L. Avis, “Moses and the Magistrate: A Study in the Rise of Protestant Legalism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26(2) (1975): 149–172. On Knox, see Williamson, “British Israel and Roman Britain: The Jews and Scottish Models of Polity from George Buchanan to Samuel Rutherford,” in R. H. Popkin and G. M. Weiner (eds.), Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1994), 106–107, and R. G. Kyle, “John Knox: A Man of the Old Testament,” Westminster Theological Journal 54(1) (1992): 65–78.

21. Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 120–125. On Laudianism, see Guibbory, Christian Identity, chap. 2; on the English revolutionary period, see generally Hill, The English Bible, as well as B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber & Faber, 1971).

22. On Protestant Hebraism, see Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Grafton, “Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and Others,” in David N. Myers and Dabid B. Ruderman (eds.), The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey Shoulson (eds.), Hebraica veritas?: Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996). For Protestant interest in the “Hebrew Commonwealth,” see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jason Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Reid Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2003); J. R. Ziskind, “Cornelius Bertram and Carlo Sigonio: Christian Hebraism’s First Political Scientists,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 37/3–4 (2000): 381–400; Shira Wolosky, “Biblical Republicanism: John Cotton’s ‘Moses His Judicials’ and American Hebraism,” Hebraic Political Studies 4/2 (2009): 104–127; Charles Prior, “Hebraism and the Problem of Church and State in England, 1642–1660,” Seventeenth Century 28/1 (2013): 37–61; Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). New Haven court order quoted in F. J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 210–211.

23. On the long history of the charge of “Judaizing” in Christian thought, see Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 58, 87, 96, 115–116, 196, 236 and passim. Reflecting on a heightened fear of “Judaizing” in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, Nirenberg (p. 196) argues that “Christian Europe awoke haunted by the conviction that it was becoming Jewish. The seeming contradiction within this coincidence is striking and worth investigating. Why is it that the fear of Judaizing reached a new peak in Western Europe at precisely the moment when Jews had virtually disappeared from it?”

24. Luther, Against the Sabbatarians: Letter to a Good Friend, 1538, tr. in Luther’s Works, American ed. (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1971, vol. 47), 65–98; Wider die Sabbater an einen guten Freund, WA 50, 312–337; see Jürgen Kaiser, Theologische Realenzyklopaedie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), vol. 24, 530 (Sabbat IV); Jerome Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony: Sixteenth-Century Christian Hebraica in the Age of Renaissance Nostalgia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1983), 182–194; Tóth, “Old and New Faith in Hungary, Turkish Hungary, and Transylvania,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 215–216. Judith Pollmann, “The Bond of Christian Piety: The Individual Practice of Tolerance and Intolerance in the Dutch Republic,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and Henk Van Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 62–67; John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 31; John Goodwin, Hagiomastix, or the Scourge of the Saints (London, 1646), 44; Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 23; D. S. Katz, Philo-semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 21–28.

25. Institutio Christianae Religionis (Basel: Thomas Platter and Balthasar Lasius, 1536), critical edition in G. Baum et al., Corpus Reformatorum. Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt Omnia (Brunswick, NJ, 1863–1900), 2: 9–11.

26. Church of England, The Second Tome of Homelyes of Such Matters As Were Promised and Intituled in the Former Part of Homelyes Set Out by the Aucthoritie of the Quenes Maiestie, and To Be Read in Euery Paryshe Churche Agreablye (London, 1563), fol. 5; Achinstein, “John Foxe and the Jews,” 95; Foxe quoted in Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 105–110, 141.

27. J. Van Den Berg, “The Eschatological Expectation of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Protestantism with Regard to the Jewish People,” in Peter Toon (ed.), Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600 to 1660 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970), 137–153; Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 135–136, 168; Junius’s words come to us second-hand from the seventeenth-century Dutch preacher and historian Gerard Brandt. See Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 28.

28. Katz, Philo-semitism, 91–94; Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176–177; Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 168–169, 178; Guibbory, Christian Identity, 45, 188–189.

29. On the community of Portuguese Jews in seventeenth-century Holland, see Yosef Kaplan (ed.), The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008); Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans; and Peter van Rooden, “Jews and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Republic,” in Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, 132–147.

30. The intellectual and theological context for the “readmission” of Jews to England under Cromwell remains the most heavily studied subject of Anglo-Jewish history before the eighteenth century. Since the 1980s, the classic statement has been Katz’s Philo-semitism. Critics of Katz include James Shapiro, whose Shakespeare and the Jews underscores widespread clerical anti-Judaism and opposition to readmission, and Nabil Matar, who has argued repeatedly that many so-called “philosemitic” references to Jews in English millenarianism are not really concerned with real Jews at all, but are better understood as militant Protestant fantasies of an apocalyptic crusade to annihilate Islam and recapture the Holy Land. In a different vein, Eliane Glaser has also sought to “recontextualize” the debate about Jewish readmission, situating it within Interregnum print controversies concerning constitutional politics and the common law rather than any concern for actual Jews. See Glaser, “ ‘Reasons … Theological, Political, and Mixt of Both’: A Reconsideration of the ‘Readmission’ of the Jews to England,” Reformation 9 (2004): 173–203. More recent studies by Achsah Guibbory and Andrew Crome focus on English Protestant self-identification as specially chosen by God as (a new) Israel, and how this informed attitudes regarding the potential for Jewish readmission to England. See Guibbory, Christian Identity, chap. 7, and Crome, “English National Identity and the Readmission of the Jews, 1650–1656,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66/2 (2015): 280–301.

31. Matthew Dimmock, Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1.

32. Dimmock, Mythologies, 57–60; G. K. Waite, “Menno and Muhammad: Anabaptists and Mennonites Reconsider Islam, 1525–1657,” Sixteenth Century Journal 41/4 (2010): 1009.

33. John Bale, The Image of Both Churches (London: Thomas East, 1570), sig. Hhh.b.4r. and passim; Henrie Smith, Gods Arrowe Against Atheists (London: J Danter, 1593), chap. 4; Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Iudgements (London: A. Islip, 1597); Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33; Dimmock, “ ‘A Human Head to the Neck of a Horse’: Hybridity, Monstrosity and Early Christian Conceptions of Muhammad and Islam,” in Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (eds.), The Religions of the Book: Co-Existence and Conflict, 1400–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 73–83; Waite, “Menno and Muhammad,” 1007–1008.

34. Gregory J. Miller, “Luther on the Turks and Islam,” in Timothy Wengert (ed.), Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003; first published in Lutheran Quarterly 14 (2000): 79–97), 185–203; 186; Luther, Heerpredigt wider den Türken, WA 30/II, 162.

35. See his preface to George of Hungary’s Liber de ritu et moribus Turcorum, WA 30/II, 205–208.

36. Miller, “Luther on the Turks,” 195.

37. Vom Kriege wider die Türken, WA 30/II, 131: “Las den Turcken gleuben und leben wie er wil, gleich wie man das Bapstum und ander falsche Christen leben lest. Des Keisers schwerd hat nichts zuschaffen mit dem glauben, Es gehoert ynn leibliche, weltliche sachen … ”

38. “Ein Kinderlied, zu singen wider die zween Ertzfeinde Christi und seiner heiligen Kirchen, den Bapst und Türcken.” Johannes Kulp (edited by Arno Büchner and Siegfried Fornaçon), Die Lieder unserer Kirche. Eine Handreichung zum Evangelischen Kirchengesangbuch. Handbuch zum Evangelischen Kirchengesangbuch, Sonderband (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), 230–233.

39. Carl Göllner, TVRCICA. Die Türkenfrage in der öffentlichen Meinung Europas im 16. Jahrhundert, vols. II and III (Bucharest, Baden-Baden, 1973); III, 73: 18. See also Margret Spohn, Alles getürkt: 500 Jahre (Vor)Urteile der Deutschen über die Türken (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität, 1993), and Almut Höfert, Den Feind beschreiben. “Türkengefahr” und europäisches Wissen über das Osmanische Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003).

40. Göllner, TVRCICA, vol. II, 76: 20.

41. According to Jon Balserak, a total of five explicit references to “the Turk” can be found in the 1559 edition of the Institutio, all of which state or imply that Islam is a false religion that possesses no hope because it rejects Jesus Christ as God’s son and the Saviour of humankind. “John Calvin (Institutio Christianae religionis; Institution de la religion chrétienne; Praelectiones in Danielam; Sermons sur le V. livre de Moyse, nommé Deutéronome),” in Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500–1900 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014), vol. 6, 700–713; 702–703.

42. Jan Slomp, “Calvin and the Turks,” in Y. Y. Haddad and W. Z. Haddad (eds.), Christian–Muslim Encounters (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995), 133–135; Dimmock, Mythologies, 81–88; Edwin Sandys, Sermons made by the most reuerende Father in God (London, 1585), 346; Bale, The Image of Both Churches.

43. Quoted in MacLean and Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 27. See also Matar, Islam in Britain, chap. 5.

44. Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), chap. 4; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60; Dimmock, Mythologies, 78–80; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2006), 264–265; Bale, The Image of Both Churches; Waite, “Menno and Muhammad,” 1008.

45. Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 26; A. H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic: A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610–1630 (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1978), 85–86; Matar, “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England: Practice and Theory,” in J. C. Laursen (ed.), Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 28; Jack Goody, Islam in Europe (New York: Wiley, 2004), 87.

46. MacLean and Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1, 15; Benjamin Kaplan, Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2007), 17, 25; Waite, “Empathy for the Persecuted or Polemical Posturing? The 1609 Spanish Expulsion of the Moriscos as Seen in English and Netherlandic Pamphlets,” Journal of Early Modern History 17/2 (2013): 101.

47. Matar, Islam in Britain, 124; Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 82–86, 144–47; Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23.

48. Matar, Islam in Britain, chaps. 1–2; Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 71–80; Games, Web of Empire, chap. 2.

49. Tóth, “Between Islam and Orthodoxy: Protestants and Catholics in South-Eastern Europe”, in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 536–557; Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier; D. P. Daniel, “Lutheranism in the Kingdom of Hungary,” in Robert Kolb (ed.), Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture: 1550–1675 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008), 455–508.

50. On the representation of Shi’a and Sunni in Britain, see Dimmock, Mythologies, 133–139. On Arabism, “Orientalist” philology, and Qur’anic translation in early modern Europe, see Thomas E. Berman, Reading the Qur’ān in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), chap. 4; Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: The Arcadian Library in association with Oxford University Press, 2004); Hamilton, William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563–1632 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985). On Erpenius and Ibn Qāsim, see Gerard Wiegers, A Learned Muslim Acquaintance of Erpenius and Golius: Ahmad B. Kâsim Al-Andalusî and Arabic Studies in the Netherlands (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit, 1988), 45–63.

51. Ram Chandra Prasad, Early English Travellers in India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsi Dass, 1965), 38, 237, 298; Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, 101–110; Beth Quitslund, “The Virginia Company, 1606–1624: Anglicanism’s Millennial Adventure,” in Richard Connors and Andrew C. Gow (eds.), Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), 43–113; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 63ff.; Leonard Blussé, “Dutch Protestant Missionaries as Protagonists of the Territorial Expansion of the VOC on Formosa,” in D. Kooiman, O. D. Muijzenberg, and P. van der Veer (eds.), Conversion, Competition, and Conflict: Essays on the Role of Religion in Asia (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1984), 163–169.

52. Prasad, Early English Travellers in India, passim; Matar and MacLean, Britain and the Islamic World, 194; Pompa Banerjee, “Burning Questions: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travel Narratives of India,” Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 29/3 (1999): 529, 543–549. On the conceptual deployment of “popery” in English Protestantism, see Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989), 72–106.

53. It became something of a philosophical commonplace in the later seventeenth century to posit the existence of a “natural religion,” rationally accessible to all mankind regardless of one’s access to the revealed Christian truth. Traces of this “natural religion” could be found in both Christian and heathen societies. The concept of “natural religion” was in fact embraced by members of the Anglican ecclesiastical hierarchy—the “latitudinarians.” But from the latitudinarian point of view, philosophers could attain only a glimmer of the “natural religion” using their reason alone; the Christian Revelation was needed to perfect it. This was the view advanced by John Locke as well, in his The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

54. Mark Goldie, “Ideology,” in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 266–291; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); P. J. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 4; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), chap. 4.

55. Nirenberg, Anti Judaism, 6ff.

FURTHER READING

Achinstein, Sharon. “John Foxe and the Jews,” Renaissance Quarterly 54/1 (2001): 86–120.

Bell, Dean Phillip and Stephen G. Burnett (eds.) Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006.

Bodian, Miriam. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Dimmock, Matthew. Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Gow, Andrew. “Christian Colonialism: Luther’s Exegesis of Hebrew Scripture.” In Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History. Essays in Honor of Heiko Augustinus Oberman on his 70th Birthday, edited by Robert Bast and Andrew Gow, pp. 229–252. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000.

Grafton, Anthony and Joanna Weinberg. “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Guibbory, Achsah. Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kaplan, Benjamin. Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2007.

Katz, David S. Philo-semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Miller, Gregory J. “Luther on the Turks and Islam.” In Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church, edited by Timothy Wengert, pp. 185–203. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.

Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.

Waite, Gary K. “Menno and Muhammad: Anabaptists and Mennonites Reconsider Islam, 1525–1657.” Sixteenth Century Journal 41/4 (2010): 995–1016.

CHAPTER 15

OUTSIDERS, DISSENTERS, AND COMPETING VISIONS OF REFORM

HOWARD HOTSON

UNIVERSAL REFORMATION

IN the middle decades of the seventeenth century, Jan Amos Comenius, the last bishop of the Czech branch of the Unity of Brethren, advocated a new reformation, necessitated by the failure of previous reformations, and designed to bring their unfinished work to fulfillment. In the recent past, he argued, reformations had been attempted in many fields. Reforms of learning had been undertaken by Ramon Lull, Francesco Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Guillaume Budé, Pierre de la Ramée, and René Descartes. Religious reforms had been pursued by Jan Hus, Martin Luther, Pierre Vaudès (Peter Waldo), Jean Calvin, the Anabaptists, and Faustus Socinus, as well as popes and emperors at the Councils of Constance, Basle, and Trent. Political reformers had intermittently sought to vanquish tyranny and to establish new constitutions. But as the events of his lifetime made all too clear, these reforms had not inaugurated a golden age of peace, concord, and brotherly love. Instead, Europe had witnessed a crescendo of discord, conflict, bloodshed, and confusion, evident in the endemic warfare which had spread across northern Europe in the seventeenth century, in the bewildering proliferation of philosophical schools so characteristic of the same period, “and most abominably in the church,” which had split into multiple, irreconcilable groups in violent opposition to one another.[1]

Why had all these worthy efforts failed to achieve harmony? The reason, Comenius argued, was that previous reforms were fragmentary: they addressed isolated parts of a deeper, broader, systemic problem, rather than attacking the problem at its roots. Since piecemeal reform had failed, he concluded, the only viable option was to undertake a “universal reformation,” designed to address all the interlinking parts of a single problem simultaneously by striking at its roots.

The fundamental problem, in Comenius’s mind, was simple: man is a fallen creature, who has lost his righteous relationship with God, his just relationship with his fellow men, and his rightful dominion over the rest of creation. The radical solution to this problem could therefore only be the reformation of human nature as a whole. Since man was created in the image and likeness of God, health had to be restored simultaneously to each of man’s faculties. Since God (as Augustine had argued) is a Trinity of velle, nolle, and posse, the “instauration” of the image of God in man must restore health to the human will, understanding, and power by repairing the volitional, intellectual, and operative faculties of Aristotelian psychology. Viewed from a different perspective, what was needed was a three-fold reformation of man’s relationship with God above him (through a reformed theology), with his fellow men around him (through a reformed politics), and with the natural world beneath him (through a reformed natural philosophy). This universal reformation would represent the instauration of the human condition itself, returning mankind progressively to the spiritual purity, moral virtue, intellectual rectitude, and practical dominion over nature lost in the Fall and the expulsion from Paradise. Soteriologically, universal reform therefore pursued the goal of “universal salvation.” Socially, it applied to “every human being born on earth … regardless of age, class, sex and nationality.”[2] Historically, it aimed to inaugurate what Comenius described elsewhere as a seventh age of universal light.[3]

Comenius’s vision may well be the most ambitious program of reform composed within the Reformation era. Yet it is safe to wager that it is not described at any length in a single textbook of Reformation history or theology, at least not outside his Czech homeland. The reason for this neglect is not difficult to understand: from the standpoint of “the Reformation” as traditionally defined, this entire proposal seems not merely alien but perverse.

Comenius describes his endeavor as a reformation and himself as a successor to three great Reformers: Hus, Luther, and Calvin. Yet this universal reformation is not confined to theology, to worship, to church government, or even to society, culture, or behavior. It expands from a religious core to remake the secular world in a manner antithetical to Luther’s doctrine of the “two kingdoms.” It ignores the still more fundamental Augustinian distinction between the spiritual and eternal “city of God” and the carnal and temporal “city of this world.” Unlike Augustine, who saw no room for an improvement of mankind’s spiritual condition in terrestrial history, or Luther, who foresaw only a brief future interval between his revelation of the papal Antichrist and the end of the world, Comenius looks forward to a dawning age of terrestrial peace, felicity, and enlightenment. Nor, even more strikingly, is the Moravian’s program founded on the cornerstone of mainstream Protestant theology: the still deeper Pauline stress on the helplessness of fallen man to contribute to the process of repairing the damage wrought by the Fall, and the consequent understanding of faith and grace as the only necessary and sufficient means of salvation. Comenius’s is not a passive vision: it is a plan of action embracing all spheres of human life, founded on a belief that human agency has a key role to play in repairing the damage done by the Fall and restoring mankind to something like its primordial perfection. Indeed, his Via Lucis, which outlines the path toward this light from the dawn of time to the present day, is marked by advances in the technology of human communication, notably speech, writing, printing, and the voyages of exploration.

Viewed from the perspective of the mainstream understanding of “the Reformation,” therefore, it appears that Comenius has misunderstood the core Protestant message completely. By adopting an anthropology, a soteriology, and an eschatology irreconcilable with those of Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, he has placed himself, at best, on the extreme margins of any narration of “the Reformation,” or excluded himself from it altogether. At worst, he is regarded as an aberration, a deformation, a mind addled by the traumas of the Thirty Years War, who misunderstood, debased, and overturned completely the “core message” of “the great Reformers.” On these grounds he was consigned by the Dresden librarian, Johann Christoph Adelung, in the later eighteenth century to the Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheit, the history of human folly, and characterized by Oxford’s pugnacious Regius Professor of History, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the most influential English essay ever devoted to him, as a “crack-brained European refugee.”[4] As a consequence, Comenius—an iconic figure in his homeland—is known elsewhere almost exclusively as an educational theorist. Nearly 350 years after his death, few other aspects of his remarkable life and work have been treated satisfactorily in English-language scholarship.

Yet this retrospective dismissal of Comenius’s reform program is problematic for at least four reasons. In the first place, Comenius’s Protestant pedigree is impeccable: he was a bishop of the Unitas fratrum or Bohemian Brethren, a genuine remnant of the radical wing of the Hussite reformation founded a century before Luther. Moreover, if the defining characteristic of “Protestantism” is a refusal to subject oneself to the authority of the Roman Church, then the strength of his Protestant convictions is beyond doubt: Comenius and his entire community are Protestant “confessors,” who preferred persecution, exile, and virtual extinction as a religious community to surrendering their faith and remaining in their homeland after the failure of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620 and the forceful reimposition of Catholicism on Bohemia and Moravia after 1627‒1628. Third, Comenius’s basic accusation, that previous reformations provoked chaos and confusion, is undeniable when viewed from his confessional standpoint: the two-hundred-year-old Czech reformation was completely uprooted and almost entirely destroyed by the conflicts which resulted when the Lutheran Duke of Saxony joined the Catholic emperor and the Duke of Bavaria to crush the Calvinist Elector Palatine and the Bohemian rebels fighting for the freedom to practice a variety of forms of Protestantism. His life was played out against the backdrop of the Thirty Years War, the Northern Wars, the British civil wars, and the Eighty Years War in the Low Countries, the culmination of a century of violence unleashed in large measure by competing attempts at religious and political reform, during which Protestantism in Poland was also fatally undermined.

History, as everyone knows, is written by the winners; and the Unitas fratrum is among history’s losers precisely because of the destructive antagonisms unleashed by the Reformations of Luther and Calvin. But what standard of justice, one might ask, gives the cadet branches of Protestantism the right to banish this remnant of its senior branch from the annals of “the Reformation” so completely? How might our conception of this period be enriched by regarding Comenius’s reformation as a legitimate alternative to Luther’s? The answer to this question depends largely on whether Comenius’s reform vision is a personal eccentricity or a synthetic statement of aspirations shared with predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. And this raises a fourth problem, since his program was not without followers in his own century or predecessors in the previous one.

For a decade and more during the mid-seventeenth century, to begin with, Comenius was central to a movement for general, pedagogical, philosophical, religious, and political reform which found advocates across the Protestant world, from Hungary and Transylvania via Poland, Sweden, and Germany to the Dutch Republic, England, Ireland, and New England. The most famous episode (although perhaps not the most enduring) was in England. Trevor-Roper called Comenius and his associates, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury, “the philosophers of the Puritan Revolution.” Charles Webster described their program as “the great instauration” of science, medicine, and learning which established Baconianism as an ascendant tradition in England and laid the foundations on which the Royal Society would be built in 1660. Their debt to Francis Bacon is obvious and explicit: Bacon’s Instauratio magna proposed, like Comenius, to restore to mankind the dominion over nature lost in the Fall, and did so by means of a moral reformation of natural philosophy which rejected the proud worship of the barren idols of the human mind in favor of the humble study of the fertile works of the Creator and the charitable application of natural knowledge to the betterment of human life. As for Bacon’s sources, it is futile (as many Bacon scholars have done) to search for them in his mother’s Puritanism: his proposal to undo the Fall is as irreconcilable with Calvinism as Comenius’s, and no such aspiration can be found in previous English Puritan literature, not even on the Apocalypse.[5]

Rather than revisiting the familiar but contested claims surrounding the Moravian’s brief visit to England, or assembling evidence of his contemporary reception on the Continent, this chapter will focus on Comenius’s fascinating but poorly understood predecessors. The main themes of his thought, it will be argued, all have deep roots in aspects of the intellectual history of the previous century; but in each case these traditions have been marginalized within mainstream historiography by a deep-seated tendency to regard deviations from Lutheran norms as departures from “the Reformation” per se. In search of the most immediate formative influences on him, this chapter begins by retracing the steps of Comenius’s educational travels. As a point of departure, it takes an aspect of his program seemingly opposed to the basic tendency of “the confessional age”: namely, his long-standing irenical effort to reconcile the warring Christian confessions.[6]

IRENICISM

In the early seventeenth century, the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren typically sent their future clergy to study in Reformed Germany. Reformed Germany’s defining characteristic was the determination to complete the Reformation begun by Luther by stripping theology and liturgy of the last vestiges of popery and reforming popular belief and behavior through ecclesiastic discipline. This movement therefore represented a significant step from the narrowly circumscribed conception of reform characteristic of Luther himself in the direction of more general reform eventually promoted by figures like Comenius.

Moreover, these two departures brought others in their wake.[7] Departing from the Lutheran conception of the Reformation jeopardized the Reformed community’s status in imperial law. By rejecting the “Real Presence,” the Reformed sacrificed the unquestioned right to shelter under the terms of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. This left them vulnerable to legal, political, or even military reprisals from the Catholic and Lutheran parties in the empire. To defend themselves the Reformed developed two complementary strategies which moved them still further from the template of the Lutheran Reformation in the direction of more general reform.

On their Catholic flank, their strategy was political and belligerent. From 1608, the Elector Palatine sought to establish a Protestant union capable of withstanding the onslaught of a militarized Catholic Counter Reformation. After 1618, he seized an even more dangerous opportunity by accepting the crown of Bohemia, which promised to create a permanent Protestant majority in the senior college of the Imperial Diet which elected the emperor himself. Further ecclesiastical reform therefore prompted efforts to achieve comprehensive political changes as well.

On the Lutheran flank, by contrast, the Reformed strategy was theologically irenical. In order to strengthen the Protestant union and shield themselves from Lutheran reprisals, the Reformed sought to de-emphasize the few points of irreconcilable theological difference and emphasize the innumerable point of concord between the main Protestant confessions within the empire. From the publication of the Heidelberg Catechism onward, leading theologians throughout the growing German Reformed community vigorously pursued a theological strategy seemingly at odds with the deepening confessional division of Europe but actually rooted in it: to buttress their legally vulnerable position within the empire by emphasizing their essential agreement with Lutheranism. If they had succeeded, the results of this bold strategy would have been a reconciled Protestantism dominating the Holy Roman Empire and promoting further reformations to east and west, north and south. In the event, both of these strategies failed. The Lutherans consistently rebuffed Reformed efforts at ecclesiastical peacemaking for over half a century, siding instead with the Catholics in crushing the Calvinists in 1620; and from this failure issued the disasters which pursued Comenius throughout his life in exile.

This does not imply that the Reformed were ecumenists and the Lutherans dogmatists. When the power relations between them were inverted, so were their attitudes to irenicism. In the Dutch Republic after 1619, for instance, the Reformed church was the dominant party, and gave a correspondingly cool response to Arminians and exiles from the empire seeking ecclesiastical peace. The Swiss cities likewise saw no profit in compromising their theological clarity by becoming entangled in the irenical negotiations of their more vulnerable confessional brethren in Germany. Where the main Protestant churches were equally exposed to Catholic repression, by contrast, concord between them proved easier to establish, at least on paper. In Poland, Bohemian Brethren, Lutherans, and Reformed reached agreement on fundamentals as early as the Consensus of Sandomierz of 1570. Five years later, the Polish example helped inspire the Confessio Bohemica in the Czech lands, which included the Utraquists, Lutherans, and Bohemian Brethren. Three years after the fall of La Rochelle in 1628, the national synod of the French Reformed church unanimously agreed to admit Lutherans to communion.[8] Irenicism during the confessional era, therefore, is not the attribute of any one confession: it is the natural posture of minority communities vulnerable to religious repression.

In 1613‒1614, Comenius ended his university years in Heidelberg, the epicenter of Reformed Germany. His principal teacher there was the leading theologian David Pareus, who at that very moment was completing his famous Irenicum, the capstone treatise of the Palatine irenical tradition, which not only advocated reconciliation between Evangelicals and Reformed but also set out the steps to achieve it.[9] Although the Eucharistic theology evident in Comenius’s dissertation under Pareus is far from conciliatory, the broader point is undeniable. The irenical strand of Comenius’s universal reform program was not a personal eccentricity: it was the extension of a tradition—as old as the Palatine Reformed church, as broad as the German Reformed tradition, and as rooted in his own tradition as the Confessio Bohemica—promoted within the empire by parties marginal to or excluded from the Religious Peace of 1555 and outside the empire by minority Protestant groups vulnerable to Catholic repression. By extension, the irenical aspect of the broader program of universal reform is not alien to the Reformation era: it is part and parcel of it. If we are prepared to regard the German Reformed as dissidents and outsiders within the empire between 1555 and 1648, then the roots of Comenius’s irenicism in a long radical lineage, scattered not only in the Bohemian lands but throughout the empire, should become clear. Precisely the same holds for an even more important aspect of Comenius’s universal reform program: its central educational element.

PANSOPHIA

At the heart of Comenius’s universal reformation was a pedagogical reform plan which he summed up in three words: “Omnia, omnes, omnino,” to teach all things, to all people, as thoroughly, quickly, and efficiently as possible. To teach “all things,” he needed a pedagogy which was encyclopedic in scope. To teach them to “all people,” he needed an approach which was popular in application, and devoted above all to teaching as much as possible with the minimum time, effort, and expense. Here too he found much of what he needed in a long-standing tradition deeply rooted in one of the German Reformed institutions in which he studied: in the post-Ramist pedagogy characteristic of the Reformed academy in Herborn. Here too he drew on a distinctive tradition developed in explicit opposition to the dominant educational standards of the day, and cultivated in vulnerable and marginal communities with ambitious plans for reform.

Petrus Ramus—from which Ramism gets its name—was the grandson of a charcoal burner who fashioned the Rhineland tradition of Agricolan dialectic into a pedagogical tool adapted to helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds obtain a useful and rewarding education in an era of dwindling social mobility.[10] Elite scholars saw little value and great harm in Ramism, and persuaded leading universities to abandon it. Theologians, determined to equip their students for confessional conflict with the sharpest of logical weapons, rejected it also; so Ramism was banished from Beza’s Geneva and Pareus’s Heidelberg alike. Humanists, at the very acme of their academic hegemony, prized above all the unmediated encounter with the classical text, and likewise ejected Ramism from Strasbourg, Altdorf, Leiden, and Helmstedt. But students, assembling in unprecedented numbers in pursuit of the new offices opening up in confessional churches and consolidating states, loved it. So did the parents who paid their educational bills; and so, crucially, did the city fathers and princelings of some of the empire’s smallest territories, since it gave them the capacity to provide quasi-university instruction to local sons on the slender resources of a semi-autonomous Hanseatic city, a freie Reichstadt, or a tiny imperial county. From the bottom of Central Europe’s educational and political pyramids, Ramist students percolated upward through Germany’s complex hierarchy of sub-university institutions, demanding similarly student-centered educational practices from the leading universities of the region. From gymnasia like Dortmund or Lemgo it rose to gymnasia illustria such as Herborn and further, in modified form, to universities like Heidelberg, from which its influence was disseminated throughout the Protestant world, Lutheran as well as Reformed. The result was a pedagogical revolution, driven not by leading scholars in the most elite of national institutions, but from pedagogical dissidents in humble gymnasia in tiny territories at the margins of European cultural and political life, powered by the huge surge of student numbers evident across Europe in the half century around 1600 and nowhere better documented than in the empire.[11]

In this case too, Comenius studied in the paradigmatic institution with the culminating figure at the very summit of this tradition. In the half century after its foundation in 1584, the Herborn academy was the liveliest center of pedagogical experimentation in Germany, in the Reformed world, indeed arguably in the entire Protestant world. His most influential teacher there, Johann Heinrich Alsted, was the culmination both of the Herborn tradition and of the longer Ramist and post-Ramist tradition institutionalized within it. The period in which Comenius studied in Herborn, between 1611 and 1613, found Alsted at the very height of his youthful pedagogical creativity. Many aspects of Comenian pansophia are readily identifiable as further developments of Alstedian encyclopedism. Among these debts, astonishingly, is the radical idea that the purpose of an encyclopedic education was to use the three books of nature, Scripture, and the human mind to restore the image of divine perfection to the volitional, intellectual, and operative faculties of fallen human nature.[12]

Even more than Palatinate irenicism, Herborn’s Ramism was part of a broader program of general reformation rooted in a particular set of political circumstances. The founder of the Herborn academy, Count Johann VI of Nassau-Dillenburg, was the older brother of William “the Silent” of Nassau-Orange. As leader of the House of Nassau, he was embroiled in a radically unequal struggle with the superpower of his day: the armies of Philip II of Spain. Survival required him to squeeze all possible resources from the diminutive imperial county over which he ruled; and this he attempted with extraordinary courage and inventiveness.[13] Bold military reforms, patterned on those of his brothers, were intended to forge his subjects into a militia capable of defending their homeland from invasion. Calvinist ecclesiastical reforms were introduced to stiffen their resolve, discipline their behavior, and inoculate them against re-Catholicization. Social reforms, driven in part by Reformed practices of ecclesiastical discipline, were intended to refashion unreliable peasants and townspeople into members of a military state. The federal tradition of Reformed theology (stressing the covenant between God and his people) was complemented by the federal theory of politics (stressing the contractual relationship between ruler and ruled): shunned by rulers elsewhere for compromising the sovereignty of the prince, it was developed by the Herborn professor Johannes Althusius as a means of convincing the populace to make common cause with their ruler. In order to propagate these ideals and implement these plans, the count needed a well-trained corps of teachers, preachers, and officials. To educate them, he established a hierarchy of academic institutions culminating in Herborn (which remained a gymnasium illustre because an imperial count like Johann VI was too humble a prince to obtain a university charter from the emperor). Finally, in order to provide quasi-university education within the means of such a tiny county, Herborn needed a practical, stripped down pedagogical method designed to extract the greatest possible public utility from every unit of educational investment. Hence the great appeal of Ramism.

Ramus and his successors, in a word, sought to teach more useful things to more people as efficiently as possible. Comenius, in turn, sought to teach all things to all people as thoroughly as possible. Like Comenian irenicism, therefore, Comenian pansophia drew heavily on a long-standing tradition of general reformation, undreamt of by Luther and Calvin. Hated by Calvin’s successor and initially outlawed from all the greatest Protestant centers of learning, the post-Ramist approach was first institutionalized in communities marginal to European intellectual life and poorly represented both in the contemporary institutions of the Reich and subsequent historiography on the Reformation. Embraced by dissenters against the dominant educational practices of the day, it proved capable of germinating conceptions in acute tension with the tenets of mainstream Protestant theology. Over the course of several generations, these dissenters developed educational methods, ideals, and values of far more explosive potential than is normally recognized in the literature, which spread in the teeth of entrenched opposition to exercise enormous influence across the international Protestant world, not least in the English-speaking portions of it.[14] Once again, the importance of this tradition has been overlooked because the disparagement by prestigious spokesmen for established standards—the scholastic culture of ancient universities, the Humanist ideals of classical scholars, and the confessional standards of the great Reformers—has distracted historians’ attention from minorities forced to innovate by the vulnerability of their situations.

Needless to say, the post-Ramist tradition was not the only influence underlying either the pansophia of Comenius or the encyclopedism of Alsted. The aspiration to teach everyone was grounded in the catechetical impulse, powerfully reinforced in the post-Reformation period by the drive to teach every human soul the core tenets of the local orthodoxy. The aspiration to teach everyone everything they needed to know democratized the ancient idea that a learned person should master the entire circulus disciplinarum. In the Renaissance, this capacity to discourse de omni scibili was promised by any number of new combinatorial arts of memory rooted in Neoplatonic and even hermetic traditions.[15] The pursuit of intellectual panaceas of this kind drew Alsted into a deep fascination with the medieval theologian and mystic, Ramon Llull, the Basque Franciscan, Bernard de Lavinheta, and the expatriate Neapolitan Dominican, Giordano Bruno. While his Moravian student also admired such diverse thinkers as Cusanus, Patricius, Campanella, Andreae, and Bacon, in his numerous works these aspirations took a slightly different turn. Universal harmony required universal education; and universal education required universal books; and these books should be written in a universal language, which promised to return mankind, not merely to the state before the confusion of tongues in Babel, but to the primordial perfection in which Adam gave names to all the creatures over which he could then exercise his dominion. Universal reformation thereby also embraced another long-standing aspiration of doubtful theological orthodoxy—the search for a universal language—which also inspired Francis Bacon and the “Baconian” universal reformers of the Hartlib circle, as well as later figures such as Kircher, Leibniz, and prominent early fellows of the Royal Society.[16]

MILLENARIANISM

Even more surprising to uncover in Herborn are the roots of a still more unorthodox aspect of Comenius’s universal reform plans: millenarianism. Luther abhorred chiliasm and by the mid-sixteenth century all three main Protestant confessions had formally condemned it: Lutherans in the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the English in the Forty-Two Articles of Religion of 1552, and the Reformed in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566.[17] But in Herborn it was taught from at least 1604 onward by no less a figure than Johannes Piscator, the leader of the academy virtually from its foundation in 1584, and the teacher of both Alsted and Comenius. When Comenius studied there in 1611‒1613, Alsted too was toying with quasi-millenarian ideas. In 1627, Alsted’s brief, clear, simple, and logically argued defense of millenarianism made him the “standard-bearer” of the doctrine throughout the Reformed world during the very years in which Comenius himself embraced it.[18] Once again, the precise date of Comenius’s conversion, its cause, and its relationship to his formal education are by no means entirely straightforward.[19] Years later, he nevertheless traced the pedigree of his millenarianism back to his studies under Piscator and Alsted in Herborn.[20]

Piscator’s millenarianism was also rooted in Johann VI’s program of general reform in Nassau-Dillenburg, albeit somewhat superficially. In order to put a Reformed version of the vernacular Scriptures in the hands of every reader in the county, Piscator translated the entire Bible into German, thereby becoming the first person since Luther to undertake that immense task single-handed. To aid comprehension, a series of brief German notes on the whole text was added, and these were followed by lengthier semi-Ramist analyses of each book. It was in puzzling over the final chapters of the Apocalypse that Piscator gradually worked out his millenarian interpretation in these notes and analyses, first published in the briefest of German notes in 1604, and then in a lengthier Latin analysis in 1613.

The roots of Alsted’s millenarianism, however, are not to be found primarily in Piscator’s crisp post-Ramist analysis of Apocalypse 20. Although he absorbed these commentaries as a young professor of philosophy in Herborn, they did not determine either his youthful or his mature apocalyptic expectations. Alsted’s apocalyptic expectations were shaped instead by a very different company: a diverse collection of alchemists, astrologers, Paracelsians, and exegetes who can be classed as dissidents and outsiders in a far more full-blooded sense than the professors in Herborn or Heidelberg. At this point, the roots of Comenius’s universal reform program divide, subdivide, and then recombine in such wildly anarchic fashion as to make a coherent account of their origins impossible until we have learned far more about these figures and the traditions they represent. For the moment, what can be said about these figures is that they inhabited a whole series of borderlands, often simultaneously: the frontiers between mainstream Protestantism and other less orthodox confessional groups, the boundaries where respectable curricular subjects shaded off into more dubious areas of study, and the indistinct divide between fully fledged millenarianism and a variety of optimistic alternative eschatologies from across and beyond Central Europe.

Perhaps the most orthodox strand—at least by the standards of the day—was the astrological theory of the “great conjunctions,” which predicted major disruptions roughly every two centuries and epoch-making transformations every eight-hundred years on the basis of the conjunctions of the two superior plants, Jupiter and Saturn. Of medieval Arabic origin, the theory was already sufficiently established in the West to arouse great anxiety on the eve of Luther’s Reformation. Subsequently fused with Luther’s own deep-seated apocalypticism, it became a pervasive feature of Lutheran Germany, and was given fresh currency by two of the most celebrated Lutheran astronomers of the era: Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Integrated into Alsted’s Encyclopaedia as well as his chronological and millenarian writings, it influenced Comenius’s circle as well.[21]

Alsted read the “great conjunction” of his own day as portending “the reformation of the Church,” “its liberation from innumerable oppressions,” and “the annihilation of tyrants and heretics in the seventh state”; and this reading derived primarily from an even stranger source: a medical doctor, astrologer, numerologist, and spiritualist by the name of Johannes Dobricius. Although nominally of Lutheran origin, Dobricius appears to be rooted geographically, confessionally, and philosophically, in an environment deeply influenced by the spiritualism of Caspar Schwenkfeld, as recently reinvigorated in Saxony, Lusatia, and above all Silesia by Johann Arndt, Valentin Weigel, and Jakob Boehme.[22] To Arndt’s emphasis on the cultivation of inner spirituality they joined a more outspoken critique of the moribund religious life of the “Mauerkirchen” and a conception of themselves as constituting a new “Church of the Holy Spirit.” This self-conception also drew on medieval roots—namely on Joachim of Fiore’s expectation of a third age of the Holy Spirit in which human nature and society would reach perfection[23]—and this heady mixture of Pietism, spiritualism, Joachimism, and astronomical history nourished a surge of quasi-millenarian writings in the first two decades of the seventeenth century which have not yet received the attention they deserve.[24] Here too Alsted tapped into a tradition which would exercise a still greater influence on Comenius: the most striking aspect of the Moravian’s millenarian writings was his belief that reliance on popular prophets from the three social orders, confessions, and nations which made up the Bohemian crown: Christoph Kotter, a Lutheran laborer from Silesia, Mikuláš Drabik, a Moravian burger from the Unity of Brethren, and Krystyna Poniatowska, a young Reformed noblewoman raised in Bohemia. Another remarkable female prophet, the Flemish mystic Antoinette Bourignon, was invited to attend Comenius on his deathbed.[25]

This cyclical reading of history was then modified by alchemical and Paracelsian traditions which reached Alsted mainly from the north and east. One component was the synthesis of astrological history with scriptural prophecy by the celebrated Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius. Another major element was the pseudo-Paracelsian prophecy of the Midnight Lion disseminated by the exiled Bohemian physician Andreas Haberweschel von Habernfeld, the Hamburg patrician Joachim Morsius, and the Swedish gnostic Johannes Buraeus. Alchemical influences were no less evident in the work of “Stephanus Pannonius,” the pseudonym of a confessionally unknown quantity purported to come from the uttermost margins of the Protestant world in Belgrade. Another conduit was Raphael Eglinus Iconius, a professor of Reformed theology in Marburg previously evicted from his native Zurich due to financial scandals arising from his alchemical practice.[26]

Where did Alsted acquire knowledge of these writers and a taste for their doctrines, so far removed from Piscator’s crisp logical analyses? Certainly not in Heidelberg, where David Pareus (under whom he also studied) wrote a voluminous commentary on the Apocalypse largely with the intention of countering Piscator’s millenarianism. In one case the answer is clear: Alsted studied with Eglinus in Marburg, and it was indirectly from him that he obtained the manuscript of Giordano Bruno which he published a few years later. It was also probably through his academic and family networks in Hesse that he met the famous Sendivogius, whom he subsequently regarded as his “master” in matters alchemical.[27] And it may also have been through the mediation of Marburg that Alsted was first made aware of the era’s most notorious blueprints for “a general reformation of things both human and divine”: the Rosicrucian manifestos.

REFORMING KNOWLEDGE OF NATURE

When Alsted matriculated in Marburg in April 1606, Hesse was in the throes of a sweeping second reformation undertaken by the local ruler, Landgraf Moritz “the Learned” of Hesse-Kassel. The early stages of these reforms would have struck him as entirely familiar, since they were patterned directly on those of nearby Nassau-Dillenburg: in the years around 1600, Moritz introduced Ramism into a revitalized network of Latin schools, reorganized the military defenses of his territory along Nassovian lines, and married the daughter of the architect of his military reforms, Johann VII of Nassau-Siegen. After inheriting the neighboring territory of Hesse-Marburg in 1604 and consulting with Piscator and other Herborn theologians, he converted to Calvinism in 1605 and introduced a sweeping second reformation throughout his territories, expelling Lutheran professors and appointing Reformed teachers in their place.

Moritz’s reforms were not, however, restricted to theology and pedagogy: in addition, he sought to reform philosophy and medicine. The roots of this inclination can be traced to his father, Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel, the paradigmatic example of a prince‒astronomer, who vied with Tycho Brahe for the accuracy of his astronomical observations and with Rudolf II as a patron of precision instrument makers.[28] Moritz, however, shifted the focus of these pursuits from the heavens to the earth, from observational astronomy to experimental alchemy, and drew to his court in Kassel and his university in Marburg many of the era’s leading theorists and practitioners in chemistry, alchemy, and chemical medicine.[29] One of these was Johann Hartmann, Europe’s first professor of chemical medicine and a distant relative of Alsted, whose mother’s family included several prominent early Paracelsians from Hesse. Another was Raphael Eglinus. A third was Benedictus Figulus, a wandering alchemist and Paracelsian in flight from religious persecution, who deposited many of his manuscripts with Eglinus and others in Hesse. Among them, it appears, were the most famous announcements of a general reformation published in the early seventeenth centuries, for it was from Moritz’s press in Kassel that the Rosicrucian manifestos first appeared in print: the Fama fraternitatis in 1614 and the Confessio fraternitatis in 1615.[30] Their publication touched off one of the greatest firestorms of controversy in this polemical period, pitting enthusiastic proponents of the manifestos against conservative critics: Carlos Gilly’s long-awaited bibliography of Rosicrucian writings is scheduled to run to six volumes.[31]

A UNIVERSAL AND GENERAL REFORMATION

Why did these manifestos cause such an uproar? The answer is that their fictional mode allowed them to imagine vividly and express as established facts an interrelated set of contemporary aspirations for a second and broader wave of reformation to complete and complement the business left unfinished by mainstream Lutheranism. The ethos of the fraternity described in the manifestos is clearly Lutheran: they “use the two Sacraments” with the ceremonies of “the first reformed Church”; they share the apocalyptic atmosphere characteristic of Lutheranism in this period; and the Confessio is explicitly anti-Catholic. But the Universal and General Reformation announced in the title of the first manifesto is neither a further reformation of theology, nor a proposal to spread mainstream Protestantism throughout the world: instead it presses the reforming impulse beyond theology to transform knowledge of and power over the natural world.

While the Protestant Reformation has been unfolding, the Fama begins, unprecedented voyages have “discovered unto us the half part of the world”; scholars have set out to “renew and reduce all arts to perfection”; and together these breakthroughs have begun revealing to man his “true nobility and worth”—a line of thinking not dissimilar to Bacon. Unlike Bacon, however, the manifesto claims that this renewal has already distilled into a single, harmonious, encyclopedic corpus “all that which, from the beginning of the world, Man’s wisdom hath found out, invented, brought forth” or received, whether through revelation, reason, or observation—a proposal very similar to Comenian pansophia. Similarly Comenian is the idea that this great book is written in a new language which, like Adam’s, expresses the very nature of things. Like the reforms proposed by Hartlib and Comenius, this general reformation is propagated by an international brotherhood. Like Kepler and many others, the Rosicrucians read the new stars in Serpentarius and Cygnus as “messengers” sent by God to announce “this Reformation which is to come.” Like orthodox Lutherans, they believe that the end of the world is nigh; but in the brief interval which remains before Christ returns in Judgment, they await (in the worlds of the Fama) “a general reformation, both of divine and human things, according to our desire, and the expectation of others [emphasis added]. For it is fitting that before the rising of the sun, there should appear and break forth Aurora, or some clearness, or divine light in the sky.” This Paracelsian expectation that the world, at its end, should return full circle to the perfection of its beginning is announced even more boldly in the Confessio, which states that, shortly before the end of the world, God will grant “such a truth, light, life, and glory, as the first man Adam had.”

It is because these wild claims so closely match the aspirations and “expectation of others” that the manifestos aroused such a storm of commentary. It was from these many points of genuine resemblance that Francis Yates famously depicted Bacon, Comenius, and others as united into a “Rosicrucian enlightenment.” But the Rosicrucian manifestos did not invent these aspirations or ideas: they merely used the fiction of a secret society to encapsulate in a pair of brief texts aspirations circulating among those dissatisfied with the fruits of the religious reformations of the previous century.[32]

SOCIETIES AND UTOPIAS

Although many details remain disputed, the composition of the Rosicrucian manifestos is now confidently traced to Tübingen, and particularly to the circle surrounding the lawyer, Paracelsian physician, and millenarian theosophist, Tobias Hess. Tübingen was the bulwark in southern Germany of Concordial Lutheranism, and thus a fierce confessional antagonist of Heidelberg and Herborn. Yet its contributions to the tradition of universal reform represented by Comenius are many. The firmest foundation of Alsted’s millenarianism was provided by the reinterpretation of scores of Old Testament messianic prophecies harvested from a series of obscure Joachimists and spiritual Franciscans by the widely read, polyglot law professor in Tübingen, Christoph Besold. A confessionally indistinct figure later to convert to Catholicism, Besold also contributed a translation from the Italian to the first Rosicrucian manifesto.[33] Some years later, Alsted was distantly connected by marriage to another member of this circle: the Hebraist, mathematician, and astronomer, Wilhelm Schickard. Schickard, in turn, emerged from the fertile mathematical school in Tübingen which produced the neo-Pythagorean world view of Johannes Kepler, who was also associated with this circle. Yet another member of this circle, Tobias Adami, republished in Germany several works by the Dominican universal reformer, Tommaso Campanella, whose influence on Alsted and especially Comenius was considerable. For present purposes, however, the key member of Hess’s circle is Johann Valentin Andreae.[34]

Andreae is a paradoxical figure, starkly illuminating the inadequacy of our understanding of this so-called confessional age. On the one hand, he is a direct descendant of one of the chief architects of Lutheran confessionalization: his grandfather was Jakob Andreae, friend of Luther, chancellor of the University of Tübingen, and co-author of the Formula of Concord. On the other, he is generally regarded as the creator of the fictional character at the center of the Rosicrucian legend, Christian Rosencreutz, whose name is based on his family coat of arms; and there is now little doubt that he was involved in the composite authorship of the manifestos themselves. It is far from clear what their authors intended the manifestos to accomplish; yet while Andreae later disparaged them as fictitia and the legend as a ludibrium, he continued to promote tenaciously an impressively wide-ranging program of his own for the reform of church, school, and society. Among its central components, several were genetically related to the traditions culminating in Comenius: these included plans for the reformation of life and morals through ecclesiastical discipline (of explicitly Reformed inspiration), a thoroughgoing reform of education (which strongly influenced Comenius), the foundation of Christian societies to promote these reforms (which Hartlib preserved in manuscript, sought to realize, and had translated into English), and his famous utopia, Christianopolis (1619), which Robert Burton immediately placed alongside the “witty fictions” of More, Bacon, and La Città del Sole of Tommaso Campanella (on which Andreae himself drew).[35]

Some have argued that Andreae’s utopian projects stem from a distinctively Lutheran tradition, inspired by the writings of Johann Arndt, which sought to renew the inner spiritual life of their members rather than the external institutions of church or society. Yet Arndt himself drew on Paracelsus, Raimond Sebond, Johann Tauler, and Valentin Weigel, among many others; and in Andreae’s view “a reordering of society is possible only when all its members have been regenerated through Christ.” Even more reminiscent of Comenius is the formulation of Frank and Fritzie Manuel: “Andreae’s man has been restored to the dignity forfeited by Adam’s transgression, and through the Holy Spirit he has entered a new relationship with nature.”[36] Andreae, in short, was a man conflicted by his family commitment to Luther’s reformation of theology and his yearning for a second and more general reformation of religion, society, and learning.

ALCHEMY AND PARACELSIANISM

Underlying the Rosicrucian legend, the second reformation in Kassel, and many forms of quasi-millenarianism are the further traditions of alchemy and Paracelsianism. Alchemy, although traditionally studied (if at all) by historians of chemistry, is likewise best understood as another extremely elastic tradition in which the modern distinction between alchemy and chemistry becomes blurred. At one extreme, it involved a large number of practical, artisanal, and proto-industrial techniques.[37] At the opposite pole, scientific experimentation could shade off into spiritualism, theosophy, individual reformation, and universal, quasi-millenarian religious renewal. Some transmutational alchemists, reading the first chapters of Genesis as an alchemical primer, sought to return to the chaos of prime matter for the power with which to complete the work of the Creator by perfecting base metals. The death of base metal and its resurrection as pure gold was also likened to the process of redemption. The sympathies between the seven subterranean metals and the seven celestial planets lent this process of creation and redemption a cosmic dimension. More practically, the alchemical panacea or universal medicine sought to restore the longevity of Adam and the biblical patriarchs. The revelation of these secrets and their application to restore man’s dominion over nature were naturally reserved for those of unblemished piety and virtue in a final period of enlightenment at the end of time. For all of these reasons, from the late Middle Ages onward, alchemy sometimes involved an ethos that was not merely deeply religious and apocalyptic, but also highly unorthodox and quasi-millenarian.[38]

Paracelsianism inherited this religious and eschatological orientation and fused it with a rich variety of social and theological impulses emerging from the radical reformation. Paracelsus himself has recently been characterized by Charles Webster as someone “determined, in the short time allocated at the dawn of the apocalyptic age, to produce a blueprint for scientific and medical reform as well as social transformation.” This vision, Webster argues, originated neither in the teachings of the great Reformers, nor in the discoveries of learned Humanists, but in the practices of apothecaries, barbers, surgeons, medical folklore, and spiritualists such as Sebastian Franck.[39] The genealogy of Paracelsianism as a broader movement can also be traced back to the very first stirrings of radical reformation in Wittenberg. Adam von Bodenstein, the leader of the earliest generation of German Paracelsians, was the son of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, the radical Reformer who arose during Luther’s absence from Wittenberg in 1520‒1521 and later, after fleeing exile in Saxony via Zurich to Basel, pioneered radical ideas on the scriptural canon, clerical marriage, iconoclasm, the sacraments, adult baptism, and the Sabbath. Mainstream hostility to radical Paracelsianism consequently mirrored hatred of Anabaptism: the Heidelberg medical professor Thomas Erastus advocated capital punishment for Paracelsians.[40] The savagery of this backlash prompted the Danish physician Petrus Severinus to de-emphasize the religious aspect of Paracelsianism in a quest to render it less objectionable; but it also drove many religious Paracelsians into the company of other radicals, especially followers of Schwenckfeld, Weigel, and Boehme; and this process only reinforced their shared characteristics still further: their anticlericalism and hostility to the “Mauerkirchen,” their critique of established learning and insistence on complete religious freedom, their mystical spirituality and expectation of a coming church of the Holy Spirit. Carlos Gilly portrays the fusion of these traditions as a “Theophrastia sancta”: a vigorous program of further reformation, in direct opposition to the established churches, ranging beyond theology to embrace medicine, philosophy, and society.[41]

Together, Paracelsianism and alchemy exercised a profound influence on most of the more radical traditions discussed above: on Johann Arndt, Jakob Boehme, and the spiritualist “Church of the Holy Spirit” in and around Silesia; on the circles around Tobias Hess and Johann Valentin Andreae in Tübingen and the whole Rosicrucian furore which they stimulated; on the court of Moritz the Learned in Kassel and his university in Marburg; on Alsted and his closest disciples in Herborn; on Bacon in England as well as Comenius and Hartlib.[42] In consequence, it is impossible to form an adequate impression of the broadening aspirations for a “general reformation” without abolishing the disciplinary divides which have separated the histories of alchemy, Paracelsianism, science, education, and radical reform as well as alleviating the deep-seated biases which have ostracized the millenarian, hermetic, and mystical traditions from Reformation studies. Mainstream Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic theologians united in waging war on Paracelsians, Weigelians, Boehmists, and spiritualists alike; and their values, faithfully passed down within mainstream historiography, have exiled these traditions to a position in Reformation studies far more marginal than their demonstrable status within post-Reformation Central Europe itself.[43]

As confessionalization reached its apex in the decades around 1600, these and allied traditions offered the empire something of great value: a locus for intellectual inquiry and even imperial identity which, while profoundly spiritual, was not centered on the contested issues of Christian belief and practice. The greatest cultural center in the empire of this era—the court of Rudolf II (1576‒1612) in Prague—was characterized by its incorporation of an enormous variety of alchemical and hermetic preoccupations into a lavish program of artistic and cultural patronage designed to reinforce the universalism of the Holy Roman Empire and the House of Habsburg in an era in which the trifurcation of the mainstream churches was threatening to tear these dominions apart. From the very summit of the imperial hierarchy, this culture descended through lesser courts, of which that of Moritz the Learned in Kassel is just one of the more remarkable.[44] By the early seventeenth century, many of these traditions enjoyed a prominence in Central European culture not remotely reflected in their extreme marginality to modern Reformation historiography. Every court had its Leibarzt or court physician; and many of them were at least semi-Paracelsian for the simple reason that chemical remedies were often more effective, or at least less invasive, than their Galenic alternatives. Unlike the highly public court preachers, whose strident theological views have shaped the established conception of the post-Reformation period, the role of court physicians was intensely private. But it was the latter who enjoyed the most intimate access to the person and family of the ruler; and it would be a bold historian who declared a priori which of these two servants was closer to an individual ruler’s heart.

This relates to a deeper point about the intellectual geography of Central Europe. Seeking the origins of a national culture, the nationalist historians who laid the foundation of German historiography bemoaned political and cultural fragmentation as a sign of decadence. Lutheran confessional historians, also deploring division and celebrating unity, promoted a conception of post-Reformation Germany as a stagnant and sterile “age of orthodoxy,” on top of which the confessionalization thesis was later superimposed. But historians in other fields have recently begun to celebrate the heterogeneity of the empire as a fertile source of cultural pluralism. The intense competition of imperial free cities, religious houses, and princely courts generated a matchless proliferation of artistic, musical, architectural, and cultural traditions.[45] The multiplication of university and sub-university institutions likewise made the Rhineland region the pedagogical laboratory of Protestant Europe.[46] The resulting multiplicity of intellectual centers prompted a much richer efflorescence of princely scientific practice and philosophical speculations than has been incorporated into textbook conceptions of Germany in this period.[47] To those who set out to collect evidence of dissenting traditions rather than to suppress it, the almost infinite number of cultural ecosystems throughout Central Europe resembles a tropical rainforest of intellectual options rather than a desertified “age of orthodoxy.” Although narrow confessional norms dominated established churches and most chairs of theology, the empire probably harbored greater religious and philosophical diversity than anywhere in Western Europe in the interval between the Roman Inquisition’s crackdown on heterodoxy in Italy and the flooding of the Dutch Republic with radical refugees from the Thirty Years War.

REFORMATIO MUNDI

The yearning for a further and more general reformation was rooted in the fabric of the Holy Roman Empire in a far more direct manner as well. Ever since the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day of the year 800, this institution had portrayed itself as the continuation of the Roman Empire, the last of the four great world empires which, according to Daniel 2, 7, and 8, was destined to endure until the end of time. Its eschatological mission was to provide a second pillar, alongside the papacy, supporting the entire edifice of Christendom and protecting it from anti-Christian enemies. This conception did not merely survive the Reformation: it was central to Luther’s conception of his place in space and time. He inserted it, for instance, into the Wittenberg Bible of 1536, where the prophecy of the armies of Gog and Magog besieging the Holy City in Revelation 20 is illustrated with an engraving of the Ottoman sultan besieging Vienna. Melanchthon inserted it into the Wittenberg curriculum; Johann Sleidan’s chronicle De quatuor imperiis summis (1556) broadcast it across the Protestant world; and in Germany it remained a common framework for universal history into the seventeenth century.[48]

Implicit within this imperial self-conception was the expectation that the final great reformation of the church must be coupled with an equally profound reformation of the empire. Although originally framed in terms of an “Angelic Pope” and “Last World Emperor,” this expectation of a reformatio mundi likewise survived the Hussite and Lutheran Reformations into the seventeenth century. According to the Fama fraternitatis, for instance, the Rosicrucians “acknowledge the Roman Empire and Quartam Monarchiam for our Christian head; albeit we know what alterations be at hand”; and this same idea formed an important pillar of expectations codified by Alsted and transmitted to Comenius’s community, where similar ideas were deeply engrained. Placed against this backdrop, the aspiration of Comenius for a universal reformation can be regarded as merely the most recent and general manifestation of a centuries-old Central European tradition rooted in the unique self-conception of the Holy Roman Empire itself.

The deep roots of these expectations in the medieval period help explain another striking fact: namely, that Comenius and his predecessors drew on parallel developments in the Catholic world as well. The paradigmatic case in point is the Calabrian friar, philosopher, theologian, and poet, Tommaso Campanella. His famous utopia, La Città del Sole, powerfully influenced Andreae’s Christianopolis and stands comparison with Bacon’s unfinished New Atlantis. Campanella’s philosophical works, published by Tobias Adami from his base in Tübingen, influenced Alsted as well, while Comenius listed him among the authors to whom he was most profoundly indebted. Like Andreae, he was a deeply ambivalent figure, yet one of the most consistent emphases running throughout his diverse oeuvre is the aspiration for a universal reformation of state, church, society, and philosophy.[49]

Campanella is unparalleled but by no means alone. One of his major predecessors, Giordano Bruno, fascinated Alsted, who published one of his works for the first time, based on a manuscript acquired in Marburg from Raphael Eglinus. The German Renaissance cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), and the Croatian Platonist and utopian, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597), were further major influences on Comenius. French Catholicism could produce similar figures, such as the extraordinary linguist, Guillaume Postel (1510‒1581). So too could the Iberian world, such as the spiritual Franciscans who sought to create a “millennial kingdom” in the New World, and the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira (1608‒1697). In pursuit of universal knowledge and a Christian alternative to the pagan philosophy of Aristotle, the Flemish alchemical physician, Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579‒1644), drew on Paracelsianism and profoundly influenced later universal reformers in and around the Hartlib circle. Nor should it be forgotten that the entire anti-Trinitarian branch of the radical reformation (shortchanged in this overview of competing conceptions of reform only because Comenius was passionately Trinitarian) traces its origin to the Spaniard Michael Servetus, whose Restitutio christianismi proposed to restore pure, ante-Nicaean Christianity by overthrowing the anti-Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Influences from these traditions—compounded by the parallel developments in the Jewish world—were capable of affecting Protestant expectations as well.[50]

THE LONG REFORMATION

For readers willing to abandon the well-trodden pathways of confessional historiography and to trace the roots of Comenius’s vision wherever they lead, it should now be apparent that his universal reformation was neither a personal eccentricity nor a misconceived stepchild of Luther or Calvin but the synthetic development of older aspirations which—like the Unity of Brethren itself—antedated the magisterial reformations. And this helps explain why the desire for a general reformation spread beyond Protestant Central Europe to attract Franciscans in South America, Dominicans in Naples, anti-Trinitarians in Transylvania, Gnostics in Stockholm, Baconians in London, and alchemists in New England.

Historians are now familiar with the idea of a “long reformation” conceived as the gradual transformation of “political institutions, socioeconomic structures, gender relations, and cultural values,” beginning before 1517 and continuing well into the eighteenth century.[51] Perhaps it is time to expand that category to include the narrative of reforming aspirations rooted in the medieval period, rejected by the mainstream churches, yet surviving at the margins of both Protestant and Catholic worlds to influence significant developments deep into the eighteenth century and indeed beyond.

Within this expanded narrative, the welter of canonical, uncanonical, and popular prophecies which initially greeted Luther’s astonishing breakthroughs can be seen as expressing the hopes of peasants and artisans, preachers and prophets, spiritualists, mystics, and scholars for a coming reformatio mundi.[52] Seen from this perspective, Luther did not generate this energy: he harnessed and channeled it into his narrower reformation while obstructing all efforts to pursue broader reforms. Yet although successful in marginalizing alternative aspirations, the magisterial Reformers failed to exterminate them, nor did what G. H. Williams called the “radical reformation” die away in “a cluster of events around 1578 and 1579.”[53] Some alternative traditions fled to less inhospitable territory, most notably the anti-Trinitarians in Poland and Transylvania. Others hid their unorthodox aspirations behind a medical or alchemical façade. Still others survived through patient discrimination, finding niches within the complex geography of the empire within which to pursue further reformation. But none of the moments which seemed to sound the death knell for the reformatio mundi could destroy aspirations deeply grounded in the empire’s own self-conception, which were still alive when the advent of Pietism finally brings them back to the attention of Lutheran church historians of the latter seventeenth century.

A proper appreciation of this aspect of the long reformation may well give rise to a new strand of Reformation historiography. Today, the standard survey of radical religion in Germany jumps from the mid-sixteenth century to the radical Pietism of the late seventeenth with little more than two paragraphs on Jakob Böhme for the century in between;[54] but a new literature is already populating this interval with a host of colorful figures. Although the plural term “reformations” features in the titles of numerous recent works, the pluralism they celebrate remains impoverished, embracing merely the two magisterial Reformations of Luther and Calvin,[55] or their implementation in different countries,[56] or the successive phases of reformation and counter-reformation in a single country,[57] or even merely two different ways of describing early modern Catholicism.[58] Future surveys may explore how “the Reformation” of Luther and Calvin competed with alternative reformations throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and indeed eighteenth centuries; and once these competing reformations have been disentangled, historians may come to grasp how many of the innovations traditionally ascribed to “Protestantism”—including new approaches to piety, peace, toleration, religious freedom, the natural world, and the relationship between reason and faith—are more accurately understood as the accomplishments of the margins rather than the mainstream. The result may even be a new narrative arc bridging the universalist aspirations of the late medieval period and those of the Enlightenment in a manner almost completely absent from mainstream historiography during the past five hundred years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Aspects of this chapter have benefited greatly from the expert advice of Georgiana Hedesan, Leigh Penman, and Vladimír Urbánek, for which the author is very grateful.

NOTES

1. Quoting J. A. Comenius, De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica, ed. J. Červenka and V. T. Miškovskà, 2 vols. (Prague: Academia, 1966), part 6: “Panorthosia,” chap. 1.3. This general theme is developed at greater length in the first part of the Consultatio, entitled “Panegersia” or “Universal Awakening,” now accessible in J. A. Comenii Opera Omnia, vol. 19/I (Prague: Academia, 2014). The standard biography remains Milada Blekastad, Comenius: Versuch eines Umrisses von Leben, Werk und Schicksal des Jan Amos Komenský (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget; Prague: Academia, 1969).

2. Comenius, Consultatio, part 4: “Pampaedia,” chap. 1.6.

3. Comenius, Via Lucis (Amsterdam, 1668).

4. Johann Christoph Adelung, Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheit, 8 parts (Leipzig, 1785‒99); Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Three Foreigners and the Philosophy of the English Revolution,” Encounter 14 (Feb. 1960): 3–20; republished in expanded form as “Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution,” in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (1967; 3rd ed., London: Secker & Warburg, 1984), 237–293.

5. Trevor-Roper, “Three Foreigners”; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1627–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002); cf. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On the deeper roots of Bacon’s reformation, see the classic work by Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone: dalla magia alla scienza (Bari: Laterza, 1957; Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), trans. by Sacha Rabinovitch as Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science (London: Routledge, 1968); and the popular introduction by John Henry, Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon and the Method of Science (Cambridge: Icon, 2002). The lack of British precedents for these expectations is evident, for instance in the DPhil dissertation supervised by Trevor-Roper: Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

6. Hans-Joachim Müller, “The Dimensions of Religious Toleration in the Eirenicism of Jan Amos Comenius (1642‒1645),” Acta Comeniana 17 (2003): 99–116; H.-J. Müller, Irenik als Kommunikationsreform. Das Colloquium Charitativum in Thorn 1645 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004); Werner Korthaase, Sigurd Hauff, and Andreas Fritsch (eds.), Comenius und der Weltfriede (Berlin: Deutsche Comenius-Gesellschaft, 2005).

7. For the following, see Howard Hotson, “Irenicism in the Confessional Age: The Holy Roman Empire, 1563–1648,” in Howard Louthan and Randall Zachman (eds.), Conciliation and Confession: Struggling for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415–1648 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 228–285.

8. For Polish developments, see Kai Eduard Jordt Jørgensen, Ökumenische Bestrebungen unter den polnischen Protestanten bis zum Jahre 1645 (Copenhagen: Arnold Busck, 1942), 252–279; Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Consensus of Sandomierz: A Chapter from the Reformation,” Concordia Theological Monthly 18 (1947): 825–837; J. Tazbir, “Die Religionsgespräche in Polen,” and P. Wrzecionko, “Die Religionsgespräche in Polen unter dem Aspekt ihrer Unionsbestrebungen,” in G. Müller (ed.), Die Religionsgespräche der Reformationszeit (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1980), 127–144, 145–161. On Czech developments, see Jaroslav Pánek, “The Question of Tolerance in Bohemia and Moravia in the Age of the Reformation,” in O. P. Grell and Bob Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 231–248; and Zdeněk V. David, Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). On the French example, Hans Leube, Kalvinismus und Luthertum im Zeitalter der Orthodoxie (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1928; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1966), 26–28.

9. Pareus, Irenicum sive de unione et synodo evangelicorum concilianda liber votivus paci ecclesiae … dicatus (Heidelberg, 1614, 1615); German trans. by Gwinandus Zosius, Irenicum oder Friedemacher (Frankfurt am Main, 1615); Hotson, “Irenicism and Dogmatics in the Confessional Age: Pareus and Comenius in Heidelberg, 1614,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46/3 (1995): 432–453.

10. James Veazie Skalnik, Ramus and Reform (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002). As Skalnik also shows, Ramus’s own pedagogical reforms were part of a wider reform program to advance Reformed theology, congregational church polity, and a form of meritocracy which he called “timocratia.”

11. On the tradition, see Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

12. See, respectively, Gerhard Menk, Die Hohe Schule Herborn in ihrer Frühzeit (Wiesbaden: Historische Kommission für Nassau, 1981); Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Hotson, “The Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia,” in Steven John Reid and Emma Wilson (eds.), Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 227–252; Hotson, “The Instauration of the Image of God in Man: Humanist Anthropology, Encyclopaedic Pedagogy, Baconianism and Universal Reform,” in Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (eds.), The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science 1500–2000: Essays for Charles Webster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1–21.

13. Key article: Menk, “‘Qui trop embrasse, peu estreind.’ Politik und Persönlichkeit Graf Johanns VI. von Nassau-Dillenburg,” Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 7 (1981): 119–157. For broader context, Menk, Das Haus Nassau-Oranien in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2009).

14. For a part of this influence, see Hotson, “A ‘Generall Reformation of Common Learning’ and its Reception in the English-Speaking World, 1560–1642,” Proceedings of the British Academy 164 [Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson (eds.), The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)], 193–228. The influence of this tradition during the golden age of the Dutch universities will be treated in Hotson, The Reformation of Common Learning: Post-Ramist Method and the Reception of the New Philosophy, 1618–c.1670 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

15. Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983); Anita Traninger, Mühelose Wissenschaft: Lullismus und Rhetorik in den deutschsprachigen Ländern der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 2001).

16. Rossi, Clavis universalis: arti della memoria e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz (rev. ed, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983), trans. Stephen Clucas as Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language (London and New York: Continuum, 2000); Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Hotson, Alsted, 50–94, 153–181.

17. The Book of Concord, trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1959): The Augsburg Confession, article xvii, 38–39. Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, ed. E. F. Karl Müller (Leipzig: Deichert, 1903), Forty-Two Articles, article lxi, 521.30–35; Confessio helvetica posterior, article xi, 185.3–7.

18. Hotson, Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).

19. The most detailed study in print is Vladimír Urbánek, Eschatologie, vědění a politika: Příspěvek k dějinám myšlení pobělohorského exilu [Eschatology, Knowledge and Politics: On the Intellectual History of the Post-White-Mountain Bohemian Exiles] (České Budějovice: Historický ústav FF JU, 2008). More detailed studies are in preparation.

20. Most explicitly in the De zelo sine scientia et charitate, admonitio fraterna J.A. Comenii ad D. Samuelem Maresium (Amsterdam, 1669), 8–9; see Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 14–26.

21. Paula Zambelli (ed.), “Astrologi hallucinati”: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986); Heike Talkenberger, Sintflut. Prophetie und Zeitgeschehen in Texten und Holzschnitten astrologischer Flugschriften 1488–1528 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990); Nicholas Campion, The Great Year: Astrology, Millenarianism, and History in the Western Tradition (London: Arkana, 1994); Robin Bruce Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Urbánek, “The Comet of 1618: Eschatological Expectations and Political Prognostications during the Bohemian Revolt,” in J. R. Christianson, A. Hadravová, P. Hadrava, and M. Šolc (eds.), Tycho Brahe and Prague: Crossroads of European Science (Thun, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Harri Deutsch, 2002), 282–291. One of the best guides to the broader phenomenon is Barnes’s pioneering work, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

22. Nils Lenke, “Johannes Dobricius (1576–1653): ein Alchemist aus der Oberlausitz,” Neues Lausitzisches Magazin 136 (2014): 103–110; Valentin Weigel, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Horst Pfefferl, in 14 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996 ff.); Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991); Leigh T. I. Penman, “Jacob Boehme’s Intellectual Networks and the Heterodox Milieu of His Theosophy, 1600–1624,” in Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (eds.), An Introduction to Jacob Boehme (London: Routledge, 2014), 57–76; Carlos Gilly, “Wege der Verbreitung von Jacob Böhmes Schriften in Deutschland und den Niederlanden,” in Theodor Harmsen and Cis van Heertum (eds.), Jacob Böhmes Weg in die Welt (Amsterdam: In de Pelikan, 2007), 71–98; Wilhelm Kühlmann and Friedrich Vollhardt (eds.), Offenbarung und Episteme: Studien zur europäischen Wirkung des Werkes Jacob Böhme im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012).

23. The classic study is Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); see also Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1977; Stroud: Sutton, 1999); Matthias Riedl, Joachim von Fiore: Denker der vollendeten Menschheit (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004).

24. This movement is the subject of Penman’s eagerly anticipated book, Hope and Heresy: The Problem of Chiliasm in Post-Reformation Lutheranism (forthcoming).

25. Comenius, Lux e tenebris, novis radiis aucta ([Leiden], 1665); Mirjam de Baar, “Ik moet spreken”: Het spiritueel leiderschap van Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680) (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2004).

26. Bruce T. Moran, “Alchemy, Prophecy, and the Rosicrucians: Raphael Eglinus and the Mystical Currents of the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Piyo Rattansi and Antonio Clericuzio (eds.), Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 104–119. On Haberweschel von Habernfeld, the fullest study is Vladimir Urbánek, Eschatologie, vědění a politika (Budweis: Historický Ústav Jihočeské University, 2008), 145–207.

27. Rafał Prinke, “ ‘Heliocantharus Borealis’: Alchemy, Polish Sarmatism and the Fourth Northern Monarchy in the Prophetic Vision of Michael Sendivogius,” in Howard Hotson and Vladimír Urbánek (eds.), Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and Prophecy, 1560–1670 (forthcoming).

28. Paul A. Kirchvogel, “Tycho Brahe als astronomischer Freund des Landgrafen Wilhelm IV. von Hessen-Kassel,” Sudhoffs Archiv 61 (1977): 165–172; Moran, “Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel: Informal Communication and the Aristocratic Context of Discovery,” in Thomas Nickles (ed.), Scientific Discoveries: Case Studies (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 67–96; Karsten Gaulke and Michael Eissenhauer (eds.), Der Ptolemäus von Kassel: Landgraf Wilhelm IV. von Hessen-Kassel und die Astronomie [Kataloge der Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, vol. 38] (Kassel: MHK, 2007).

29. Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991); Heiner Borggrefe, Vera Lüpkes, and Hans Ottomeyer (eds.), Moritz der Gelehrte: ein Renaissancefürst in Europa (Eurasberg: Minerva, 1997); Menk (ed.), Landgraf Moritz der Gelehrte (Marburg: Trautvetter und Fischer, 2000); Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, Hesse: A Princely German Collection (Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 2005).

30. Johann Valentin Andreae, Rosenkreuzerschriften, ed. Roland Edighoffer and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2010). On the provenance, see Joachim Telle, “Benedictus Figulus. Zu Leben und Werk eines deutschen Paracelsisten,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 22/4 (1987): 303–326; Gilly, Adam Haslmayr: der erste Verkünder der Manifeste der Rosenkreuzer (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan; Stuttgart, 1994), 93–105.

31. Gilly, Bibliographia Rosicruciana. Das europäische Schrifttum zu den Rosenkreuzern des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, forthcoming). Meanwhile, the best overview of this literature remains his exhibition catalogue: Gilly, Cimelia Rhodostaurotica. Die Rosenkreuzer im Spiegel der zwischen 1610 und 1660 entstandenen Handschriften und Drucke (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 1995), which can be supplemented by Gilly and Friedrich Niewöhner (eds.), Das Rosenkreuz als europäisches Phänomen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan; Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2001); and Susanna Åkerman, Rose Cross over the Baltic: The Spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).

32. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972): WorldCat includes multiple editions in English, Italian, Spanish, German, French, and Turkish. The book’s most obvious flaw is to assume that Elizabethan England was in the vanguard of this movement and that the Palatine marriage of 1613 transferred it to Germany: an absurd claim, given the centrality of the latter and the peripherality of the former to this whole culture. The more fundamental mistake was ignorance of the much deeper roots of this culture in the self-conception of the empire, the medieval aspirations associated with it, the culture of alchemy and Paracelsianism, and various species of dissenting Lutheranism and radical Protestantism stretching back a century before the manifestos appeared.

33. On the work, see Penman, “ ‘Sophistical Fancies and Mear Chimaeras?’ Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso and the Rosicrucian Enigma,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 15/1 (2009): 79–98.

34. On Andreae, the major ongoing project is the new edition of his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann et al., 20 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994 ff.). The most recent attempt at synthesis is Martin Brecht, Johann Valentin Andreae 1586–1654. Eine Biographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008).

35. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulknert et al., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989‒1994), i. 89.

36. Gilly, “Hermes oder Luther. Der philosophische Hintergrund von Johann Arndts Frühschrift De antiqua philosophia et divina veterum Magorum Sapientia recuperanda,” in Hans Otto and Hans Schneider (eds.), Frömmigkeit oder Theologie. Johann Arndt und die “Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum” (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2007), 163–199; Donald R. Dickson, The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 54; Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 301.

37. On terminology, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 32–65. On the practical side, see Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

38. For medieval traditions, see for instance Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); P. J. Forshaw, “Vitriolic Reactions: Orthodox Response to the Alchemical Exegesis of Genesis,” in P. J. Forshaw and K. Killeen (eds.), The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 111–136; Georgiana Hedesan, “Reproducing the Tree of Life: Radical Prolongation of Life and Biblical Interpretation in Seventeenth-Century Medical Alchemy,” Ambix 60/4 (2013): 341–360; Forshaw, “ ‘Chemistry, that Starry Science’: Early Modern Conjunctions of Astrology and Alchemy”, in L. Greene and N. Campion (eds.), Sky and Symbol (Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press, 2013), 143–184.

39. Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); cf. Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997); Paracelsus, Essential Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Weeks (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007).

40. On the early tradition, see the superb collection of documents assembled by Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle (eds.), Corpus Paracelsisticum. Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Naturphilosophie in Deutschland: Der Frühparacelsismus, parts I–III (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001, 2004, 2013); Charles D. Gunnoe Jr., Thomas Erastus and the Palatinate (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011), 263–338.

41. Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540/2–1602) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004); Grell, “The Acceptable Face of Paracelsianism: The Legacy of Idea Medicinae and the Introduction of Paracelsianism into Early Modern Denmark,” in Grell (ed.), Paracelsus: The Man and his Reputation, his Ideas and their Transformation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 245–268; Gilly, “ ‘Theophrastia Sancta’—Paracelsianism as a Religion, in Conflict with the Established Churches,” in Grell, Paracelsus, 151–185.

42. Heinz Schott and Ilana Zinguer (eds.), Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).

43. Cf. Gunnoe, Erastus; Shackelford, “Rosicrucianism, Lutheran Orthodoxy, and the Rejection of Paracelsianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Denmark,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90/2 (1996): 181–204; Ralf Georg Bogner, “Paracelsus auf dem Index: Zur kirchlichen Kommunikationskontrolle in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Joachim Telle (ed.), Analecta Paracelsica: Studien zum Nachleben Theophrast von Hohenheims im deutschen Kulturgebiet der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994), 489–530. In general, see W. J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

44. The paradigm established in R. J. W. Evans’s classic portrait of Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; London: Thames & Hudson, 1983 [1997]) has been applied to his predecessor by Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). This aspect of court culture is particularly well illustrated by a series of exhibition catalogues, such as Kulturstiftung Ruhr Essen, Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II, 2 vols. (Freren/Emsland: Luca, 1988); Eliška Fučíková (ed.), Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City (Prague: Prague Castle Administration; London Thames & Hudson, 1997); Silke Gatenbröker (ed.), Hofkunst der Spätrenaissance: Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel und das kaiserliche Prag um 1600 (Braunschweig: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, 1998); Borggrefe et al., Moritz der Gelehrte; Hunter-Stiebel, Hesse; Peter Wolf (ed.), Der Winterkönig. Friedrich V (Augsburg: Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, 2003); Dirk Syndram and Antje Scherner (eds.), Princely Splendor: The Dresden Court 1580–1620 (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Milan: Electa; New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004); Ivo Purš and Vladimír Karpenko (eds.), Alchymie a Rudolf II. Hledání tajemství přírody ve střední Evropě v 16. a 17. století (Prague: Artefactum, 2011): English translation forthcoming.

45. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995); Peter C. Hartmann, Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches 1648 bis 1806 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2001).

46. For international comparisons see: Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Joseph S. Freedman, Philosophy and the Arts in Central Europe, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Hotson, Commonplace Learning.

47. On science, see Moran, “German Prince-Practitioners,” Technology and Culture 22 (1981): 253–274; and “Patronage and Institutions: Courts, Universities, and Academies in Germany: An Overview, 1550–1750,” in Moran (ed.), Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court 1500–1750 (Rochester, NY: Boydell, 1991), 169–183. The most comprehensive survey of these philosophical traditions is, revealingly, not by a Reformation historian but by a Marxist historian of philosophy from the German Democratic Republic: Siegfried Wollgast, Philosophie in Deutschland 1500–1650, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993). See also Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, founded by Friedrich Ueberweg: Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jean-Pierre Schobinger et al., 4 vols., vol. iv (2001): Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation. Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (Basle: Schwabe, 1988‒2001).

48. Arno Seifert, Der Rückzug der biblischen Prophetie von der neueren Geschichte. Studien zur Geschichte der Reichstheologie des frühneuzeitlichen deutschen Protestantismus (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1990); E. van der Vekene, Johann Sleidan, Bibliographie seiner gedruckten Werke (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1996); A. Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008).

49. John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

50. Patrizi’s main work, Nova de Universis philosophia (1591), was divided into four books—“Panaugia,” “Panarchia,” “Pampsichya,” and “Pancosmia”—which influenced both the form and the content of Comenius’s pansophic works. M. L. Kuntz, Guillaume Postel: Prophet of the Restitution of All Things (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981); Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The “Christian Philosophy” of Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2016); Thomas M. Cohen, The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Servetus, The Restoration of Christianity, trans. Christopher A. Hoffman and Marian Hillar (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2007); Brandon Marriott, Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds: Sabbatai Sevi and the Lost Tribes of Israel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).

51. Quoting from the abstract of Peter G. Wallace, The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350–1750 (2nd ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

52. Arguably the richest study remains Will-Erich Peuckert, Die große Wende. Das apokalyptische Saeculum und Luther (Hamburg 1948; repr. 1966 in 2 vols., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), on whom see Hanegraaff, “Will-Erich Peuckert and the Light of Nature,” in A. Versluis, C. Fanger, L. Irwin, and M. Phillips (eds.), Esotericism, Religion, and Nature (Minneapolis, MN: North American Academic Press, 2010), 281–305.

53. James M. Stayer, “The Passing of the Radical Moment in the Radical Reformation,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 71 (1997): 147–152. Quoting the synopsis in G. H. Williams, “The Radical Reformation,” in Hans. J. Hillerbrand (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), iii. 383; referring to Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1962 [1975]; 3rd rev. ed., Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1992 [2000]).

54. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Religiöse Bewegungen in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993). For a similar example by another leading expert see Günter Vogler (ed.), Wegscheiden der Reformation: Alternatives Denken vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1994). Meanwhile, the broader surveys of non-confessional theologians written outside Germany and America have tended to modernize and simplify them as “rationalists” or “humanists,” rather than treating them in all their contemporary complexity. For the former tendency, see Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del cinquecento: ricerche storiche (Florence, 1939 [1967]; 3a ed. immutata., 1978); repr. as Eretici italiani del Cinquecento e altri scritti, ed. Adriano Prosperi (Turin: Einaudi, 1992); German trans. Werner Kaegi, Italienische Haeretiker der Spätrenaissance (Basel: Schwabe, 1949), as well as Williams’s treatment of the “Evangelical Rationalists.” For the latter, Friedrich Heer, Die dritte Kraft: Der europäische Humanismus zwischen den Fronten des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1959). A noteworthy exception is Leszek Kołakowski, Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna. Studia nad chrześcijaństwem bezwyznaniowym siedemnastego wieku (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1965 [1997] [2009]); trans. Anna Posner as Chrétiens sans église: La conscience religeuse et le lien confessionnel au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1969 [1987]), which deals primarily with Dutch material, relevant also to Comenius’s latter years but not properly treated in the current survey of the Central European background.

55. Heiko A. Oberman, The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World, ed. Donald Weinstein (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003); German version: Zwei Reformationen: Luther und Calvin, Alte und Neue Welt, ed. Manfred Schulze (Berlin: Siedler, 2003). Other German examples include Ulrich A. Wien (ed.), Reformationen am Oberrhein: Wahrnehmungen von Luther und Calvin in der Region (Speyer: Verlag-Haus Speyer, 2011); cf. the older work by H. A. Enno van Gelder, The Two Reformations in the 16th Century (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961), which posited the Christian Humanism of Erasmus as the first and most influential Reformation.

56. Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); complemented by Lindberg (ed.), The European Reformations Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); James D. Tracy, Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650 (Lanham, MD and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999 [2006]); Alec Ryrie (ed.), Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Ryrie lists “Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic and Radical Reformations, national Reformations, princely and popular Reformations, first and second Reformations, Reformations of life, of manners, of buildings, even of the dead” (3), but it is the national Reformations which most clearly structure this volume. It should perhaps be added that Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and Derek Wilson, Reformations: A Radical Interpretation of Christianity and the World, 1500–2000 (New York: Scribner, 1997) falls outside this pattern altogether: it is not a history of the Reformation(s) but a set of interconnected essays on Protestantism and Catholicism in which, as Geoffrey Parker pointed out (New York Times, June 29, 1997), “extremes have been somewhat neglected.”

57. Christopher Haigh, Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Thomas Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Henry A. Jefferies, Priests and Prelates of Armagh in the Age of Reformations, 1518–1558 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1997); Samantha A. Meigs, The Reformations in Ireland: Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Anne Overell, Italian Reform and English Reformations, ca.1535–ca.1585 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Jefferies, The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010).

58. Keith Randell, The Catholic and Counter Reformations (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990). A welcome exception is David, Finding the Middle Way which attempts, controversially, to interpret the Bohemian tradition of an Utraquist Church as an alternative to both Catholicism and Lutheranism.

FURTHER READING

Barnes, Robin Bruce. Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Blekastad, Milada. Comenius: Versuch eines Umrisses von Leben, Werk und Schicksal des Jan Amos Komenský. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget; Prague: Academia, 1969.

Evans, R. J. W. Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; London: Thames & Hudson, 1983 [1997].

Gilly, Carlos. “Theophrastia Sancta: Paracelsianism as a Religion, in Conflict with the Established Churches.” In Paracelsus: The Man and his Reputation, his Ideas and their Transformation, edited by Ole Peter Grell, pp. 151–185. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998.

Hanegraaff, W. J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Headley, John M. Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Hotson, Howard. Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979.

Penman, Leigh T. I. Hope and Heresy: The Problem of Chiliasm in Post-Reformation Lutheranism (forthcoming).

Webster, Charles. Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Williams, G. H. The Radical Reformation. 3rd rev. ed. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1992 [2000].

CHAPTER 16

PIETISM

ULRIKE GLEIXNER

GERMAN Pietism represents the most significant Protestant renewal movement since the Lutheran Reformation. Its central features included new forms of sociability and an optimistic vision of the future associated with an encompassing reform of church and society. Demonstrative penitence and techniques of self-improvement were designed to lead to individual awakening and rebirth. For the laity and particularly for women, Pietism offered new possibilities for religious communal formation as well as individuation. Charity, child-rearing, education, catechesis, religious text-production, mission and media policy, as well as economic undertakings formed central fields of Pietist activity. Together with the Enlightenment, Pietism overcame class-bound conceptions of human beings and argued for the potential of human development.

The heterogeneous movement, arising among Lutheran and Reformed Christians alike, which developed from within was supported by theologians as well as born-again laypeople, and caught up people of all social levels. Ecclesiastical political reactions alternated between integration, toleration, and proscription. The greater part of the movement remained within state churches, yet radical currents with heterodox writings also formed. This repeatedly led to the criminalization of individuals and groups, who were not infrequently forced to emigrate. As a result of this expansive dynamic, the originally German renewal movement took root in neighboring Protestant countries (Denmark, Sweden, the Baltics, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) as well as in North America, and led to the founding of the first continental Lutheran missions outside Europe.

Particularly among church historians, the phenomenon of Pietism continues to be a subject of scholarly controversy. There is consensus neither about terminology nor periodization. One side of the debate has a broad concept of Pietism which locates it within religious reform movements around 1600 and includes a transatlantic perspective.[1] The other side has a narrower concept of Pietism, and sees it as a movement beginning with Philipp Jakob Spener and his text Pia Desideria, and extending from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth.[2] Although both positions have their merits, Pietism here is taken in its narrow sense, since this seems better suited to precise historical analysis. The narrower definition of Pietism is moreover helpful in view of the Pietist program, for Pietists turned away from the eschatology of Lutheran orthodoxy, with its emphasis on the impending end of the world, and cultivated a hopeful optimism about the future. Without this hopefulness, Pietism’s social and missionary activism cannot be understood.

Pietism was part of the religious Enlightenment in Germany. Based on an optimistic vision of the future, it advocated the education of all classes, promoted individual responsibility and self-improvement, and also applied itself to the study of nature. Innovative approaches and practices were grounded in Christian faith.[3] Elements of early Enlightenment thought including toleration, community, and solidarity entered Pietism through ideas of natural justice, as did the promotion of limits on the powers of state and church to protect the individual’s natural rights.[4] With its social engagement, practice of pluralism in questions of faith, and its contribution to public literary and political life, Pietism remained an agent and architect of modernity to the end of the eighteenth century.[5]

A CONVENTICLE MOVEMENT

Anchored in the Lutheran and Reformed churches, influenced at once by radical reforming currents and Puritanism, Pietism is related to the parallel movement of Jansenism within Catholicism and in the broadest sense to Chasidism in Judaism. The name “Pietism” emerged in the context of conflict with Lutheran orthodoxy. The terms “children of God” or the “truly pious” were preferred self-descriptions.

The Pietist devotional movement arose from the 1670s in the milieu of the influential theologian and minister Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and the lawyer Johann Jacob Schütz (1640–1690) in the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main.[6] Members devoted themselves to piety beyond the church service through meetings in the Spener household by the Barfüßer Church. This group formation very much corresponded to seventeenth-century notions of association, yet private religious gatherings had a political charge, since the state churches in German lands had a monopoly over the convening of religious gatherings. Spener and Schütz’s circle was initially composed of members of Frankfurt’s elite, but was subsequently opened to all classes and also to women. In the first phase of the Collegium pietatis, edifying literature was read aloud and discussed after an opening prayer; from 1674, Bible reading was set at the heart of meetings and Spener now described the gatherings as congregational gatherings, analogous to the congregations of the Early Church referred to in 1 Corinthians 14. In 1682 Spener transferred the meetings, from which the founding members had withdrawn, to prayer meetings held inside the church.

A new dynamic arose when Johanna Eleonora von Merlau (1644–1724) arrived in Frankfurt in 1675 and took up residence with the widowed Maria Juliana Baur von Eiseneck (1641–1684) in the Saalhof. Together with the couple Johann Jacob and Catharina Schütz (née Bartels) (1652–1721) and others, the two women then founded their own conventicle. Religious gatherings also took place in the house of Anna Elisabeth Kißner (1652–1730), wife of the doctor Johann Kißner and a friend of Spener. This chronology shows that one can by no means speak of a methodical foundation of the conventicles—they developed dynamically. From the very beginning, there were separatist currents alongside those loyal to the church.

In 1675, not long after his Collegium pietatis was established, Philipp Jakob Spener published his Pia Desideria with numerous proposals for the improvement of the church. This manifesto, which became a foundational document of Pietism, was strongly influenced by Jean de Labadies’s (1610–1674) reform texts La Reformation de l’Eglise par le Pastorat (1667) and L’Exercice prophétique (1668). The authors held in common their proposals to reform theological education, the central significance of Bible reading, and the reintroduction of early Christian gatherings. With the proclamation of a “hope for better times” in the Pia Desideria, founded on the biblical promise of the conversion of the Jews and the fall of papal Rome, Spener left the territory of orthodox Lutheranism. The millenarian eschatology of Pietism turned away from the orthodox Lutheran expectation of the Last Judgment, and instead placed its hopes on a thousand-year reign of God on earth before the end of the world. Two years after the appearance of Pia Desideria, Spener had received ninety positive responses from other theologians. A seven-page booklet was the only pamphlet against Pietism to appear, until the riots in Leipzig in 1689/90 which unleashed the so-called Pietism controversy. Only then did a paper war over Pietism begin, lasting several generations and generating 2,000 pamphlets by 1720.[7]

With the beginning of theological controversy, the appeal of conventicles also grew. From Leipzig, a wave of conventicles spread into central and northern Germany through visits, correspondence, and testimonies.[8] In March 1690, the Elector of Saxony issued a ban on private meetings and the theological faculty of Leipzig’s university set itself against university members involved in the movement. Pietistic students left Leipzig and carried the conventicle practice to other cities, including Eisenach, Erfurt, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Helmstedt, Berlin, Arnstadt, Colditz, Quedlinburg, Jena, Gotha, and Altenburg. A super-regional sense of belonging grew from the experience of being part of a new Christian community.

In some groups particular significance was accorded to sensory experience, and inspired visionaries spoke as “God’s instruments.” Accusations formulated in visions against the authorities and church had particularly explosive potential. Occasionally there were group visions, in which members perceived physical signs of Christ’s Passion like the sweating of blood. Letters quickly spread through the Pietist network the testimonies of those involved. Conflicts over private gatherings grew increasingly bitter among participants, parish ministers, and local non-Pietists. There were arrests, judicial examinations, and banishments. At the same time, female visionaries began to find themselves held at arm’s length by leading Pietist theologians like Spener, who from 1691 had been provost and councilor of the consistory in Berlin, and August Hermann Francke, called to Halle as a professor and minister in 1692.

LUTHERAN AND RADICAL TRADITIONS

It is uncontested that close connections existed between the reformatory efforts of Lutheran orthodoxy in the seventeenth century and Pietist approaches. The Lutheran devotional writings of Philipp Nicolai (1556–1608), Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), Christian Scriver (1626–1693), Heinrich Müller (1631–1675), and others promoted a more pious way of life. There was a shift of emphasis toward practices of personal piety which predated Pietism. Pietism grew out of developments which thematized rebirth, the internalization of the word of God, and penitence, and which called for godliness in everyday life. An immense influence on orthodoxy and Pietism alike was Johann Arndt’s (1555–1621) Vier Bücher vom Wahrem Christentum (Four Books on True Christianity), 1605–1610, and his prayer book Paradiesgärtlein aller christlichen Tugenden (Little Paradise Garden of all the Christian Virtues), 1612. Arndt oriented himself toward medieval mysticism and adopted the ideal of inner piety of the heart.[9]

The claim that Pietists wanted to complete the incomplete Reformation, and supplement the reformation of doctrine with the reformation of life, made a significant connection between the movement and the Reformation. Pietism smoothed over the rifts that had torn Lutheranism from Calvinism in the period of confessionalization. Philipp Jakob Spener’s reform manifesto took up Luther’s program: (1) faith should recreate the Christian as a new person; (2) the formulation of the “priesthood of all believers” became a motto for active participation by all Christians; (3) the connection to writers in the mystic tradition, especially Johann Tauler, was adopted; (4) through Luther’s reference to gatherings of those who genuinely desired to be Christians, Spener legitimated private conventicles and the church reform program of the ecclesiola in ecclesia.[10] Many Pietists cited the Reformer to legitimize their own writings and demonstrate their adherence to Lutheranism.

Alongside its rootedness in orthodox Lutheranism, Pietism also drew on traditions of Protestant thought from outside the denomination. Spener and the Frankfurt circle for instance undertook intensive reading of English devotional literature in translation, studying authors like Lewis Bayly, Daniel Dyke, Joseph Hall, and Richard Baxter.[11] Impulses from Netherlandish and German Reformed congregations were also taken up in the Frankfurt circle. The writings and ideals of German mystics, Anabaptists, Schwenkfelders, spiritualists, Paracelsists, and alchemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to have an impact a century later through religious discourse, small circles of devotees, and Protestant literature. August Hermann Francke and Count Zinzendorf for example were both influenced by Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and his central concern for new birth and inward transformation through Christ. The inclusion of female participants within “the priesthood of all believers,” at times in leading roles, was already evident among Schwenkfelders.[12]

PLURALITY: PIETIST DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE CHURCH

Research on Pietism, shaped by the tradition of ecclesiastical history, orders its material primarily according to territories, individuals, and institutions, but also, increasingly, according to systematic questions of cultural history. It is important to note that there was a variety of Pietistic formations. The most important are briefly outlined here.

Shaped by August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) and following the principle of “universal social reform,” Halle Pietism was adopted far beyond the borders of Prussia.[13] With the help of the Prussian king and influential individuals at the Berlin court, Francke, his colleagues, and followers succeeded in institutionalizing Pietism in Halle, and developing the newly established university into a Pietist training center. Considering that, previously, Francke had also moved in radical Pietist circles, it becomes apparent that this marks a turning point, where visionary practices were suppressed in favor of institutional, state-sanctioned work. First, a Dutch-style orphanage was founded in Halle, aided by state privileges and donations from wealthy patrons of both sexes. The orphanage complex was quickly expanded into a “school city” encompassing various types of school. These included the German school as a primary school, the Latin school that prepared students for university, and the Pädagogium regium for the upper classes and nobility—as well as a natural history collection, a library, a bookstore, and a printing house. In addition to full-time educators, the demand for teachers was met by students at the University of Halle who worked inexpensively as tutors and teachers in exchange for bed and board, financing their own studies in the process.

Francke outlined the principles of his innovative education program in his pedagogical text Kurzer und einfältiger Unterricht, wie die Kinder zur wahren Gottseligkeit und christlichen Klugheit anzuführen sind (Brief and Simple Instruction in How Children are to be Led to True Godliness and Christian Wisdom), 1702. Poverty was to be combated not through welfare but through self-help. Piety, diligence, and personal responsibility were the educational goals. All children regardless of their origins were to be supported on the basis of personal ability. Girls were not excluded from this program; however, efforts to integrate them into higher levels of education were unsuccessful.

Halle strategically developed its own printing and publishing houses, where advertising and information went hand in hand. Profitable economic ventures such as the orphanage pharmacy, consisting of a pharmaceuticals manufactory with a delivery department, contributed substantially to financing the orphanage.[14] Understood by its members as a foothold in the effort to realize the kingdom of God in this world, the Halle institutions had a global influence.[15] Orphanages and schools on the Halle model developed in the German-speaking lands, in England, Eastern Europe, North America, and India. Many of the university graduates influenced by Halle Pietism who found employment across the world as ministers, teachers, or even doctors, saw themselves as active ambassadors for the expansion of the kingdom of God on earth.

Whereas in Prussia the university and orphanage at Halle formed the nucleus of Pietist influence, in Württemberg Pietism influenced the entire regional church. Since not only the academic middle classes but also the church leadership and sections of the student body rapidly aligned themselves with Pietist devotion, there was little that orthodox theologians at the state University of Tübingen could do to oppose them.[16] Pietist conventicles also formed quickly among urban artisans, winegrowers, and farmers. Erbauungsstunden (devotional meetings) with a limited number of participants under clerical supervision were permitted under the Pietist Edict of 1743, and were thus integrated into church governance in Württemberg. At the same time, however, strong separatist movements also existed within both the middle classes and the rural population. Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), the Württemberg theologian most important to Pietism, developed a biblical and salvation–historical theology whose millenarian underpinnings fostered a culture of untiring work for the approaching kingdom of God. Meanwhile, the minister and theological writer Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782) advocated for a stronger spiritual orientation that would combine the pursuit of piety with research in the natural sciences and alchemy.

Pietism was not able to establish itself so comprehensively in other regions beyond Württemberg. The tolerant religious policy of several free imperial counties in Wetterau in Hessen, north of Frankfurt am Main, enabled the settlement of radical Pietist groups. In the Palatinate, Alsace, and Baden, Pietism within the church achieved only sporadic successes, since from the outset these territories took a strict approach toward separatist groups. In Westphalia it was particularly Pietism in the mold of Halle which gained a foothold; numerous circles of supporters formed in Westphalian towns. In Lower Saxony, too, Pietism within the church was only able to establish itself in isolated cases.[17]

A central role in the movement was played not only by Pietism within the church, however, but also by radical currents. The term “radical Pietism” describes separatist tendencies critical of the church as well as heterodox ideas and practices. Radical Pietists were found at all levels of society. Their hallmark was a dismissive attitude toward the church as an institution, which was seen as unreformable. This was at times accompanied by a rejection of the social order, marriage, and sexual morals. The radicals’ eclectic modes of thought were rooted in mystical, alchemical, and radical reforming traditions. Radical Pietists turned to the writings of Jakob Böhme and cultivated a mystical language as well as a millenarian vision of a new age of harmony and peace. Although very well connected through correspondence, travel, and itinerant preaching, they were often considered criminals and consequently lived in precarious circumstances.[18] Radical Pietism produced an enormous number of religious writings.[19] The theologian Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) for example emphasized the status of the truly devout in his Unparteiischen Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of the Church and Heretics), 1699/1700, independent of confession or church membership. His criticism of the church provoked a storm of indignation. The couple Johann Wilhelm (1646–1727) and Johann Eleonora Petersen, née Merlau, composed theological texts that aimed to spread their biblically grounded millenarianism and the doctrine of universal reconciliation, which taught that all human beings would be redeemed. Their writings became eighteenth-century best-sellers. They also formed a circle around the visionary Rosamunde Juliane von der Asseburg (1672–1712).[20] The theologian, doctor, and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel (1673–1734) wrote polemical texts against orthodoxy and openly criticized the lifestyles of high-ranking individuals. His life alternated between arrest, imprisonment, and exile. He spent his last years in Berleburg under the protection of the tolerant Imperial Count Casimir von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who was favorably inclined toward radical Pietism.

One of the many groups in which living prophets rather than Bible reading played a central role formed around the Swiss-born visionary Ursula Meyer (1682–1743), an unmarried stocking weaver. There were also separatist groups that lived in inconspicuous and retiring circumstances, cultivating Philadelphian, non-denominational principles of mystical inner love for Christ.[21] In contrast to England and North America, in the German lands there was no principle of religious toleration in the early eighteenth century. Since religious nonconformists were considered enemies of the state, many adherents of radical Pietism immigrated to Pennsylvania between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and later to the Midwest and Russia.

The Moravians can be located between Lutheran and radical Pietism on the basis of their development into a free church. Their founder, Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf (1700–1766), was born into a highly aristocratic family influenced by Pietism, and attended the Pädagogium regium in the Francke Foundations in Halle. After having been compelled to study law, he undertook a tour of the Netherlands and Paris. His experiences with Reformed and Catholic individuals encouraged his profession of an ecumenical religion of the heart and distanced him from Halle Pietism.[22] Following his return, he took up service in Dresden as electoral Privy Councilor and King’s Counsel in autumn 1721. This brought him into contact with persecuted Protestants from the Habsburg territories.

Shortly after his marriage in 1722 to the Pietist countess Erdmuthe Dorothea von Reuß-Ebersdorf (1700–1756), the couple settled Bohemian religious refugees—descendants of the Bohemian Brethren and mostly artisans—on his estate in Upper Lusatia. This settlement became the model settlement of Herrnhut, which in 1727 received a constitution “according to the manner of the first Christian communities,” and in which the “priesthood of all believers” was to be realized. The constitution stipulated various lay offices, and self-administration independent of the manorial system. The executive, pastoral, and diaconal offices were all occupied by both sexes. The entire community lived in so-called “choirs,” groups separated according to sex, age, and marital status, and forming household and economic units. The choirs were intended to promote individual religious development and internal cohesion. In addition to central gatherings similar to church services, they held their own daily prayer meetings. Daily scriptural quotations were issued as watchwords. Marriages were entered into by drawing lots and were understood as “militant marriages,” in the sense that each couple was to work for the community. New approaches to economic history are showing that unmarried noblewomen in leadership positions, possessed of higher levels of education and organizational skills, played a central role in Herrnhut’s entrepreneurial success.[23]

The Moravians, who enjoyed a strong influx from separatist circles, pursued intensive diasporic activities. Within only a few years, a dense network of circles of friends and new communities developed in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Scandinavian and Baltic lands, Russia, and elsewhere. Zinzendorf undertook missionary journeys to Riga, Reval, Amsterdam, London, the West Indies, and Pennsylvania. The break with Pietist movements within the church had theological grounds, but was also connected with the Moravians’ diasporic and missionary work. The Moravians rejected penitential struggle and awakening, relying instead on the Lutheran doctrine of justification. During the so-called Time of Sifting (1743–1750), the Moravians developed a Heilandsreligion (religion of the Saviour) with a doctrine of blood and wounds; its expressions included eroticized mysticism surrounding Jesus.[24] Adopting an ideal of childlike naturalness, they employed diminutives for religious concepts (little lamb, little sinner, etc.). When lay brothers and sisters, not infrequently married couples, were sent abroad and appeared in Pietist church contexts, conflicts with local clergy were inevitable. Both sides competed for influence over the devout.

PAST AND FUTURE

If Pietists followed the Lutheran conception of the past, there were nonetheless deep differences in their vision of the future. Lutheran ecclesiastical historiography began shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century with the Centuriators of Magdeburg, a group of authors surrounding the Humanist and theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–1575). Their aim was to depict the entire history of the church from a Protestant perspective, from the time of the Apostles to the Reformed present.[25] Touching on Luther’s dictum of the “true church under the cross of persecution,” the chapter on the persecutions of the church was central. From the writings of the church fathers, saints’ lives, and conciliar decrees, the team of authors distilled the true teachings which had always been preserved in the face of persecution by a small flock of brave believers. It was this which was held to guarantee the continuity of the true church, and not the Roman apostolic succession. This conception made it possible to historicize the Lutheran Church as the true and original church.

Pietist theologians adopted this line of reasoning and developed it for their own purposes. Making explicit reference to Flacius, Gottfried Arnold followed the method of the Centuriators of Magdeburg in his Kurtz gefasten Kirchenhistorie (Brief History of the Church), 1697. This work claimed to show that at all times there had been “witnesses to the truth.” This maxim was also central to his slightly later Unparteyischen Kirchen- und Ketzer Historie (Impartial History of the Church and Heretics), 1699/1700. From a Lutheran perspective, Arnold certainly overshot the mark by a long way, since for him every institutionalization, including that of the Lutheran Church, contradicts the essence of the Christian faith. His spiritual critique of the church only allowed for the true invisible church of the Spirit. Although the Centuriators of Magdeburg only published thirteen volumes between 1559 and 1574, their methods guided not only Lutheran but also Pietist church historiography. In particular, Flacius’s concept of witnesses to the truth was taken up by Pietist authors and used to legitimize the Pietist movement as the true branch of the Lutheran tradition.

Alongside scholarly historiography, Pietism cultivated biography as a form of popular history writing. The mania for biographies of individual figures stood in the Lutheran tradition of exemplary culture. Memoirs, biographies, and thanatographies (accounts of a person’s death) served to provide evidence of God’s grace at work in individual lives. In this way, Pietism cultivated a dynamic conception of memory that incorporated all the devout into the history of salvation. This led to the Pietists’ interest in genealogy, with biblical genealogical lists serving as an important model. No small number of middle-class Pietists constructed family histories with genealogical lists; these connected the elect status of the family and their inscription into biblical salvation history. Status-conscious and religious cultures of remembrance were combined here.[26] History’s ability to form identity was used in multiple ways within Pietism. Through the concept of the witnesses to the truth, the movement wrote itself into the history of the church as the true church, and thereby in a certain way repeated a process of inscription which the Reformers had devised for Lutheranism. Taken together, biographies and genealogies amounted to a Pietist history of salvation.

If in many respects Pietism could deploy and appropriate Lutheran traditions, when it came to conceptions of the future there was a significant break with Lutheran expectations of salvation. For, as has been mentioned before, the Pietist vision of the end of the world was millenarian. This meant that before the end of the world, the kingdom of God would be realized in this world for a thousand years, and only afterwards would the “Last Judgment” take place. Variants of this teaching divided along questions of whether crises would necessarily precede the kingdom of God on earth; whether God’s return would come to a close at the beginning or the end of the thousand-year kingdom of God; and whether the kingdom of God would spread gradually.[27]

In opposition to this, until the mid-seventeenth century Lutheran orthodoxy held fast to the expectation of an imminent end of the world, according to which earthly history would end in the near future with the return of Christ at the Last Judgment. Millenarian conceptions were marked as heterodox in the Lutheran Church, and being vocal in propagating them led to loss of office. Philipp Jakob Spener’s successors in Pietism within the church expressed millenarian views very carefully, and spoke indirectly of their hope in a better future for the church, and work for the rapidly approaching kingdom of God. This temporal horizon, at once worldly and positive, resulted in Pietist activism with its expansive work promoting conversion and education. Millenarian expectations became an essential structural element of Pietist culture.[28]

GENDER

The Pietist reform movement had a considerable influence on the construction of gender. Gender boundaries became more permeable, new forms of self-fashioning were practiced, and the agency of both sexes was enlarged. Due to the postulated equality of the sexes before God, and the movement’s focus on personal piety, new spaces emerged especially for women. Correspondence, religious gatherings, and visits developed mixed-gender spaces outside of family and employment. Conventicling spread among academics, the urban middle classes, artisanal classes, rural peasant populations, and to the courts of princes and counts; in all these places, women were among the conventiclers.

Research on gender has recently pointed out that women were especially attracted to Pietism and frequently took active roles within the movement.[29] Pietism’s new communication practices allowed women of all classes to transgress the boundaries of their positions marked out by gender. Illiterate maidservants became visionaries, middle-class women hosted Pietist meetings, and noblewomen offered protection to persecuted radical Pietists and engaged in religious writing.[30] Some highly educated women were numbered among the female Pietists. Both Anna Maria van Schurmann (1607–1678) and Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680) were part of the European republic of letters. Henriette Katharina von Gersdorf (1648–1726) composed religious poetry, and Johanna Eleonora Petersen wrote theological works.[31] Contemporary anti-Pietist polemics, meanwhile, exploited the active participation of women in mixed-gendered spaces in order to create images of sexual excess and discredit the movement as a whole. This effective rhetoric was one reason that male Pietists attempted to limit the public activities of female members. In the course of the eighteenth century, it became increasingly difficult for women to occupy leading positions within Pietism, as male Pietists sought to evade further criticism by curtailing women’s access to leadership positions.

The Pietist world view had an important impact on marriage. The emphasis on the religious relationship inside marriage and the highlighting of men and women’s spiritual equality opened new possibilities for a partnership. Nevertheless, there remained a fundamental tension between the obligation of mutual, symmetrical support and the asymmetrical subordination of wife to husband.[32] Pietist theologians advised against mixed marriages between orthodox Lutherans and Pietists, arguing that their different forms of devotion would lead to marital conflict.[33] The remarkable inclusion of women in the communicative culture of Pietism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a source of tension in the historiography of Pietism, which until recently has mostly excluded women. It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that church historians began to exclude the contributions of women from their histories of Pietism in favor of genealogies of pious men.[34] More recently, social and literary historians have begun to argue that questions such as the structure of communication, the role of religion in daily life, and the meaning of gender for the reform movement, are much-needed research desiderata.[35]

For research into women’s agency within Pietism, a strict polarization of Lutheran versus radical Pietism is rather unhelpful. In Lutheran Pietism we often find women acting as religious writers, hostesses, or leaders for women’s conventicles. Margaretha Undereyck (1633–1691), née Hüls, wife of the Reformed minister Theodor Undereyck (1635–1693), held a conventicle for women and girls, as did many other wives of Pietist ministers.[36] The evidence for women occupying positions of leadership is probably clearer in extra-ecclesial Pietism. In certain periods, for example, Moravian women had almost equal access to pastoral and organizational offices in the community, being excluded only from leading services and from preaching. Nevertheless, male dominance of the community’s leadership remained intact. Following the death of the charismatic leader Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, women were removed from leadership positions in the Moravian community.[37]

COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA

Verbal self-expression played a central role in conventicling. There were also extensive correspondences in which members reported on conversion experiences, persons, events, and conflicts, as well as new local developments. Frequently, letters were copied out and sent to several addressees. Religious communication within conventicles, alongside intensive cultures of letter writing and visiting, made Pietism a religion of communication.[38] The Pietist renewal movement intensified forms of communication in private settings, and in doing so it cut across class boundaries, as in many conventicles people of differing social strata came together in an egalitarian setting.

A directed media policy created networks of like-minded people. Periodicals played a central role here. August Hermann Francke, and later his son Gotthilf, published a periodical, the Ausführliche Berichte (Detailed Reports), 1710–1772, serving to advertise and inform readers simultaneously about the Pietist Indian missions. Another widely read edifying periodical was titled the Sammlung Auserlesener Materien zum Bau des Reiches Gottes (Collection of Select Materials for the Building of the Kingdom of God), 1730–1760. In Württemberg, Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785) published the journal Altes und Neus aus dem Reich Gottes (Old and New from the Kingdom of God), 1733–1739. Radical Pietists used the medium too, as with Geistliche Fama (Spiritual Fame), 1730–1744, a Berleburg publication. The Moravians were globally networked through handwritten reports of news which, like periodicals, were collated centrally and sent out to communities worldwide.[39]

The success of Pietist periodicals lay in their balanced mixture of salvation history and information. Alongside periodicals, the Pietist book market included biographical anthologies, autobiographies, religious poetry and devotional literature, theological texts, tracts, and sermons. By the end of the early modern period, there existed a differentiated religious media market in which Pietism had an important part. The Pietists’ intensive use of all forms of media cannot be explained solely by the general rise in print and literacy in the eighteenth century; it was also grounded in the millenarian perspective of the movement. Media were multipliers of news employed to spread the kingdom of God.

INDIVIDUATION, LITERATURE, AND MUSIC

The influence of Pietism on cultural developments was multifaceted. Church song, poetry, visual art, and also architecture were shaped by Pietism. The practical sciences of pedagogy, psychology, medicine, natural science, and ethnography received particularly important stimulus from Pietism, and led to perspectives that intersected in significant ways with the aims of Enlightenment, notwithstanding their different justifications and contexts.[40] Spoken and written expressions of religious experience, the use of diaries and Pietistic self-reflection in life stories, and autobiographies were performative practices of Pietist self-fashioning.[41] A pattern which developed in Halle was a written testimony of conversion preceded by an experience of penitential struggle. In Württemberg, life stories were composed in such a way as to make recognizable the effects of God in the individual’s life. With the Moravians, every member was meant to compose a life history before their death which integrated the individual life into that of the community. The path to salvation was sketched out, with formal variations, and had to be appropriated by the individual.[42]

Feelings, perceptions, and lifestyles were formed as Pietistic in a performative process employing external discipline and internal self-examination. The practice of systematic self-evaluation with a diary as its central instrument was an expression of a new culture of individuation. In writing, individuals developed a consciousness of themselves in as close a proximity to God as possible, and in isolation from their surroundings. To a greater extent than had previously been the case, women of all classes joined noble and educated women in this new writing culture. Pietism offered women from the middle and artisanal classes the opportunity to write about themselves for the first time. Keeping a diary especially was used by both sexes in times of personal crisis in order to reconcile external and internal demands in dialogue with God.[43] By cultivating autobiographical genres, Pietism made a valuable contribution to the development of modern individuation. Individual devotional practices directed toward personal renewal were of fundamental importance to the genesis of a modern subjectivity.

With its religiously motivated writing and poetic composition, Pietism created a new language of the heart. Characteristics of its specialized semantics and terminology were a constant adaptation of biblical and edifying formulations, a passion for allegorizing, the transgression of existing concepts and the generation of new ones.[44] Pietists developed a particularly strong engagement with the creation of religious lyric. Its language and themes shift between euphoria, melancholy, mystic spirituality, and a strong Christological orientation with sometimes erotically charged bridal mysticism.[45]

Pietists had a complex relationship with music, with different groups maintaining highly distinctive musical cultures. Hymns were the most important form. Lutheran Pietists and Moravians produced a lively hymn culture, while Reformed Pietists held organ concerts in their churches.[46] Hymn singing even structured Pietist sociability, and formed a component of various types of Pietist gathering. Radical as well as non-radical Pietists sang hymns at every conceivable opportunity, including conventicles, singing classes, and Moravian love feasts.[47] Moravians integrated wind-ensemble and organ accompaniment into their liturgy.

In the Halle orphanage and elsewhere singing and interpreting hymns were part of education. The Freylinghausen hymnal from Halle was particularly influential: composed of well-established Lutheran hymns from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it contained more than a few by pious Lutheran princesses.[48] Hymns were important as everyday guides and support in times of distress. In their journals and letters, Pietists mention singing hymns in solitude to comfort themselves in moments of misfortune. Halle Pietists and Moravians also exported their distinctive hymn culture to the New World. In North America, as in Germany, music played an enormous role in the formation of Pietist identities and communities.

AN EXPANSIVE NETWORK

The insight that Pietist activities were anchored in a trans-local network will in future require the development of network-based research. Such research would also make visible the personal connections between radical Pietists and those who remained within institutional churches, as well as the active roles of laypeople and women. Since Pietism did not form its own church, regional and group-specific variations developed and were transferred via networks. Of structural importance for the kind of network was whether its conventicling practice was integrable into the state church, tolerated at the margins, or forbidden.

The Pietistic movement was fundamentally a personal, institutional, and medial network whose connections can be understood as nodes, consisting of individuals, groups, or institutions. The network was polycentric, and there was a mutual exchange of information, practices, and goods between the nodes. The various centers retained their autonomy, yet were connected with the whole network and did not exist independently of each other.[49] Propelled by the millenarian idea of belonging to the elect in the kingdom of God, and of being able to lead more people to rebirth and conversion through personal effort, Pietism developed an expansive practice which reached beyond Europe to North America, the Caribbean, and India. The movement formed transcontinental nodes within the global network, and founded new local networks. The transfer of news and shared Pietist identity were secured by strategic media policies. Settlers were expected to provide regular handwritten reports and letters. Reports were shipped to Europe from the settlement and missionary fields and formed the basis for print communications processed in relevant Pietist centers, and equally feeding into the European book market and back into settler and missionary areas.

European networks existed from the beginning. The Saalhof Pietists in Frankfurt cultivated close contacts with the English Philadelphian society surrounding Jane Lead (1624–1704), and also maintained an exchange with the Netherlandish Reformed scholar Anna Maria von Schurmann (1607–1678). A Pietist network appeared between Europe and North America as a result of forced and voluntary emigrations. Early Pietists settled in Pennsylvania; exiled Austrian Protestants from the Salzburg region formed congregations in the British colony of Georgia; and various groups of radical Pietists found a new home in North America.[50] From the turn of the eighteenth century, Protestant state churches in Germany increasingly engaged in the Atlantic world and thereby fundamentally changed the nature of North Atlantic Protestantism.

Alongside the Pietist settlement movement there arose a Pietist missionary movement which, spurred by millenarianism, founded the first long-lasting missions of Lutheran Protestantism outside Europe. Amid these were missions among the Tamils in South India, the mission to slaves on the Caribbean islands, and the mission to American Indians in the Upper Ohio Valley.[51] The earliest was the Danish-Halle mission to India at the Danish trade base of Tranquebar (modern Tharangambadi), on the southeast Indian Coromandel coast on the Bay of Bengal. Founded in 1706, it persisted until 1836.[52] Alongside the Danish royal house, which supported the Halle missionaries, the mission was financed by a European network of sponsors that took a lively interest in developments and successes via epistolary contact with Halle.[53]

As well as missions outside Europe, Pietists engaged in missions to the Jews in the old world.[54] From as early as the Pia Desideria, the successful conversion of the Jews had been imagined as an important module in the realization of the kingdom of God on earth. The neglected children before the gates of the city of Halle, the Jews in the German lands, and the heathens in distant India were to be educated in a Pietist manner. In these parallel undertakings, their awakenings and conversions had to be promoted. Within the Pietist program, internal and external missions were components of the same project of reform.

NOTES

1. Martin Brecht et al. (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus, 4 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993–2004).

2. Johannes Wallmann, Philipp Jakob Spener und die Anfänge des Pietismus, 2nd rev. ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986); Wallmann, Der Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

3. Hans-Georg Kemper, Deutsche Lyrik der frühen Neuzeit, vol. 5/1: Aufklärung und Pietismus (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991); Udo Sträter, “Aufklärung und Pietismus—das Beispiel Halle,” in Notker Hammerstein (ed.), Universitäten und Aufklärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1995), 49–61; David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Achim Landwehr, “Alte Zeiten, Neue Zeiten, Aussichten auf die Zeit-Geschichte,” in Landwehr (ed.), Frühe Neue Zeiten: Zeitwissen zwischen Reformation und Revolution (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2012), 9–40.

4. Wallmann, Spener, 82–83; Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton (eds.), Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

5. Martin Gierl, “Pietism, Enlightenment, and Modernity,” in Douglas H. Shantz (ed.), A Companion to German Pietism 1660–1800 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015), 348–392, here 385.

6. Wallmann, Spener; Jutta Taege-Bizer, “Weibsbilder im Pietismus. Das Beispiel von Frankfurt am Main 1670–1700,” in Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz et al. (eds.), Frauen Gestalten Geschichte. Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Religion und Gesellschaft (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1998), 109–136; Andreas Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002).

7. Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 9–192; Wallmann, Pietismus, 50–56.

8. Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit: Pietistische Selbst- und Weltwahrnehmungen im ausgehenden 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2004).

9. Hans Leube, Die Reformideen in der deutschen lutherischen Kirche zur Zeit der Orthodoxie (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1924); Wallmann, Spener, 1–36; Sträter, Meditation und Kirchenreform in der lutherischen Kirche des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995).

10. Wallmann, Spener, 252–263.

11. Sträter, Sontholm, Bayly, Dyke und Hall. Studien zur Rezeption der englischen Erbauungsliteratur in Deutschland im 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr, 1987).

12. Brecht, “Die deutschen Spiritualisten des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Brecht (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 1: Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 205–240; Caroline Gritschke, Via Medi’. Spiritualistische Lebenswelten und Konfessionalisierung Das süddeutsche Schwenkfeldertum im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2006); Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 15–37.

13. Juliane Jacobi and Thomas Müller-Bahlke (eds.), “Man hatte von ihm gute Hoffnung…”: Das Waisenalbum der Franckeschen Stiftungen 1695–1749 (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 1998); Peter Menck, Die Erziehung der Jugend zur Ehre Gottes und zum Nutzen des Nächsten: Die Pädagogik August Hermann Franckes (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2001); Juliane Jacobi (ed.), Zwischen christlicher Tradition und Aufbruch in die Moderne: Das Hallesche Waisenhaus im bildungsgeschichtlichen Kontext (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2007); Holger Zaunstöck, Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke, and Claus Veltmann (eds.), Die Welt verändern. August Hermann Francke—ein Lebenswerk um 1700 (Exhibition Catalogue) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013).

14. Renate Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-Century North America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

15. Sträter, “Der hallische Pietismus zwischen Utopie und Weltgestaltung,” in Sträter et al. (eds.), Interdisziplinäre Pietismusforschung. Beiträge zum Ersten Internationalen Kongress für Pietismusforschung 2001. (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2005), vol. 1, 32.

16. Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969); Wallmann, Pietismus, 204–235.

17. Dieter Merzbacher and Wolfgang Miersemann (eds.), Wirkungen des Pietismus im Fürstentum Wolfenbüttel. Studien und Quellen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015).

18. Wallmann, Pietismus, 136–180; Hans Schneider, German Radical Pietism (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007); Wolfgang Breul, Marcus Meier, and Lothar Vogel (eds.), Der radikale Pietismus: Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Shantz, Introduction, 147–178.

19. Hans-Jürgen Schrader, Literaturproduktion und Büchermarkt des radikalen Pietismus: Johann Henrich Reitz’ “Historie der Wiedergebohrnen” und ihr geschichtlicher Kontext (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989).

20. Markus Matthias, Johann Wilhelm und Johanna Eleonora Petersen: Eine Biographie bis zur Amtsenthebung Petersens im Jahre 1692 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993); Ruth Albrecht, Johanna Eleonora Petersen: Theologische Schriftstellerin des frühen Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

21. Eberhard Fritz, Radikaler Pietismus in Württemberg: religiöse Ideale im Konflikt mit gesellschaftlichen Realitäten (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca-Academica-Verlag, 2003); Isabell Noth, Ekstatischer Pietismus: Die Inspirationsgemeinden und ihre Prophetin Ursula Meyer (1682–1743) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

22. For Zinzendorf and Herrnhut I refer to Dietrich Meyer, “Zinzendorf und Herrnhut,” in Brecht and Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 2: Der Pietismus im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 5–106; Wallmann, Pietismus, 181–203.

23. Heidrun Homburg, “Glaube—Arbeit—Geschlecht: Frauen in der Ökonomie der Herrnhuter Ortsgemeinde von den 1720er Jahren bis zur Jahrhundertwende: Ein Werkstattbericht,” in Pia Schmid (ed.), Gender im Pietismus: Netzwerke und Geschlechterkonstruktionen (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2015), 43–62.

24. Wallmann, Pietismus, 199; Paul Peucker, “Inspired by Flames of Love: Homosexuality, Mysticism, and Moravian Brothers around 1750,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (2006): 30–64; Katherine M. Faull, Masculinity, Senses, Spirit (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011); Peter Vogt, “Christologie und Gender bei Zinzendorf,” in Schmid (ed.), Gender im Pietismus, 63–92.

25. Martina Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik. Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2001); Harald Bollbuck, Wahrheitszeugnis, Gottes Auftrag und Zeitkritik. Die Kirchengeschichte der Magdeburger Zenturien und ihre Arbeitstechniken (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014).

26. Ulrike Gleixner, “Memory, Religion and Family in the Writings of Pietist Women,” in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), Gender in Early Modern German History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 247–274; Erika Hebeisen, “ ‘Vom Rand zur Mitte—eine weibliche Genealogie aus dem pietistischen Milieu Basels 1750–1820,’” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 52 (2002): 463–476; Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum. Eine historische Anthropologie der Frömmigkeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 349–391; Schrader, “Kanonische Heilige. Sammelbiographien im Pietismus und in der Erweckungsbewegung,” in Wolfgang Breul and Jan Carsten Schnurr (eds.), Geschichtsbewusstsein und Zukunftserwartung in Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 341–378.

27. Brecht, “Chiliasmus in Württemberg im 17. Jahrhundert,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 14 (1988): 25–49; Lehmann, “Pietistic Millenarianism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in Hellmut (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 267–279; Ulrich Gäbler, “Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft,” in Lehmann (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 19–48; Sträter, Utopie und Weltgestaltung, 19–36; Sträter, “Spener und August Hermann Francke,” in Dorothea Wendebourg (ed.), Philipp Jakob Spener—Leben, Werk, Bedeutung. Bilanz der Forschung nach 300 Jahren (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2007), 89–104; Breul, Geschichtsbewusstsein.

28. Wolf-Dietrich Schäufele, “Geschichtsbewusstsein und Geschichtsschreibung um 1700,” in Breul, Geschichtsbewusstsein, 29–55.

29. Richard Critchfield, “Prophetin, Führerin, Organisatorin: Zur Rolle der Frau im Pietismus,” in Barbara Becker-Cantarino (ed.), Die Frau von der Reformation zur Romantik: Die Situation der Frau vor dem Hintergrund der Literatur – und Sozialgeschichte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987), 112–137; Christel Köhle-Hetzinger, “ ‘Frauen im Pietismus,’” Blätter für Würtembergische Kirchengeschichte 94 (1994): 107–121; Albrecht, “Frauen,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, 522–555; Cornelia Niekus Moore, “ ‘Obschon das Schwächste Werkzeug’: Die Darstellung der Frau im deutschen Pietismus,” in Sträter, Interdisziplinäre Pietismusforschungen, 37–53; Hebeisen, Leidenschaftlich fromm: Die pietistische Bewegung in Basel 1750–1830 (Köln: Böhlau, 2005); Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum; Schmid, “ ‘In Christo ist weder Mann noch Weib’: Zur Aufwertung des Weiblichen in der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Meike Sophia Baader, Helga Kelle, and Elke Kleinau (eds.), Bildungsgeschichten: Geschlecht, Religion und Pädagogik in der Moderne (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 103–117; Schmid, Gender im Pietismus.

30. Moore, “Magdalena Sibylla Rieger, ‘die Poetische Eh-frau,’” Pietismus und Neuzeit 21 (1995): S. 218–231; Albrecht, Johanna Eleonora Petersen; Ulrike Witt, Bekehrung, Bildung und Biographie: Frauen im Umkreis des Halleschen Pietismus (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen im Niemeyer-Verlag, 1996); Irina Modrow, “Adelige Frauen im Pietismus. Das Beispiel der Benigna von Solms-Laubach, Hedwig-Sophie von Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg und Erdmuthe Benigna von Reuß-Ebersdorf als Vertreterinnen des frommen hohen Adels im frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” in Michael Weinzierl (ed.), Individualisierung, Rationalisierung, Säkularisierung: Neue Wege der Religionsgeschichte (Munich: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1997), 186–199; Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung; Taege-Bizer, “Adeliges Selbstverständnis und pietistische Reform—Reichsgräfin Benigna von Solms-Laubach (1648–1702),” in Eckart Conze, Alexander Jendorff, and Heide Wunder (eds.), Adel in Hessen: Herrschaft, Selbstverständnis und Lebensführung vom 15. bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Marburg: Historische Kommission für Hessen, 2010), 293–315.

31. Becker-Cantarino, “ ‘Die mütterliche Kraft unsrer neuen Gebuhrt’: Theologische Ideen und religiöse Wirksamkeit von Jane Lead (1623/1624–1704) und Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724),” in Ruth Albrecht, Annette Bühler-Dietrich, and Florentine Strzelczyk (eds.), Glaube und Geschlecht: Fromme Frauen—Spirituelle Erfahrungen—Religiöse Traditionen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 235–252; Robert Langer, Pallas und ihre Waffen: Wirkungskreise der Henriette Catharina von Gersdorff (Dresden: Neisse-Verlag, 2008); Mirjam de Baar, “Gender, Genre and Authority in Seventeenth Century Religious Writing: Anna Maria van Schurmann and Antoinette Bourignon as Contrasting Examples,” in Anne Bollmann (ed.), Ein Platz für sich selbst: Schreibende Frauen und ihre Lebenswelten (1450–1700) Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2011), 135–163.

32. Gleixner, “Zwischen göttlicher und weltlicher Ordnung: Die Ehe im lutherischen Pietismus,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 28 (2002): 147–184; Andreas Gestrich, “Ehe, Familie, Kinder im Pietismus: Der gezähmte Teufel,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, 498–521; Wolfgang Breul and Christian Soboth (eds.), “Der Herr wird seine Herrlichkeit an uns offenbaren”: Liebe, Ehe und Sexualität im Pietismus (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2011).

33. Gleixner, “Religion, Männlichkeit und Selbstvergewisserung: Der württembergische pietistische Patriarch Philipp Matthäus Hahn (1739–1790) und sein Tagebuch,” L’Homme 14/2 (2003): 262–279; Gleixner, “Spiritual Empowerment and the Demand of Marital Obedience: A Millenarian Woman and Her Journal,” in Ulrike Gleixner and Marion W. Gray (eds.), Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practise in German-Speaking Europe, 1750–1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 157–172.

34. Gleixner, “Wie fromme Helden entstehen. Biographie, Traditionsbildung und Geschichtsschreibung,” Werkstatt Geschichte 30 (2001): 38–49; Gleixner and Hebeisen (eds.), Gendering Tradition: Erinnerungskultur und Geschlecht im Pietismus (Korb: Didymos-Verlag, 2007); Gleixner, “Tradition and Rewriting Church History,” in Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser (eds.), Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009), 105–116.

35. Lehmann, “Vorüberlegungen zu einer Sozialgeschichte des Pietismus im 17./18. Jahrhundert,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 21 (1995): 69–83; Gleixner, “How to Incorporate Gender in Lutheran Pietism Research: Narratives and Counternarratives,” in Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James van Horn Melton (eds.), Pietism in Germany and North America 1680–1820 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 271–278.

36. Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters, “Der reformierte Pietismus in Deutschland,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 1, 241–278; Jan van de Kamp, “Religious Dissidence Both Resisted and Protected by Power: The Case of the German Reformed Pietist Minister Theodor Undereyck (1635–1693),” Usuteaduslik Ajakiri. Akadeemilise Teoloogia Seltsi väljaane. Erinumber “Religioon ja vastupanu” [Theological Journal. Publication of Estonian Theological Society. Special issue “Religion and Resistance”] 64/1 (2013): 27–44, here, 35.

37. Peucker, “ ‘Gegen ein Regiment der Schwestern’—Die Änderungen nach Zinzendorfs Tod,” Unitas Fratrum 45/46 (1999): 61–72; Beverly Prior Smaby, “ ‘No one Should Lust for Power … Women Least of All’: Dismantling Female Leadership among Eighteenth-Century Moravians,” in Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy (eds.), Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 159–176.

38. Brecht, “Pietismus als alternative Geselligkeit,” in Wolfgang Adam (ed.), Geselligkeit und Gesellschaft im Barockzeitalter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), vol. 1, 261–273; Gleixner, “Warum sie soviel schrieben. Sinn und Zweck des (auto-)biographischen Schreibens im württembergischen Pietismus (1700–1830),” in Sträter, Interdisziplinäre Pietismusforschungen, 521–526; Katja Lißmann, “Der pietistische Brief als Bildungs—und Aneignungsprozess. Anna Magdalena von Wurm in ihren Briefen an August Hermann Francke (1692–1694),” in Juliane Jacobi, Jean-Luc Le Cam, and Hans-Ulrich Musolff (eds.), Vormoderne Bildungsgänge. Selbst- und Fremdbeschreibungen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Köln: Böhlau 2010), 63–79.

39. Note Hallesche Berichte <http://192.124.243.55/cgi-bin/mission.pl>; Gleixner, Pietismus und Bürgertum, 176–194; Rainer Lächele, Die “Sammlung auserlesener Materien zum Bau des Reichs Gottes” zwischen 1730 und 1760: Erbauungszeitschriften als Kommunikationsmedium des Pietismus (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2006); Gisela Mettele, Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich: Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine als globale Gemeinschaft 1727–1857 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009).

40. Kelly Joan Whitmer, The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the early Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

41. Magnus Schlette, Die Selbst(er)findung des Neuen Menschen: Zur Entstehung narrativer Identitätsmuster im Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

42. Mori, Begeisterung; Fred van Lieburg, Living for God: Eighteenth Century Dutch Pietist Autobiography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006); Strom, “Pietist Experiences and Narratives of Conversion,” in Shantz, Companion to German Pietism, 293–318; Gleixner, “Pietism and Gender: Self-Modelling and Agency,” in Shantz, Companion to German Pietism, 423–471.

43. Gleixner, “Pietism, Millenarianism, and the Family Future: The Journal of Beate Hahn-Paulus (1778–1842) of Württemberg,” in John Christian Laursen (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, vol. 4: Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 107–121; Gleixner, “Pietismus, Geschlecht und Selbstentwurf: Das ‘Wochenbuch’ der Beate Hahn, verh. Paulus (1778–1842),” Historische Anthropologie 1 (2002): 76–100; Gleixner (ed.), Beate Hahn Paulus: Die Talheimer Wochenbücher 1817–1829 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007); Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750–1820 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009).

44. Schrader, “Die Sprache Canaan: Pietistische Sonderterminologie und Spezialsemantik als Auftrag der Forschung,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, 404–427.

45. Kemper, Deutsche Lyrik der frühen Neuzeit, vol. 6/I Empfindsamkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997); Kemper, Deutsche Lyrik der frühen Neuzeit, vol. 6/II Sturm und Drang: Genie-Religion (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002).

46. For this paragraph, I refer to Tanja Kevorkian, “Pietist Music,” in Shantz, Companion to German Pietism, 171–200.

47. Christian Brunners, “Gesangbuch,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, 121–142.

48. Gudrun Busch and Wolfgang Miersemann (eds.), Pietismus und Liedkultur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002); Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen, Geistreiches Gesangbuch: Edition und Kommentar, ed. Dianne McMullen and Wolfgang Miersemann (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2004–2010); Judith P. Aikin, “Devotional Songs by Women of the Ruling Families in Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Germany: Authorship, Dissemination, Compilation, Publication,” in Susanne Rode-Breymann and Antje Tumat (eds.), Der Hof: Ort kulturellen Handelns von Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Köln: Böhlau, 2013), 335–351.

49. de Baar, “Internationale und interkonfessionelle Netzwerke: Zur frühen lutherisch pietistischen Rezeption von Anna Maria van Schurmann und Antoinette Bourignon,” in Gleixner, Gendering Tradition, 85–105; Donald F. Durnbaugh, “Communication Networks as One Aspect of Pietist Definition: The Example of Radical Pietist Connections between Colonial North America and Europe,” in Strom, Pietism in Germany, 33–49; Guido Naschert, “Breckling als Netzwerker des protestantischen Nonkonformismus,” in Brigitte Klosterberg and Guido Naschert (eds.), Friedrich Breckling (1629–1711), Prediger, “Wahrheitszeuge”, und Vermittler des Pietismus im niederländischen Exil. (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2011), 3–18; Gleixner, “Potenziale eines Konzeptes ‘Pietismus als Netzwerk’ für die Genderforschung,” in Schmid, Gender im Pietismus, 3–17.

50. Strom, Pietism in Germany; Strom, Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010); Charlotte E. Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika. Mobilität und Kultur einer Gruppe religiöser Emigranten im 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011); Becker-Cantarino, “ ‘Neugefundenes Eden’? Raumvorstellungen deutscher Migranten in die englischen Kolonien Nordamerikas um 1700,” in Karin Friedrich (ed.), Die Erschließung des Raumes (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), vol. 2, 709–721; Alexander Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer: Formen und Mechanismen protestantischer Expansion in der atlantischen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015).

51. Carola Wessel, Delaware-Indianer und Herrnhuter Missionare im Upper Ohio Valley, 1772–1781 (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verlag, 1999); Hermann Wellenreuther, “Pietismus und Mission,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, 168–194; Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

52. Heike Liebau, Die indischen Mitarbeiter der Tranquebarmission (1706–1845), Katecheten, Schulmeister, Übersetzer (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Niemeyer-Verlag, 2008); Andreas Gross et al., Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India, 3 vols. (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2006).

53. Gleixner, “Expansive Frömmigkeit: Das hallische Netzwerk der Indienmission im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Heike Liebau, Andreas Nehring, and Brigitte Klosterberg (eds.), Mission und Forschung: Translokale Wissensproduktion zwischen Indien und Europa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010), 57–66; Gleixner, “Remapping the World: The Vision of a Protestant Empire in the Eighteenth Century,” in Becker-Cantarino (ed.), Migration and Religion (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 77–90; Gleixner, “Mäzeninnen im Reich Gottes: Frauen hohen Standes im Netzwerk der protestantischen Indienmission im 18. Jahrhundert,” L’Homme 2 (2012): 13–31.

54. Christoph Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus und Judenmission: Johann Heinrich Callenbergs Institutum Judaicum und dessen Freundeskreis (1728–1736) (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen im Niemeyer-Verlag, 2004).

FURTHER READING

Ahnert, Thomas. Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006.

Baar, Mirjam de. Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van Schurmann (1607–1678). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996.

Erb, Peter C. Pietists: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1983.

Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Martin H. Luther, pp. 16–49. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Lieburg, Fred van. Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe. Mainz: von Zabern, 2006.

Lindberg, Carter. The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Marschke, Benjamin. Absolutely Pietist: Patronage, Fictionalism, and State-Building in the Early Eighteenth-Century Prussian Army Chaplaincy. Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Max-Niemeyer-Verlag, 2005.

Petersen, Johanna Eleonora. The Life of Lady Eleonora Petersen, Written by Herself. Pietism and Women’s Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century Germany, ed. and trans. Barbara Becker-Cantarino. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Peucker, Paul. A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.

Peucker, Paul. “Pietism and the Archives.” In A Companion to German Pietism, 1660–1800, edited by Douglas H. Shantz, pp. 393–420. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015.

Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Shantz, Douglas H. Between Sardis and Philadelphia: The Life and World of Pietist Court Preacher Conrad Bröske. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008.

Shantz, Douglas H. “Homeless Minds: The Migration of Radical Pietists, Their Writings and Ideas in Early Modern Europe.” In Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–1820, edited by Jonathan Strom, pp. 85–99. Farnham: Ashgate 2009.

Sorkin, David. The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Ward, William Reginald. The Protestant Evangelical Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Ward, William Reginald. Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 17

PROTESTANTISM OUTSIDE EUROPE

MARK HäBERLEIN

FOR a long time, the study of a single religious movement—New England Puritanism—has dominated the literature on Protestantism outside Europe in the early modern period. Many scholars have focused on the Puritans because of the distinctiveness of their theology and social institutions as well as their contributions to American thought and culture. During the last three decades, however, historians have moved beyond this “Puritan paradigm.” They now emphasize the pluralistic character of American Protestantism, which was shaped by Anglicans, Scotch–Irish Presbyterians, Quakers, and continental European Pietists along with Puritans; and they explore the transatlantic and global connections of early modern Protestantism, which was not limited to North America but extended to the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Dutch possessions in Asia.[1] Building on this recent literature, this chapter traces the origins and development of Protestantism in a variety of colonial contexts from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

ARGUMENTS FOR COLONIZATION AND IMAGES OF THE NEW WORLD

While early Protestant Reformers propagated their understanding of the Christian faith and worked for the establishment of churches in Europe, they initially showed little interest in the world beyond. The Iberian discoveries and conquests in Asia and America and the resulting opportunities for overseas missions are absent from Martin Luther’s writings and received little comment from Lutheran theologians in the sixteenth century. According to Dennis C. Landis, “Luther and his early successors … accepted the principle that the biblical injunction to spread the gospel throughout the world had in fact been achieved and the Apostolic Age was past.” It was only in the mid-seventeenth century that German Lutheran theologians earnestly reconsidered the question of overseas missions and debated the possible role of their church in bringing the Gospel to “heathen” peoples.[2]

Instead, the spread of Christianity outside Europe initially “was largely a Catholic affair.” Led by missionary orders like the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and especially the Jesuits, Catholicism enjoyed a huge head start over Protestantism in Christianizing non-European peoples. Employing a mixture of coercion, cultural compromise, and innovative missionary tactics, Catholic priests spread the Gospel in large parts of Central and South America as well as the Philippines and enjoyed limited missionary success in India, China, and (temporarily) Japan.[3] Some Catholic clergymen even came to regard the Christianization of non-European peoples as a form of compensation for the loss of souls to Protestant “heresy.”[4]

It was not before the second half of the sixteenth century that Protestants began to challenge Catholic hegemony overseas in principle and practice. French Huguenots were the first to seriously explore the possibilities of overseas colonization. Huguenot leaders like the admiral de France, Gaspard de Coligny, envisioned French colonies as a counterweight to Iberian power and influence in the New World as well as a safe haven for their co-religionists. Coligny supported the chevalier Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon’s fledgling settlement in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro in 1555 and sent two expeditions to Spanish Florida after the outbreak of religious war in 1562. The French colony in Brazil was thwarted by Portuguese resistance and abandoned by 1560, however, and the nascent settlement in Florida was destroyed by a Spanish expedition in 1565.[5]

The main legacy of these failed enterprises consists in travel narratives that are not only noteworthy for their geographic and ethnographic descriptions but also for their powerful Protestant imagery. The later Calvinist pastor Jean de Léry, one of the chroniclers of the abortive French colony in Brazil, and the leaders of the Florida enterprise Jean Ribault and René de Laudonnière interpreted their experiences as part of the larger struggle for religious truth in the confessional age. As literary scholars have shown, these authors constructed a specifically Protestant martyrology that linked bodily pain to “true” religion and contrasted the Scripture-based culture of Reformed Protestantism with the oral cultures of both Catholics and American “savages.” Léry portrayed the native Tupinambas of Brazil as a carnivalesque “world turned upside down” in which the “foolish” behavior of the Brazilian natives mirrors the irrationality and violence of French Catholics. More than simply satisfying readers’ lust for sensationalism, Léry’s vivid accounts of Native American cannibalism are powerful statements in the confessional struggle of contemporary France: For Huguenots, Catholics who believe in transsubstantiation and devour the body of Christ are worse cannibals than American “savages” who ritually eat human flesh.[6] Several Huguenot accounts of the New World were translated into English and helped kindle interest in American colonization there.[7]

In the Elizabethan era, English advocates of overseas ventures linked religious considerations with economic and political arguments to promote the establishment of a Protestant presence outside Europe. According to David Armitage, the Protestantism of the English empire “depended upon a common anti-Catholicism that was more negative in content than affirmative in structure.”[8] In his “Discourse of Western Planting” (1584), Richard Hakluyt the Younger proclaimed that “this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargement of the gospel of Christe whereunto the Princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde.” Spain’s claims to exclusive dominion of the western hemisphere were a false invention of “the popishe Clergye … to terrifie the Princes of the [Protestant] Relligion and to abuse and blynde them.” Hakluyt was confident that English colonization would “inlarge the glory of the gospell and from England plante sincere religion, and provide a safe and a sure place to receave people from all partes of the worlde that are forced to flee for the truthe of gods worde.” As defenders of the faith, the English monarchs should take up the task of spreading the Gospel to the millions of heathens living in the darkness of religious falsehood and idol-worship.

Describing the native population in the nascent English colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina in the late 1580s, Thomas Hariot “hoped, if meanes of good government be used, that they may in short time bee bought to civilitie, and the imbracing of true Religion.” A few years later, Walter Raleigh promoted the colonization of Guyana as an “honourable” enterprise because it was supposed to free the native inhabitants “from the intolerable tirrany of the Spaniards” and “infinite nombers of soules may be brought from theyr idolatry, bloody sacrifices, ignoraunce, and incivility to the worshipping of the true God aright to civill conversation.” The translation of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas’s account of the conquistadors’ atrocities among the Native Americans heightened English awareness of Spanish “cruelty” and “tyranny.”[9]

While English writers acknowledged that the Spanish had successfully harnessed evangelization to military expansion, they claimed that Protestants would pursue a gentler missionary strategy. Consequently the early charters issued for English colonizing ventures usually stated the conversion of the natives as a primary aim. King James I instructed the early governors of the Virginia colony to make sure that
the true word, and service of God and Christian faith be preached, planted, and used, not only within the said several colonies, and plantations, but alsoe as much as they may amongst the salvage people, which doe or shall adjoine unto them … according to the doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within our realme of England.[10]

The successes of the early missions, however, were limited. Few natives responded favorably to Anglican Christianity in the short-lived English colony on Roanoke Island on the coast of present-day North Carolina (1584–1590) and in the struggling Virginia colony founded in 1607. Despite a fund-raising campaign in England, a projected Indian college in the town of Henrico in 1619 failed miserably. The best known early converts are the Algonquin Manteo, an interpreter and cultural broker for the English on Roanoke Island, and Pocahontas, a daughter of the native leader Powhatan who married the English settler John Rolfe. Both Manteo and Pocahontas (alias Rebecca Rolfe) traveled to England, where they were publicized as examples of the appeal of Anglicanism to Native Americans.[11]

PROTESTANTISM IN THE DUTCH OVERSEAS EMPIRE

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces emerged as the most dynamic European actor in overseas trade and colonization. Formed in 1602, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) managed to push the Portuguese out of the centers of the lucrative spice trade on the Moluccas and in the Malayan archipelago and built up a far-flung trading empire that stretched from the Red Sea to Japan. The West India Company (WIC), which was formed after the example of the VOC in 1621, was less profitable and failed to fulfill its chief propagandist Willem Usselincx’s vision of self-governing settler colonies manned by virtuous, pious Dutch Protestants.[12] Nevertheless, in the 1640s it governed a network of colonies and trading posts that included northeastern Brazil, the region along the Hudson River in North America, and several Caribbean islands and West African forts.

While scholars have long maintained that the Dutch showed little interest in spreading the Reformed religion, recent studies have emphasized that both the VOC and the WIC actively sought to promote Protestant Christianity overseas. Thus the national Reformed synod in 1618 debated “the propagation of the Gospel in the Indies and in other regions,” particularly in places “where our countries have commerce.” The second VOC charter of 1622 proclaimed that the company had been set up “for the preservation of the public faith,” and the WIC’s directors argued in 1628 that the company “had the following aims: First the glory of God; secondly the true Reformed religion, here, and the propagation of the same in other lands; thirdly, the welfare of the provinces … and fourthly harm to the common enemy.” Colonial governors in the East and West Indies were requested to uphold the position of the Dutch Reformed Church and provide aid to the missionary endeavors of its ministers. A seminar established by Anton van Wale in Leyden trained twelve Reformed missionaries for the East Indies from 1622 to 1632.[13] Moreover, the peculiar approach toward tolerance in the Dutch Republic shaped their religious policies overseas: While the Dutch were willing to grant individual liberty of conscience at home and abroad, they considered this liberty as a purely private, interior matter and sought to limit public worship to the Dutch Reformed Church in most places in the Netherlands as well as in the Dutch overseas empire. Dutch authorities usually connived at clandestine religious gatherings and informally tolerated religious minorities but rarely granted official toleration patents and frequently cracked down on open displays of faith outside the public church.[14]

Both the spread of Reformed Protestantism and the position of other religious groups within the Dutch colonies largely depended on local circumstances—the initiatives of individual ministers, the position of local authorities, and the demographic and political balance of power between the Dutch colonizers and other groups. On the island of Amboina in the Malayan archipelago, the minister Caspar Wiltens embarked on an ambitious missionary enterprise in 1614. He rapidly learned the local language and set up schools and congregations. At the end of the seventeenth century, there were almost seventy Dutch Reformed communities with more than fifty schools for a Reformed population that numbered roughly seventeen thousand people. On the island of Formosa (present-day Taiwan), the first Reformed minister arrived only three years after the Dutch had established Fort Zeelandia there in 1624. Like their counterparts on Amboina, the Dutch missionaries learned the local languages and organized schools and congregations, reportedly Christianizing more than 5,000 natives by the 1640s. The conquest of Formosa by the Chinese warlord Zhen Chenggong (also known as Koxinga) in 1662 put an end to this mission; the Dutch ministers were crucified and all signs of Christianity extirpated. In Ceylon, the VOC opened two seminars in the 1690s to train indigenous pastors and schoolteachers. In Batavia, the center of the Dutch maritime empire in Asia, where the Dutch were vastly outnumbered by Javanese, Malay, and Chinese inhabitants, the Reformed church established in 1616 became the focal point of the religious life of the VOC elite, and Dutch officials unsuccessfully sought to restrict public displays of Chinese religion. In VOC outposts and on Dutch ships where no ordained ministers were present, lay readers performed essential religious services.[15]

Northeastern Brazil, which the WIC captured from the Portuguese briefly in 1624 and again in 1630, was the only Dutch colony where Catholics and Jews were allowed public religious services in pragmatic recognition of the Portuguese settlers’ numerical superiority and the Sephardic Jews’ economic importance. Recife’s numerous Jews worshipped in their own synagogues, while Portuguese Catholic clergy were allowed to stay and largely retained their religious institutions and practices.

As in other Dutch colonies, however, the Reformed Church had a privileged status and closely cooperated with the government in matters of poor relief and education. There were twenty-two Dutch Reformed churches and chapels and twelve congregations governed by Reformed consistories in Brazil. More than fifty ordained clergymen and ministerial candidates were active there between 1625 and 1654. These churches were organized in 1636 as the “Brazil Classis of the Christian Reformed Church,” which was divided in 1642 into the Classis of Pernambuco and the Classis of Paraíba; together these two Classes made up the Synod of Brazil. With few exceptions, the Dutch did not build their own churches but continued to use the Portuguese Catholic sanctuaries, from which images and altars were removed. In addition to their work among the Reformed colonists and largely unsuccessful efforts to win over Catholic Portuguese settlers, several Dutch missionaries reached out to native Tupí villages. They prepared a trilingual catechism in Tupí-Guaraní, Portuguese, and Dutch (which was rejected by the Classis of Amsterdam) and set up schools in which native teachers instructed and catechized the children.

While the wish to convert Indians who had been Christianized by Portuguese Jesuits to Protestantism provided a major motive for missionary work among the Tupí, the latter were apparently motivated by a desire to strengthen their political and economic bonds with the Dutch, improve their social status, and gain access to schooling and literacy. Like other native peoples, Tupí converts adopted Protestant beliefs selectively and blended them with native religious practices and elements of Catholicism. Discussions to extend the missionary effort to enslaved Africans produced few results. Dutch Brazil’s pragmatic experiment in religious coexistence and the Reformed missionary effort came under severe strain after the outbreak of revolt among the Portuguese settlers in 1645, however, and ended with the Portuguese re-conquest in 1654.[16]

The WIC colony New Netherland, which was founded in the 1620s and became a center of the North American fur trade, attracted settlers from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds: German Lutherans, English Puritans, Walloons, and a small group of Jewish refugees who arrived after the fall of Dutch Brazil in 1654. In 1655 New Netherland conquered the small Swedish outpost on the Delaware River where a few hundred Scandinavian Lutherans lived and several Lutheran congregations had been organized in the 1640s. The congregation of New Amstel on the Delaware became the only Lutheran one in the entire Dutch empire to receive official recognition. Some religious freethinkers in the Netherlands openly advocated religious pluralism and “proposed radical social and religious experiments for New Amstel” which were influenced by Spinoza and the Dutch Collegiant movement.

While the vast majority of New Netherland’s settlers were Protestant, Governor Petrus Stuyvesant, who defended the public monopoly of the Dutch Reformed Church, clashed with Lutherans and Quakers, who demanded the right to public worship, in the 1650s and early 1660s. Stuyvesant and the Reformed ministers in New Netherland were strict Calvinists, and although they upheld the principle of liberty of conscience and generally refrained from religious persecution, they were adamant about granting official toleration to Protestant minorities. In 1656, the governing council passed an ordinance prohibiting “all such conventicles and meetings, whether public or private, differing from the customary and not only lawful but scripturally founded and ordained meetings of the Reformed divine service.” While the WIC directors supported the privileged position of the Reformed Church, they asked Stuyvesant in 1663 “to shut your eyes, at least not force people’s consciences, but allow every one to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbors and does not oppose the government.” When an expedition organized by the Duke of York captured New Netherland during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664, the English took over a religiously heterogeneous population. They refrained from creating a new religious establishment and granted official toleration to groups like the Lutherans. As a result of its Dutch heritage and the liberal religious policy of its English governors, New York added a distinct element to the religious pluralism which emerged as a hallmark of North America’s mid-Atlantic region in the later seventeenth century.[17]

ENGLISH PURITANISM IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEW ENGLAND

In the early seventeenth century, the English founded colonies on the Chesapeake Bay, where the settlement of Jamestown was established in 1607, on the islands of Barbados and Bermuda, and in New England. While political leaders in England expected that public worship in these colonies would be conducted according to the teachings of the Church of England, the actual outcome in each of these settlements differed enormously. While the Anglican churches suffered from a lack of qualified ministers, members of the Protestant reform movement known as Puritanism established their own communities. In contrast to Virginia and Bermuda, where Puritans were a dissenting minority and clashed with colonial authorities, they formed a majority of the emigrants to New England and managed to shape the institutions there according to their own conceptions of a godly society.[18] The result was a unique social experiment.

Historians have found it notoriously difficult to define Puritanism, as its religious leaders differed over important points of doctrine and church government and adapted their concepts to changing social and political circumstances.[19] Still, a few general characteristics may be identified. Puritans criticized the Church of England for its retention of an ecclesiastical hierarchy and Catholic elements in its theology and liturgy, and they called for the further purification of worship services and church government. In their view, religious life should focus on autonomous congregations, an intense piety, strict moral discipline, communal worship, and the preaching of God’s word. Puritans viewed history as a continuous struggle between the forces of Christ and Antichrist and regarded contemporary English society as morally decayed and corrupt. They believed that God had formed a Covenant of Grace with his people as a voluntary gift of redemption that held out the promise of salvation to the chosen few. In accordance with this view, they sought to shape individual and social behavior according to the dictates of the Old and New Testaments. While Puritans’ desire for moral reform and their fervent anti-Catholicism were shared by many other Anglicans, their opponents regarded them as overly zealous and self-righteous. When Elizabeth I and James I proved unwilling to heed the Puritans’ call for a further reformation, most Puritans persisted as a disaffected minority within the church.[20]

Only the radical fringe of the movement considered the Church of England so hopelessly corrupt that they separated from it. Persecuted by English authorities, several hundred separatists went into exile in the relatively tolerant Dutch Republic and formed congregations in Amsterdam and Leyden. Faced with economic difficulties and concerned for the spiritual fate of their posterity, several dozen members of Pastor John Robinson’s Leyden congregation decided to migrate to the New World. In 1620 these Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony, where they organized religious life according to their separatist principles. Congregations initially were completely independent, financial support for ministers voluntary, and in the early years laymen led services in the absence of ordained ministers. It was not before the 1650s that Plymouth passed a law providing for mandatory support of the clergy; at that time only three ordained ministers resided in the colony. The law met with considerable local opposition, however, and the government of Plymouth Colony did little to enforce its conception of religious orthodoxy on individual towns. With the notable exception of Quakerism, which was suppressed and persecuted around 1660, the colony showed a fair measure of toleration toward dissenting Protestant views.[21]

While Plymouth Colony remained a small outpost of perhaps 3,000 settlers in 1660, the Puritan leaders who formed the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 initiated transatlantic migration on a much larger scale. After the quest of Puritan Members of Parliament for a moral reformation of English society and a purification of the Church of England had failed in the early years of King James’s reign, the open embrace of “Arminianism” by James’s son Charles I and his dissolution of Parliament in 1629 effectively ended Puritans’ hopes for reform and heightened their sense of impending danger. In sharp contrast to Puritan conceptions of divine election and the priesthood of all believers, Arminians like William Laud, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, rejected the notion that God’s grace was limited to an elect few, advocated the use of an elaborate liturgy in worship services, and emphasized the authority of priests and bishops. Events on the European Continent, where England failed to counter the triumphs of the Habsburg emperor and his Catholic allies during the Thirty Years War, and economic problems in southeastern England added to the perception of a deep social and spiritual crisis. Alarmed by these developments and harassed by the officers of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, thousands of Puritans decided to leave the country and establish a colony that was destined to provide an inspiring example to other Protestant Christians. One of the leaders of the Puritan migration to New England, the Suffolk magistrate John Winthrop, blended familiar providential and anti-Catholic arguments when he claimed that

It wilbe a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into those p[ar]ts of the world, to help on the cominge of the fulnesse of the Gentiles and to rayse a Bulworke against the kingdome of Antichrist, w[hi]ch the Jesuites labour to rear up in those parts.

Upon the arrival of his fleet in America, Winthrop famously described the Puritan settlement as “a City upon a Hill” in which the Protestant world took an intense interest. An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people joined the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay from 1630 to 1642. Most of them were artisans and farmers of middling rank who hailed from East Anglia and traveled in family units and kinship groups.[22]

The society which Massachusetts Puritans created reflected their religious convictions. Some ninety ordained ministers joined the Great Migration—an extraordinary number, especially given the paucity of trained clergymen in other English (and Dutch) colonies. While ministers were unable to hold public office in Massachusetts Bay Colony, leading Puritan clergymen like John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Richard Mather, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport exerted considerable influence through their sermons and their advice on political and social issues. Hooker and Davenport played important roles in the founding of the Connecticut and New Haven colonies by leading their congregations there. In the early 1630s the leaders of Massachusetts Bay decided on a decentralized Congregationalist form of church government that gave local congregations a large degree of autonomy in the selection of ministers and the exertion of moral discipline. Significantly, no church courts were formed in the colonies. Church membership was restricted to “visible saints,” i.e. Puritans who had confessed their sins and narrated a convincing conversion experience to the congregation. The founding of Harvard College in 1636 ensured that the New England colonies would be supplied by theologically trained, orthodox ministers in the future.[23] While meetinghouses became the centers of the religious and political community in New England towns, they were simple, unadorned buildings and were not regarded as sacred, but as civil spaces.[24]

Like their counterparts in early modern Europe, New Englanders considered the family as the nucleus of community and society. New England towns were composed of patriarchal households in which men exerted authority over women, children, and servants.[25] While congregations experienced a process of “feminization” that resulted in sizable female majorities by the end of the seventeenth century,[26] colonists were wary of women challenging male authority and claiming a voice in public affairs. On the other hand, Puritan conceptions of companionship and marital love mitigated patriarchal authority, and women enjoyed considerable freedom in choosing their partners in a society with a demographical surplus of males. They frequently acted as executors of wills and were active participants in congregational life as well as indispensable members of the household economy.[27]

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay created a unique political system that scholars have labeled “godly republicanism”—a system in which political authority was mediated and the power of rulers constrained by the principles of consent, liberty, and equity.[28] The royal charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company had provided for the government of the colony from London by a governor, deputy governor, and eighteen assistants. When twelve members of the company decided to emigrate, the governing body transferred the charter to America with them. In 1630 the Court of Assistants granted the status of freemen to the residents of the colony, and four years later it yielded considerable power to the General Court of Freeman. Colonial officers, including the governor, were annually elected, and the General Court, which evolved into a representative assembly of deputies from the towns, secured the power to make laws as well as the right to summon and adjourn its own sessions. It also became the colony’s highest court of jurisdiction. In marked contrast to contemporary England, Massachusetts Bay “eliminated all aspects of royal rule and its adjuncts,” including the royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege. The colonies that were created with the expansion of settlement in New England—Connecticut, New Haven, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire—also decentralized political power and endowed towns with a large measure of autonomy. Although these developments were not approved in England, the outbreak of civil war there in 1641 prevented intervention into the affairs of New England and gave the colonies a large measure of de facto independence.[29]

On the local level, the town mirrored New England colonists’ communal and religious values. The founding of a new town was accompanied by a solemn covenant among the original proprietors. The town meeting emerged as the central institution of local government, controlling the division and distribution of land, the admission of new members, and the collection of taxes. The management of many day-to-day affairs was delegated to local officers known as selectmen. Although Massachusetts Puritans limited the franchise to full church members, i.e. to “visible saints,” scholars have estimated that fifty percent of the freemen were entitled to vote.[30]

While the leaders of Massachusetts Bay were clearly interested in establishing a viable economy and stimulated the development of production and trade, they were also concerned to control the forces of the market. The result of this ambivalent attitude was a system that historians have termed “moral” or “communal capitalism.” On the one hand, Puritans shared the Calvinist dignification of labor as a personal calling and a duty to God. On the other hand, they sought to harness individual activity to communal purposes. By freeing economic pursuits of feudal and corporate constraints and endowing them with a larger moral and communal purpose, New England Puritans created a diversified economy based on mixed agriculture, fishing, whaling, iron and timber production, and overseas trade. Settlers obtained individual landownership under secure titles and enjoyed a large measure of freedom in drawing up contracts. By abolishing most religious holidays and festivals, the Massachusetts Puritans created a working year of more than 300 days. While the General Court set up wage and price controls and sumptuary laws, their execution was left to the individual towns. The General Court, the courts, and the towns monitored economic behavior, sanctioned vices like “idleness” and drunkenness, and imposed standards of fairness and honesty in business dealings. Ministers’ sermons emphasized that economic behavior served moral and communal purposes.[31]

In accordance with their emphasis on preparation and salvation and their view of “spiritual life as a journey or pilgrimage from sin to salvation and glory,” New England Puritans structured religious life around an elaborate system of devotional disciplines that ranged from individual religious practices—prayer, meditation, and the reading of Scripture—through family devotions and private meetings to communal worship on the Sabbath that focused on prayer, psalm-singing, and sermons in a “plain style” accessible to all believers. Traditional saints’ days and religious holidays like Christmas and Easter were replaced by communal rituals like fast days, thanksgivings, the gathering of new churches, and the renewal of the covenant.[32]

A highly literate society, Puritans valued access to books, especially the Bible, whose message they took to be self-evident and accessible without intermediation. Another key work was John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, whose stories of heroic suffering for the faith reinforced Puritans’ view of history as a perpetual struggle with the forces of Antichrist. Besides the Bible and Foxe, devotional works like Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety and Arthur Dent’s The Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven, which laid out man’s journey from sin to salvation and grace, enjoyed great popular success.[33] New Englanders’ intense Scripture-based piety coexisted with a widespread belief in magical powers, visions, and prodigies, however, and many colonists resorted to healers, fortune-tellers, and magicians. They interpreted natural phenomena as signs of God’s providence and dreaded disasters such as earthquakes, hailstorms, and monster births as harbingers of divine wrath. Significantly, the one major outbreak of the witch craze in colonial America occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–1693.[34]

While Massachusetts Puritans understood Christian liberty as the freedom to realize their conception of a godly society, this did not include the toleration of dissenting views. When the minister of Salem, Roger Williams, called for a strict separation of church and state and criticized the colonists’ appropriation of Indian lands, Massachusetts Bay decided in 1635 to expel him.[35] In 1636 Anne Hutchinson, a self-confident and well-connected laywoman, caused a major controversy in the colony by criticizing the clergymen’s teachings on the importance of human action for salvation and arguing that grace was a free gift from God. When open strife broke out in the Boston congregation, Hutchinson was tried before the General Court for her “antinomian” views and in 1638 was banished from Massachusetts Bay. The settlements which Williams, Hutchinson, and their followers built on Narragansett Bay formed the nucleus of the small colony of Rhode Island, which became a haven for religious dissenters.[36]

In the late 1650s, two other groups challenged the authorities of Massachusetts Bay: Baptists, a strict brand of Puritans that limited church membership to adult believers and rejected state interference with matters of individual conscience; and Quakers, members of a radical sect that minimized the role of Scripture, emphasized the “inner light” guiding individuals, and allowed women to preach. When the first English Quakers arrived in Boston and a community sprang up in Salem, authorities reacted with fines, imprisonment, whipping, and mutilation and eventually executed four Quakers who persistently defied their sanctions. Like the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, these dissenting groups appropriated the imagery of persecution and martyrdom to interpret their experience in New England. Despite the authorities’ efforts to suppress them, small communities of Baptists and Quakers persisted, especially in Rhode Island.[37]

As the founding generation of New England Puritans gradually died out in the 1650s and 1660s, the second generation experienced a spiritual crisis that manifested itself through a “rhetoric of declension.” One reason for this crisis was the so-called halfway covenant. As thousands of laypeople abstained from communion and full church membership because they were unsure of their conversion, the Congregationalist ministers decided to extend the sacrament of Baptism to children whose parents were not full members of the church. This measure met with considerable opposition from local congregations. Attempts by the English crown to exert more control over the New England colonies after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and a devastating Indian War known as King Philip’s War during 1675–1676 further added to the colonists’ sense of spiritual crisis. The second generation of New England clergymen expressed these anxieties in the jeremiad, a type of sermon that combined reverence for the idealism and heroic deeds of New England’s founders with criticism of the apparent laxity and decline of piety among their successors.[38]

King Philip’s War, an uprising of a Native American confederacy headed by the Narragansett sachem Metacom, also dealt a severe blow to the only major attempt to spread Puritanism to New England’s native inhabitants. Although the “obligation to bring the means of grace to Indians suffering from its absence had been high on various lists of reasons that English Puritans had used to justify migration,”[39] Puritans’ view of Native Americans was ambivalent. Some of their leaders claimed that the land was free for taking as the original inhabitants were merely roaming the country and not using it productively, while others viewed the Native Americans as followers of Satan and inveterate enemies of the godly. When the Pequot tribe resisted the intrusion of English traders and settlers into the Connecticut Valley, several hundred natives were massacred in the brief but brutal Pequot War during 1636–1637.[40]

Puritan ministers’ missionary efforts met with considerable obstacles, including English notions of cultural superiority, the disastrous impact of epidemic disease on native communities, Puritans’ demanding standards of preparation for salvation, and the difficulty of interpreting Christian concepts in native languages. The major exceptions were the “Praying Towns” set up by the Puritan minister John Eliot and the missionary work of Thomas Mayhew Jr. among the Wampanoag of Martha’s Vineyard. Eliot gathered his native converts in special communities, where he instructed them in the Christian faith and the tenets of English “civilization,” including a settled lifestyle, English-style agriculture, European dress, and Christian sexual mores. This religious and social experiment involved the translation of the Bible and other religious texts into the Algonquian language with the help of native interpreters. In the early 1670s there were more than two thousand “Praying Indians” in southern New England, but only a small minority ever became full church members. On Martha’s Vineyard, where native communities were relatively intact, Christianization has been described as a process of translation that involved the blending of Christian and native religious and cultural concepts. In other places, however, it divided native peoples between Christian converts and traditionalists. When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, the Christian Indians were drawn into the havoc and ten of the fourteen “Praying Towns” destroyed.[41]

PLURALISM AND REVIVALISM IN ENGLISH NORTH AMERICA, CA. 1660–1750

In marked contrast to Puritan New England, ecclesiastical institutions in the early English colonies in southeastern North America and the Caribbean were weak and ministers few. Only six Anglican ministers served in Maryland from the colony’s founding in 1634 up to the early 1680s, and except for small communities of Presbyterians and Labadists, “most of Maryland’s Protestants were, in effect, unchurched.” The colony’s proprietors, the Lords of Baltimore, had actually conceived Maryland as an asylum for persecuted English Catholics, and the seminal Maryland Act of Toleration passed in 1649 was designed to protect the religious rights of the Catholic minority in a colony with a Protestant majority. Apart from Catholics, Quakers, who emphasized lay preaching and the values of community, benefited from the policy of toleration, the weakness of the Church of England, and the colony’s “stunning secularity.”[42] Quakerism also flourished in Virginia despite efforts in the early 1660s to suppress the movement. While the sacraments of the Church of England were rarely administered due to a lack of ministers and many colonists “presumably developed a casual attitude toward the church,” lay vestries played an important role in organizing and maintaining Anglican parishes in Virginia.[43]

With the exception of a failed colonization attempt on Providence Island in the 1630s, in which Puritan settlers and investors played a major role,[44] the English colonies in the seventeenth-century Caribbean were also characterized by the weakness of organized Protestantism and a conspicuous lack of piety. Although the expedition sent out by Oliver Cromwell to attack Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, which resulted in the conquest of Jamaica in 1655, “was framed in part as a religious war against the popery and cruelty of the Spanish in America,” Jamaica quickly became a haven for pirates and smugglers infamous for their raucous, dissolute lifestyle. When Barbados, the English Leeward Islands, and eventually Jamaica evolved into slave-based plantation colonies, the slaveholders obstructed missionary efforts among the enslaved African population. In the 1680s, eleven Anglican clergymen served some twenty thousand settlers on the island of Barbados, while the Quakers had organized six meetings. The colonial governors repeatedly fined Quakers for opening their meetings to slaves.[45] In general, however, Protestant missions to the Afro-Caribbean slave population did not gain a foothold in the English colonies until the later eighteenth century.

Viewed against this background, three major developments characterize the development of Protestantism in the English (after 1707, British) Atlantic world from the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 to the mid-eighteenth century: the growth of religious diversity; the consolidation of religious institutions; and the emergence of revivalism as a major spiritual and social force.

Whereas Virginia was at least officially committed to an Anglican establishment and the New England Puritans took pains to preserve the orthodoxy of their godly societies, the colonies founded during the reign of Charles II (1660–1685) were conspicuous for their lack of a religious establishment. Carolina and New Jersey, which were founded as proprietary colonies by royal courtiers and favorites in the 1660s, guaranteed religious liberty to Protestants of all denominations. So did New York after the English conquest in 1664. Ten years later the colony’s governor Edmund Andros was instructed

[to] permit all persons of what Religion soever, quietly to inhabitt within the precincts of your jurisdiccon, without giving them any disturbance or disquiet whatsoever, for or by reason of their differing opinions of Religion; Provided they give no disturbance to the publique peace, nor doe molest or disquiet others in the free exercise of their religion.

Carolina and New York received several hundred Huguenots who had fled France after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685.[46] New Jersey attracted Dutch Reformed, Scottish Presbyterians, Quakers, Anglicans, and New England Baptists, and was marked by a “radically decentralized religious system” in which “every town was essentially segregated into a different faith.”[47]

William Penn, who obtained a royal charter for a proprietary colony in 1681, had joined the Quaker movement as a young man and argued for freedom of conscience in numerous tracts which he published in Restoration England. The founding of Pennsylvania gave him the opportunity to translate his ideas into practice: Penn envisioned his colony as a “holy experiment” of religious liberty that had no established church and was to become an asylum for his co-religionists as well as for persecuted minorities on the European Continent. The promotional activities of Penn and his associates attracted not only English and Irish Quakers, but also Anglicans, Baptists, Swiss Anabaptists, and radical German Pietists. Swedish Lutherans who had settled in the Delaware Valley prior to the founding of Pennsylvania further added to the ethnic and religious mix.

The immigration of thousands of German and Irish settlers in the middle decades of the eighteenth century swelled the ranks of the Presbyterian, Lutheran, and German Reformed churches. Although the immigration waves reduced them to a demographic minority, the colony’s Quakers retained disproportionate political and social influence until the outbreak of the Seven Years War in the 1750s. While incidents like the prosecution of George Keith, whose views on church government and the importance of religious doctrine had caused a schism among the Quakers in the 1690s, and the exclusion of Catholics from public office in 1705 indicate the limits of toleration in Pennsylvania, the extent of religious liberty clearly exceeded that of most Anglo-American colonies.[48]

Whereas New England Congregationalists trained their own ministry in Harvard and later Yale, the Anglican, Presbyterian, Reformed, and Lutheran churches in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies were dependent on the supply of trained and ordained ministers from Europe. While this supply was often inadequate and many clergymen failed to meet the congregations’ expectations, all these denominations undertook major efforts to strengthen the colonial churches. Two Anglican societies formed around 1700, the Society Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, sent pastors, bibles, prayer books, religious tracts, and funds to the colonies. Presbyterians strengthened ministerial authority and improved the supply of trained clergymen by forming the Synod of Philadelphia in 1716 and founding the College of New Jersey at Princeton in 1746. Responding to pleas from German Lutheran congregations, the educational and missionary institution established by August Hermann Francke in Halle sent Lutheran ministers to Pennsylvania from the early 1740s, and the Halle clergymen set up their own coordinating body, the Lutheran Ministerium, in 1748.[49] A leading Pietistic theologian and skillful organizer, Francke, a correspondent of the New England minister Cotton Mather, had taken up the idea of a Protestant overseas mission in the early years of the eighteenth century and sent missionaries to the Danish colonial outpost at Tranquebar in southern India. The Protestant exiles from Salzburg who immigrated to the newly founded colony of Georgia in the 1730s were also accompanied by ministers from Halle.[50]

The organizational efforts of colonial churches and the growing size and wealth of individual congregations are mirrored in the architecture of church buildings. In the eighteenth century elaborate brick and stone edifices, often adorned by steeples and equipped with galleries, altar railings, pews, organs, and church bells, replaced the crude wooden buildings of the previous century, at least in large communities, and the seating arrangements within the churches came to reflect the social hierarchy within the congregation. Rural communities often worshipped in simpler edifices, and laymen played an important role in running congregational affairs in the absence of trained ministers.[51]

To renew faith and piety in their congregations, clergymen like the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts, the Dutch Reformed Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, and the Presbyterian Tennent brothers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey initiated local revivals in the 1720s and 1730s. Around 1740, these local revivals were swept up in the transatlantic movement known as the First Great Awakening. Following the lead of the immensely popular Anglican itinerant George Whitefield, numerous Protestant preachers traveled the colonies where their message of the “new birth” attracted large crowds. Among German-speaking settlers of the mid-Atlantic region, the ecumenical movement of Nikolaus von Zinzendorf’s Moravian Brethren challenged established religious boundaries and sparked intense controversy. While the issue of revivalism divided Protestant denominations like the Congregationalists in New England and the Presbyterians in the mid-Atlantic region, there is no doubt that it had a dynamic, invigorating impact on Protestant religiosity in British North America.[52] Taken together, organizational growth, increasing religious diversity, and evangelical revivalism profoundly transformed Protestant Christianity in eighteenth-century British America and created a distinct religious mosaic that set it apart from Protestant Europe.

NOTES

1. See e.g., Charles L. Cohen, “The Post-Puritan Paradigm of Early American Religious History,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 695–723; Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania 1517–1740 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

2. Dennis C. Landis, “Lutherans Meet the Indians: A Seventeenth-Century Conversion Debate,” in James Muldoon (ed.), The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2005), 99–117, quote on p. 100. Cf. Heinz Schilling, Martin Luther: Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs. Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012), 26; Hermann Wellenreuther, “Pietismus und Mission. Vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Hartmut Lehmann (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus. Vol. 4: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 166–193, esp. 166–167.

3. Pestana, Protestant Empire, 56 (quote), 62; Wolfgang Reinhard, Globalisierung des Christentums? (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 16–20.

4. Pestana, Protestant Empire, 33, 63; James Muldoon, “Introduction: Seeking Spiritual Gold in the Americas,” in Muldoon (ed.), The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, 1–16, here p. 1.

5. Frank Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le Sauvage: L’Amérique et la controverse colonial, en France, au temps des guerres de Religion (1555–1589), 3rd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 39–64; Bertrand van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 2–3; Owen Stanwood, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations in Early America,” in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (eds.), The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 218–240, esp. 221–223; Susanne Lachenicht, Hugenotten in Europa und Nordamerika: Migration und Integration in der Frühen Neuzeit (Fankfurt and New York: Campus, 2010), 85–86.

6. Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le Sauvage, 31–35, 77–128, 145–161; Kirsten Mahlke, Offenbarung im Westen. Frühe Berichte aus der Neuen Welt (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005), 48–83, 141–195.

7. Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le Sauvage, 171; Lachenicht, Hugenotten, 86.

8. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61–99, quote on p. 66; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 63–64.

9. Quotes from Peter C. Mancall (ed.), Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580–1640 (Boston, MA and New York: St Martin's Press, 1995), 46–47, 52, 77, 108. On the younger Hakluyt’s use of religious and anti-Spanish arguments, see Armitage, The Ideological Origins, 75–80; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 139–140; Stanwood, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations,” 223–224. On the impact of Las Casas, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 8–11.

10. Quoted after Pestana, Protestant Empire, 68–69.

11. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 179–182; Michael Leroy Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful Englishman’: Manteo and the Early Anglo-Indian Exchange,” Itinerario 24(2) (2000): 146–169; Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “England’s ‘Others’ in the Old and New Worlds,” in Francis J. Bremer and Lynn A. Botelho (eds.), The World of John Winthrop: Essays on England and New England, 1588–1649 (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005), 22–74, esp. 46–49; Karen O. Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 195–203; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 70–71, 92.

12. Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 50–68.

13. Frans Leonard Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998), 99–100 (quotes on p. 99); Jürgen G. Nagel, “Predikanten und Ziekentrooster: Der Protestantismus in der Welt der Verenigden Oostindischen Compagnie,” in Michael Mann (ed.), Europäische Aufklärung und protestantische Mission in Indien (Heidelberg: Draupadi, 2006), 101–121, esp. 103–104, 108; Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 85 (quotes), 89; Landis, “Lutherans Meet the Indians,” 109.

14. Haefeli, New Netherland, 20–84.

15. Cf. Nagel, “Predikanten und Ziekentrooster,” 106–118; Gijsbert M. Koolen, Een seer bequam middel. Onderwijs en kerk onder de 17e-eeuwse VOC (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1993); Jurrien van Goor, “God and Trade: Morals and Religion under the Dutch East India Company,” in Karl Anton Sprengel and Roderich Ptak (eds.), Maritime Asia: Profit Maximisation, Ethics and Trade Structure c. 1300–1800 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 201–220; Haefeli, New Netherland, 124–125, 128–133, 220–221; and the essays in Gerrit J. Schutte (ed.), Het Indisch Sion. De Gereformeerde kerk onder de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002).

16. Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil, 67–304; Jonathan Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 13–31; Mark Meuwese, “Dutch Calvinism and Native Americans: A Comparative Study of the Motivations for Protestant Conversion in Northeastern Brazil (1630–1654) and the Mohawks in Central New York (1690–1710),” in Muldoon, The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, 118–141; Haefeli, New Netherland, 98–103, 127–128.

17. Haefeli, New Netherland, 135–278 (quotes on pp. 141, 229, 233); cf. also Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 228–237; Rink, “Private Interest and Godly Gain: The West India Company and the Dutch Reformed Church in New Netherland, 1624–1664,” New York History 75 (1994): 245–264; Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Practicing Toleration in Dutch New Netherland,” in Beneke and Grenda (eds.), The First Prejudice, 98–122. On the Lutheran church of New Sweden, see Frank Blomfelt, “The Lutheran Churches and their Pastors in New Sweden, 1638–1655,” in Carol E. Hoffecker et al. (eds.), New Sweden in America (Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 249–276.

18. Mark A. Peterson, “The Practice of Piety in Puritan New England: Contexts and Consequences,” in Bremer and Botelho (eds.), The World of John Winthrop, 75–110, esp. 81–84; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 382–394; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 68, 85, 88.

19. These shifts and debates are explored in Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

20. Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards, 2nd ed. (New Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1995), 1–28; Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on Hill (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), 14–25, 28–29.

21. J. M. Bumsted, The Pilgrim’s Progress: The Ecclesiastical History of the Old Colony, 1620–1675 (New York and London: Garland, 1989), 8–26; George D. Langdon Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 2–11, 58–78, 100–140; Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 29–36; Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg: Geschichte Nordamerikas vom Beginn der Besiedlung bis zum Ausgang des 17. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: LIT, 2000), 299–312; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 111–133.

22. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12–88; Foster, The Long Argument, 108–137; Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 37–47; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 67–88, 166–172, 188–193. Winthrop quote after Mancall, Envisioning America, 134.

23. David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 96–126; cf. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 105–113, 117–120; Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg, 340–344; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 76–77.

24. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 166–167; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 56–57.

25. R. Todd Romero, Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early New England (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 7, 36, 44; cf. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 114.

26. Harry S. Stout and Catherine Brekus, “A New England Congregation: Center Church, New Haven, 1638–1989,” in James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (eds.), American Congregations. Vol. 1: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14–102, esp. 40–43; Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 64.

27. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 114–116; Hall, A Reforming People, 71–72.

28. Hall, A Reforming People, 9–11; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 185.

29. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 58–62, 73–80, 121–126; Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg, 323–336, 344–352, 366–379; Hall, A Reforming People, 22–52; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 193–204.

30. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 101–105; Anderson, New England’s Generation, 89–130; Hall, A Reforming People, 53–95; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 195–200.

31. While Stephen Innes argues that “Puritanism played a key role in the transition to capitalism” by tying economic gain to providential purpose, Mark Valeri “emphasizes Puritan ambivalence toward, even resistance against, the new economy or what may be termed in shorthand as ‘the market’.” Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995); Mark Valeri, “Puritans in the Marketplace,” in Bremer and Botelho (eds.), The World of John Winthrop, 147–186, quote on p. 149. According to Virginia D. Anderson, most New Englanders aspired to “competency”—economic security, household independence, and moderate prosperity—rather than to great wealth: Anderson, New England’s Generation, 131–176.

32. Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), quote on p. 20; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 122–124, 166–185; Peterson, “The Practice of Piety.”

33. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 21–70; Foster, The Long Argument, 85–92. On the impact of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, cf. Adrian Chastain Weimer, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

34. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 71–116, 189–196; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 70–73, 94. The numerous studies on witchhunting in New England include John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, rev. ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

35. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 62–65, 80–83; Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg, 354–357; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 206–224. Cf. Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

36. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 65–70; Winship, The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson: Puritans Divided (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2005).

37. Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Pestana, Protestant Empire, 83–84, 90; Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 138–139, 154–161; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 186–189; Weimer, Martyrs’ Mirror, 78–117.

38. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 161–167; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 139 (quote), 161–162; Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 242–277; Foster, The Long Argument, 180–230; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 61–63.

39. Peterson, “The Practice of Piety,” 86.

40. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence. Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 176–177, 197–198, 203–215; David S. Lovejoy, “Satanizing the American Indian,” New England Quarterly 67 (1994): 603–621; Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

41. Salisbury, “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 31 (1974): 27–54; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 131–150, 159–162, 169–172, 176–178, 182–186, 218–241; Cohen, “Conversion among Puritans and Amerindians: A Theological and Cultural Perspective,” in Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 233–256; Annie Parker, “Conversion in Theory and Practice: John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians,” in Muldoon (ed.), The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, 78–98; David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 62/2 (2005): 141–174; Romero, Making War and Minting Christians. Pestana, Protestant Empire, 105–106 emphasizes the sharp contrast between Catholic and Protestant missionary efforts. On King Philip’s War, cf. Lepore, The Name of War; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 129–135.

42. Michael Graham, “Meetinghouse and Chapel: Religion and Community in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (eds.), Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 242–274 (quote on p. 257); Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 51–55 (quote on p. 53); Horn, Adapting to a New World, 387–389.

43. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 38–51; Horn, Adapting to a New World, 394–411.

44. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island: The Other Puritan Colony, 1630–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

45. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 103–106; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 89 (quote), 101–104, 110.

46. Governor Andros quoted after Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975), 86–87. On the Huguenots see van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden; Lachenicht, Hugenotten, 86–89, 150–167, 297–324.

47. John E. Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 7–48, 98–102, 107–116; Douglas C. Jacobsen, An Unprov’d Experiment: Religious Pluralism in Colonial New Jersey (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991), 22–31; Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg, 555–562; Haefeli, New Netherland, 263–264 (quotes).

48. Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York and London: New York University Press, 1987); J. William Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 13–47; Arlin M. Adams, “William Penn and the American Heritage of Religious Liberty,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 (1993): 516–526; Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg, 546–555; Andrew R. Murphy, “Persecuting Quakers? Liberty and Toleration in Early Pennsylvania,” in Beneke and Grenda (eds.), The First Prejudice, 143–165. See also Pestana, Protestant Empire, 108–111, 118–123.

49. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 99–105, 116–128; Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 188–192; cf. Mark Häberlein, “Reform, Authority and Conflict in the Churches of the Middle Colonies, 1700–1770,” in David K. Adams and Cornelius A. van Minnen (eds.), Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs and Social Change (Edinburgh and New York: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 1–27; Hermann Wellenreuther, Thomas Müller-Bahlke, and A. Gregg Roeber (eds.), The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2013).

50. George Fenwick Jones, The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans along the Savannah (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Andreas Gross (ed.), Halle and the Beginnings of Protestant Christianity in India, 3 vols. (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2006); Wellenreuther, “Pietismus und Mission,” 168–172.

51. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 106–116; Butler, Becoming America, 192–196. The role of the laity is emphasized in Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 72–79, and Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1820 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009).

52. For recent accounts of the First Great Awakening, see Butler, Becoming America, 196–204; Pestana, Protestant Empire, 187–217; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

FURTHER READING

Beneke Chris and Christopher S. Grenda (eds.) The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Bremer, Francis J. The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards, 2nd ed. New Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Foster, Stephen. The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Haefeli, Evan. New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Hall, David D. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Lestringant, Frank. Le Huguenot et le sauvage: L’Amérique et la controverse colonial, en France, au temps des guerres de Religion (1555–1589), 3rd ed. Geneva: Droz, 2004.

Muldoon, James (ed.) The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2005.

Pestana, Carla Gardina. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Winship, Michael P. Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012.

PART III

COMMUNICATING THE REFORMATIONS

CHAPTER 18

PRINT WORKSHOPS AND MARKETS

ANDREW PETTEGREE

IN twenty years of intense, inspired, and ultimately financially ruinous experimentation (1440–1460), Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust had solved the major technological challenges of print: the construction of the press, the casting of type, the development of a suitable ink. The books and broadsheets that emerged from their workshop to captivate an astonished public were to a remarkable extent similar to the products of a printing press one hundred years later. Attempts at two- or three-color printing were a significant mis-step, and it took some time to accommodate the market to the idea that books were essentially monochrome, and that readers must seek relief from the monotony of type through design features, rather than relying on a separate visit to the illuminator’s workshop to decorate and shape the page. Otherwise the only major aspect of the book that pioneers had failed to anticipate was the title page. This, as it would turn out, would be the major design innovation of the next generation, and one in which the Reformation played a significant part.[1]

To create the first books, Gutenberg and Fust drew on several strands of artisan practice very familiar from medieval society. The wine press or loom provided the model for the press; Gutenberg himself had some experience of the casting of metal and the stamping of images from his failed contract for the mass production of pilgrims’ mirrors.[2] Papermaking was already well-established in many parts of Europe. The ubiquity of these techniques made it impossible that the secrets of Mainz could be kept for any length of time. Within fifteen years, Gutenberg’s new art had spread across Germany and crossed the Alps. By the end of the century print had reached into nearly every corner of the European landmass; it has indeed been argued that the engagement with print played a critical role in constructing the very notion of what it meant to be European, or a part of Christendom.[3]

The spread of printing, and the consequent vast increase in the number of books available, meant that print rapidly became a ubiquitous part of European culture. Many of Europe’s citizens would have been familiar not just with the new printed books but with the printer’s workshop. Here authors came with their texts, publishers and booksellers to haggle deals, the curious to gawp at the magical new press. The essential features of such workshops would not have differed greatly wherever in Europe they were situated. Each workshop required a minimum of at least four or five personnel for each press, each with their allotted tasks. The most skilled and in many ways critical employee was the compositor. It was his task to take the individual pieces of type and, working either from a manuscript or previously printed text, place lines of type into a hand-held composing stick.[4] These would then be transferred onto a metal plate until the page was complete and could be fitted into place on the press. At this point a proof page could be printed off.

Proofreading was, ideally, the task of the author or editor, who for that reason was often a frequent visitor to the shop; some authors virtually set up camp there, not least to watch and ensure that their own text was not set aside if some more lucrative job came to hand.[5] When this was not possible, printers usually employed a local scholar, often themselves an aspirant author. Many of the leading figures in the Reformation had their first experience of print in this way, including the young Philip Melanchthon; in later years the turbulence unleashed by the Reformation conflicts created an almost inexhaustible supply of often impoverished refugee scholars who could be exploited in this way.[6]

The relationship between the author (or author manqué) and the print-shop professionals was often a difficult one, and these tensions would lead to angry exchanges: sometimes in the shop, more often in the bitter, contemptuous denunciations with which scholars filled their correspondence. Authors were always convinced that printers cared more for profit than the purity of letters or the beauty of the printed page; Luther would say much the same when he was frustrated with the performance of the Wittenberg press. And of course they were right: when printers forgot the basic economics of profit and loss they ended up broke, with little support or sympathy from the scholars who had urged them to naive attempts at technical virtuosity.

The proofreader, and to a lesser extent the compositor and the master printer who ran the shop, were the only workshop professionals of whom literacy was absolutely required. Once the page of type had been made ready and passed to the press it was bolted down and two pressmen began the arduous task of pulling off the required number of sheets. With the two working as a team, one would ink the type, affix the sheet of paper, and slide the platen under the press. His teammate would then rotate the lever which pressed the paper down onto the inked type. This required considerable physical strength, and the operation was repeated a thousand times or more in a working day. The printer’s workshop was a noisy, sweaty place, with tough, strong men working long hours, often to tight deadlines.[7] It was also very cluttered. As each sheet was printed it needed to be hung or stacked for drying before the reverse side could be printed, often the next day.

Every print shop needed one or more youngsters to gather and order the newly printed sheets, sweep up mess, see to the ink, and run errands. This is where apprentices could also come in useful. Theirs was an uncomfortable and ambiguous position, as it was in every trade. One day they might be a master with their own shop, particularly if they caught the eye of the master’s daughter, or even, in the event of his death, that of the grieving widow. But in the meantime theirs could be a hard lot, bullied by the pressmen and the butt of their master’s anger, and the workshop’s coarse humor.

As each printed sheet was finished the growing pile needed to be stored until the whole text was complete and the quires could be assembled into a complete book. In the case of large books it might be several months, or even a year, before the task was finished and a whole book was ready for the market. The storage of these incomplete jobs was a considerable logistic problem for many print shops; perhaps less so in the pioneering days, when new businesses found accommodation in roomy ecclesiastical property. Once printing became consolidated into major centers of population, the problem of space became more acute.

The management of this crowded, combustible, and often exclusively male working environment fell to the master printer.[8] Most print workers took their meals in the workshop; often they were working up to twelve hours a day. The master printer had to keep order, deal with frequent breakdowns in the machinery, and arrange the purchasing and replacement of equipment. In the larger shops several presses would be working simultaneously and coordinating the jobs underway called for considerable mental dexterity. The most important task was the provision of the necessary fonts of type and any required decorative material, woodcut initials, or borders. Gutenberg and Fust cast their own types, but in later days type was usually bought in. These were specialist trades, requiring a high level of expertise, especially in the case of those who designed the matrices for new alphabets of type. A successful print shop might own a dozen or more different fonts, in sizes appropriate to headings, text, or side notes; by the first decades of the sixteenth century most shops would also routinely use different fonts of black letter (Gothic), Roman, and italic types.[9] These different fonts might be accumulated gradually; a new shop, or a workshop in a small town, usually worked with a much more restricted range of characters.

In most cases it was impossible for the costs of such an enterprise to be borne by the master printer alone. The maintenance of a successful workshop required other investors, particularly when it involved underwriting large and expensive projects. In the first experimental years technological fascination ensured that many among Europe’s elites were prepared to invest heavily to ensure that a printing press was established in their locality.[10] As the novelty wore off and the industry consolidated, such seed corn funding became scarce. It became necessary for others—booksellers or publishers—to stump up cash to ensure that new books could be printed. Authors were often told that their book could only be published if they contributed to the cost.

The financial underpinnings of book production remain the least well understood aspect of the industry in the first age of print. We are hampered both by a lack of surviving archival documentation, and a lazy tendency to regard printer and publisher as essentially cognate terms. They are not: a printer very often worked to contract for other industry professionals. These might be an individual bookseller or a consortium, a wholesaler, or paper merchant. An increasingly powerful figure in the industry was the publisher whose name appears on the title page of books, but who never ran his own press, instead placing work with a variety of different print shops. The rise of the publisher was the most significant feature of the second, evolutionary phase of printing, when it became clear that the exuberant enthusiasm that greeted the new invention would not be sufficient to sustain it on a long-term basis. The painful restructuring that followed represented a serious crisis for the new art. It also created a very different context for the transforming impact of the Reformation.

CRISIS AND CONSOLIDATION

It did not take long to establish that in the first experimental generation the infrastructure of print had become seriously over-extended. The genius of print was its technological simplicity; it was also, in a perverse way, its Achilles’ heel.[11] Print shops had been established in many places where they were not sustainable. Even in the larger cities, too many had been tempted into the industry without a sustainable model for survival. It is well known that the first printers modeled their designs very closely on manuscripts. This was perfectly sensible. It was necessary to reassure existing clients that the new books had all the qualities of the books they already owned, and of course the first printers were thinking primarily of those who already owned books as their potential clients. It was at the point when the books were printed and ready for purchase that the inherited model derived from manuscript production broke down. In the manuscript world texts were by and large created from an existing model for a known client. Every participant in the transaction, the owner of the base text, the scribe, and the new owner were most likely known to each other. In contrast the world of print required the disposal of several hundred texts to purchasers spread across Europe, who might until that moment not even have known that they coveted this particular book. Disposing of so many copies was a task of a whole different order, and one for which the infant industry was not well prepared.

It only gradually dawned, as Lotte Hellinga has aptly remarked, that the invention of printing entailed further inventions, such as publishing and marketing, to which I would add distribution.[12] It might be said that these problems essentially began once the books left the printer’s workshop, but the printers too could be ruined if their books proved unsaleable: they too had to play their part, through design innovations likely to make their books more appealing. The Reformation, as we will see, played a crucial role in creating a new mass market for print; it also played a vital role in devising new marketing strategies to ease the path to purchase for neophyte owners.

The first and most painful lesson of the incunabula age was that traditional customers provided too narrow a customer base for the age of print. That this was so only gradually dawned on the early enthusiasts; it required a systematic restructuring of the industry, which we can date to the forty years between 1480 and 1520, before print would rest on secure foundations. During this period print disappeared from many places where a shop had been planted in the incunabula age. The industry consolidated into a far smaller number of major publishing centers, major commercial cities close to the main markets in France, the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, and northern Italy. The real geography of print was far less expansive than a speckled map of early print locations may suggest: in fact two thirds of output during the fifteenth century was concentrated into twelve cities.[13] In France, Paris and Lyon dominated, as did Venice and Rome in Italy. In Germany printing was marshaled around six regional entrepôts: Cologne, Strasbourg, and Basel on the Rhine, Augsburg and Nuremberg in the south, and Leipzig in the northeast. This was the geography of print established before the Reformation: mastering the complex tasks of distribution played a critical part in the movement’s early success.

WITTENBERG

This economic geography should have had no place for little Wittenberg. In 1508, when Luther first passed through its gate, Wittenberg was a town of about two thousand inhabitants. Like most early visitors, he was not impressed; to Luther this was the edge of civilization, a frontier town poised perilously on the outward extremity of Christendom.[14] It was no surprise that print had come very late to Wittenberg; such books as were required could easily be supplied from nearby Leipzig. Yet by the end of the sixteenth century Wittenberg was Germany’s largest publication center, outstripping all the major cities of the south and west.[15] This it owed entirely to the Reformation, and the charismatic presence of its most famous son, Martin Luther. Together Luther and Wittenberg had subverted the iron geography of print.

This is all the more extraordinary when one considers that Luther himself had published very little before 1517, when he raised his famous protest against indulgences. By this point Luther had passed into middle age: this was not a hungry young scholar anxious to make his reputation through controversy, but a mature cleric of rather conservative tastes, respected in his religious order, and building a modest local reputation as an effective administrator and capable scholar. Yet within five years of the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses Luther was Europe’s most published author: the most published, indeed, in the history of print.[16] The speed and violence of this transformation says a great deal both for the latent power of the printing infrastructure in Germany, and for Luther’s own extraordinary, instinctive mastery of the new arts of persuasion.

When Luther first settled in Wittenberg, the city had one small print shop. Even this business, run by the stolid, unflappable Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, teetered on the brink of viability. It was only because the local ruler, Elector Frederick the Wise, believed that his capital required this accoutrement of culture (along with a court painter and a chapel choir), that a print shop had been established in the first place.[17] The arrival of print was closely connected with the foundation of the university, also in 1502. Yet four printers had come and gone before Rhau-Grunenberg was lured from Erfurt. A man of limited talent and still more limited imagination, he would develop a complicated relationship with Luther.

Rhau-Grunenberg was devoted to the reformer, and would become a loyal supporter of his movement; Luther valued this on a personal level, but was repeatedly driven to distraction by the poor quality of Rhau-Grunenberg’s work and his inability to work faster when demand for Luther’s writings gathered pace. In fairness the press was hardly equipped for this: in the sixteen years between 1502 and 1517 Wittenberg’s presses had seldom taken on anything more demanding that small literary works for the local professors and the normal ephemera of university life, dissertation theses, and the like.[18] From 1518, when Luther’s cause was attracting interest and criticism, this became a serious problem. Luther was forced to intervene personally to attract to Wittenberg a second more experienced printer. This was a seminal moment for the development of the Wittenberg printing industry; it also casts a revealing light on the intensity of Luther’s engagement with the mechanics of the trade.

In March 1518 Luther published his vernacular response to the growing controversy over the Ninety-Five Theses, his Sermon on Indulgence and Grace.[19] This was the moment he crossed the Rubicon, abandoning the Latin of academic disputation that had provided the intellectual shield for his trenchant criticism of indulgences; as a professor Luther was fully entitled to propose challenging theses, which could then be withdrawn after criticism. The German Sermon was a different matter altogether: a succinct summary of his new teaching in fifteen hundred words, organized around twenty brisk propositions. No one could have predicted that the middle-aged professor could have discovered such an easy facility as a vernacular writer: this was a work that essentially defined the new genre of Reformation Flugschriften: short, accessible, and cheap. Greatly to Luther’s surprise (he had chafed at the lack of response to the Latin theses), the Sermon on Indulgence and Grace was a publishing sensation: sixteen editions in 1518 and a total of twenty-five by 1520.[20]

After a first edition by Rhau-Grunenberg, it was almost instantly republished in Leipzig, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Basel. This represented almost all the major stations of German publishing, particularly when Strasbourg too became a major center of Lutheran publication: only Cologne of the pre-Reformation publishing giants remained closed to evangelical print. Through Nuremberg and Augsburg Luther entered the bloodstream of German intellectual life. Luther’s new status was confirmed when Johann Froben, Erasmus’s own publisher, issued a first collective edition of Luther’s Latin writings. It was this volume that a curious Desiderius Erasmus sent to Thomas More in March 1519.[21]

During these first years Luther wrote incessantly, twenty-five original compositions in 1518 and a similar number the following year.[22] They were published in a total of over two hundred and fifty editions. Luther’s astonishing facility as a writer was at this point the Reformation’s most potent weapon. Of these forty-five works, twenty-five were no more than eight pages long; in printing terms one sheet (and one or two days’ work).[23] In an age that did not conspicuously value brevity, Luther was essentially inventing a new form of theological discourse. More to the point, texts of this sort of length were ideal for less well-capitalized print shops. Short texts like this required very little up-front investment; they also sold out quickly, to a largely local audience, and so involved few of the complex logistical problems of transportation to distant markets or storage of slow moving stock.

It was little wonder that the German print world took to Luther: the way in which Luther’s writings were circulated, through reprints in different locations, was custom-made to inject new vitality into an industry that in previous decades had largely retreated into a smaller number of major hubs: places like Augsburg, the major center for the publication of vernacular works, and Basel, geographically well-placed for the international scholarly market.[24] Yet in the next thirty years printing would be established, or re-established, in over thirty towns and cities where before the Reformation there had been no functioning press.[25] The experience of Wittenberg, where print became the new driver of the local economy, was replicated in miniature in a host of other German towns.

That was for the future; in 1518, with Luther’s cause attracting ever more interest and controversy, the lack of capacity in Wittenberg was an ever more pressing problem. In the summer of this year Luther had been seriously embarrassed when a maliciously constructed and unauthorized edition of his sermon on excommunication came into public circulation. Luther quickly took up his pen to set the record straight, but Rhau-Grunenberg could not find time to print it. For interminable weeks his press was occupied with printing Luther’s longer Latin response to the Indulgence debate, the Resolutiones.[26] Luther began casting around for alternatives. His eye alighted on Melchior Lotter, a veteran publisher with a substantial business in Leipzig.[27] In May 1519 Lotter visited Wittenberg, bringing with him samples of his workmanship. Luther, who had a highly developed aesthetic sense, saw this was in technical and aesthetic terms work of a different order. Luther was keen that Lotter should move his business to Wittenberg, but there was one substantial obstacle: Lotter had a perfectly satisfactory relationship with the Old Church. It was Lotter who had printed the confessors’ manual for the St. Peter’s Indulgence campaign.[28] In 1517 he had published two editions of Jerome Emser’s Life of Benno; in 1518 he would publish the first Catholic attack on Luther, Tetzel’s Rebuttal. Yet a few weeks later he was publishing Luther.

This sort of pragmatism was typical of the age. Most of the printers prominent in the promotion of the St. Peter’s Indulgence also printed for Luther. In Lotter’s case the deal was sealed at the Leipzig Disputation in 1519, when Luther was lodged with Lotter, and could observe his well-stocked workshop at work. It was decided that Lotter would stay in Leipzig, but his son Melchior Junior would establish a branch office in Wittenberg, bringing with him a selection of the Lotter types.[29]

BRAND LUTHER

The establishment of the second print shop in Wittenberg following Lotter’s arrival toward the end of 1519 ended the first phase of the evangelical engagement with print, when the movement had been reliant on the initiative of printers in Germany’s more established centers to relay Luther’s message to a wider public. From the point of view of reach and impact this was undoubtedly felicitous; but it did mean that the presentation of Luther’s writings was essentially outside his control. In the years that followed Wittenberg would play a more significant role, both in terms of the volume of output and in shaping the look—the brand identity—of Luther’s works. Here the critical role would be played not by Melchior Lotter but by Lucas Cranach.[30]

Lucas Cranach was one of a number of painters drawn to Wittenberg to work on the decoration of Elector Frederick’s reconstructed castle and castle church. When others (including Albrecht Dürer) fulfilled their commissions and departed, Cranach stayed on as Frederick’s court painter. This was a role that inevitably involved a wide range of tasks, but Cranach would prove an entrepreneur of remarkable versatility and drive. By the time of Luther’s arrival he was one of Wittenberg’s richest citizens and he soon became the proprietor of an enormous factory workshop in the center of town (Schloβstrasse 1).[31] One of his early assignments was the creation of the woodcut illustrations for a published catalogue of Frederick’s famous collection of relics.[32] This initiation into the printing industry was to prove extremely profitable; when Melchior Junior arrived from Leipzig he was found space in the Cranach factory, and for a few years Cranach dabbled as a publisher.[33] But it was not really necessary for Cranach’s name to appear on the imprint for him to play a determining role in the book industry, for Cranach’s workshop had an effective monopoly on the production of woodcuts in Wittenberg. This included the woodcut title-page designs that now began to give Wittenberg books their distinctive appearance.[34]

Lotter had brought energy and technical competence, but his style was essentially that of his father’s Leipzig shop (as were his typefaces). Cranach offered something entirely different: a range of title-page borders that clothed Luther’s work in an extraordinarily expressive, eye-catching uniform. By this time Wittenberg’s printers were learning how to make their books stand out on the bookseller’s stall. This involved picking out in large lettering and with plenty of white space the most saleable aspects of the book, namely the two words “Luther” and “Wittenberg.” This was a strategy that took a little time to be learned; the first Luther works often bury the reformer’s name in an indigestible paragraph of text, sometimes even with the name “Luther” divided over two lines.

Gradually, commercial sense won out. Together with Cranach’s new borders, masterpieces of design, and clarity of line, these refinements of presentation gave Wittenberg’s Luther editions a highly distinctive livery; Wittenberg publications had finally found a physical form, and their printers developed a technical competence that did justice to the force and significance of the contents. The ultimate proof of their success can be seen in the number of times these critical design features, and Cranach’s borders, were copied by printers in other German cities. Very often these too shamelessly proclaimed “Wittenberg” as their place of origin. Hunting down these “false Wittenbergs” is by no means easy, as they have often deceived modern cataloguers in much the same way they were meant to mislead contemporary customers. Frustrating as this piracy may have been to Cranach and Wittenberg’s printers, from the point of the movement the impact was largely benevolent, only serving to reinforce brand identity and evangelical dominance of the marketplace of print.

BOOK TOWN

By the mid-1520s Wittenberg was firmly established as the center of the evangelical book world. The obvious potential for profit attracted new men to Wittenberg. A further four print shops had opened by 1525, bringing new investment and a considerable measure of stability to the industry. All four of the newcomers maintained their businesses for the best part of twenty-five years, and the largest shop, that of Hans Lufft, endured for a remarkable sixty years. The steady profits to be made from publishing Luther’s works created the capital to invest in larger projects, epitomized by Hans Lufft’s successful publication of the complete Luther Bible in 1534. Luther continued to be a shrewd managing presence, ensuring that the rights to his own first editions were spread among the different workshops, so that all remained viable.[35]

In addition to a share of his own original compositions, each printer was allowed his own specialism: Lufft had the Bible, Luther’s Betbuchlein, and the postils; Georg Rhau was given the Large Catechism and editions of the Confession of Augsburg (he also published the official proclamations of Electoral Saxony); Joseph Klug had responsibility for the German songbook; and Nickel Schirlentz enjoyed a local monopoly on the publication of Luther’s Small Catechism.[36] Luther was also increasingly able to place the works of other evangelical authors with a Wittenberg press. Aspirant authors such as Johann Toltz, a schoolmaster from Plauen, frequently sent their unpublished works to Luther and his colleagues on the Wittenberg Faculty for comment and approval; this was also true for town councils looking to introduce a new evangelical church order. In this way the Wittenberg Faculty came to have a controlling interest in what could or could not be published, an influence that radiated far beyond Wittenberg itself. Wittenberg’s printers willingly conformed to this new order: they knew that without Luther there would be little work to be had. The terrible example of Melchior Lotter, who had fallen out with both Cranach and Luther and by 1525 was effectively forced out of business, lingered in the memory.

It was not all plain sailing. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 demonstrated how dangerous print could be when turned against the Reformation. The peasant manifestos were printed and reprinted around Germany, and for once Luther’s response was clumsy and ill-timed.[37] Luther’s Catholic opponents were also more active and effective than they are sometimes given credit for.[38] But the force of the market was definitely with the evangelicals; their books simply sold better, by a massive margin. Nothing demonstrated this more vividly than the fate of the Leipzig print industry, before the Reformation the greatest regional entrepôt in northeastern Germany. In the first days Leipzig shared in the Luther boom, but after Luther’s condemnation at Worms the devout Duke George would permit no more printing or sale of evangelical works on his lands. The Leipzig print industry endured hard times. Established printers were driven out of business or forced to liquidate capital assets to survive.[39]

In 1524 a city council delegation pleaded with Duke George on their behalf that the ban be lifted: the Catholic works they were obliged to publish simply would not sell. The bibliographical data bears them out.[40] Few of the works of Eck, Emser, or Cochlaeus, all of them dogged and prolific authors, merited a second or third edition. Luther’s works, on the other hand, were often published eight, ten, or a dozen times, and on many different presses. Catholic authors complained bitterly that printers would not take their works without a subsidy, if at all.[41] They claimed confessional bias; in fact it was simple financial prudence. The industry in Leipzig, previously one of the largest in Germany, withered away. Some of their publishers tried the desperate expedient of setting up a secret branch office outside the city to publish Lutheran works.[42] Only after Duke George’s death in 1539 and the conversion of Ducal Saxony to Protestantism would Leipzig’s publishing industry revive.

The Luther effect transformed Wittenberg; even today one can see the evidence of this sixteenth-century prosperity, as houses and civic buildings were remodeled and rebuilt, reinvesting profits and extending properties to accommodate the large number of students attracted to study in Luther’s city. Nor was Wittenberg the only beneficiary. The halo effect enveloped a number of north German towns that shared in the publishing boom: Erfurt and Magdeburg, later Jena, Berlin, and Königsberg. The previously dominant cities of the south and west also benefited greatly from the sharp increase in demand for printing. In the ten years after Luther’s protest the market expanded dramatically. For the first time, with Reformation Flugschriften, the buying of books had a low entry cost. A pamphlet of four or eight pages was within the capacities of a wide spectrum of urban society: this form of publication represented for many citizens the first opportunity to participate actively in public debate, and follow the major political events of the day. For Luther was simultaneously a powerful religious teacher and a major political sensation, and the vast profusion of pamphlets, a bold and open challenge to authority, was part of the sensation.[43]

A GERMANICAL NATURE

The impact on the German print market was profound: it amounted almost to a relaunch. In the ten years before Luther the Holy Roman Empire had been responsible for about a quarter of European book production; 75 percent of these books were in Latin. In the next ten years German book production advanced dramatically to 42 percent of the European total; in the five years 1521–1525 Germany accounted for one in every two books published in Europe and 80 percent of these were in German.[44] This enormous reorientation of the book industry was not at the expense of existing Latin sales; Latin production in fact remained fairly static, while German output leapt forward sixfold. The role of evangelical print in this transformation was unmistakable. During the ten years between 1518 and 1527 Luther’s own works accounted for 20 percent of total German production, but he was not a gang of one. Six of the seven most published authors in these years were German evangelical writers.[45]

This scale of demand would not be sustained; the demand for short religious pamphlets was a phenomenon of a particular moment, and these “pamphlet moments” would recur only infrequently in the century ahead. But the transforming impact on the German print industry was sustained throughout Luther’s lifetime and to the end of the sixteenth century. Church building, the publication of bibles, catechisms, and hymn books, as well as continued religious controversy, provided a steady stream of work for publishers. Luther was one of many reformers who would salute the role of print in spreading God’s word. But if the printing press was the agent of change, Luther was its patron saint.[46]

The transforming impact of Luther’s movement was very much a German phenomenon; outside the empire his influence was much more muted. There are several reasons why this should have been the case. One was Luther’s own, profoundly German temperament. As a vernacular writer Luther was remarkable for the skill with which he developed, almost instinctively, the homely style to address the man and woman in the pew. This, combined with the extraordinary economy and clarity of his writing, helped give the German pamphlets of the Reformation their distinctive shape; they also transformed theological writing, privileging brevity and simplicity of expression over prolixity and rhetorical virtuosity. Luther was also an acute reader of German politics, as he demonstrated in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. But he was a man of conservative tastes and limited horizons. His only trip outside the empire, to Rome in 1510–1511, was unhappy; of all the major reformers Luther had by far the least cosmopolitan correspondence. Unlike Calvin or Bullinger he showed little interest in cultivating policy makers abroad. Indeed, his rare excursions into dialogue with influential members of the wider Christian community usually collapsed into acrimony: one thinks here of Erasmus, Henry VIII, and various members of the traditional church hierarchy.

For all of these reasons Luther’s writings did not travel particularly well. Ninety percent of the editions of Luther’s works published during the sixteenth century were printed in Germany, and almost 80 percent in German.[47] Of course this still left a considerable residue of Latin books that could (and did) carry Luther’s theological insights abroad; but here they did not enjoy the virtually untrammeled progress that they could largely rely on in Germany. The political configuration of the empire, a mass of small states and largely self-contained urban communities, was almost uniquely favorable to the spread of Luther’s writings. These market conditions were not repeated elsewhere in Europe. In Western Europe’s nation states the ruling monarch (in the Low Countries the emperor) was in a position not just to make regulations inhibiting access to Luther’s works, but to enforce them.

THE END OF A FREE MARKET

The suppression of Luther’s works was shaped by two defining periods of regulation. The first, the condemnation of Luther in the Bull Exsurge Domine (1520) and the subsequent Edict of Worms provided the impetus for the condemnation of Luther’s writings in France, the Low Countries, England, and Spain. The considerable interest in Luther manifested in these places before the papal and imperial ban was now much more dangerous. It was also important that the print industry was very differently organized in these places. In France the industry was dominated by the capital, Paris; in England the relatively small publishing fraternity was almost exclusively settled in London. This made it far easier to submit the industry to close supervision, a regulatory regime by and large accepted by more established publishers, who were often prepared to help police any rasher brethren tempted to dip their toes into this dangerous market. Only in the Low Countries, where Lutheran sentiment had bled across a porous language border, was there significant opposition to measures to prevent the circulation of Lutheran books, with brutal consequences for a number of printers and booksellers who chanced their arm.

The second major wave of regulatory legislation came in the 1540s with the promulgation of the first comprehensive lists of forbidden books. These appeared contemporaneously with the definitive collapse of attempts at reconciliation between the Catholic hierarchy and the new Lutheran churches; they formed an important part of the hardening of confessional boundaries that was the result. These indexes continued the process of enumerating forbidden Protestant texts that had begun with the first involvement of university theological faculties in the judgment of Luther’s heresies: most influential were the indexes published in Paris (1544) and Louvain (1546); the definitive Roman index followed in 1559. The works of the major evangelical writers were inevitably well represented in these lists, but so too were an increasing number of works published anonymously. The Roman index also named printers active in the international book trade whose works were subject to a blanket ban as a result of their involvement in the promotion of evangelical literature. This had particularly severe consequences for the transalpine trade between Italy and northern entrepôts such as Basel. These were the twin nodes of the wholesale trade around which the international book market had largely been structured. This would ultimately rebound to the disadvantage of Italian and especially Venetian publishers, since what they could now take in exchange for their own publications was severely constrained.[48] This, perversely, served only to reinforce Germany’s supremacy in the international market, now centered firmly on the book fairs in Frankfurt.

The elaboration of these structures of regulation and control led to the development of a number of very particular markets, specializing in the publication of books destined specifically for sale abroad. Thus early English evangelicals looked to Antwerp for the production of books that could not safely be brought to the press in London. Geneva became a major center of production for France.[49] In a slightly later period Emden served the same role for clandestine churches in the Low Countries.[50] Even after the establishment of a Protestant state church in England, the cross-Channel trade continued, with Leiden and later Amsterdam providing a safe haven for the publishers of Puritan and dissident non-conformist literature.[51]

Of these centers of clandestine printing Geneva had the most profound and long-lasting impact, fueled, as had been Wittenberg’s industry, by the priceless asset of their own charismatic reformer, John Calvin. Like Luther, Calvin was an author of unusual versatility and power; and as with Wittenberg, Geneva enjoyed an economic renaissance as a publishing center and as a magnet for students wishing to study at its newly established academy.[52]

This literature would have a profound importance in inspiring a second generation of Protestant reform, but it occupied a very different position in the marketplace. Profit had to be balanced with danger: some of those who carried Calvin’s books across the mountains to France paid with their lives.[53] In cases like these the physical appearance of the texts had to reflect the tension between the economic benefits of brand identity and the expediency of discretion. To be caught with a book identifiable as a Reformed text was to commit a capital offense in France; Genevan printers learned the techniques of disguise, as did those operating in other centers of exile publishing. Such subtleties permitted the circulation of a number of clandestine evangelical works in Italy, England, and the Low Countries, often disguised as the orthodox devotional works that had been a cornerstone of the pre-Reformation press. Whereas in Germany Luther’s name had been a principal selling point, here it was invariably omitted altogether. The disguise worked. Sometimes Luther’s authorship of translated texts has only been determined by careful scholarship in very recent times.[54]

The second half of the sixteenth century also saw the growth of more stable, permitted markets for Reformation literature. England was a prime example: in the long reign of Elizabeth, Protestant texts would quickly become the most open and lucrative part of an otherwise closely controlled market.[55] This was not achieved without considerable growing pains. The extraordinary growth in Reformation literature during the short reign of Edward VI was followed by a rapid contraction during the Catholic restoration under Mary, accompanied by the departure abroad of major figures in the London industry. The restoration of Catholic worship was followed by a major regulatory initiative, the grant of a charter to the Stationers’ Company of London.[56] In effect, regulation of the industry was subcontracted to a private corporation, the only example of such a strategy anywhere in Europe. On her accession Elizabeth was quick to confirm the company’s privileges and duties, so that the exuberant freedoms of Edward’s reign were never restored. Instead London’s publishers were content to explore safer markets for catechisms and sermons, all the while squabbling over the legitimacy of privileges granting lucrative monopolies over some parts of the trade to favored publishers.

France and the Netherlands also experienced their years of religious turmoil when it briefly seemed that Calvinism, partially fueled by the clandestine literature smuggled in from abroad, might become a significant, even the dominant force.[57] French and Netherlandish publishers enjoyed fleeting periods when Protestant works could be published within the law, stimulating, in France in particular, a torrent of popular literature in defense of the Catholic Church.[58] In France the new faith never enjoyed majority support, and when the Protestant advance was pinned back, printers and booksellers associated with the new faith were among those who felt the wrath of the vengeful majority.[59] In the Low Countries military action would eventually determine that the original centers of dissent in the south would return to Spanish rule. Rather improbably it was Holland in the north that would be the core of the new Calvinist state, its printing industry reshaped by a substantial internal immigration from Flemish cities such as Antwerp. In the new Dutch Republic the market was never unconstrained; but rivalry between Amsterdam and the major cities, and between the House of Orange and the city regents, ensured that effective censorship was difficult to maintain. The new state would develop a market in religious publications of unrivaled richness and diversity, a mainstay of a vibrant commercial culture where the problems that had so afflicted print in the early years, poor communications and a lack of capital, were largely absent.

The development of a publishing titan in the Netherlands, where a century before Charles V had constructed the most stringent regime of censorship anywhere in Europe, was one further example of the extraordinary malleability of the technology of print. The first seventy years after the invention of printing had taught hard lessons in the difficulties of creating a commercial infrastructure in a world full of books; the Reformation presented a transformative challenge to an industry that had seemed content, after decades of retrenchment and restructuring, to settle for safe profits in familiar genres. In the first generation printing had been promoted as a means to provide cheaper texts for a relatively narrow circle of existing customers. The Reformation helped print find new customers in new markets: as had been demonstrated by early setbacks, this was a necessity if print was to thrive outside the major cities to which it had largely retreated. The Reformation was the most dramatic manifestation of this new potential before the growth of a commercial market for news and recreational literature. Indeed the Reformation had helped create the market for these genres, by introducing new classes of readers to the pleasures and habit of purchasing print. The Reformation was itself also a major news event; when the fires of controversy dimmed, publishers and their new customers went in search of other sensations to feed the newly expanded market.[60] With the Reformation, print passed a point of no return. Luther’s invitation to his fellow German citizens to join in a public theological debate would resonate through the centuries.

NOTES

1. Margaret E. Smith, The Title-page: Its Early Development, 1460–1510 (London: British Library, 2000).

2. Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and his Invention (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996).

3. José María Pérez Fernández, “Andrés Laguna: Translation and the Early Modern Idea of Europe,” Translation and Literature 21 (2012): 299–318.

4. Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

5. Jan Machielsen, “How (not) to Get Published: The Plantin Press in the Early 1590s,” Dutch Crossing 34 (2010): 99–114.

6. Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (London: British Library, 2011).

7. For fine fictional evocations of the atmosphere of the printing house see Blake Morrison, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000); Shirley McKay, Fate & Fortune (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011).

8. For the role of women in the printing households, and sometimes as business managers, see Susan Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), and now Kat Hill, “Anabaptism and the World of Printing in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” Past & Present 226 (2015): 79–114.

9. Robert Proctor, An Index of German Books 1501–1520 in the British Museum, 2nd ed. (London: Holland Press, 1954).

10. For the example of Brittany, see Malcolm Walsby, The Printed Book in Brittany, 1486–1600 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010); Philippe Nieto, “Géographie des impressions européennes du XVe siècle,” Revue française d’histoire du livre 118–121 (2004): 125–173.

11. For what follows, Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (London: Yale University Press, 2010).

12. Lotte Hellinga, “Sale Advertisements for Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century,” in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print since the Fifteenth Century (London: British Library, 2009), 1–25.

13. USTC (Universal Short Title Catalogue), searching 1450–1500.

14. Maria Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, 1485–1517 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1975), 36, quoting Luther’s Tischreden.

15. USTC, searching Holy Roman Empire and 1501–1600.

16. USTC, searching 1450–1522; Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2015).

17. Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg.

18. Grossmann, Wittenberger Drucke 1502–1517: Ein bibliographischer Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus in Deutschland (Vienna: Krieg, 1971); Andreas Gössner, “Die Anfänge des Buchdrucks für universitäre Zwecke am Beispiel Wittenbergs,” in Enno Bünz (ed.), Bücher, Drucker, Bibliotheken in Mitteldeutschland (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 133–152.

19. Available in English translation in Kurt Aland, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (St Louis: Concordia, 1967).

20. For the editions, Josef Benzing and Helmut Claus (eds.), Lutherbibliographie. Verzeichnis der gedruckten Schriften Martin Luthers bis zu dessen Tod (2 vols.) (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1966–1994), 90–114 [hereafter Benzing]. Martin Treu, “Poimenik und Polemik—Die Anfänge Luthers als deutscher theologischer Schriftsteller,” in Walter Beltz and Jürgen Tubach (eds.), Religiöser Text und soziale Struktur (Halle: Hallesche Beiträge zur Orientwissenschaft, 31, 2001), 289–299.

21. Benzing 2a, 3. R. A. Mynors (ed.), The Correspondence of Erasmus (12 vols.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–2003), EP 785.

22. Benzing 90–557.

23. Bernd Moeller, “Das Berühmtwerden Luthers,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 15 (1988): 65–92; Moeller, “Die Rezeption Luthers in der frühen Reformation,” Lutherjahrbuch 57 (1990): 57–71.

24. Hans-Jörg Künast, “Getruckt zu Augspurg”: Buchdruck und Buchhandel in Augsburg zwischen 1468 und 1555 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997); Peter G. Bietenholz, Basle and France in the Sixteenth Century: The Basle Humanists and Printers in Their Contacts with Francophone Culture (Geneva: Droz, 1971).

25. Christoph Reske, Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet: auf der Grundlage des gleichnamigen Werkes von Josef Benzing (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007).

26. Benzing 205, 206. For Luther’s frustration see Luther to Spalatin, August 28, 1518: WABr I 1901, Letters I 75.

27. Thomas Döring, “Der Leipziger Buchdruck vor der Reformation,” in Irene Dingel and Henning P. Jürgens (eds.), Meilensteine der Reformation. Schlüsseldokumente der frühen Wirksamkeit Martin Luthers (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2014), 87–98; Helmut Claus, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Leipziger Buchdrucks von Luthers Thesenanschlag bis zur Einführung der Reformation in Herzogtum Sachsen (Berlin: Humboldt-Universität, 1973); Reske, Buchdrucker.

28. USTC, 669147.

29. Robert Proctor, An Index of German Books, 1501–1520, in the British Museum (London: Holland Press, 1954).

30. Pettegree, Brand Luther.

31. This is not the site of the Cranachhaus Museum: this is at Markt 4, another house Cranach owned and remodeled.

32. USTC, 641851. Andreas Gössner, “Die Anfänge des Buchdrucks für universitäre Zwecke am Beispiel Wittenbergs,” in Enno Bünz (ed.), Bücher, Drucker, Bibliotheken in Mitteldeutschland (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 133–152.

33. John Flood, “Lucas Cranach as Publisher,” German Life and Letters 48 (1995): 241–262.

34. The pioneering study of this book art is Tilman Falk, “Cranach-Buchgraphik der Reformationszeit,” in Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk, Lukas Cranach, I 307–412. See also Cranach im Detail. Buchschmuck Lucas Cranachs des Älteres und seiner Werkstatt (Wittenberg: Lutherhalle, 1994). A selection of the book title pages are also illustrated in F. W. H. Hollstein, German Engravings. Etchings and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700 (Amsterdam: Hertzberger, 1954–), VI 163–175.

35. For a fine example of Luther’s management of the Wittenberg press while at the Coburg in 1530, see Pettegree, Brand Luther, 269–273.

36. Ibid., 270–271.

37. Claus, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg im Druckschaften der Jahre 1524–1526 (Gotha: Forschungsbibliothek, 1975).

38. David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991).

39. Reske, Buchdrucker, for the printer biographies. Claus, Das Leipziger Druckschaften der Jahre 1518–1539 (Gotha: Forschungsbibliothek, 1987).

40. The story is told in Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). For the decline of the Leipzig industry see USTC, searching Leipzig and 1521–1539.

41. Pettegree, Brand Luther, chap. 8.

42. At Grimma and Eilenberg.

43. See here the insightful comment of Jerome Aleander, a determined opponent of Luther, who witnessed the Reformation excitement in Worms in 1521: P. Kalkoff (ed.), Die Depeschen des Nuntius Aleander von Wormser Reichstage 1521 (Halle: Niemeyer, 1897). Extracts in English translation in Preserved Smith and Charles M. Jacobs (eds.), Luther’s Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters (2 vols.) (Philadelphia, PA: Lutheran Publication Society, 1913–1918).

44. Figures from the USTC.

45. Luther, Melanchthon, Karlstadt, Urbanus Rhegius, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Ulrich von Hutten. The exception was Erasmus.

46. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For an alternative interpretation, Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance.

47. USTC.

48. Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

49. For Geneva, Jean-François Gilmont’s online bibliography, GLN 15–16: <http://www.ville-ge.ch/bge/gln/>. For Antwerp, see USTC.

50. Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

51. J. A. Gruys and Keith L. Sprunger, The Pilgrim Press: A Bibliographical & Historical Memorial of the Books Printed at Leyden by the Pilgrim Fathers (Utrecht: De Graaf, 1987).

52. Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005); Karin Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995).

53. Heidi-Lucie Schlaepfer, “Laurent de Normandie,” in Gabrielle Berthoud (ed.), Aspects de la Propagande Religieuse (Geneva: Droz, 1957); Jeannine E. Olson, Calvin and Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse française (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1989), chap. 4.

54. Gilmont, The Reformation and the Book (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Francis Higman, “Les traductions françaises de Luther, 1524–1550,” in Lire et Découvrir. La circulation des idées au temps de la Réforme (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 201–232.

55. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Green, The Christian ABC: Catechism and Catechizing in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

56. Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960); Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

57. Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007).

58. Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, and Alexander Wilkinson, French Vernacular Books (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007); Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

59. Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

60. Pettegree, The Invention of News (London: Yale University Press, 2014).

FURTHER READING

Baron, Sabrian Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds.) Agents of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L Eisenstein. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Edwards, Mark U. Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Eisenstein, Eizabeth L. Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2011.

Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

Gilmont, Jean-François. The Reformation and the Book. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

Gilmont, Jean-François. John Calvin and the Printed Book. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005.

McKitterick, David. Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation. New York: Penguin, 2015.

CHAPTER 19

THE WORD

HELMUT PUFF

MOST sermons sixteenth-century Reformers preached resounded in churches that had been built before 1517. St. Peter and Paul in Weimar is no exception (Figure 19.1). Its architectural shell dates to the late medieval period. After the town introduced the reform in 1525, this Gothic hall church underwent a profound transformation. Over time, its white walls, galleries, monuments, and centrally placed pulpit came to signal Weimar’s adherence to the Lutheran confession. Prominent among the church’s post-Reformation features is the winged altar painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son Lucas (ca. 1555). Known as visual propagandists for the Lutheran cause, these artists moved to the town together with their lord, Duke John Frederick the Magnanimous of Saxony. After having been defeated by imperial forces in the Schmalkaldic War, this Protestant ruler turned Weimar into his residence, commissioned the altar, and designated the local town church as the ducal burial place. St. Peter and Paul is thus a space where the alliance of political elites and Reform proponents that shaped Lutheranism becomes manifest. But it also has much to tell us about how the Word was heard and conceived in Reformation Europe.

In fact, the painted altar is so monumental in size that wherever one sits or stands one can make out the larger-than-life figures represented in its foreground: the crucified and the resurrected Christ, John the Baptist, Cranach père, Martin Luther, with the duke, his wife, and their three sons framing the center panel on the side wings. Conveying its message with the utmost clarity, modesty, and grandeur, the triptych is a prime example of Lutheran didacticism in pictorial form. Its depiction of selected biblical scenes with the crucifixion at the center offers the congregation nothing less than a summa of Reform tenets. While St. John points to the body of Christ on the cross, Luther’s index finger rests on the open pages of a book. Three passages from the New Testament are legible (Hebrews 4:16; John 3:14; and The First Letter of John 1:7). Fittingly, the quotes illustrate how to gain salvation through Christ, a veritable textual foundation for what we get to see. That Cranach receives a stream of blood emanating from Christ provides something akin to visual proof for the Christocentrism at the core of Reform teachings.

FIGURE 19.1 Interior of St. Peter and Paul, Weimar.

Foto Constantin Beyer, Weimar; with permission of the Ev. Luther. Kirchengemeinde in Weimar.

As depicted, Luther does not read from the Bible, be it silently or aloud. Possibly remembering the biblical quotes and their meanings, his lips are closed and his eyes are directed to what is beyond the painting, the heavens. This painted altar therefore prods us to recognize that which cannot be captured visually. Yet with an iconography evidently founded on Scriptures, this altar also gives vivid expression to a theological program where biblical word and painted image, Christ’s bodily presence and verbal communication, the Gospels and their evangelical renewal in Weimar exist in harmony. What is more, by the identifiable portraits of some of the Reform’s founding fathers, the work also appeals to the churchgoer to follow in their footsteps. After all, this altar sought to bind the urban community together in the embrace of the unshakeable theological truths it was meant to reveal, a visual confession of faith to match its textual equivalents.

Due to the altar’s prominence, placement, and legibility, Protestant teachings come alive in the space of this church. It is no accident that Luther’s likeness on the painting is aligned with the pulpit on the right side of the main nave. To be sure, this visual axis commemorates the late Reformer as someone who had preached frequently in St. Peter and Paul.[1] Yet it also serves as a reminder that what the Reformers uttered should not be considered in a vacuum. The painted stream of blood resonated with the “frenzy for blood” in late medieval Christendom.[2] What is more, in Protestantism, words were spoken and performed, heard and recorded, internalized and visualized. Words merged with bodies through the modulation of voices, postures, or gestures. Put differently, words were embedded in religious practices. How did Protestants invest words with spiritual meaning and emotions to launch a truthful Christian religion?

THE AGE OF THE WORD

Ever since historians carved out the Reformation as a distinct historical period, they have claimed that the Word was not only crucial for the breakthrough of Reform theology but also characterizes the epoch as a whole. Whereas the Renaissance as a designation conjures up images of a time replete with paintings, maps, and visual objects, the Reformation conventionally is heralded as centered in the biblical Word. In his magisterial History of the Reformation in Germany (1839–1847), Leopold von Ranke saw the index finger of God at work in the restitution of the evangelical sermon during a period that supposedly ushered in European modernity and the age of nation states.[3]

More recently, in an essay that sketches the Reformation through the lens of media theory, Manfred Schneider turned Luther into a prophet of “the dawning epoch of the printed book, made possible by the technology of movable type.”[4] Such master narratives, different as they are, converge in that they portray the Reformation as a period of the Word. These and similar accounts continue to resonate powerfully through Reformation historiography or textbooks on sixteenth-century Europe. Ultimately, such interpretations can be traced back to the Wittenberg Reformer himself. His programmatic and (already in his own time) oft-cited formula of sola scriptura—Scripture alone—declared Holy Writ as the foremost foundation in spiritual matters. In other words, whatever the Catholic Church had instituted, taught, and practiced through the centuries could only be upheld if a particular institution or mode of worship was authorized in the Bible. In Joseph Leo Koerner’s words sola scriptura “was a rallying cry in a territorial war between rival communicative media”—a war that resulted in the triumph of the verbal over the visual register.[5]

Interestingly enough, characterizations of this kind assume that the Word competed with other media, as if whenever the former was victorious, the image was bound to lose. To be sure, Reform-oriented believers harbored skepticism, if not outright animosity, against what they saw, and in some cases feared, as the power of religious images. Needless to say, the fact that, for everyone to see, removing or destroying “idolatrous” altars announced the advent of the Reformation in many a place substantiates this claim. The image breakers or iconoclasts thus valorized the Word by downgrading images, if not, like in Zwinglianism or Calvinism, by banning them outright from places of worship. Yet drawing an impenetrable border between word and image is problematic not least because, as in Weimar, the Word, if not spoken, relies on the visual to become flesh on the page or the painted surface.[6]

The churches the Reformers fostered were deeply suspicious of rituals.[7] Seeking to extirpate what they considered mindless observance or superstitious practices, they advocated an individual believer’s true understanding of God’s message. Not surprisingly, such sentiments privileged verbal communication. Only words were thought to have the power to tie believers together. Yet the liturgies and forms of devotion the Reformers instituted were also rituals, even if they bestowed pride of place to the Word. When people gathered for the day’s sermon, these get-togethers were about far more than the contents of what could be heard from the pulpit.

Rather than isolating textuality from visuality, orality, or ritual performance, a cultural history of the Reformation therefore needs to tend to the multimedial contexts in which believers perceived and received, learned and spoke the Word. Such an approach conceptualizes the Word as fundamentally relational. Put differently, the Word acquired meaning in an environment that was never about words alone. Luther acknowledged as much. In “Against the Heavenly Prophets” (1525), he declared that trying to purge the world of images would be impossible; linguistic concepts provoke mental pictures.[8] When it came to religious truth, visual objects were of secondary status, he said; they were “indifferent” or, as the Greek word has it, adiaphora. Here and elsewhere, Luther elaborated a hierarchy between different modes of expression, with the Word occupying the top position.[9]

THE WORD IN CONTEXT

What was unprecedented about the word-centered theologies Protestant churches instituted was not so much that they accorded pride of place to Writ and Word alone. It was that they launched an ensemble of printed, written, spoken, sung, and, at least in the case of Lutheranism, pictorial media that communicated central tenets for each respective confession in consonance. Protestant attempts at turning parishioners into informed believers responded to the many forms of religious edification common in the pre-1517 church. By reducing the broad or, if we follow the Reformers, confusing spectrum of texts, images, and rituals, they worked toward a society in which all media were in line with one another.

Protestants of all persuasions had exceedingly high hopes for the societies that would emerge from spreading the Word. Theirs was nothing less than a comprehensive experiment in engendering evangelical communities, whose motors and mechanisms were various interlocking measures in disseminating biblical messages. So that a uniform doctrinal understanding would gain ground an array of vehicles of communication, instruction, examination, expression, and enforcement emerged in the decades after 1517. Some were new, like catechism school; others had existed for quite some time but were redefined or more widely applied. While catechisms in writing, for instance, were not unknown in the late medieval church, the systematic schooling of believers in the creed, based on authoritative, ecclesiastically mandated, and centrally controlled catechetical texts, certainly was.

Central beliefs were repeated often and in different genres; an utterance in one medium was to sustain another message in a different medium. Luther’s Large Catechism, for instance, built on the Small Catechism (1529); their author saw these foundational texts as one of his supreme literary achievements. Importantly, this catechetical pair provided models on how to target addressees of various ages, professions, stations, or genders.[10] As a result, the efflorescence of Protestant print publications in the sixteenth-century German lands rubbed against the assumption that inundating believers with a multitude of books was undesirable. When the Nuremberg pastor Veit Dietrich published his printed sermons for Lutheran households, he defended the appearance of this so-called postil against critics who claimed no collections of this kind were necessary since Luther’s own and others’ were available.[11]

Protestant communities monitored religious words—their dissemination, content, and consistency. While communication was crucial, communication also required control. Everyone was held to attend weekly service in order to receive messages of various kinds, including government mandates. Those who failed to comply were reprimanded or disciplined if caught. In addition, while often ineffectual, educational opportunities and, in the seventeenth century, first attempts at universal schooling in certain territories, sought to equip Protestants and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Catholics with the essential skill necessary to thrive within a confessional society, reading.[12]

While many students of the Reformation have focused on the top-down quality of the disciplining processes that emerged in Protestant and Catholic territories alike, it is important to recognize that religious experts were not only disciplinarians but also themselves the target of oversight. Whether they were professors of theology, clerics, teachers, household heads, or bailiffs, they were expected to communicate messages that did not contradict central tenets of the respective confessional churches they belonged to. Conformity in religious practice, writings, and comportment, in other words, was ensured on a variety of levels and through a variety of measures. First introduced in Saxony around 1525 but adopted in most Protestant as well as Catholic territories, visitations were intended to record the progress of the reforms (or the lack thereof) and to help improve their effect. Needless to say, the implementation of such policies hinged on the cooperation of many societal, political, and ecclesiastical forces. The aforementioned hierarchy of media (where the Word presumably was positioned above other modes of expression) thus went hand in hand with a newly invigorated social hierarchy.

In confessional societies, believers became lifelong listeners and learners. Some, if not many, derived an acute sense of self from embracing their place as defined by their confessional group. In actuality, however, regional or theological differences were never eradicated; Lutheran and other confessions were anything but unified blocks; and the ensemble of media was constantly shifting. Differences of this kind provided incentives to improve the workings of the confessional regimes that took hold in the second half of the sixteenth century. Over the long haul, in sum, the Protestant reforms gave birth to a complex apparatus designed to reliably and systematically spread the Word—efforts fueled by anxieties about words and their ambiguous meanings.[13]

LUTHER’S BOOK OF BOOKS

Late medieval Christianity was ripe with the ferment of lay piety. New religious movements activated the clergy as well as non-clerics. This Christianization of everyday life relied, among other things, on disseminating the Word—the psalter, prayers, and religious manuals—in the various vernaculars.

Making biblical books accessible to lay readers was controversial in the medieval Catholic Church. Reading sacred texts in milieus other than those overseen by clerics smacked of heresy. However, the marked rise of literacy in the late Middle Ages, believers’ search for a personal Christian faith, as well as the emergence of a market for manuscripts or prints in the fifteenth century contributed to the church’s failure at controlling the spread of biblical texts beyond those said to be competent to interpret them—attempts at control that were more haphazard than systematic to begin with. In the foreword to his seminal 1516 Greek and Latin New Testament, the Humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam vigorously defended giving the laity unmediated access to the biblical word: “I absolutely dissent from those people who don’t want the holy scriptures to be read in translation by the unlearned—as if, forsooth, Christ taught such complex doctrine that hardly anyone outside a handful of theologians could understand it, or as if the chief strength of the Christian religion lay in people’s ignorance of it.”[14]

Ironically, Erasmus issued his plea for disseminating Christ’s message to the laity in Latin. Be that as it may, the rise of biblical philology, Humanist pedagogy, Christian Humanism, and various movements in pious devotion created incentives to get the Word out to readers. It is indicative in that regard that Luther based his translation of the New Testament on the second version of Erasmus’s landmark edition, the soundest text available at the time. In the same year when Luther’s so-called Septembertestament saw the light of day, Erasmus renewed his argument about the Bible’s universal appeal: “exact knowledge of the holy books is not to be condemned simply because someone, through his individual fault, turns them to evil ends”—as if responding to the “Luther affair” that, by 1522, had spread beyond a single theologian to envelop much of the Christian public in debate, a development that was proof to many ecclesiastical dignitaries that the clergy as mediators of the divine message were more needed than ever.[15] A Catholic religion where specific places, times, or words were considered holier than others was replaced by a religion where God’s omnipresence was made evident to all.

No fewer than eighteen printed Bibles in German were published before Luther’s complete Biblia of 1534 (some historians speak of more than thirty such translations). The first German Bible appeared in Strasbourg in 1466, only shortly after Gutenberg’s epochal prints of the Latin Vulgate. Johann Mentel’s Bible experienced a long life as a text. It was reprinted and revised thirteen times; its last edition appeared as late as 1518, more than half a century after its editio princeps. While vernacular versions of the Book of Books (or selections thereof) existed in many places, such a great number is unique among European languages on the eve of the Reformation. Notably, these prints greatly differed in style and layout. As early as 1475/76, for instance, an Augsburg printer issued an illustrated Bible, though its woodcuts pale in comparison to the visual splendors of Anton Koberger’s Nuremberg Bible of 1483.

In general, these vernacular prints preserved the linguistic structures of the authoritative Latin Vulgate in the target language. The Strasbourg Bible (whose translation was based on a fourteenth-century Low German text), for instance, deployed many words that were alien to everyday speech, heralding the text’s sacred character. While translators had precedent on their side for proceeding in this fashion, such faithfulness to the revered Vulgate also proved an obstacle. It limited the prints’ usefulness for an audience untrained in biblical exegesis or theology.

By contrast, Luther and his “helpers”[16]—Philipp Melanchthon, Matthew Goldhahn, and others—based the translation on the Bible’s original Hebrew and Greek. Yet its overarching target was to produce a Biblia Deudsch that while returning to the textual sources with their promise of accuracy in transmission was also eminently readable. “For the literal Latin is a great hindrance to speaking good German,” Luther notes in 1530. Indeed, spoken language—that of “the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace”—provided one standard he adopted.[17] Characteristically, he prevaricated on what it meant to translate the Book of Books. In a letter addressed to his princely protector, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, he claims to have “received the Gospels not from man but solely from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ”—as if he were a prophet.[18]

Contemporaries of Luther described the stylistic choices a translator faced with the binary of translating either word by word (often thought to be particularly appropriate for sacred texts) or meaning by meaning. Yet Luther laid claim not only to having translated the Bible for the “common man” but also to having used a literal style in translation.[19] At times, he preserved Latinate elements, syntax, and prosody in the target language.[20] In other words, Luther availed himself of a host of approaches when rendering Scripture in German. Arguably, it is this tremendous flexibility that helped turn Luther’s translation, with its rich textual fabric, into a milestone in biblical exegesis.

The Biblia Deudsch originated from the idea of the priesthood of all believers Luther first formulated in 1520: the notion namely that the clergy was no closer to God than other believers and, as a corollary, that everyone was capable of immersing himself in the Bible. Yet with the rise of dissent within the Protestant movement and the rebellions of 1524–1526 known as the German Peasants’ War, widely interpreted at the time as caused by Luther’s theology, the need to channel readers’ reactions became evident. In order to prevent the “simple-minded and those with no understanding of history” from misappropriating the vernacular Word, Luther supplied most biblical books with prefaces.[21] He endowed readers with a plethora of reading strategies to make sense of the translated Word: relating the stories of the Old to the New Testament; providing extensive syntheses of Paul’s Letter to the Romans as the centerpiece of the Gospels; and extolling the purity of the evangelion as a “sermon on God’s son,”[22] to name but a few of the ways Luther propagated to make his audience fit for the task of engaging the Book of Books by themselves.

Catholic or Calvinist publishers deployed similar measures. Johann Dietenberger annotated his Catholic Biblia extensively (1534); the Bible published by the Calvinist theologian Johann Piscator (1602–1604) framed each chapter with explanatory glosses and a list of lessons to be derived from each section. Through these and similar devices, publishers of biblical books sought to prevent unorthodox readings and guided their readers. Ample paratexts compensated for the absence of mediators in the person of a cleric.

Much ink has been spilled on Luther’s Biblia Deudsch, its theological originality, its idiomatic quality, as well as its profound and lasting impact on the German language. Arguably, with the exception of Jerome’s Latin Bible, no other Bible translation has ever achieved a similarly canonical status.[23] In fact, the Wittenberg Bibles provided the gold standard for all subsequent scriptural renderings into German, whether Catholic, Calvinist, or other (Figure 19.2). Even where translators departed from Luther’s linguistic choices, their wording reflected knowledge of his text. Gleefully, Luther noted that Hieronymus Emser (who in 1527 issued a Catholic version of the German New Testament to counter Luther’s) had copied his text, merely correcting “mistakes.”[24] Furthermore, the influence of Luther’s Bible translation extends beyond the German-speaking lands; William Tyndale’s rendering of the Book of Books, the first complete English Bible, was indebted to its Lutheran predecessor. Vernacular theology no longer constituted a paradox.

FIGURE 19.2 Johann Eck, Luther’s adversary, was also the editor of a Bible (1537)—based on Jerome Emser’s edition (Ingolstadt: Weissenhorn, 1550). The illustrations on its title page demonstrate how the biblical text as received from God connects heaven and earth.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 2 Rem. IV 2 (bsb10150086_00005).

BRINGING THE WORD TO LIFE

Though they differed in many respects, all Protestant confessions shared a concern with getting the Word out to believers. This centrality of the spoken, written, read, and received religious word included the radical reformers. To mainstream confessions, these Reformers and their followers supposedly sought immediate spiritual fulfillment at the cost of a theology based in the biblical Word.

According to Thomas Müntzer, a contemporary of Luther and one of the first critics of Lutheranism among the Reformers, words are unreliable vehicles of communication. As transmitters of messages between humans, they are vulnerable to manipulation and deviation from their original meaning. It is indicative that, in a 1522 letter, he quotes St. Matthew where the evangelist equates “scribes,” “Pharisees,” and “hypocrites” (Matt. 23:27) against critics among the Reformers. What is more, he juxtaposes the dead letter of their words to the “living word.”[25] As conveyors of the divine message, words are insufficient, at least if they serve as the sole basis for religious messages. It is not so much the indeterminacy of the sign that is at issue here. Rather, for radical reformers, the exclusivity of the verbal sign is at stake. Words cannot and should not operate in a vacuum. As signs, words are in need of an embodied truth beyond the verbal utterance itself: experience, life, and spirit are among the concepts regularly adduced to circumscribe this extra-verbal dimension necessary to make words resonate with the conditions in which they are uttered. The truth about the Word then is that we cannot do without them. But they are not the whole truth either.

Whereas the divine is marked by permanence, the human sphere of communication is irreparably riven by ruptures, decay, and risks. Accuracy of transmission therefore warranted considerable attention. At the same time, the contingencies and pitfalls of verbal communication do not entail a laissez-faire attitude toward the Word. “I will back up all I have said from the Scriptures, from the order of creation, from experience, and from the clear [open] word of God,” Müntzer concludes a letter to Melanchthon.[26]

Like all things earthly, languages were subject to historical change. Müntzer and other Reformers thought both linguistic decay and improvement possible. Importantly, decay in the administration of Holy Writ reflected the general decline that, if we follow many Reformers (radical or not), set in with the early history of the church.[27] There is little evidence, however, that they thought an apostolic standard could be restored with immediate effect. What evangelicals were called upon to do was rather to embark on a path toward “improvement” or besserung
[28]—a gradual change.

A contrast between different and distant time periods served to characterize the confluence of forces in the Reformers’ own time. When Italian and French monks—those “pious and good-hearted fathers”[29]—converted the Germans of the past, the German language lacked the well-structured form needed to unify Christianity. Centuries later, the situation had changed. Through perpetual abuse, Latin had become associated with magic and superstition. This is why German offered itself as a linguistic medium ready for edification, education, and spiritual betterment. That it appeared as an idiom untouched by the impurities of church traditions recommended its use in the context of this intended apostolic restoration. Many sixteenth-century reformers of language saw in the vernacular a linguistic vessel of the greatest spiritual potential. The emphasis Reformers placed on the vernacular has often been reduced to a function of their mobilizing a mass audience. Yet the vernacular as a vehicle was tied to sophisticated reasoning regarding its religious potential.

For many Reformers, every veiling of meaning was considered a distortion of the truth. The followers of John Wycliffe known as Lollards, for instance, had heralded English as a linguistic medium that was “openere” than Latin.[30] Similarly, many Reformers associated German with openness. This association amounts to a turn against theologians as gatekeepers. The radical reformers came to see the Protestant churches that emerged in very much the same light as the early Reformers had seen the Catholicism of their time. By dint of their institutional structures and their reliance on ministers as mediators of the Word, these Protestant confessions shielded believers, if we follow the radical reformers’ critique, from the full benefits of an evangelical belief.

Divisions among the Reformers multiplied since the early 1520s—divisions that revolved around a host of issues, not only doctrinal ones. Yet questions over the course of the reforms inevitably hinged on the Word, its status, and exegesis. When Luther and Zwingli debated their differences, the sacrament of the Eucharist and the question what “this is my body” (Luke 22:19) means became the most divisive issue. The former embraced God’s Word literally, even where it seems incomprehensible, that is the bread broken in communion actually is or rather becomes Christ’s body; by applying hermeneutics and reason, the latter arrived at the reading “This is the sign of my body.”[31] In local communities such as Augsburg, many more takes on the Eucharist circulated before confessional orthodoxies gained ground.[32] No wonder that believers turned to learned theologians in seeking guidance on how to grasp a ritual about which there existed “many manners [of execution], many opinions, and many speculations.”[33]

OF SERMONS AND SILENCES

Without a doubt, sermons were the most important way of winning people over to the evangelical cause in the years after 1517. The vast majority of the population, especially in the countryside, was unable to read or write. Not surprisingly therefore, the orally delivered sermon mobilized the populace for the Reform creeds. What is more, as Protestant churches established themselves alongside their Catholic counterparts, launched liturgies, and refined their institutional apparatuses, sermons became the preeminent medium to instill a sense of belonging in parishioners. In this, Protestantism departed from Catholic tradition where the most cherished ritual was the celebration of Mass. Wherever the Reformation held sway, communities constituted themselves above all via the preached Word.

Nonetheless, Andrew Pettegree (Chapter 18) is right in calling the sermon a problematic genre. Whereas there is no shortage of printed sermons from the period, the relation of printed matter to oral delivery or of performance to print is vexed. As a result, the “sermon as event” remains elusive.[34] Protestant authors were reticent on many aspects of how they thought a sermon ought to be delivered. Their advice on length, intonation, and the like is rudimentary. How did Protestant sermons sound? We have to piece together the Word that believers heard from the pulpit from a variety of sources, anthologies of model sermons among them.

To be sure, for those able to read, printed sermons were a means to receive the Word when one was unable to attend church. Yet printed sermon collections also trained ministers in how to preach. In fact, visitation records bemoan the fact that many ministers were not up for the task. In some instances, the visitatores therefore supplied them with the tools of their trade. Reformers held different views on whether reading from sermon collections in the pulpit would adequately make up for a pastor’s shortcomings.[35] Johann Spangenberg, the author of homiletic anthologies, admonished ministers not to rely too heavily on published texts when preaching, urging his fellow sermonizers to engage the Bible in a lively manner.[36] Though realities on the ground fell short of this ideal in many parishes, the aforementioned Dietrich defined the minister as a “shining example of an excellent man who knows, explains, and presents Scripture well.”[37]

Model sermons in print are exemplary among other things in that their disposition is crystal clear: Narrative retellings of biblical episodes are separated from interpretative or instructional sections. The sermonizer was expected to unfold the biblical passage of the day for a particular audience and a particular occasion by specifying relevant themes and what was to be learned from the day’s reading. The sixteenth-century Lutheran Joachim von Beust and his translator Johann Wittich recommend painting a vivid portrait of the places where the biblical events took place. According to the same sermonizer, a good sermon consists of instruction, consolation, warning, and admonition. Importantly, these different parts touch on various emotional registers. Religious controversies should be revisited with a light touch to teach parishioners how to distinguish right from wrong. Importantly, these multifaceted texts were expected to instill in believers awareness about their place in the history of revelation. As a result, sermons as a medium gave rise to the memoria of the various confessions. In short, sermons were a textual collage of sorts, meant to captivate a diverse audience by covering an array of aspects and affects, including parishioners’ daily life.[38] It is telling that Von Beust likens the sermonizer to the honeybee that laboriously assembles, builds, and transforms.[39]

Let us compare several sermons on one and the same theme. For this purpose, I have chosen the story of the Apostle Thomas who doubted Christ’s resurrection until the latter permitted him to touch the wound in his side (John 20:24–29). First, this conversion narrative is fitting for a confessional age. Second, if we follow Glenn Most, the story of the doubting Thomas is an “expression of the nearness and farness” in one’s relationship to Christ, an ur-Protestant topic.[40] Last, this New Testament episode, with its focus on bodily experience, compels us to reflect on the limits of what words can achieve; after all, Thomas had responded with disbelief to the accounts by others about Christ’s resurrection.

When parsing the story of the doubting Thomas, sixteenth-century sermonizers shunned its glaring corporeality (of the anthologies that featured woodcuts, this is also true of the illustrations for the story).[41] The Apostle who was only persuaded by touch barely makes an appearance in these texts. Whether Catholic or Protestant, sixteenth-century sermons did not dwell on Christ’s wounded body. Von Beust even speculates that Thomas might actually have refrained from touching Christ out of reverence. When descriptions of Christ’s lacerated body come up, they are made to serve an end: One Protestant sermonizer in print states that Christ appeared before God with an open wound in order to plead for humanity.

Overall, sermonizers distilled simple truths from sermonizing on Thomas’s doubts. The lesson that those who are repentant can be forgiven their sins trumped all others in that regard. What is more, many sermonizers drew connections to other biblical passages. Georg Witzel (1501–1573), a Catholic, stresses the story’s place in the liturgical year; tellingly, this former Reformer added that the Gospels do not contain everything there is to know about Christ’s life. By contrast, via the doubting Apostle, Caspar Huberinus (1500–1553) reinforced typically Lutheran imagery, namely that everyone has to carry his or her own cross. If the rhetorical colors seem somewhat more vivid in Catholic texts and if the straightforward lessons that many Protestant sermonizers favored seem matter of fact by comparison, then this results from confessional backgrounds as well as from different rhetorical styles.[42]

Doctrinal and other differences notwithstanding, however, there is remarkable overlap in how Catholic and Protestant theologians interpreted this story. Many printed sermons pay considerable attention to narrative detail, for instance. Also, for the most part, these texts avoid overt confessional agitation. Michael Helding (1506–1561), a Catholic who was present at the Council of Trent, alludes to the many doubters who deserted the church in his own time; yet this veiled formulation barely qualifies as an attack on a specific group. Statements such as the one by the rather obscure Christoph Fischer that it is the minister’s task to clean the church of papal filth are rather the exception than the rule. In the same context, another Protestant, Erasmus Sarcerius (1501–1559), took issue with Anabaptists since, he argues, those who assume ministry are in need of an education. The Catholic Witzel had his parishioners pray for a general church council.

Intriguingly, this New Testament narrative which may be said to be about the limits of what words can do (before he started to believe, Thomas needed to feel Christ with his own hand) transmogrifies into an occasion for Catholic and Protestant clerics to celebrate preaching per se. “Apostles and preachers … are God’s messengers,” Helding lets us know in his sermon.[43] Jesus who taught Thomas the truth thus serves as a reminder to the congregation that the teacher in the pulpit deserves respect. One may detect a certain anxiety among the authors about their own status as preachers in this interpretative twist. Bringing the whole community together in a sermon and appealing to everyone present was an exceedingly difficult task.

Protestant sermons in this period were more diverse than often assumed. Next to the Sunday sermon, additional homilies were supposed to be offered during the week, though visitation records suggest that they frequently fell into neglect; there were catechism sermons; wedding and funerary sermons became a staple in the sixteenth century; pastoral genres abounded. But sermons were also more diverse in that in addition to those delivered in the vernacular Lutheran ministers continued to preach in Latin when the occasion was appropriate, as with university students. At any rate, the juxtaposition of Latin and the vernacular as a linguistic alternative falls short for this period. In fact, the educated moved in milieus where mixing Latin and German was not uncommon and code-switching frequent. Visitations sometimes brought to the surface discontent among parishioners about Latinate elements in service that persisted well into the Reformation. Doing so in speaking or writing allowed for the differences in textual functions and rhetorical colors of Latin and German to shine. Characteristically, German, unlike Latin, the language of erudition, was the idiom that was emotionally charged, the language of religious fervor. But vernaculars also were well suited for vilifying and joking. Some visitatores criticize sermonizers for what they called ruffian preaching, suggesting that the model sermons we have provide an incomplete picture of the sermons actually delivered. While religious propaganda threatened the social or confessional status quo, it also provided a powerful strategy for captivating one’s audience emotionally.

Did believers listen? Did they take an interest in the often prolix sermons they heard? This question is all the more important, since, according to pastoral theologians, mere listening to a sermon was not enough; they encouraged, if not expected, active participation in their parishioners: remembering, ruminating, and reiterating. To be sure, there are signs to the contrary. The visitation records report ignorance as regards the most cherished prayers, catechetical texts, and tenets of the faith. It was not uncommon for a visitation committee to decry that the “uses and abuses” of the Old Church had not yet been abolished. Not surprisingly, this was especially true for the countryside where disciplinary oversight was less stringent than in towns. If Reform Geneva was praised as “the most perfect school of Christ” by Reformers like John Knox for its stunning display of Protestant morality, then this had much to do with the city’s particular social and political conditions where Jean Calvin and his followers launched a series of well-focused reforms.[44] Other places were probably less successful in bringing about the religiously enlightened society the Reformers strove for.

At the same time, local conditions mattered. In Mansfeld, a mining region in decline, ordinary believers participated in a sophisticated debate that had originated in university theology. In the 1570s, they even formed conventicles or, in Robert Christman’s formulation, an “underground church” in order to hold on to their belief that original sin affected human nature in its entirety—a stance that mainstream Lutheran theology of the time deemed unorthodox.[45] Episodes such as this make it more likely that audiences engaged sermons actively, as recent research also suggests.[46] Still, many second- or third-generation Reformers expressed disappointment with the outcome of their efforts in reforming Christian society. This sentiment gave rise to strands within Protestantism that opened uncharted avenues for a true inner and outer reform. In sum, one needs to read visitation records with a grain of salt. Where one set out to measure religious compliance, examiners were bound to detect deficiencies. This was precisely the social, religious, political, and textual dynamic the Word-centered disciplinary apparatus of Protestantism and post-Tridentine Catholicism set into motion.

It would be misleading, however, to identify the Word in the Reformation exclusively with communication about religious matters. As we have seen, words were weapons in the verbal wars waged between and within the confessions. To be sure, the harshest vilifications targeted those who stood outside the organized churches, the Anabaptists (who, for the most part, refused to build societies based in the communal embrace of certain religious tenets) and those who were not Christians such as the Jews (who often lived in the midst of Christians) or the Muslims (who provoked fear when the most successful empire of the early modern world, the Ottomans, made conquests on the European Continent). Slanderous language often left an indelible mark. When the Braunschweig city council restricted contact between Christians and Jews in 1545, and, in 1546, expelled Jews from the city, the relevant edicts exploited Luther’s late anti-Jewish writings, for example.[47]

In fact, polemical language may have contributed to the focus on the Word that was characteristic of the age. Published broadsides and pamphlets were replete with inventive puns, word plays, verbal associations, and the like. Controversialists capitalized on the linguistic resonance between Luther’s name and the German word for lucid, clear, or honest, luter/lauter, for example. In response to this widely deployed link, Müntzer vilified Luther as “Dr. Liar,” turning the former association on its head.[48] At times, such figures of polemical speech had a long after-life. Pro-Reform satirists exploited the onomatopoetic echo between Thomas Murner and Murrmiow or “purrer”; the identification of this Catholic author with a cat caught on, both visually and textually. In a poem of 1522, Murner even assumed a feline role in writing.[49] Attention to the Word and focus on the word thus were anything but a contradiction; they reinforced each other. Beginning with the early 1520s, the ups and downs of polemicism accompanied, reflected, and contributed to the ups and downs of religious conflicts during the sixteenth century.[50]

Yet words were also apt to shield and protect their speakers or writers. They were useful in masking one’s beliefs. Uttering words to simulate or dissimulate could protect one from persecution, forced emigration, or the bodily harm many believers suffered for their beliefs. It is therefore no accident that during an age that prided itself in having elevated the Word, a debate raged about whether Christians were bound to speak truthfully about their religious convictions. In various writings, Calvin condemned equivocating on one’s faith or hiding one’s religious leanings.[51] These so-called Nicodemites—named after the Pharisee Nicodemus who listened to the teachings of Jesus Christ (John 3:1–21)—found their apologists among both Catholics and Protestants; writers specified the conditions under which concealing one’s beliefs was defensible, if not prudent. The case of the Alsatian Calvinist Augustin Güntzer, a pewterer, is a good case in point that these philosophical discussions resonated with the everyday, though they did not fully capture what it meant to live in a multi-confessional society. During his travels as an apprentice, Güntzer kept a low profile in religiously hostile environments. If we follow the record of the life story he authored, he and two other Protestants (a glassblower and a carpenter) “did not reveal their heart to each other” while wandering through Italy, though they shared a secret understanding, as he claims. In France in 1621, he rid himself of a religious booklet in order to avoid being found out as a Calvinist.[52]

Future historians of the Reformation will need to pay attention to the silences in between the many words declaimed, exchanged, and published. For all too long the verbose utterances of confessional polemicists have preoccupied our historical imagination. Their shrillness as well as the sheer scope of the archive they left behind has given rise to widespread assumptions that there existed little if any in between; in one way or another, everyone must have been partisan. Yes, after 1517, the Word penetrated societies in ways that one hardly could have imagined before the various Reformations. At the same time, some, if not many, simply did not care or resisted the intrusion of the disciplining efforts couched in a seemingly endless stream of prohibitions and injunctions.

Interrogated in the bi-confessional city of Augsburg in 1598, the goldsmith David Altenstetter admitted to “sometimes” having “heard the preachers of the Confession of Augsburg [i.e., Lutherans] and sometimes the Catholic preachers.” Neither persuaded him apparently, since he “joined neither religion,” as the deposition has it. Pressed further by his interrogators, he expressed a preference for Catholicism, though without offering a reason why. Importantly, however, he showed himself familiar with the word-centered understanding of religion as it had emerged after 1517; he declared that before making a decision about his true religion he would “first need proper instruction in that faith”; what he did or did not become is not known.[53]

Still others embraced religious irenicism. In the few, often covert, avenues open to those who were thus inclined, theologians and ordinary believers furthered peaceful co-existence or confessional rapprochement. But for many the sixteenth-century burgher Hermann Weinsberg might best sum up their attitude—recorded at a time when the Jesuits were beginning to reshape urban religiosity in his native Cologne, a bastion of Catholicism, with their sermons and schools: “I go to church and like to hear preaching, but I do not pray so diligently or often, and bother myself little with the Holy Scriptures, but more with worldly, temporal things.”[54] Let us therefore not underestimate the fact that silences were part of our story; these silences also speak—clearly, loudly, and perceptibly.

NOTES

1. The axis is more prominent today than it was in the sixteenth century before the grills that surrounded the tombs of the ducal couple in the church’s choir were removed in the nineteenth century. The Lutherschrein—a painted triptych with three iconic portrayals of Luther (Luther as monk, as Junker Jörg, and as teacher) by an unknown artist (1572)—only came to be hung in relation to this axis after World War II.

2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1.

3. Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, part i (Hamburg: Standard, 1957), 101.

4. Manfred Schneider, “Luther with McLuhan,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds.), Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198–215, here 199.

5. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 46.

6. Margit Kern, “Performative Schriftbilder im konfessionellen Zeitalter: Die Wende der Reformation vom Wort zum Bild,” in Thomas Kaufmann, Anselm Schubert, and Kaspar von Greyerz (eds.), Frühneuzeitliche Konfessionskulturen (Heidelberg: Verlag für Reformationsgeschichte, 2008), 263–287.

7. Ed Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 155–228; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997).

8. Martin Luther, “Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 40 (Philadelphia, PA: Mühlenberg Press, 1958), 99f.

9. Luther, “The Fourth Sermon, March 12 [1522], Wednesday after Invocavit,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 51 (1959), 84–86.

10. Luther, “Der Große und Kleine Katechismus Luthers,” in Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 30:1 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1910), 123–826.

11. Veit Dietrich, Haußpostill (Nuremberg: Johann vom Berg/Ulrich Neuber, 1544), 4v–5v.

12. Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974).

13. Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); Brady, German Histories: The Age of Reformations 1400–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

14. Desiderius Erasmus, “Two Forewords to the Latin Translation of the New Testament,” in The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton 1989), 121.

15. Erasmus, ibid., 128.

16. Luther, “On Translating: An Open Letter,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 35 (1960), 181–202, here 194; see also 188.

17. Luther, “On Translating,” 190, 189.

18. Luther, Briefwechsel, vol. 2 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1913), 455.

19. Luther, “On Translating,” 194.

20. Birgit Stolt, Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Herzens (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 84–126.

21. Luther, “Vorrehde vber den Propheten Daniel,” in Biblia (Wittenberg: Hans Luft, 1534), A1r: “die einfeltigen / vnd die / so der Historien nicht wissen.” The preface to the Book of Daniel by far exceeds the preface to the New Testament in length.

22. Luther, “Preface to the New Testament,” in Biblia, a2v.

23. In “On Translating,” Luther compared the reception of his translation with that of Jerome’s Vulgate (184).

24. Luther, “On Translating,” 184.

25. Thomas Müntzer, “Thomas Müntzer an einen ungenannten Kritiker,” in Siegfried Bräuer and Manfred Kobuch (eds.), Briefwechsel (Leipzig: Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010), 139–141, here 140; Thomas Müntzer, The Collected Works, ed. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 51 (Letter of July 14, 1522 to an unknown recipient).

26. Müntzer, Works, 46. See Müntzer, Briefwechsel, 137.

27. Müntzer, Schriften, 161.

28. Ibid., 161, 162 (the verb “to improve” appears several times).

29. Ibid., 161.

30. Rita Copeland, “Rhetoric and the Politics of the Literal Sense in Medieval Literary Theory: Aquinas, Wyclif, and the Lollards,” in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (eds.). Interpretation: Medieval and Modern (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), 1–24, here 19.

31. “The Marburg Colloquy and Articles,” in Donald J. Ziegler (ed.), Great Debates of the Reformation (New York: Random House, 1969), 79–86.

32. Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 46–93.

33. Müntzer, Briefwechsel, 159 (Engelhard Mohr to Müntzer, March 31, 1523).

34. Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. See also Larissa Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformation and Early Modern Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001); Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

35. Wilhelm Schmidt, Die Kirchen- und Schulvisitation im sächsischen Kurkreise vom Jahre 1555 (Halle: Verein für Reformationsgeschichte, 1906); Günter Tietz, “Das Erscheinungsbild von Pfarrstand und Pfarrgemeinde des sächsichen Kurkreises im Spiegel der Visitationsberichte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Ph.D. thesis, Tübingen University, 1971. See also Günther Franz, Die Kirchenleitung in Hohenlohe in den Jahrzehnten nach der Reformation: Visitation, Konsistorium, Kirchenzucht 1556–1586 (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1971); Thomas Paul Becker, Konfessionalisierung in Kurköln: Untersuchungen zur Durchsetzung der katholischen Reform in den Dekanaten Ahrgau und Bonn anhand von Visitationsprotokollen 1583–1761 (Bonn: Edition Röhrscheid, 1989).

36. Johann Spangenberg, Postilla: Vom Aduent/bis auff Ostern ([Erfurt: Melchior Sachse], 1564), A3r.

37. Dietrich, Haußpostill, 6v.

38. Sabine Holtz, Theologie und Alltag: Lehre und Leben in den Predigten der Tübinger Theologen 1550–1750 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993).

39. Joachim von Beust, Postilla, trans. Johann Wittich (Leipzig: Voegl, 1597), 5r.

40. Glenn Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2005), 99.

41. For the ensuing paragraphs, I consulted the following sixteenth-century sermon collections: Erasmus Sarcerius, In evangelia dominicalia: Postilla (Marburg: Christian Egenolff, 1544); Spangenberg, Außlegung der Episteln vnd Euangelien (Wittenberg: Hans Luft, 1547); Caspar Huberinus, Postilla Teutsch (Nuremberg: Johann Daubmann, 1550); Michael Helding, De Tempore. Sommertheyl der Postill vnd Predig (Mainz: Franciscus Behem, 1568); Georg Witzel, Sommerheil HOMILIARVM ORTHODOXARVM Postillen (Mainz: Franciscus Behem, 1571); von Beust, Postilla; Christoph Fischer, Postilla (n.p., 1598).

42. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

43. Helding, De Tempore, 18r.

44. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 365–368.

45. Robert J. Christman, Doctrinal Controversy and Lay Religiosity in Late Reformation Germany: The Case of Mansfeld (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012), 187.

46. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 10–11, 60–116.

47. Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 139. On anti-Jewish rhetoric in sermons across the confessions, see Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 137–157.

48. Müntzer, “Hochverursachte Schutzrede,” in Schriften, 322–343. “Doctor lügner” appears seven times in this treatise (327, 329, 331, 332, 333, 334, 342). See Müntzer, “Vindication and Refutation,” in Works, 324–350.

49. Thomas Murner, “The Great Lutheran Fool,” in Erika Rummel (ed.), Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools: Five Reformation Satires (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 72–83. See also Karsthans, ed. Thomas Neukirchen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011); David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989).

50. See, for instance, Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation: Magdeburgs “Herrgots Kanzlei” (1548–1551/2) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

51. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 63–82. The term Nicodemism arose in the context of the debate; Calvin did not use it.

52. Augustin Güntzer, Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantzen Leben: Die Autobiographie eines Elsässer Kannengießers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Fabian Brändle and Dominik Sieber (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 139f., 196.

53. <http://www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=4401> accessed July 10, 2014. See also Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011).

54. Matthew Lundin, Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 146f. (1574).

FURTHER READING

Cummings, Brian. The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Dixon, C. Scott and Luise Schorn-Schütte. The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Hsia, R. Po-Chia. Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750. London: Routledge, 1989.

Pettegree, Andrew. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Rublack, Ulinka. Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Rublack, Ulinka.“Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word,” Past & Present 206 (supplement 5) (2010): 144–166.

Scribner, R. W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

CHAPTER 20

THE REFORMATION OF LITURGY

SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN

THE “Protestant” Reformers of the sixteenth century were united by a desire to conform their religious beliefs and practices and their lives as far as possible to what they found to be indicated in the Scriptures and modeled by the early Christians who were described there. They equally intended to bring to an end what they regarded as the idolatrous accretions of the ages that the Catholic Church specified for both its Masses and its sacred spaces. To a man, the founding Reformers emerged out of the late medieval Catholic theological and ceremonial framework, and they reacted decisively against it. With their Humanist-influenced resort ad fontes, to the wellspring record of the life of Jesus and the New Testament books attributed to Saint Paul and other Apostles, they found a yawning discrepancy between the program of the Mother Church and the ostensible will of God. They set out, in their respective circles, to rectify every dimension of this purported wrong. The task at hand is to explore the changes they wrought in the realm of sacred practice. Their greatest frustration lay in the fact that none of the founding leaders of the groups as we name them today—the followers of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, the Anglicans, John Calvin, or myriad Anabaptists—read the Bible in the same way. They could not agree either on doctrine or on ecclesiastical practice. The failure of the Marburg Colloquy to resolve the matter of the Eucharist in 1529 demonstrated to them that a larger movement designed to purify the faith and also to unify European Christians would splinter into often enduring fragments. Theirs was a sad realization. They did not move toward compromise, for they lived in an era during which prominent clergymen, princes, and magistrates believed in the existence of a single truth. To accommodate one’s opponents was to admit that degree of falsehood to the way one taught God’s ordinances for all humanity.

The theories that have shaped our approaches to ritual change were unknown to the founding divines. They had never heard of the field of liturgics or of the concepts of habitus or performativity.[1] They would have rejected the assertion, indeed, that all human interaction is structured according to ritualized patterns in some degree. Their perspective on the alterations they introduced was made up of three principal ingredients: first, the desire to replicate what each of them found in the New Testament; second, by means of the physical acts of the service of worship to inculcate upon and ingrain in each participant the doctrines that every physical act, every decorative aspect of the place of assembly, set out in symbolic form; and third, to forge and then to maintain through lifelong intermittent repetition a sense of congregational commonality, a shared acceptance of the referent core of belief that would be socially reinforced between formal enactments. A full early modern rationale lay behind the prescriptive literature designed to guide clerics and spiritual heads of a gathering.

THE CATHOLIC SETTING

At the end of the era of Catholic predominance throughout Europe, parishes did not present a uniform liturgical face. Over the centuries, local saints, idiosyncratic practices, and varied tropes had crept in. As Arnold Angenendt has said, medieval liturgy was life and never simply text.[2] Nevertheless, certain patterns such as those prescribed by the Sarum (Old Salisbury) Rite or the Magdeburg Agenda had held sway. Fundamentally, every Roman Catholic altar, whether the high altar of a cathedral or that of a simple rural chapel was designed to feature the marvel of that transubstantiation which the church had proclaimed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The priest’s changing the essence of bread and wine into the actually present body and blood of the Son of God was an incomparable transaction, one that the church came to underscore by means of specialized equipage: the pyx (for storage of consecrated Hosts) and monstrances (for showing the body of Christ to the people); the demand for paintings (“Saint Gregory’s Mass”) of Pope Gregory I (r. 590–604) elevating the Host, which is in the process of turning into the living Christ before the holy father’s eyes; and the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi in 1247 in Liège. A parallel shift of the high and late Middle Ages was the ever more emphatic centrality of the Virgin Mary. Throughout Europe churches bore her name as their patron saint, and the sanctuaries were replete with her image. In liturgical terms, members of monastic orders sang to her as regina cœli and stella maris, while feast days devoted to events in her life proliferated (the Purification of Mary, February 2; the Annunciation, March 25, when the medieval calendar year began; her Visitation to Elizabeth, May 31; her Assumption into heaven, August 15; her birthday, September 8; and the Immaculate Conception of Mary in the womb of her mother Anna, December 8).[3] These, along with many others devoted to her various local manifestations, are observed in Catholic countries to this day. The bells that rang from parish belfreys at high noon called every Christian to pause and recite the “Hail, Mary!” Many town bells were inscribed with “Ave Maria” and “Dona nobis pacem,” as though their ringing would impel these prayers of the community upward to their recipients, the Virgin, her Son, and God the Father.

The entire panoply of Catholic precept, place, and practice carried the imprint of the assumption of prelates and peasants alike that divinity interpenetrated the material creation. The supernatural was accessible even to humble mortals if they availed themselves of the appropriate adepts as intermediaries, objects, and rituals. The Mass bore this out to them. Its powers radiated outward through the limits of human habitation, throughout the graveyard with its as yet unmarked preliminary burials, the settlement that was circumambulated in processions, and the fields that were prayed over and aspersed on Rogation Days.

Initially, the Reformation did not so much alter this popular conception of the universe as it expressed the new cosmic view of the intellectuals who shaped it. For all their anticlerical furor, ordinary parishioners objected mainly to the financial impositions and other obvious departures from Christian charity that representatives of the church imposed upon them. Most wished to retain a pastor. At first, they did not object to the sacral forces at work in the everyday world described above. As Andrew Pettegree has asserted, the people needed to be persuaded of the superiority of a different world view, and the repetitions of the liturgy of the new churches were an apt means—one among others—of such persuasion.[4] Some Anabaptists’ rather rapid conversion was based on their desire to see the evidence of true Christianity in the outer, moral transformation, which Lutheranism did not provide.

Before the disciplinary mood of the age of orthodoxy and religious war took hold beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, liturgy, whether Catholic or Protestant, was dynamic. Initial rubrics did not satisfy even their own authors in the longer term. Debates focused on them. They went too far, or they did not go far enough. They were altered over time, with circumstances, with political shifts, in accordance with who presided over worship. Christian Grosse’s comprehensive Les rituels de la Cène is evidence all by itself of this liturgical dynamism.[5] Despite this reality, every Reformer entertained an ideal of a right order of worship conveying the right theology.

THE EARLY REFORMERS

In the early stages of the emerging movement to rectify perceived wrongs within the Catholic Church, those men who played leading roles agreed neither upon theology nor upon the liturgy that should display and inculcate that theology upon the mainly illiterate masses. In those days, with the help of state forces, Christians living in those places where the Reformers were at work, and before the formative divines could enforce their will upon the populace, there was no unanimity, no lutherische Engführung (Lutheran solidarity).[6] Still, it was an age of anticlericalism—resentment of the clergy for its numerousness, its comparative prosperity at the expense of the laity, its extra-judicial privilege, its sexual indulgence when the church held up a model of abstemiousness, and its lack of compassion as landlords. The poor were viscerally attracted to preachers who criticized the institutional church for its abuses. For all sermons’ infrequency except in those large cities that had endowed preacherships, coming to hear a priestly exposition—always in the vernacular except to other clerics—was already a major occasion of conviviality and exchange of information. Preaching was the principal means of spreading new versions of Christian authenticity, whether among the Lollards, John Huss’s contemporaries in Bohemia, or German cities.

As the pioneer articulators of a Reformed doctrine gained preeminence within their home sphere, they sought to add another indispensable medium to the instruction of the populace: liturgy. Modern scholars such as Victor Turner, Pierre Bourdieu, Catherine Bell, and Monique Scheer have helped us to see a complex of factors at work in shared rituals.[7] Our sixteenth-century forebears could hardly conceive of their own scripts for ecclesiastical rituals as habitus, group misunderstanding, or bodily practice. Nevertheless, they sensed that in order to persuade their neighbors of the rectitude of their teachings, they needed to provide for the proper carrying out of ceremony. This meant that every official act within the church must bear out, further imprint upon observers’ minds and bodies, the newly articulated truths. It meant in every case the demotion of the priesthood from its signal functions of transubstantiation and intermediation. Verbal explication had to accompany the sign language of the service in order to attain the goal of convincing the laity of the superiority of the new order. Catechisms, when the Reformers added these to their arsenal of instructional implements, represented a fixed, memorized glossary of key definitions of the faith. The liturgy was an emblematic form of teaching the same matter. It employed not only the presider’s words and gestures but it involved the onlooker’s physical engagement.

Reformers produced new liturgies, then, with a sense of urgency. They considered a revised Eucharist to be of paramount importance. A number of German Masses preceded Luther’s own.[8] To leave practices in place would have been to contradict the verities that were being introduced; symbol and word would have contradicted one another. Yet the laity were often attached to familiar customs. Further, they tended to take pride in the interior decoration of their parish churches. Many were distressed when fanatics, aroused by harsh spoken critique of the numerous “idols” in the churches, engaged in iconoclasm. These sought to cleanse the liturgical setting, without which, again, the traditional would have sat uneasily next to the innovations. Where princes and magistrates were sufficiently cunning, they imposed a gentler, more assuredly peaceable form of disposing of saints’ images and cultic objects: by stealth of night, or very gradually, over time, they removed non-biblically attested artifacts and sold them discreetly on the Catholic market. Some were restored to the families that had given them to the churches. These were objets d’art and had monetary value. Such considerations did not prevent the razing of the Saint Andrews Cathedral (Scotland) between 1559 and 1561 by uncompromising Protestant zealots.

Despite his celebrity, it was initially unclear that Martin Luther would emerge supreme in northern Germany, Scandinavia, and beyond. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Luther’s colleague in Wittenberg, filled in the gap in leadership when Luther was held in the Wartburg Castle. On December 22, 1521, he announced that he would offer both elements of the Eucharist, both Host and Chalice, on New Year’s Day, 1522. He actually did so on Christmas Day in the castle church, speaking the service in German. The practice spread outward to the surrounding villages. The city council issued the Wittenberg Ordinance, which approved of changes already spontaneously undertaken, including alterations in the Mass and the removal of images. Overenthusiastic townspeople, inspired by Karlstadt’s preaching against images, engaged in acts of iconoclasm, and sympathetic priests modified the existing rubrics of the Mass as they saw fit. Alarmed, Elector Frederick the Wise ordered that no changes should be made. Luther’s return on March 6 effectively nullified the Ordinance and re-established his leadership. He argued that one should not proceed precipitously but should accustom people to liturgical change. Karlstadt eventually (November 1524) responded with his treatise against compromise on the principle of immediate conformity to the demands of the Bible. To delay for the sake of tremulous consciences was to offend God, he said.[9]

In the meantime, another of Luther’s opponents, Thomas Müntzer, a mystic and advocate of peasant rebellion in 1525, had already prescribed a new order of vernacular worship for his parishioners in Allstedt. By 1524, Müntzer’s Ordnung und Berechnung and Deutsch-Evangelische Messe were published. In the latter, Müntzer divided the year into five parts reflecting stages in the life of Christ: the Incarnation, the Nativity, the Passion, the Resurrection, the descent of the Holy Spirit. The services he provides are mere outlines, hinting that the presiding cleric determined the rest according to his best judgment, and/or that the sermon was indeed the centerpiece and beyond verbatim prescription. Yet, his abbreviated text supplies not just words to be followed, which had been in Latin, but brought the concept of the Holy Spirit, which was central to his own spirituality, home to the people:

O du allerhöchster Trost,
der Seelen ein so süßer Gast
eine süße Arzenei.

In aller Arbeit unsre Ruh,
in Sturm und Wetter guter Fug,
im Elend auch dich zu uns neig!

O you highest Comforter,

Sweet Guest and Remedy of the soul,

Respite in all our labor,

Refuge in storm and bad weather,

Incline toward us in our

wretchedness!

O unser allerseligst Licht,
der Menschen Herzen bald aufricht,
die in dem rechten Glauben seind.

Ohn deine Hilf und Hulde zwar
ist in dem Menschen ganz und gar
ein andres nicht als Schuld und Pein.[10]

O you most blessed Light,

Uplift those human hearts

That hold to the right faith.

Without your help and grace, however,

Nothing but guilt and torment

Fill this earthly being.

He muted the sacrificial language of the Catholic Eucharistic rite.

THE EUCHARIST

Luther himself had to be persuaded that the time was right for him to set out an order of worship for his followers. He had to act when he returned to Wittenberg from the Wartburg and found a new rubric for the Mass already laid down.[11] He distanced himself from it even though he agreed with the need to modify Catholic practice. Between 1522 and 1523, several pertinent treatments flowed from his mouth and pen. His target was especially the All Saints’ Chapter, which had not responded to his impulse toward reform. The elector admonished him for overstepping his authority in threatening the chapter with the ban for its intransigence.

In response to the urging of Nicolaus Hausmann, pastor in Zwickau and Luther’s friend, the Reformer wrote in 1523 his Formula Missae et communionis pro Ecclesia Wittembergensi. Still retaining the word Mass (it would gradually fade from usage), he quickly moved through the sections of a Reformed service, indicating when in a curtailed calendar it would be celebrated: an introit, the Kyrie eleison, a prayer or collect, an alleluia, a sequence such as “Come, Holy Spirit,” the reading of the Gospel, the singing of the Nicene Creed, the Lord’s Supper with Latin responses and the elevation of the elements, the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and the benediction. Much of the liturgy was sung, although how ready the laity were to lift their own musical voices to the Lord is debatable.[12] The presiding cleric should be simply attired. Luther was consistently readier to resort to the indeterminate category of adiaphora (indifferent matters) than most of his peers, and so his specifications in Die deutsche Messe (1526) too are skeletal and explicitly flexible. Luther continued to elevate Host and Chalice until 1542 but did not try to make the practice binding on his peers. The Wittenberger retained a reverence for traditional ritual, including the sung liturgy.[13]

In Switzerland, whether in Zurich early on or in Geneva somewhat later, hardly anything about the order of worship fell into the category of adiaphora. A major difference between Wittenberg and Zurich is that in the former, Luther and the elector interrupted Karlstadt’s and the council’s move suddenly to abolish traditional liturgies; and in the latter, Zwingli and the magistrates were in agreement and cleansed both church interiors and services during 1523. The breaking up and disposal of previously “holy” objects would continue on into the later 1520s and carried away even the organ in the Great Minster, stools, and gravestones.[14] After a broader European debate among learned men, the use of the Roman Mass itself was decisively abolished in April 1525, although the use of Latin continued yet a while in some churches. G. R. Potter has described the Maundy Thursday 1525 service in the cathedral:

A table was placed between the nave and the choir; on it were wooden platters with plain bread rolls, and a jug of wine. Thus the altar with its implications of a sacrifice was eliminated and the practice of communion in both kinds accepted. There was no singing: there was a prayer or collect, the reading of passages from the Bible, a short explanatory sermon and the recitation of the Gloria in Excelsis and the Nicene Creed by men and women, verse by verse alternately. After a prayer for forgiveness of sin, an invitation and admonition, all said the Lord’s Prayer, which was in German, as was the whole of the service. The biblical words of consecration were then read and the ministers in simple dark clothes or gowns distributed the bread and wine to the congregation in silence. Some broke a piece of bread themselves, others opened their mouths to receive it, and then the wine, from the ministers. The service ended with the 113th (Vulgate 112th) psalm, “Praise the Lord, you that are his servants” and a blessing.[15]

As we are well aware, with all visual art already dispensed with, the privately music-loving Zwingli abolished all singing and organ-playing in the churches.[16]

While the simplification presented by this liturgical shift underlay almost all Reformation revisions of the plan of worship, in their particulars they differed widely. Embedded within them were all those differences in theology that set one divine apart from another and that were designed to convey those differences to the laity. Little work has been possible on the liturgy of those diverse dissidents referred to collectively as Anabaptists, even though they radically pared back the small amount of liturgy that they found the New Testament to validate.[17] From their probable beginnings in 1525, and in Switzerland, southwest Germany, Austria, and Moravia so intent were they on remaining undetected after the beginning of executions of their adherents that they concealed their meetings, including their ritual transactions. Their Eucharist entailed the consumption of table bread, often with no clerical leader; as in all congregational settings, the Lord’s Supper was designed to display Christians’ unity with each other and with Christ. Pilgram Marpeck wrote, “The proper and true fellowship of the body and blood of Christ is unity.”[18] They debated the propriety of immersion versus pouring water during adult baptism. Later, when Mennonites were able to establish themselves with relative impunity in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, they met in simple “hidden” churches and better resembled their Reformed neighbors in their forms of worship. Song, often very long hymns, was prominent in their gatherings, where it quickly came, among unlettered people, to provide a means of remembering both their leaders’ teachings and their list of martyrs. Nearly all would have affirmed Pilgram Marpeck’s declaration that Catholic ceremonies were of the Antichrist.[19] Presumably, so were Luther’s.

Johannes Bugenhagen, “Apostle to the North” and pastor in Wittenberg’s city church from 1523, transmitted Luther’s less drastic changes in the order of worship to Hamburg, Hildesheim, Lübeck, Brunswick, Denmark with Norway (where he crowned Christian III), East Frisia, Schleswig-Holstein, Wolfenbüttel, and Pomerania his homeland. A committed adherent of Luther, the “Pomeranian” prescribed Martin Luther’s liturgy, albeit in the local vernacular. What is hard to reconstruct, whether in the northern lands or elsewhere, is the extent to which the liturgical setting was made to conform to ideals of scriptural attestability or whether, having often been endowed by magnates, numerous beautiful objects either remained in place or were temporarily stored in sacristy or balcony. Works that have survived till today may have done so because they were hidden and caused no offense during that period of intense scrutiny.[20]

A point on which Luther and his Reformed colleagues would differ was auricular confession. On the Saturday before an instance of Holy Communion, Lutheran pastors were instructed to make themselves accessible close to the altar so that parishioners could come to them one at a time and be examined as to their moral state—they were absolutely not to provide the details of their sins as under Catholicism—and their knowledge of the faith. Upon passing muster, or at least convincing their clergyman of their penitential hearts and readiness to improve, they were admissible to the sacrament.[21] For this transaction the Swiss Reformers substituted a collective statement of sorrow for sin and of unworthiness to receive God’s grace. This congregational recitation hints at the collusion, at the social relations that are involved in numerous sins. Sin is not simply an individual failure to conform to God’s standard of uprightness as the Catholic confession implied but a collective culpability. Nevertheless, as disciplinary intent strengthened during the sixteenth century, Genevans and other Reformed (including Presbyterian) laity could be excluded from Communion by being denied the coin-sized token that admitted the approved to the ritual.[22] Those lacking permission to partake were obligated to hear the sermon, nonetheless.

The officiants at enactments of Holy Communion played a role that was still susceptible of interpretation. The leading clergymen generally believed that pastors and preachers were mouthpieces of the divine; and yet those mouthpieces could disagree. Lee Wandel has observed that presiding Catholic priests could have been seen as re-enacting the Last Supper and playing, with arms extended, the part of the crucified Christ himself.[23] This still signal function surely furthered the personal view of the Protestant clergy that they remained special people even without producing transubstantiation. How much more may this have been true among Lutheran men of the cloth, who dispensed to their flocks the “true body and blood of Jesus Christ” with the bread and the wine? As their provenance, education, and livings improved, the processes of “neoclericalism” intensified.[24]

THE SERMON AS LITURGICAL FORM

Preaching was plentiful if unreliable in the late Middle Ages. It occurred outside the liturgy of the Mass and was irregular. The one exception to its generally unpredictable occurrence was in those cities that had seen preacherships established in the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. As Leutpriester from 1519, Zwingli was not required to preach, yet he himself found explicating the Bible from the pulpit to be a core task; he took it upon himself. He was formally made a preacher only in 1522.[25] During Lent and Holy Week, Catholic priests preached both as a penitential act and to bring home to laypeople the excruciating suffering of their Lord. This focus on the crucifixion prepared them to confess and commune. Such preaching could be immensely popular, a way of rehearing familiar Bible stories and becoming emotionally aroused.

After arriving at their fundamental insight, that the Scriptures were the literal Word of God and the sole sure source of knowledge about God that the Divinity desired His creatures to possess, the Reformers objected strenuously to the blatant embroidery of the text that Catholic preachers engaged in. They did this to entertain and to hold their audiences’ attention. They also did it because they themselves did not have free access to a Bible and could not verify what precisely the Holy Book contained. The Reformation was a move to purify the preached Word and thereby to ensure that the lessons taught from it were genuine. Properly edifying his congregation now became the clergyman’s primary task; the sermon was taken into the liturgical sphere and given pride of place; it became the centerpiece of religious services. The sermon came to be the eponymous label for parish worship.

Protestant divines were in general agreement that sermons ought to teach Scripture and relate it to people’s lives. Luther and his followers retained the inherited pattern of pericopes, prescribed texts for the ecclesiastical year around. They gradually modified their practice by excluding saints’ days that were no longer seen as valid or as presenting a core issue to the faithful. Zwingli and Calvin adopted the device of lectio continua, which enabled them to explicate at length, over a number of days, a particular book or chapter of the Bible, without reference to any saint’s day on which they may have preached.[26]

Illustrations are plentiful that show a clergyman expounding in a pulpit, surrounded by men and women standing or hunkering down on probably collapsible three-footed stools. With the coming of the Reformation, the scene changed. Pews were built very gradually during the sixteenth century, altering the context of religious observances and underscoring the preeminence of the sermon. The Cranach predella of the altarpiece in the Wittenberg city church (St. Mary’s Church) shows Luther pointing to the crucified Christ from a preacher’s wall-niche. The attentive laity stand, except for a few mothers of young children, who repose in “ladies’ seats” (Frauenstühle), earlier reserved for women of high standing. The transition to fixed, seated bodies directed toward the preacher has begun. Box pews (as opposed to bench pews) were more widespread in the north and northwest of Europe.[27]

Across Protestant Europe, pulpits were raised up above the listeners’ heads. All could see (and hear) the preacher, including those seated in the balconies; and conversely, he could inform himself of the presence and attentiveness of his neighbors. Increasingly, pulpits became elaborate works of art, underscoring in yet another way the centrality of the sermon within the liturgy. Reformed sanctuaries favored the height but avoided the artistic embellishment of the pulpit. Theologically, however, all graced the preacher in his appointed post in this piece of furniture with the special status of mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit. In this narrow sense, even among Calvinists (Reformed) God was present during the length of the sermon and worked within the preacher and the souls of the elect. As the Heidelberg Catechism would state, “The Holy Spirit creates it [faith] in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy Sacraments.”[28] All eyes were on the preacher’s face rather than the priestly elevation of the Eucharistic elements; this was a new form of sacral looking, along with the more obvious listening, with some form of spiritual benefit implicitly held out to those who believed. Falling asleep in the pew could now meet with discipline. Randall Zachman has described at length the inner visualization that Calvin desired his followers to engage in, which was beyond the capacity of most of them even had they understood his theology.[29]

THE REFORMED LITURGIES

After waves of iconoclasm resembling both a festival and charivari, and intermittent outbursts of popular anticlericalism, the Mass was provisionally abolished in Geneva on August 10, 1535. Christian Grosse describes the general situation:

From the month of August 1535, the acts of the iconoclasts attacked all the symbols of the traditional faith, wherever they were to be found. Churches, convents, streets and squares were denuded of the material traces of idolatry. The iconoclasts suppressed in this way the network of images and sacred objects that outlined a continuity between public space and the interior of the churches. In the same way, in the interior of the churches the demolition of the altars removed the instrument of celebrating the mass, just as the destruction of the crosses and the statues decorating the streets deprived devotional rites, such as genuflecting to the cross, of their referent objects … Secular space and religious space are thereby equalized: neither the one nor the other any longer constitutes the place of a privileged presence of the divine.[30]

The unifying characteristic of Reformed celebration was its simplicity. Insofar as possible, every physical symbol of divine things had been banned. God was meant to be indeed a spirit and thus above palpability. Compared to the Lutheran retention of (moderated) image, procession, song, choir robe for the officiant, altars, and round Hosts, Zwinglian and then the quickly predominating Calvinist model was one of psalm, prayer, and sermon within a setting now oriented away from the stead of the earlier altar and toward the newly prominent pulpit often placed along the south wall, or sometimes the north wall, of the sanctuary. Lutherans had, to be sure, generally placed a flat altar table at the front of the dais, from which, facing the people, the officient consecrated both Host and Chalice and dispensed the elements to women on the northern edge and men on the southern.[31] The Reformed might have preferred to raze the Gothic buildings in which they convened, but they could not afford to replace them. Instead, they demolished the excess and reoriented the indispensable structures to which sacral worth had been ascribed. They set a small table at the foot of the pulpit and from that served the supper of the Lord, using simple table bread, first to men and boys, then to women and girls. It is unclear whether among the Puritans, women and men may have mingled at the Communion table.[32] The Reformed effort to obliterate every trace of the Catholic cult shows through in the many Dutch paintings of whitewashed ecclesiastical interiors.[33] The First Helvetic Confession of 1536 already lays down the unifying principle:

We hold that the sacred assemblies and meetings of believers should be conducted in such a way that above all else God’s Word be placed before the people at a common place reserved for that purpose alone; and that the mysteries of Scripture be daily expounded and explained by qualified ministers; that the Lord’s Supper be observed in order that the faith of believers be exercised continually; and that earnest prayer for the needs of all men be constantly made. Other ceremonies, which are innumerable, such as chalices, priestly gowns for the mass, choir robes, cowls, tonsures, flags, candles, altars, gold and silver, to the extent [that] they serve to hinder and pervert true religion and the proper worship of God, and especially the idols and pictures which are used for worship and are a scandal, and any more such ungodly things—these we want to have banished far from our holy congregation.

Twenty-five years later, the authors of the Belgic Confession of Faith (revised at Dordrecht, 1618) were content simply to summarize, “We reject all mixtures and damnable inventions which men have added unto and blended with the Sacraments, as profanations of them.”[34] Gradually, however the visual blandishments of the baroque style that was everywhere available in seventeenth-century Europe would affect even the Reformed fathers. They would begin to readmit organs—which is to say, instrumentally accompanied psalms—to their worship and to decorate their congregational spaces in other eye-pleasing ways.[35]

Calvin had been outspoken in his preference for weekly Eucharistic celebrations. Ultimately, however, the magistrates confined this sacrament to four times per year, which followed the Zurich pattern of fewer rather than more frequent Suppers of the Lord. But in fact, the Catholic practice had been and continued very widely to impose only a once-a-year obligation upon all adherents of their faith. Thus, four times a year represented a fourfold increase over previous practice. As Protestantism spread within Europe, each church within its own walls or its own territory negotiated such matters with the authorities who governed it. The relative weight in ecclesiastical affairs of civic and clerical powers was universally a bone of contention.

BAPTISM, THE OTHER SACRAMENT

All the Reformers agreed on the retention of baptism as a biblically attested sacrament, God’s sign and promise, along with Holy Communion.[36] Indeed, whatever critique each one leveled at the Catholic rite with its exorcisms, salt, and spittle, none regarded it as invalid and in need of rectification—until that tiny and variegated minority, the Anabaptists, categorically challenged the scriptural basis of infant christening. Too often these paid for their nonconformity with their lives. The liturgical patterns of this persecuted few were variable, simple, and deliberately concealed from authorities. Within early Lutheranism, baptism was usually still a private affair, celebrated promptly, even hurriedly, after a child’s birth, outside of regular services. If a newborn were in danger of dying, the midwife could apply, along with water, the effective formula, “I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” to the infant’s head. In his Taufbüchlein (1523), Luther initially adhered to the prescription of the Magdeburg Agenda. Three years later, however, he had seriously altered the rite, adding his “great flood prayer,” and yet retained one of the three Catholic exorcisms. In the second half of the sixteenth century, his followers would gradually eliminate even that remnant of “papist superstition.”[37] As in other respects, Zwingli and Calvin swept the liturgical stage nearly clean.[38]

Baptism did not influence salvation, but it did engraft the new Christian onto the body of Christ, his church. Baptism was a ritual of admission and inclusion. Biological fathers were expected to be present along with godparents, a great novelty, and to personally vow to raise their offspring in the faith. Suited to this purpose, the Reformed moved baptismal fonts, or the simple basins that frequently replaced the older “idolatrous” objects, to the front of the sanctuary. Previously, across Europe, the fonts had been used either in wholly separate buildings, baptisteries, as in the greatest Italian churches, or in separate chapels north of the west entrance of the churches; for the infant could not be admitted to the sanctuaries until cleansed of the tainture of its sexual generation. With the coming of the Calvinist variety of Reformation, unbaptized infants were brought directly before the people. The simplest initiatory rites were now performed in the presence of the visible church, involving all members in the vow to oversee the upbringing of the baptizand. Emergency baptism both as concept and act was now abolished. Unbaptized infants were interred in the unconsecrated cemeteries that received the earthly remains of every other parishioner. In the late Reformation era, Lutheran divines began to follow suit, even though these increasingly consecrated new graveyards.[39] In revised baptism, we see the Reformed tension between ministration to the individual and the shaping of a Christian collectivity.

ENGLAND

The island kingdom warrants its own treatment in view of the intense conflict that nearly consumed it and which was partly the result of disgreement over the liturgy and the beliefs that it symbolized. Henry VIII essentially regarded himself as Catholic. Thus, the real dispute over theology and its representation to the populace opened after his death. Influence from the Continent already appealed to some in power. Upon the succession of Edward VI, his lord protector, the Duke of Somerset, declared
that they shall take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines, coverings of shrines, all tables and candlesticks, trundles or rolls of ware, pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstitition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, windows or elsewhere within their churches or houses.

Every church was to have a “comely and honest pulpit” above all else.[40] Puritanism as such had not yet taken shape, with its even more rigorous paring back of ceremony. In 1547, Convocation and Parliament agreed that Communion should be served in both kinds. Two years later, the First Edwardian Prayer Book was made incumbent upon all, and then its revision in 1552. Bryan Spinks has observed that Thomas Cranmer retained much, both of object (altars) and language, that was traditional. Especially noteworthy in comparing the two Edwardian Prayer Books are the contrasting languages of institution in the Eucharistic rites. The First Prayer Book specifies, “The body of our Lorde Jesus Christe whiche was geuen for thee, preserue thy bodye and soule unto euerlasting lyfe.” The Second Prayer Book prefers the more Reformed commemoration to bodily presence: “Take and eate this, in remembraunce that Christ dyed for thee, and feede on him in thy hearte by faythe, with thankesgeuing.”

Even as Puritanism took shape during the reign of Elizabeth, the queen’s slightly further revised Prayer Book was binding upon all her subjects. Her Book of Common Prayer juxtaposed the two forms of institution.[41] Spinks notes the influence of individual churchmen over time: “There continued to be complaints that some clergy tried to celebrate the Holy Communion as if it was a Mass, but as the older Catholic-trained clergy died, so the memory of Catholic style of celebration died out, and a Prayer Book piety established itself in England.”[42] As we know, those intent on more drastic removal from the Catholic template demanded to be exempt and must have bent the rules in their own parishes as much as was possible without incurring dire consequences. To affronts such as these Archbishop William Laud (r. 1633–1645), known for his “high church policy,” ultimately reacted. For Laud, ecclesiastical ceremonies were “the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all indignities.” He was deaf to Puritan accusations that Prayer Book worship departed radically from the biblically attested celebrations of the early Christians. The Puritans declared reprovingly,

They [the early Christians] had no introite … but we [who follow the Book of Common Prayer] have borrowed a piece of one out of the masse booke. They read no fragments of the Epistle and Gospell: we use both. The Nicene Crede was not read in their Communion we have it in oures … Then they ministered the sacrament with common and usual bread; now with wafer cakes … They received it sitting; we kneeling … Then it was delivered generally and indefinitely, Take ye and eat ye: we particularly and singularly, Take thou and eat thou. They used no other words but such as Chryste left: we borrow from Papistes The body of our Lorde Iesus Chryste which was geven for thee, &c … They ministered the Sacrament plainely. We pompously, with singing, pyping, surplesse and cope wearyng.[43]

SOCIAL LITURGIES

Along with the administration of the two retained sacraments and the preaching of the Word, Protestant services, both Lutheran and Reformed, made room for rites that in the view of the leading divines were essential remedies for the disorderly tendencies of fallen humankind. We have seen the shift of the second sacrament, baptism, from outside the Eucharistic space to within it, increasingly even among Lutherans. Calvin’s insistence on excluding certain saints’ names from parents’ choices affected some social relationships in Geneva and its territories.[44] And now, the joining of women and men as wives and husbands, whether or not now labeled merely a civil transaction, was no longer relegated to the secular, less structured space outside the sanctuary (Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora married on the church porch) but was brought before the gathering of the visible church. Lutheran rubrics added vows to the existing consent, and wedding sermons to biblical readings; yet nuptials could still be held in private and followed, outside the church, by feasting and dancing. Reformed authorities moved more quickly, making every ritual of wedlock a public event. Couples wed before their fellow parishioners during regularly scheduled devotions, without fanfare but with the customary Bible citations that directed spouses how to behave toward one another: wives must submit to and obey their husbands as their lords; husbands must love their wives and forbear in the face of women’s inherent weakness. Wedding sermons were now prescribed. The Anglican Prayer Books prefer a congregational setting for marriage rites if at all possible, lay out the oath script which remains well known into the twenty-first century, and recommend a concluding Holy Communion for the couple. In none of these emerging denominations were weddings any longer permitted in private homes or outdoors. These were now of the utmost spiritual seriousness; to speak of solemnization is apt. Marital bonds at their inception, points of theology aside, were symbolically sacralized, just as they drew throughout their duration increasing surveillance from civil and clerical authorities.[45]

The purification of women by means of their “churching” after childbirth was retained in both Lutheran and Anglican contexts. It was brief. The First Edwardian Prayer Book calls it “the Purification of Weomen”; while the second significantly relabels it “The Thankes Geuing of Women after Childe Birth, Commonly Called the Churchyng of Women.”[46] Reformed churches forbade it as a work of the Law (Lev. 12:1–8) and as implying, perhaps, that God did not have the transactions of the birthing room firmly under His dominion. In Lutheran Germany and northern and eastern Europe, and in England, churching took place within congregational worship at appointed times.[47] New mothers were accompanied by a party of those women who had aided them in parturition. The blessing was brief:

O almightie god, whiche hast delyered this woman thy seruant from the great paine and peryl of childe birth: Graunte, we beseeche thee … that she through thy helpe, maye both faythfully lyue, and walke in her vocacion, accordyng to thy wyl in thys lyfe present; and also maye bee partaker of euerlastinge glorye in the life to come.[48]

Its beneficiary was obligated to make a gift to the officiant, often by laying a coin or another item of value on the altar. Afterward, the churched woman entertained her companions with food and drink.

From at least the mid-sixteenth century on, ecclesiastical authorities pressed ordinary pastors to impose strict moral discipline upon their human flocks. In a disciplinary age, peccadilloes hardly existed, for every transgression offended the godhead and might bring His wrath and punishment down upon collective humanity. Liturgies of public penance were available within the late medieval church, and yet they were seldom used. Archduke Ferdinand I, king of Bohemia and Hungary, applied them in dealing with recanting Anabaptists, having them don shaming garments, declare their errors before the attendees at Mass, and kneel before the congregation three Sundays in a row.[49] We might see in the proceedings of the Inquisitions a revival and application of that surviving mechanism. The Protestant churches did not leave these behind as part of the jetsam of papalism. Rather, they brought them into their sanctuaries wherever they could persuade parish clerics to be merciless. Governing clergymen exerted themselves to this end. In Zerbst in the mid-sixteenth century, the culprit knelt before the altar after the sermon. The pastor read his script, supplying the exact name and sin, and declaring that the accused “has deeply angered God, and has grieved and aggravated our Christian community.” The transgressor must then confess to all and express his deep sorrow. The minister admonishes him to appear before the congregation a number of additional times, up to eight, before being absolved.[50] Margo Todd has described rites of penitence in the Scottish Kirk, including the desirability of the guilty party’s weeping as a sign of true regret. Ironically, in the Scots churches in the Netherlands, where the members had choices of religious affiliation, some sinners did not submit to such humiliation. Among Huguenots, offenders were more likely to perform ritual penitential acts before members of their consistory instead of all their neighbors.[51]

Laying the dead to rest was ever a socio-religious act, and it varied greatly according to social class and wealth. On the Continent, in Catholic territories, women of lower rank still rented out their services as washers of corpses and bewailers of the dead. Protestant leaders dispensed immediately with the second function. They closed down the ubiquitous ossuaries, often carting the skeletal remains displayed there to fields outside the walls and burying them. Theologically Reformers disputed the entrenched opinion that prayers and other acts by the living for the dead could improve their chances of attaining paradise. What remained after the dismissal of all the accoutrements of purgatorial belief were the simple accordance of honor to the departed and a simultaneous remembrance of one’s own transitory nature and utter dependence upon God. In the new Lutheran and Anglican scenarios, especially male family members and neighbors—or in the case of women who died giving birth, women too—accompanied loved ones and friends. Their destinations and their order could vary. The possibility of proceeding directly to the open grave existed in each emerging cluster of conviction. There a liturgy of Bible reading and prayer predominated. In Lutheran areas, schoolmaster and schoolboys sang hymns along the way, one of them beginning, “Now let us bury the body” (Nun laßt uns den leib begraben). Parish visitors ordained, however, that after depositing the earthly remains, all friends of the dead should return to the church, there to hear the increasingly requisite funeral sermon and to make an offering to the community chest. In Geneva, clergymen did not take part in funerals, and deposition was rapid. Graves were unmarked, and we thus do not know where Calvin’s own body reposes. The Christian should make every effort to contain her grief, for in each departure God’s will is done. Calvin regarded the moment of death as the moment of birth of the immortal soul, and Reformed almanacs reflect that view. Ideally, one should celebrate the day of decease.[52]

CONCLUSION

Bruce Gordon has rightly remarked, “Liturgies cannot be separated from either the beliefs which created them or the physical space in which they were performed.”[53] I would add that liturgies cannot be understood without reference to the social culture within which they are enacted. The gain of the last two generations has been the integration of the basic principles of anthropological and semiotic analysis into the study of all rites, whether in the context of church fairs (kirmes) and wedding banquets, or in the sanctuary proper. Our consideration of methodologies drawn from other disciplines enriches our approach to the liturgies of the Reformation era. Most recently these methodologies have brought us to awareness of the sensory experiences of worship—what one saw, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled within the church.[54] Emotional programs for the populace, to be conveyed via the liturgy along with other media, and its reactions have also been under study.[55] Such experiences were not wholly the results of theologians’ commitment to higher principles, the products of their religious convictions. They were indeed that: what these men considered to be the will of God and what they were duty bound to disseminate to the laity in their charge. But they were also a reflection of the world views, experiences, aesthetic tastes, and social structures of early modern European people.

Reformation-era liturgies differed among themselves, and they were in a state of continued alteration as divines, secular rulers, magistrates, and ordinary people were exposed to new religious strains or even new styles of living. Liturgy was endlessly dynamic, perpetually in motion. On the surface of the guiding men’s consciousness, this state of change was precisely to be avoided, for the lords of the churches, once again, adhered to the belief in a single, enduring truth. They strained themselves in the second half of the sixteenth century to maintain unity of practice among all those who were subject to them. Yet, change would inevitably creep in, and they were largely responsible for it. They, too, were embedded in their context. As the Mennonites in the Netherlands became more affluent and integrated into Dutch society, they did worship in a manner that affiliates of other denominations could now recognize. The high baroque style of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, in its near-Catholic decoration, does reveal its designers’ competition with the Hofkapelle of the now-Catholic electors of Saxony. The work of Andrew Spicer, both as author and editor, has shown, among much else, that sanctuaries and their liturgical transactions took on influences from the environments in which they existed.[56] It is nonetheless doubtful that early modern church leaders would sympathize with modern Western humanity’s increasing desire to invent personal liturgies to mark every life stage. They saw liturgical stability as their task. This eluded their grasp.

NOTES

1. As a starting point, see Arnold Angenendt, Liturgik und Historik: Gab es eine organische Liturgie-Entwicklung, 2nd ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2001), which begins with a summary of the rise of liturgical studies that focused on medieval Christianity. On modern theory, key works would be: Marcel Mauss, “Les Techniques du Corps,” Journal de Psychologie 32 (1934): 3–4; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). The latest survey is Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Rituale (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 2013).

2. Angenendt, Liturgik und Historik, 168.

3. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. chaps. 4–5.

4. Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 443 (Geneva: Droz, 2008). See also Lee Palmer Wandel’s summation of the variability of the Eucharist: The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80, referring to Augsburg but equally true of numerous other places in transition. With regard to Strasbourg, a real pioneer is René Bornert, La Réforme Protestante du culte à Strasbourg au xvie siècle (1523–1598): Approche sociologique et interprétation théologique, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 28 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981).

6. This phrase is the motto-like summary of Bernd Moeller and Karl Stackmann, Städtische Predigt in der Frühzeit der Reformation: Eine Untersuchung deutscher Flugschriften der Jahre 1522 bis 1529 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), which finds in published sermons a virtually uniform adherence to Luther’s teaching of justification by faith; almost simultaneously debated in a small book, Bernd Hamm, Bernd Moeller, and Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformationstheorien: Ein kirchenhistorischer Disput über Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995).

7. Representative publications by each of these theorists are: Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969); Bourdieu, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, rev. ed., trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220.

8. Julius Smend, Die evangelischen deutschen Messen bis zu Luthers Deutscher Messe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1896); Wolfgang Herbst, Evangelischer Gottesdienst: Quellen zu seiner Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992).

9. “Ob man gemach faren, vnd des ergernüssen der schwachen verschonen soll, in sachen so gottis willen angehn” (1524), reprinted in Erich Hertzsch (ed.), Karlstadts Schriften aus den Jahren 1523–24, vol. 1 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1956).

10. Thomas Müntzer, Schriften, Liturgische Texte, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Bentzinger and Siegfried Hoyer (East Berlin: Union Verlag, 1990), 162–163 (my translation).

11. Natalie Krentz has laid out the details of debate and change in Ritualwandel und Deutungshoheit: Die frühe Reformation in der Residenzstadt Wittenberg (1500–1533), Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation: Studies in the Late Middle Ages, Humanism and the Reformation 74 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

12. Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), is more representative of the traditional view that the laity readily broke into song and that intoning hymns quickly became a beloved habit. Challenging that assumption is Joseph Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Also indispensable are Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and Robin A. Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).

13. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation 1521–1532, trans. James L. Schaaf (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990), 256. Princes, however, were bent on uniformity.

14. See Wandel’s account of the violent disposal of images and objects in Zurich in Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53–101.

15. G. R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 208; see also F. Schmidt-Clausing, Zwingli als Liturgiker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1952), 128–143.

16. Charles Garside, Jr., Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).

17. Michele Zelinsky Hanson, “Anabaptist Liturgical Practices,” in Wandel (ed.), A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014), 251–272, mainly reliant on Balthasar Hubmaier’s Form of the Supper of Christ (1527).

18. “The Cause of the Conflict: To the Swiss Brethren in Appenzell, especially to Ulrich Scherer and Jörg Maler [Pilgram Marpeck], 1543,” in John D. Rempel (ed.), Jörg Malers Kunstbuch: Writings of the Pilgram Marpeck Circle (Kirchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2010), 193–201, here at 200. An up-to-date summation of the varieties of Anabaptism may be found in John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011). This contains only occasional reference to forms resembling liturgy: e.g. 171, 196–197, 201–202, 223, 234, 333, 335.

19. On the first page of “A Clear Refutation,” in William Klassen and Walter Klaassen (eds. and trans.), The Writings of Pilgram Marpeck (Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 1978).

20. Colleagues such as Hugo Johannsen and Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen have devoted much of their careers to the verbal reconstruction of late medieval and Renaissance buildings in Denmark, including their decoration. For the present purpose, they are paragonic scholars. Few churches in any country can boast of such expertise, especially in the dynamic sense of tracking down change. Andrew Spicer and his colleagues, however, have added greatly to our knowledge of early modern ecclesiastical structures. A very recent work by Spicer is “Site of the Eucharist,” in Wandel (ed.), Companion to the Eucharist, 323–362, which includes Catholic spaces. See also nn. 28 and 56.

21. The right-hand panel of the Lucas Cranach the Elder altarpiece in the Wittenberg City Church (St. Mary’s) shows Johannes Bugenhagen, the pastor, hearing confessions.

22. For images of more modern tokens, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communion_token>, accessed May 15, 2015.

23. Wandel, “Envisioning God: Image and Liturgy in Reformation Zurich,” Sixteenth Century Journal 4 (1993): 21–40, here at 30.

24. R. W. Scribner’s term, “Anticlericalism and the Reformation in Germany,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London and Roncevert: Hambledon Press, 1987), 242–256, on this point at 255.

25. Potter, Zwingli, 45, n. 3.

26. On Calvin’s form and style, as well as other aspects of his preaching, see T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992).

27. See the photographs of English box pews at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_pew>, accessed May 15, 2015.

28. Arthur C. Cochrane (ed.), Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century, rev. ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 316. See in general on Reformed sanctuaries, Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

29. Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007); also Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 351–362, “Experiencing the Sermon.”

30. Christian Grosse, Les rituels de la cène, 92 (my translation).

31. See, for example, the Abendmahlsaltar, the altarpiece of 1560, artist uncertain, in the Freiberg/Saxony Dom (main church, not a cathedral), which shows this pattern of distribution, and also a hierarchical order of reception by the laity. Verena Friedrich, Der Dom zu Freiberg (Passau: Kunstverlag Peda, 2008), 24.

32. Richard Day, A Booke of Christian Prayers, 2nd ed. (London: John Day, 1578); fol. M1v shows a clergyman dispensing bread to a mixed group of males and females. Box pews also could accommodate family members of both genders.

33. Angela Vanhaelen, Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (College Station, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012).

34. Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century, respectively 109, 217.

35. Paul Corby Finney, Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), passim. Contains a number of illustrations of objects used in early modern Reformed services. These cease to be as unembellished as the stark wooden and clay vessels adopted in Zurich originally were, for example.

36. J. D. C. Fisher, Christian Initiation: The Reformation Period (London: Alcuin Society, 1970), 9.

37. On the exorcism controversy in Saxony: Bodo Nischan, “The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 31–51.

38. Hughes Oliphant Old, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), traces the development in detail.

39. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “ ‘Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me, and Forbid Them Not’: The Social Location of Baptism in Early Modern Germany,” in Andrew C. Gow and Robert J. Bast (eds.), Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History—Studies in Honor of Heiko A. Oberman on His Seventieth Birthday (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 359–378. See also Karen Spierling, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). On the Lutheran revival of church and cemetery consecration, Robert J. Christman, “Gottes Haus, Werckstadt des Heiligen Geistes: Lutheran Understandings of Church and Cemetery Space, c. 1570–1620,” in Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds.), Topographien des Sakralen: Religion und Raumordnung in der Vormoderne (Munich: Dölling und Galitz, 2008), 221–237; and in the same vol. Vera Isaiasz, “Lutherische Kirchweihen um 1600: Die Weihe des Raumes und die Grenzen des Sakralen,” 103–119.

40. From “The Edwardian Injunctions, 1547,” in Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 255.

41. Bryan D. Spinks, “Evaluating Liturgical Continuity and Change at the Reformation: A Case Study of Thomas Müntzer, Martin Luther, and Thomas Cranmer,” in R. H. Swanson (ed.), Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, Studies in Church History 35 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999), 151–171, on this point 160–163. For great detail concerning the evolution of Eucharistic rites in the Church of England, see Spinks, Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (London: SCM Press, 2013), 313–346. On the words of institution: The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward VI (New York: Dutton, 1977), 225 and 389 respectively. On the Elizabethan Prayer Book, Clair Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), “The Act of Uniformity, 1559,” 131–135. Also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Common_Prayer>, first page, accessed November 25, 2014.

42. Spinks, The Eucharist, 325.

43. Kevin Sharpe, “Archbishop Laud,” in Margo Todd (ed.), Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 74. Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Cranmer to Baxter and Fox, 1534–1690 (Originally Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961–1975; reprinted in one vol. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), esp. “Puritan Worship,” 255–293.

44. William G. Naphy, “Baptisms, Church Riots and Social Unrest in Calvin’s Geneva,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 87–97.

45. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

46. The First and Second Prayer Books, 278, 428–429. On the change of wording, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 205–206.

47. Karant-Nunn, “A Women’s Rite: Churching and the Reformation of Ritual,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner (eds.), Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 78 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 111–138. Cressy gives details of English churching, including the social dimensions, in Birth, Marriage and Death, 197–229.

48. The First and Second Prayer Books, 429.

49. For a summary of the entire proceeding, see Linda A. Huebert Hecht, Women in Early Austrian Anabaptism: Their Days, Their Stories (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2009), 76.

50. Karant-Nunn, “ ‘They have highly offended the community of God’: Rituals of Ecclesiastical Discipline and Pastoral Membership in the Community in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century German Parishes,” in Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (eds.), Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 211–229, here at 216–217.

51. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 3, “Performing Repentence,” 127–182; on weeping, 160–163; and to me viva voce. Douglas Catterall, “The Rituals of Reformed Discipline: Managing Honor and Conflict in the Scottish Church of Rotterdam, 1643–1665,” Archive for Reformation History 94 (2003): 194–222; and Robert A. Houston, “The Consistory of the Scots Church, Rotterdam: An Aspect of ‘Civic Calvinism’, c. 1600–1800,” Archive for Reformation History 87 (1996), 362–392. On Huguenots, Raymond A. Mentzer, “Marking the Taboo: Excommunication in French Reformed Churches,” in Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 32 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), 97–128.

52. See René Bornert’s summation of the visitation of the dying and funerary changes in Strasbourg, including Lutheran and Reformed phases, La Réforme Protestante, 580–589.

53. Bruce Gordon, “Transcendence and Community in Zwinglian Worship: The Liturgy of 1525 in Zurich,” in Swanson, Continuity and Change, 128–150, here at 128.

54. Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), esp. chaps. 3 and 4, on worship and liturgy respectively, 93–161, which are on late medieval Catholicism; and chaps. 7 and 8, 241–341, which are on post-Reformation “sensing.” On the imperial city of Ulm about to appear is: Philip Hahn, “Sensing Sacred Space: Ulm Minster, the Reformation, and Parishioners’ Sensory Perception, c. 1470 to 1640,” Archive for Reformation History 105 (2014): 55–91; with thanks to Ute Lotz-Heumann for bringing this to my attention. Mainly about Catholicism is Alexander J. Fisher, “The Sounds of Eucharistic Culture,” in Wandel, Companion to the Eucharist, 445–465.

55. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), passim.

56. In addition to titles already mentioned, Spicer (ed.), Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

FURTHER READING

Coster, Will and Andrew Spicer (eds.) Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England from Cranmer to Baxter and Fox, 1534–1690. Originally Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961–1975; reprinted in one vol. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996.

Finney, Paul Corby. Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999.

Hanson, Michele Zelinsky. “Anabaptist Liturgical Practices.” In A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, edited by Lee Palmer Wandel, pp. 251–272. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014.

Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Leaver, Robin A. Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007.

Mentzer, Raymond A. (ed.) Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 32. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002.

Milner, Matthew. The Senses and the English Reformation. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Old, Hughes Oliphant. The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992.

Ryrie, Alec. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Spicer, Andrew. Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Spicer, Andrew. “Site of the Eucharist.” In A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation, edited by Lee Palmer Wandel, pp. 323–362. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014.

Spierling, Karen. Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

Wandel, Lee Palmer. The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 21

AN “EPISTOLARY REFORMATION”
The Role and Significance of Letters in the First Century of the Protestant Reformation

MARK GREENGRASS

INTRODUCTION

LETTERS were essential to the Protestant Reformation in almost all its dimensions. Yet the mechanics of their production and transmission, as well as the fundamental nature of epistolary culture in the sixteenth century, made them nothing like the private forms of communication that we might imagine them to be. Letters circulated within epistolary communities. Those communities took on all sorts of forms, reflecting the multiple contexts in which correspondence was transacted. Even the most private letter, one that enjoined the strictest secrecy upon its recipient, had the potential to be copied, extracted, collected, printed, utilized by one’s friends and enemies alike, instrumentalized to tarnish a reputation, to advance an argument in a debate, or to ensure a particular outcome. Letters contained news and information which might, or might not, prove to be accurate. They inevitably told only part of the story, and even that part might not be true. Letters could be lost, and correspondents unreliable. So many letters were in circulation, and so many seemed to contradict one another. Those that ended up in print often turned out to have a complicated history behind them—transforming them into artifacts that served the strategic purposes of those behind their publication. At the heart of the “epistolary reformation,” in short, was a necessary and inevitable anxiety about the way letters functioned in a semi-public domain, even less controlled in some ways than the printed word.

THE ART OF LETTER WRITING

Humanist treatises on epistolography were almost exclusively composed in Latin for educational and training purposes until the time of the Reformation. Letter writing was, at least in the minds of its most distinguished Humanist exponents, the affirmation of friendship (amicitia), the communication of thought and feeling in an intimate, albeit still public relationship. Friendship was the essence of our humanity (humanitas) and the building block of civil society. The latter was sustained by the wisdom and eloquence of the correspondent, the vir bonus dicendi et scribendi peritus [the man skilled in speaking and writing], whose image is played out with all imaginable variants in Humanist correspondence.[1] None was a more distinguished exponent and representative of these values than Desiderius Erasmus. On the Art of Letter-Writing [Opus de conscribendis epistolis] appeared from his publisher Froben in Basel in 1522 as a sideshow to the bigger events taking place in Germany at that same moment. It had begun life as an occasional piece, the product of his tutoring days in Paris. Most of it reads like a school manual (for teachers and students) of the kind that it ostensibly disdains. While Luther was facing the music at Worms in 1521, Erasmus was polishing the text for publication, pushed into doing so by the appearance of a pirated edition of an early version of it, and an anonymous Caliban-style version, one that Erasmus only years later, and reluctantly, recognized as his own.[2]

At the heart of On the Art of Letter-Writing was a fundamental message about how we had to be educated to live in a civil society, and about the crucial role of letter writing within it. The form and content of letters should not be artificially constrained. “To expect all letters to conform to a single type, or to teach that they should … is in my view to impose a narrow and inflexible definition on what is by nature diverse and capable of almost infinite variation.”[3] Letters were mercurial in their form and transit; they could be as long, or as short, as their content demanded. Figures of speech and ornaments should be tolerated because they are ways by which we reveal our personalities (“I would sooner put up with a letter reeking of the lamp, than one that reeks of drink”).[4] The style of a letter has to be adapted to the person to whom it is addressed and the topic that it is tackling. Letters are capable of conveying the full range of human thoughts and emotions. A good letter is the result of years of studying how others do it, and constant practice. He was impatient of overblown, hierarchically dictated, impersonal salutations and farewells, and recommended directness and informality. Postscripts were encouraged. So although he fell back on the traditional (oratorically based) division of letters into “deliberative” “demonstrative,” and “judicial,” he immediately added a fourth category (the “intimate” letter) while having already conceded that the kinds of letters we write are almost infinite.[5] He ended the treatise with examples of types of letters (including some of his own) that imply genres (letters of request, recommendation, advice, apology, etc.) that he was reluctant to impose categorically upon the subject. The phrase that would be most readily remembered, and most often cited, was that letters were “as the comedian Turpilius aptly wrote … a kind of mutual exchange of speech (‘mutuus sermo’) between absent friends.”[6]

What turned Erasmus’s work into a landmark text was that it contributed to, and served to embody, the consciously constructed self-manifestation of Erasmus as a “man of letters,” which then became the vehicle for its subsequent publishing success.[7] It ran through twenty-four editions in its first decade, published from Cracow to Antwerp. There were seventy-four editions of the work between 1521 and 1559, and a further sixteen thereafter through to the end of the century.[8] Marginalia on surviving copies testify to its study. It was prescribed reading in Lutheran schools, recommended (among others) by Philipp Melanchthon. In the colleges of France and the Low Countries, as in English grammar schools, it became the standard textbook for exercises in letter composition.[9] Absorbed into the common gene pool of sixteenth-century epistolography, Erasmus’s Humanist contemporaries and emulators reworked the subject along the same unformulaic lines into their own Latin treatises.[10] These in turn were incorporated into the growing number of vernacular treatises on the subject.[11]

Erasmus’s own epistolary self-representation was itself considerable. By the end of his life, about 1,200 of them had appeared in a variety of editions. The letter as a “conversation between absent friends” implied an exchange that was dyadic, domestic, and devoid of strategem. Nothing, however, turns out to be further from the truth when one investigates the artifices that lay behind Erasmus’s publication of his own letters. The earliest editions (1515–1517) promoted his talents as a Humanist writer and championed his orthodoxy. The debates of the emerging Protestant Reformation overshadowed all the subsequent editions, Erasmus sometimes playing elaborate games with his public, hiding behind pretenses that the letters had been published by others without his consent, or dragged unwillingly from him into the public domain. Oscillating between publishing new selections and updates to previous editions, he ostentatiously refused to publish them in chronological order, substantially altered them to remove references that might cause offense, and consciously edited out salutations and dates.

Erasmus’s tactics are not surprising in the context of the “battles of the books” that preoccupied the literary world of the Rhineland Humanists in the 1510s, and which, in due course, came to reverberate to the echoes of the Luther Affair. In those skirmishes, letter collections, real and imaginary, played a central role in the polemical strategies of drawing up allies and battle lines, defining targets, and undermining the reputations and credibility of one’s opponents.

An opening salvo came in the publication of an anonymous collection of Letters of Famous Men (1514) in support of the Hebrew scholar, Johannes Reuchlin, whose works had been condemned, thanks to an orchestrated anti-Semitic campaign against him, supported by an imperial decree that imposed silence on all parties to the controversy.[12] It contained a preface by Philipp Melanchthon, which blandly justified the publication as simply a collection of model letters for stylistic purposes. In reality, the compendium had been orchestrated by Reuchlin himself as a roundabout way of rallying supporters to his defense. In October 1515, Erasmus received his copy of a follow-up anonymous volume, the Letters of Obscure Men (1515) composed by Crotus Rubianus, an Erfurt-educated poet and Humanist, with the aid of Ulrich von Hutten and Hermann von dem Busche. In this satirical parody of a reply, Reuchlin’s opponents were depicted as starchy old bigots, trapped in their own hierarchical and formulistic epistolary conventions, and incapable of expressing themselves clearly. “Piggy,” “Honeylicker,” “Shitshifter,” and “Bottleclanker,” etc. (the lubricious names ascribed to the supposed correspondents) offered comments on the Reuchlin affair while showing themselves to be ignorant hypocrites.[13]

It was reported (by a later source) that Erasmus so fell about with laughter when he read it that an abscess on his face burst. One of the letters mocked Erasmus himself, and thereby made him an ally by association of Reuchlin’s.[14] Erasmus knew that Reuchlin’s enemies would seize on that implication, and indeed they did when, in 1518, Ortwinus Gratius, the target of a good deal of the satire in the Obscure Men, responded with his own volume of fictitious letters, in equivalently satirical vein.[15] He took care, however, to publish prominently in it a real letter from Erasmus, one whose authenticity it would be difficult for him to deny, to the effect that he disapproved of the Obscure Men satire because it brought the noble art of letter writing into disrepute. Within months, Reuchlin returned to the fray with a new published collection of letters (the Illustrium virorum epistolae) that included, this time, five letters from Erasmus to Reuchlin with the explicit purpose of presenting him and his English Humanist friends as moderates who agreed with his, Reuchlin’s, trilingual method of interpreting Scripture.

As the pulse of polemic quickened, its content determined by letters exchanged privately between individuals, but which assumed a public and controversial significance unimagined at the time of their composition, so Erasmus, John Fisher, John Colet, and others were dragged into an affair that was none of their own making. The “necessity” to which Erasmus coyly referred when publishing his 1519 Medley of letters was precisely his response to a battle in which he had been enlisted without his permission. He offered a collection of “real” letters that would make clear his relationship to the Reuchlin controversy without his being directly involved in it. By indicating his epistolary relationship with those in power, he sought to protect himself. By advertising his promotion of Greek studies, his educational aspirations, and the promotion of universal peace that were the flavor of the month (thanks to Wolsey) in 1518, he strove to put himself above the fray. The “epistolary reformation,” in short, would not be about a bland, dyadic reciprocity of friendship between theologians committed to the Protestant cause, but about the central cut and thrust of profound ideological divisions, however politely expressed, and with an ever-present undertow of polemical and political strategies.[16] The letter, it has been said, “became one of the most successful of the Reformation’s propagandist genres.”[17]

LETTER EXCHANGE: COURIERS, ITINERARIES, INTERMEDIARIES, AND DIFFUSION

Sixteenth-century states, whose diplomatic activities and governing processes increasingly depended on communication at a distance, sponsored post relays, often franchising the service out to independent operators. This resulted in the creation of messenger services that were expensive but extensive in their geographical range, dense in their coverage, and often complementary to those offered by merchants. The tendency was for them all to be quasi-public in character, with identifiable itineraries and defined places of deposit and collection. That, in turn, generated agents for the collection and dissemination of news, concentrated in the information hotspots of Europe. Their activities were at the core of the preparation and syndication of manuscript newsletters (avvisi), the foothills of the larger information transformation that would take place with the emergence of periodically published gazettes in the early seventeenth century.

Those are the headlines of a more complicated story, the details of which are still emerging from research actively under way. Venice was one of Europe’s precocious information centers, its newsletters reflecting its mercantile predominance.[18] By the early sixteenth century, its merchant community could access almost daily news from Rome, Florence, and Milan, weekly communication from Genoa, Naples, and Innsbruck, fortnightly traffic from Paris, Augsburg, and Budapest, and monthly contact with Palermo, Madrid, Valladolid, London, Constantinople, and Alexandria. Florence, Genoa, Lyon, Milan, and Augsburg generated similar communication hotspots based on their mercantile activities in the early sixteenth century.[19]

Rome, in particular, benefited from the exceptionally good messenger services in northern Italy (where it exploited the information coming in from mercantile sources) as well as drawing its position at the hub of the Roman Church with its evolving network of regular nuncios and then, later, Jesuit communication networks. It became an unrivaled center of information collection and diffusion in the age of the Reformation.[20] The manuscript avvisi in the pontifical archives, the product of syndicated news coming from other sources and impressively regular and bulky from the 1540s onwards, fill shelf upon shelf of the pontifical archives. In German lands, the first reference to a “postal” service occurred in December 1490, among the records of Emperor Maximilian I’s Innsbruck administration. That was when the rudiments of a network of relays of horses (“positae stationes,” the semantic roots of the term “post”) began to be established, which permitted a division of labor between riders, allowing non-stop journeys from start to finish. That was franchised out to Giovanni Baptista de Tassis (Johann Baptista von Taxis), from a Bergamo family whose nephew, Francisco de Tassis (Franz I von Taxis) became the postmaster (“capitaine et maistre de nos postes”) to run the relays of the Burgundian ruler Philip the Handsome in 1505.

The von Taxis dynasty was ideally placed to contract for the relay stations in Charles V’s dynastic empire, and a dense network of inns and publicans—ready to turn themselves into postmasters—facilitated the establishment of a network that, by the 1530s, was open to the public.[21] Philip the Handsome’s establishment of a relay network copied the arrangement decreed by Louis XI for the kingdom of France in 1477, one whose functioning reality Charles Estienne’s enterprising Guide des Chemins de France (1553) described for contemporaries in detail.[22] An important basis for Valois authority throughout the kingdom, it was already by that date utilized by others besides royal officials for conveying messages, a reality which was recognized in 1576.

At first sight, these developments seem somewhat marginal to the Protestant Reformation. Its success or failure did not depend on the information centers in Venice, Genoa, Florence, or Lyon. The emerging information hub in Rome served to indicate what a formidable enemy to the progress of evangelical truth information in the service of power could prove to be. Newsletters were the manifestations of mercantile and political interests, not instruments of evangelism. Preachers, not postmasters, would be in the vanguard of the Protestant Reformation. Yet looked at in the longer term an important part of the dynamic of the Protestant Reformation revolved around the North Italian–Rhineland corridor of high literacy, urbanization, trade, and information flow. The relays of horses and messengers in the empire were at the disposition of its evangelical urban elites, and their teachers, preachers, and princes, as much as their Habsburg overlords.

It was those messengers that kept Melanchthon in June 1530 at the Diet of Augsburg in touch with Luther, back in Coburg Castle, anxiously demanding news by return of post.[23] It was the merchants from Saint-Gallen, Christoph and Thomas Zollikofer, who carried the messages from Jean Calvin and Pierre Viret to fortify the resolve of the students from Lausanne, imprisoned in Lyon in 1553.[24] Printers, booksellers, students traveling to study at Protestant universities and academies, footmen, and chevaucheurs in the service of noblemen, provided a complementary and naturally autonomous infrastructure of messengers, just as the networks of journeymen artisans and other merchant vendors would service the needs of Protestant congregations meeting in the shadow of official persecution. The correspondence of the Protestant Reformers often refers to the lack of time and pressure of events that had prevented the writing of a letter; it rarely refers to the lack of an available messenger to carry it.

CORRESPONDENCE IN THE PROCESSES OF PROTESTANT REFORMATION

The early magisterial Protestant Reformers were ambivalent toward their own correspondence. They resented the large amount of time and energy that it absorbed. Letters were hardly the best way of presenting and discussing with one another the complex theological issues that preoccupied and divided them. Yet such missives needed careful thought and drafting because they knew that the contents would be shared abroad. Even when they asked for confidentiality in their correspondent, they knew that it could not be guaranteed, for there were too many unreliable intermediaries (secretaries, carriers, assistants, etc.) in the chain. Their ambivalence reflected their divergent appreciation of the Humanist emphasis on the value of bonæ lettræ, but also their own archival and polemical strategies. Luther, for example, rarely kept a copy of the letters he wrote and paid almost no attention to keeping those addressed to him (he once confessed to Georg Spalatin that a dog had chewed up the recent missive he had received from him). He was horrified when Johannes Mathesius suggested that his letters should be edited and published: “Not on your life! No one should do that!” he replied.[25]

That, however, does not tell the whole story, since Luther devoured the published letter collections of others, and wrote one of his earliest letters to Erasmus in the hope that it would have found its way into one of the published editions, and thus drawn the great scholar into the Wittenberg turmoil at a crucial moment.[26] He expected his own letters to circulate to others: “I fear not that it be known to you, and to everyone, for I write under the eye of God” he told the Cistercian Michael Muris in 1520.[27] He understood that letters were the way by which false rumors flew around, and appreciated that his enemies could use his correspondence against him. In a letter tinged with reproach, Luther wrote to Melanchthon during the negotiations at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530:[28]

I am astonished at the complaints of all those in Wittenberg about the letters I wrote to you, which have become public knowledge. Master Veit [Luther’s secretary, Veit Dietrich] is held to blame. He complains bitterly about that, but lives with the injustice of the accusation. Others, meanwhile, point the finger at Kaspar Müller, who had revealed all to the Master of Eisleben [Agricola], who sent it on to M. Stromer at Leipzig. That is what happens with letters. X asks Y to keep them a secret, but the moment comes when they fall into the hands of enemies, who jump for joy when (as they say) the pessimism and preoccupations of Philip show that our affairs are not going well.

Such anxieties explain why other Reformers chose to keep copies of what they sent along with archiving what they received. Simon Grynaeus (1493–1541), the Wittenberg-inspired Humanist and biblical theologian, did so—his collection passing into the hands of his descendants before being dispersed in the eighteenth century.[29] Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich also kept his correspondence thereby providing researchers with the core of what is the largest collection of letters from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers—over 12,000 letters.[30] He was influenced by the fraught publication of one of the earliest editions of correspondence of Protestant Reformers—that of Zwingli’s letters in 1536. Its editor, Bullinger’s Zurich compatriot Theodor Bibliander, acquired the originals from Zwingli’s correspondents, particularly from Johannes Oecolampadius’s literary executor, Wolfgang Capito in Strasbourg. The publisher in Basel, Johannes Oporinus (sensing a commercial proposition) acted as his agent. Bibliander selected his material under Bullinger’s direction, choosing precisely those letters that lent weight to the emerging Zurich view of the symbolic interpretation of the Mass. The volume was prefaced with a letter from Martin Bucer, Strasbourg’s Reformer, which made it seem as though he had approved of the work. At the moment it came off the press, however, Bucer was undertaking delicate negotiations in Wittenberg toward a common front in support of the Schmalkaldic League, and it left him compromised (which was precisely what was intended by the publication). Bucer was reduced to dispatching a long letter of protest to Bibliander in which he accused him of false dealing, before moving rapidly to defend his own conduct in printed Retractions.

The reinforcing of confessional positions inspired the collecting and publishing strategies of the magisterial Reformers’ acolytes throughout the sixteenth century. Luther’s associates kept copies of the Wittenberg Reformer’s letters, which then circulated in collections before becoming the kernel of the earliest published editions of his correspondence.[31] His consolatory and exhortatory letters (Trostbriefe), edited by Kaspar Cruciger and published in 1545 while Luther was still alive, reworked a genre identifiable with the Pauline epistles. Mostly in German and addressed to a lay audience, the collection became a classic of Lutheran piety with an enduring appeal.

Other printed collections accompanied the first volume of Luther’s Latin works, published in 1545, and formed the main source for Ludwig Rabus’s Historien. Der Heyligen Außenwölten Gottes Zeügen [Life of the Reformer] (1557). The eleven Luther letters published by Johann Aurifaber in 1547 aimed to offer solace to the pastors of Weimar in the wake of the disaster of the Battle of Mühlberg. In 1549, Matthius Flacius published some of Luther’s letters urging no compromise at the time of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530—with a polemical message intended for those who had accepted the Augsburg Interim. Aurifaber’s more substantial, two-volume collection (1556) of Luther’s letters (not a great publishing success) sought to present him as one of the great prophets and patriarchs for truth in the church.[32]

Like Luther, Calvin did not openly encourage the publication of his own correspondence beyond prefatory letters and polemical pieces in letter format, written and printed for express purposes. He relied on secretaries to reduce the jumble of papers in his study to order. They included François Baudouin, later one of Calvin’s bitter opponents, whom Calvin accused (“I nourished that viper, that plague, in my house”) of having stolen some of his letters to use against him.[33] Aware of the intensity of the opposition to him, both inside Geneva and outside the city, in the later 1540s and early 1550s, Calvin’s sensitivity about his letters being circulated, tampered with, and used against him, increased. In 1545, he was embarrassed to discover members of Geneva’s council reading one of his letters (even out loud in the city’s taverns), in which he accused some of their number of wishing “to reign under the pretext of Christ, but actually without Christ.”[34]

In 1551, Pierre Viret in Lausanne warned Calvin about untrustworthy letter carriers; two years later, the carrier of letters from Zurich was exposed as an imposter.[35] One of Calvin’s most assiduous secretaries, Charles de Jonvillier, prudently awaited the Genevan Reformer’s death in 1564 before setting to work on a published edition. Eliciting the collaboration of Théodore de Bèze (essential, since Calvin had left his correspondence in his care, sanctioning their public use so long as it was for the benefit of God’s true church), the work appeared over a decade later in 1575.[36] Almost all of the four hundred letters in that collection were in Latin, carefully selected and edited to tone down Calvin’s acerbic style and, without opening old controversies, tailored to present a sober, coherent picture of the Genevan Reformer’s stance to the literate audience at which the volume was directed.[37]

There is an interesting parallel case concerning the fate of the correspondence of the Strasbourg Reformer, Martin Bucer. His literary remains were sold and dispersed after his death in England in 1551; but Conrad Hubert, his secretary, made it his business to reconstitute what survived in the collections of others. His purpose was to defend the posthumous reputation of the Strasbourg Reformer, maligned by hard-line Lutherans and Zwinglians alike, and to respond to the collection of Luther’s letters, which by then was, by common knowledge, under way. Oporinus offered his services as printer, only to be put off by the potential size of the publication. Following the coming to power of Elizabeth I in England in 1558, the project acquired for a time the high profile backing of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, and the recently repatriated English divine, Edmund Grindal. In pursuit of material for his volume, Bucer’s secretary visited the elderly Ambrose Blarer [Blaurer], the Reformer from Konstanz, by then retired to Winthertur, who pulled out the big dossier of letters from Bucer that he had kept. Together, they sat down to decipher Bucer’s horribly crabbed handwriting (“cacography” was how Grynaeus had described it back in 1532, a term he borrowed from Erasmus). Reading them out to one another was a pious act of remembrance: “they felt the spirit of Christ, which inspired them … they reflected the soul of the one who had written them such that he seemed once more a living presence among them.” In that moment, they “savoured anew those years gone by, when Christ’s message presented itself to us … in its purety and novelty.” The complex evolution, challenges, and disappointments of the later generations of the Reformation sustained the collecting, copying, and circulating of the letters of the early Reformers, thereby serving to heroize them, while cementing the confessional rifts in the movement.

No one working on this subject can ignore the impressive bulk of published and edited correspondence that now confronts us from the earliest Protestant Reformers. It is primarily the result of the empiricist and positivist historiography of the nineteenth century with its emphasis on contemporary primary sources, and it followed in the footsteps of Leopold van Ranke. Few sources exemplified better than the letters of the Protestant Reformers von Ranke’s sense of history as the working out of God’s providential will, since that is how they themselves wrote about the world. The initial process of collecting, transcribing, editing, and publishing this mass depended on the extraordinary labors of nineteenth-century pioneers (Karl Gottlieb Brettschneider in Gotha, Ernst Ludwig Enders in Frankfurt-am-Main, Johann-Wilhelm Baum in Strasbourg, Aimé-Louis Herminjard in Lausanne, Traugott Schiess in Saint-Gallen, and Walther Köhler in Zurich, among others). Their efforts have been superseded by the fastidious exactitude of twentieth-century editing practices, which have often necessitated editorial teams organized into projects, whose publications spill over volumes and decades. Those projects currently stand at varying degrees of completeness, while publication online now challenges their scholarly and economic model.[38]

The overall volume of surviving Reformers’ correspondence is superficially impressive. Four hundred and seventy-nine letters to and from Melanchthon survive for the climacteric year of Charles V’s victory over the Protestant princes at the Battle of Mühlberg, and four hundred and forty-three to and from Bullinger in the year 1541. Yet, although over 12,000 letters survive to and from Bullinger from 1524 until his death in 1575 (ca. 2,000 by him; and ca. 10,000 written to him), that has to be measured against the fact that his overall correspondence probably comfortably exceeded 20,000 items. In the year 1569, he reported that he disposed of a ream of paper (1,000 sheets) simply on the writing of his own letters.[39] So, despite the peaks and troughs of the correspondence of individual Reformers, explicable in the chronology of their own role within the Protestant Reformation, the overall pattern of Reformers’ correspondence reflects more the randomness of survival than other overall trends (see Appendix I).

The positive results of such scholarship are evident, especially in the biographies of the Reformers themselves, and in the detailed reconstruction of the theological debates of the early Reformation. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim once remarked that individuals are defined in terms of their relationships with a wider group, their thoughts contained by its “collective habits of mind,” their individual actions inscribed in its “collective ways of being.”[40] There is no better way of exploring the habitus of the Protestant Reformers than through their surviving correspondence—even though the letters should never be read at face value since they are always carefully concocted with an eye to a world beyond the ostensible correspondent, and we generally have only one “side” of the letter exchange.

By means of their correspondence, the Reformers kept abreast of the wider political context of the Reformation. They were aware that they were each part of a broader movement with no overall leadership, divided within, and vulnerable from without. The persistent pessimism, sometimes tinged with eschatological perspectives, was not a polemical construction but an epistolary commonplace, a way of interpreting the world. Over and again, they lament to one another that they are living in Babylon, that there is no Joshua, that their enemies have been sent by God to chasten the infidelity of His people, and that it is only trust in His providential grace that can save the Reformation.

The Reformers regularly complained at the burden imposed upon them by their correspondence. Luther’s experience would become that of others. “I almost need two secretaries for I have done nothing else this Sunday than write letters” he wrote already in 1516.[41] “I am exhausted by letters coming from all quarters” he told Gabriel Zwilling six years later, shortly after his return to Wittenberg from the Wartburg.[42] “I am almost crushed by reading my correspondence. What time do you think I will have to waste in writing the necessary replies to them?” he wrote a week later to the Elector’s chaplain, secretary, and librarian, Georg Spalatin.[43] Four years later, he vividly captured the epistolary mêlée prevailing around him:[44]

In your last letter you ask me why you have no reply to your questions. Do not be surprised. If you want an answer you must write again and send me a reminder. Every day I am so besieged by letters that tables, chairs, step-ladders, landings, window-ledges, chests, beams and every space in-between, are all covered with letters, questions, causes, disputes, demands, etc.

There was no easy answer to the problem. To write less, and less often, risked harming friendships and infringing the implied Humanist codes of conduct on which Reformation correspondence was transacted. To hand matters over to a secretary, or to rely on a carrier’s verbal message (a “living letter” as Luther called them) carried their own risks. Luther’s correspondence became a cross that he had to bear: “I am killing myself with writing letters, even though I am old, cold, and slow. I long for the ultimate day when I can rest from my labours”; and “I have to write letters, even though at death’s door and almost a skeleton.”[45]

The explanation for this intense epistolary pressure lies in the dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. The explosion of religious polemics in the printed sphere generated a complementary irruption in the epistolary sphere, the one feeding on the other as Reformers sought to keep abreast with what appeared in a variety of locations, and reply in kind.[46] As the impact of the Reformation widened, so too did its epistolary communities. The latter functioned as families. The anxious sharing of news about each other’s health, well being, and the offering to one another of moral and intellectual support was an essential part of family life. It took place in the context of God’s providential care of His own in the light of the immense task of bringing His truth to the world, which He had entrusted to them. The enemies of that truth were everywhere, and the ruses of Satan were so manifold that no one could know for sure how to interpret the machinations of the political and ecclesiastical forces lined up against them, of the Turks, or of the various, perceived enemies from within. The impulse to communicate their hopes and fears to one another was inexorable.

The epistolary community of leading Protestant Reformers grew geographically, however, also as a function of the complex interplay between the impact of their publications, the status and reputation of their location within the Protestant movement, their engagement on the public stage in colloquies, disputes, and conferences, their polemical talents, and their role within the educational outreach of the Protestant movement. The range of the linguistic area to which they related and the patterns in the ecclesiastical organizations whose loyalty they could command also played an important part in determining the geographical extent of their correspondence. The geographical snapshots from what survives of Zwingli’s postbag (1520, 1522, 1524, 1526, 1528, 1530), as analyzed by Philip Benedict, indicate how his influence remained limited by linguistic, political, and ecclesiastical boundaries.[47] His epistolary “footprint” broadened and deepened only later in the 1520s, as the reputation of his Latin publications spread, alongside that of the Zurich city Reformation.

Similar patterns of deepening and broadening are reflected, too, in Calvin’s surviving correspondence after his return to Geneva in 1541 (analyzed by Benedict for the years 1542, 1546, 1550, 1554, 1559, 1563).[48] In the early 1540s, Calvin’s main correspondence exchanges were with fellow Reformers in the Swiss cantons and their francophone margins, the collaboration and circulation of ministers and ideas reinforced by shared political circumstances, a common language, and a sense of common purpose. Only in the later 1540s did the Genevan Reformer’s influence transcend that region, initially (in the late 1540s) in Germany, reinforced by his engagement with the Diets of the empire, his pursuit of a rapprochement with the Lutherans, and then by his involvement in the Rhineland stranger churches. That was followed by the broader “footprint” from the later 1540s onwards, as Geneva began to overhaul Zurich in its wider European influence—that being reflected in Calvin’s printed epistolary dedications to leading figures in Sweden, Denmark, England, and Poland.

Then, beginning in the 1550s, there was a renewed intensification of epistolary traffic closer to home with the pays de Vaud, and then with his native France, as the processes of implantation of an indigenous francophone Reformation began to take shape. The international “footprints” of Calvin, Bucer, Melanchthon, Bullinger, and Beza remained, however, the exception rather than the rule. Their predominance was complemented by similar processes of epistolary broadening and deepening in the “footprint” of dozens of other regional Protestant Reformers (the surviving letter collections of Wolfgang Capiton, Pierre Viret, or Joachim Westphal are exemplars), albeit in a more restricted geographical compass, whose role would be essential in the institutionalization of the Reformation.[49]

That institutionalization—establishing the preaching and teaching ministries in towns, training those who would take up the posts in question, putting in place regional colloquies, councils, and inspectorates of the churches that would oversee them—generated a great deal of correspondence. The epistolary issue that it posed for those theologians whose preeminence was becoming a matter of fact was precisely how much they should seek to direct the affairs of individual churches. As Luther put it, when asked to persuade a particular preacher to take up a post in Saxony: “I have no intention of becoming a new pope, nor of nominating preachers to every parish and pulpit, even though I recognise that it is my duty to offer aid and advice to those who seek it from me.”[50]

The reality was, however, that (at least after the pastoral visitations of 1528–1529 in Electoral Saxony, and following the death of Duke George in 1539 in ducal Saxony) the distinction between offering epistolary aid and advice, and managing things from afar was not easy to sustain. Communities and churches looked to the Reformers to settle their quarrels, or support them in their efforts to have ministers adequately rewarded, and public religion secured in their locality. They asked for advice on moral questions (“cases of conscience”). The epistolary demands grew as students flowed to and fro, their own letters to their families and communities back home supplemented by those from missionaries, emissaries, and exiles—a process particularly noticeable in the epistolary contacts between the Protestant centers in Geneva, Zurich and the Rhineland, and central-eastern Europe.[51] Calvin’s largely epistolary relationships with the scattered exiled (mainly francophone and anglophone) communities in the Rhineland which, in the years after 1538, gradually formed themselves into “stranger” churches, were equally dominated by their desire to engage him in their often fractious internal disputes about the purity of worship, church discipline, and their fraught relationships with local magistrates and populace.[52]

Calvin’s response started from the premise that each church was independent unto God, under His care and therefore responsible to Him for educating the faithful in His ways.[53] The consequence of that premise was, he deduced, that evangelical congregations should not rush to establishing themselves as gathered churches. Many were called, but few were chosen—even among exiles who might, with some justification, claim that their lives demonstrated that God had, indeed, chosen them. Calvin’s caution, based in part on his reading of the Pauline epistles and their recounting of the early Christian church experience, was even more in evidence when the communities of the faithful in France and the Low Countries wrote to Geneva in the later 1540s and early 1550s.[54] They asked for ministers and help in establishing their churches, and asked increasingly pointed questions about how they were expected to keep the faith in the shadow of increased persecution. Calvin could not refuse to offer, when asked, advice and ministration, albeit aware that there were others, in Strasbourg, Zurich, and elsewhere, to whom they might turn for counsel. He was conscious, too, that whatever he wrote would be likely to be instrumentalized in local disputes, or was not what they wanted to read. When, after 1555 and despite Calvin’s caution, Protestant congregations in France began to consolidate into churches, accompanied by conversions among the nobility, Calvin was obliged to advise the former, and minister to the latter.[55] Letters had to suffice when the numbers of trained ministers to dispatch from Geneva were inadequate to meet the burgeoning demand. The contents of those that survive testify to the limits of epistolary exhortation, especially when written to churches whose leaders were increasingly convinced that God’s truth would see off the present danger of persecution, or when addressed to nobles who had their own ideas about what their role was in relation to God and the world.

The relationship between the leading Protestant theologians in the early generations of the Reformation was nothing if not complex, and those complexities were reflected in their correspondence exchanges. They had fundamental theological truths in common (sola fide; sola scriptura). They shared the same enemies of those truths, and sought to establish God’s word in people’s hearts and minds through Reformed ecclesiastical institutions. They felt the impact of common political and social imperatives. Yet they were separated by the equally fundamental theological consequences derived from those truths, by differing attitudes to perceived enemies from various quarters, and by divergent perspectives on how those Reformed ecclesiastical institutions should function, especially within the more specific local political and social environments in which they would take root. Far from being the reflection of what they had in common, the correspondence between leading Protestant theologians was more often about what drove them apart. The Reformers themselves were aware that letters were a necessary, but far from ideal, way of trying to express, and eventually resolve, their differences. Theological treatises and biblical commentaries furnished recognizable scholarly hermeneutics for exposition and argument. Not so letters, which were expected to answer more specific issues, with arguments which were adapted to the person to whom they were addressed. Often written under pressure, the authors did not have time to render their arguments very concisely. They became verbose, or resorted to postscripts to cover points that they had neglected. Their epistolary exchanges often resembled epistolary duels rather than amicable discourses. In the correspondence between the Polish theologian Jean à Lasco and Martin Bucer over the theology of the Mass, for example, both sides flexed the sinews of their Latin to the limit as they sought to persuade one another of how they each understood God’s truth. If only they could talk about it together, instead of writing letters, Bucer sighed.[56]

Behind the fraternal respect expressed in the numerous exchanges of letters between Bucer in Strasbourg and Bullinger in Zurich in the wake of the Diet of Augsburg, there was an underlying polemic and a sense that what was said in 1532 could as well have been written fifteen years earlier because the epistolary dialogue had gone nowhere.[57] The twenty-nine exchanges between Calvin in Geneva and Melanchthon in Wittenberg observe to the letter the Humanist formalities of epistolary friendship. Yet both parties, engaged in battles within their own camps, instrumentalized the contact for their own purposes, and construed one another’s silences as signs of broken friendship.[58] With unbridgeable points of difference on adiaphora, on the Lord’s Supper, and on their approaches to biblical exegesis, the only meeting of minds would occur beyond the grave. The most significant theological Protestant “consensus” before 1560, that between Geneva and Zurich in 1549 (the “Consensus Tigurinus”) was, however, largely arrived at by epistolary means, and represented a triumph of two masters of all the ambiguities in Reformation epistolary writings, Bullinger and Calvin.

The Protestant Reformation was, almost from its beginning, a political event. The epistolary correspondence of the Protestant Reformers also expanded, therefore, as the political complexities of the Reformation itself grew exponentially greater, pulling into its slipstream more towns and princes. It was by epistolary means that they sought the protection of the evangelical cause from princes. Luther’s relationship with Spalatin, the broker to his political protector, Elector Frederick the Wise and absolutely crucial to making the Reformation possible, was largely epistolary, and there is something coldly political about the way that Luther distanced himself from his “most learned and dearest friend” when Spalatin ceased to play that role for him. As the Protestant Reformation took root, the Reformers received demands for advice from towns and rulers who were required to put into practice a Protestant Reformation for which there was no agreed blueprint, and where local circumstances often required particular solutions. They offered their considerations on issues of public policy. So, in the year 1542 alone, Melanchthon was asked for, and gave, advice by letter on the reform of the universities of Leipzig, Königsberg, Rostock, and Frankfurt an der Oder as well as on issues of church governance in Naumberg, ducal Saxony, Prussia, and Cologne.[59]

If anything, Calvin was even more activist—especially in the later 1550s, writing letters to seek the support of aristocrats and princes for the establishment of God’s churches—than the more reactive role that Luther and Melanchthon had adopted.[60] The Reformers were also the object of regular solicitations from preachers and teachers in post on a host of individual issues. They were inundated with requests for letters of recommendation from students seeking posts as pastors and teachers. That same year, 1542, Melanchthon complained wearily to Joachim Camerarius: “You would not believe how much of my time is spent with student affairs, to whom letters [of recommendation] must be given.”[61] Four years earlier, he had found himself intervening on behalf of a student whose Anabaptist remarks had landed him in prison, seeking student bursaries from the city authorities in Augsburg on behalf of another, and trying to get to the bottom of a student riot in Wittenberg in the course of which the windows of a former rector had been broken.[62] The Reformers were active in petitioning towns, princes, and nobles, often resorting to using intermediaries (secretaries; chaplains; trusted councilors, etc.) in order to gain a hearing. The material changes that accompanied the Reformation (the secularization of ecclesiastical property and the closure of monasteries; the reassignment of charitable bequests, incidents of iconoclasm, etc.) generated important letter traffic, in which the Reformers were required to confront the implications of their theology, and to seek support for them in the name of Christian charity and justice from an often skeptical laity.

LETTERS AND THE POLITICS OF REFORMATION

An over-concentration on the epistolary traffic to and from the Protestant Reformers tends, however, to shift our focus away from what would become the increasing dominance of lay, political figures in its evolution. The fundamental reasons for that evolution are evident. Wherever the Protestant Reformation became an “act of state,” the epistolary Reformation became amalgamated into, and sublimated by, the broader administrative, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical paperwork of the state in question. Protestant Reformers were obliged to play more complicated, sometimes compromising and less heroic, roles—engaging with internal disputes in towns, playing the courtier toward a prince, seeking patrons in high places, and nurturing intermediaries among princely entourages.

The history of Reformation epistolary correspondence thus becomes imbricated in the history of Europe’s politics more generally, and it is impossible to delineate the subject with any clarity. How, for example, should we analyze the surviving copybook of letters kept by Hans Jenitz, the chamber secretary to the most important Protestant prince in German lands in the aftermath of the Peace of Augsburg, Elector August of Saxony (r. 1553–1586)?[63] Educated at the University of Wittenberg, and also as a lawyer at Padua, Jenitz dutifully copied out the letters dictated to him by Elector August. How Jenitz interpreted his role, and to what extent his religious convictions determined his loyalties, is an open question. But it was Jenitz, and not the squabbling Gnesio-Lutheran and Philippist theologians, who was at August’s side as, haunted by the fear that he would be unseated by his Ernestine cousins, he pursued the non-confessionally allied politics of cultivating friendship with the Habsburgs, putting his weight behind the Peace of Augsburg, and refusing to break off with the Calvinists. Jenitz’s copybook is part of the epistolary writings of the Protestant Reformation, but it is also an essential and problematic document for the politics of the post-Augsburg settlement in German lands.

The first annalist of the Protestant Reformation in German lands, Johannes Sleidanus [Johannes Philippson von Schleidan] relied extensively on manuscript letters when he came to document what his preface to the work, published in 1555, confessed was a political and civil, as much as a religious, account of its events.[64] That emphasis on correspondence is hardly surprising since his own career was emblematic of the breed of secretaries, who doubled up as diplomats, agents, spies, legal advisors, and intermediaries in the processes of the Reformation. After studying for a law degree in Orléans, he was recruited as a secretary by the French cardinal Jean du Bellay in the later 1530s when the latter spearheaded Francis I’s efforts to build bridges with the German Protestants. Sleidan kept in touch with the evangelically minded individuals in Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s extensive network—a reminder that the sixteenth-century Protestant world would become dominated in the course of the sixteenth century by the micro-politics of patronage in which the letter was the primordial way of expressing one’s affinity with a grandee.[65]

Sleidan also hoped to secure the confidence of leading figures in the Schmalkaldic League, especially Philip of Hesse, the Sturms, and Martin Bucer in Strasbourg. When the French rapprochement collapsed in the early 1540s, Sleidan returned to Germany in around 1544, and was recruited by Bucer and Jacob Sturm; he was given a pension by Philip to write the official history of the Schmalkaldic League. An early example of how the politics of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century would become dominated by alliances and coalitions of political forces, the activities of the League in its various manifestations—its meetings, diplomatic initiatives, negotiations, and armed forces—would have been quite simply impossible without correspondence.[66]

It was through the secretaries of the towns and princely chanceries of the League, as well as through the documents furnished by Luther, Calvin, and Bucer, that Sleidan constructed his account. “It will not be difficult for their secretaries to collect this information,” he told Jacob Sturm on May 15, 1545, as he dispatched letters to ask for materials to be forwarded to him for the history. In reality, however, relatively little was forthcoming from Hessian, Saxon, and English sources, and he was forced to rely mainly on the documents nearby in Strasbourg. That is evident when one compares his account with the nineteenth-century published edition of the city’s political correspondence in the sixteenth century—just one of a raft of editions of letters illustrating the processes of Reformation from Protestant princes and urban councils in German lands, appearing mainly in the years before World War I.[67] Similar publications appeared elsewhere, too, and they provide the “other face” of the epistolary Reformation from that of the editions of the correspondence of the magisterial Reformers. This “other face” would be of overwhelming significance as the Protestant Reformation became intertwined in the politics and international relations of early modern Europe.

LETTERS OF THE MARTYRS

Our consideration has so far been concentrated on theologians and lay notables. The evangelical Protestant movement also drew strength, however, from other players—preachers, printers, publicists, urban and rural mass movements. The role of letters in the mobilizing of these forces is mostly virgin terrain, since the focus of historians has been hitherto directed toward the way in which printing and other forms of dissemination made the dynamic of the movements, and their underlying political and social forces, seem more powerful and integrated than in reality was the case. Protestant martyrologies, however, offer a privileged, albeit problematic, way of apprehending the role of letters in the dynamics of the Reformation among more ordinary people.[68] Letters accorded pride of place in them. That is because they furnished proof that the martyrs had died knowingly and intentionally, witnessing for the Gospel. That was important, since Catholic critics of the Protestant martyrological tradition had seized on the possible ambiguities between those who were executed for sedition and those executed for the true faith.

Miles Coverdale drew on the Humanist topos of the letter rendering the absent present in his preface to his published collection in 1564 in order to convey his sense of letters having the capacity to reveal how ordinary people had suffered for the faith in almost a three-dimensional reality. Jean Crespin, the French martyrologist, included over one hundred martyr letters in his 1570 edition, written by modest individuals, men and women, mostly in prisons, awaiting sentence or close to death. His references to how these letters were smuggled out of prison, copied, and circulated around the congregations in France, accord with the evidence in Calvin’s letters and the papers of the Company of Pastors. These sources reveal the scribal networks that sustained the congregations and churches as they sought discreetly to remain in touch despite the efforts of the French authorities to find and eliminate them.[69]

Across the Channel, John Foxe also collected martyr letters in preparation for his martyrology. By the time of its first edition in English (1563) their bulk had become so considerable that the decision was taken to publish them as a separate volume—which appeared the following year with Coverdale’s preface. In Foxe’s case, however, we have a good deal of the manuscript material on which he drew for this collection (about 20 percent of the edition exists in manuscript form). As a result, we can document the editorial decisions that were taken. Some letters were excluded; others were edited down. Potentially embarrassing references to the networks of “free-willers,” martyrs who were not convinced by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, were excised. And, in one instance, the gender of a martyr was changed from feminine to masculine, presumably to avoid hostile critics seizing on the letter as evidence for how Protestantism encouraged women to speak out. The authors regarded their letters as “tokens” of the grace that they had been given to be God’s suffering servant. They offered “comfort” to their readers who could vicariously relive their hopes and fears, and quell the rumors that were fostered by the authorities about their imminent recantation. As in Crespin’s martyrology, Foxe’s martyrology and letter collection documents the networks of “sustainers” around whom the letters were copied and circulated. It is those copies (rather than the originals) that Foxe collected. It would be interesting to know if the letters of the martyrs were used, as must have been likely, in the conventicles of later Elizabethan England, thereby providing (in a way that Foxe had not intended) a devotional aid that would sustain the English dissenting tradition.

Europe’s Protestant dissenting tradition—the various lineages of Anabaptism especially—certainly used martyr letters in that way. They were particularly prominent among the Hutterites—Robert Friedmann has inventoried about four hundred Hutterite epistles in the period from 1527 to 1662, written by between seventy-five and eighty authors, about half of whom met their death at the hands of the authorities.[70] Most of them were Hutterite missionaries or ministers, and their backgrounds were modest—wool shearers, cobblers, barbers, tailors, blacksmiths, millers—but no women. Mostly literate enough to write these epistles (some of which are quite long) in their own hands, one prisoner dictated his letter to someone else in his cell because he could not put it on paper. They describe their arrests and trials in a no-nonsense way. They offer plainly expressed confessions, and sometimes letters of consolation and admonition, to their brethren. They were biblically saturated in a way that makes it clear that God’s word had (in a way that would be inconceivable for most of us today) been memorized, and could be readily quoted. A network of brethren secured their transmission back to their home communities. There, the Hutterite community scribes (Gemeindeschreiber) copied them into codices, and bound in leather with brass clasps the record of Hutterite collective devotional memory (in the copying process, they lost their dates, and thus their historicity). The great Hutterite chronicle was mostly constructed, in fact, as a series of epistles, and they played a significant part in Thielmann van Bracht’s Martyrs Mirror (1660), the collective devotional memory focused on Dutch Anabaptism (the whole second part of this large compilation being devoted to letters from the martyrs).[71]

Anabaptist martyr letters bear a considerable resemblance to the Hutterite equivalents, albeit with one exception. Many of the Anabaptist letters were written by women, presumably a reflection of different levels of literacy in the host communities. Letters thus served to consolidate the magisterial and confessionalizing Protestant Reformations. They were essential to its political manifestations. But they also alimented its various dissenting traditions.

NOTES

1. Marc Fumaroli, “Rhetoric, Politics and Society: From Italian Ciceronianism to French Classicism,” in J. J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1983), 253–273, 253–255ff.

2. See the introduction by Craig R. De conscribendis epistolis, vol. 25 of the Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE) (Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press, 1985); also the introduction by J.-C. Margolin to the edition of the De conscribendis epistolis in Opera Omnia, vol. i/2 (Amsterdam, 1971). Judith Rice Henderson has explored the complex genesis of the work in several articles, notably “Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing,” in Murphy, Renaissance Eloquence, 331–355. For a convenient analysis of the content of Erasmus’s work, see Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 76–103.

3. CWE, 25, 12.

4. Ibid., 14.

5. Ibid., 67–71.

6. Ibid., 20.

7. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 6.

8. See Margolin, cited n. 2.

9. Henderson, “Humanism and the Humanities: Erasmus’ Opus de conscribendis epistolis in Sixteenth-Century Schools,” in C. Poster and L. Mitchell (eds.), Letter-Writing Manuals from Antiquity to the Present (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 141–177.

10. See, in particular, for Latin treatises, the influential text of Juan-Luis Vivès, written in the early 1530s for Charles V’s secretary, edited and discussed in Charles Fantazzi (ed.), J.L. Vives. De conscribendis epistolis. Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation and Annotation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989).

11. For the growth of vernacular texts on letter writing in the sixteenth and first part of the seventeenth century, there is a substantial bibliography. Much of it appears in Pedro Martin Baños, El arte epistolar en el Renacimiento europeo, 1400–1600 (Bilbao: Universidad de Deustro, 2005). In addition, for England, see W. Webster Newbold, “Letter-Writing and Vernacular Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Poster and Mitchell, Letter-Writing Manuals, 127–140; for France, see Guy Gueudet (ed.), L’art de la lettre humaniste (Paris: H. Champion, 2004); Luc Vaillancourt, La lettre familière au XVIe siècle: Rhétorique humaniste de l’epistolaire, in Claude Blum (ed.), Études et essais sur la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2003), 168–188.

12. Erika Rummel, The Case against Johann Reuchlin: Religious and Social Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press, 2002).

13. Jean-Christophe Saladin (ed.), Lettres des hommes obscurs (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2004).

14. Ibid., 300–306 (letter 42).

15. Jardine, “Before Clarissa: Erasmus, ‘Letters of Obscure Men,’ and Epistolary Fictions,” in Toon van Houdt, Jan Papy, Gilbert Tournoy, and Constant Matheeussen (eds.), Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric of Letter-Writing in Early Modern Times (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 385–403.

16. The argument appears in an English literary context in Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005).

17. Lyndal Roper, “ ‘To His Most Learned and Dearest Friend’: Reading Luther’s Letters,” German History 28 (2010): 286.

18. Mario Infelise, “From Merchants’ Letters to Handwritten Political avvisi: Notes on the Origins of Public Information,” in Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (eds.), Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33–52; cf. Pierre Sardella, Nouvelles et spéculation à Venise au début du XVIe siècle, Cahier des Annales, No. 1 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1948).

19. J. Bottin, “Négoce et circulation de l’information au début de l’époque moderne,” in M. Le Roux (ed.), Histoire de la poste: De l’administration à l’entreprise (Paris: Éditions de la rue d’Ulm, 2002), 41–54.

20. Johann Petitjean, L’intelligence des choses. Une histoire de l’information entre Italie et Méditerranée (XVIe–XVIIe siècles) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2013), esp. chap. 2.

21. Wolfgang Behringer, Thurn und Taxis: die Geschichte ihrer Post und ihrer Unternehmen (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1990); Behringer, Im Zeichen der Merkur. Reichpost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003).

22. Eugène Vaillé, Histoire générale des postes françaises, 6 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises, 1947–1955), vol. 2, chaps. 1–4; Jean Bonnerot (ed.), Charles Estienne. La guide des chemins de France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, 1935–1936).

23. O. Clemen (ed.), Luthers Briefwechsel (Weimarer Kritische Gesamtausgabe), 16 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau Nachfolger, 1930–1985), Band 5, 350ff (Luther to Melanchthon, Coburg Castle, June 5, 1530).

24. Michael W. Bruening (ed.), Epistoli Petri Vireti: The Previously Unedited Letters and a Register of Pierre Viret’s Correspondence (Geneva: Droz, 2012), nos. 91–92.

25. Luther’s Table-Talk, attributed 1540—cited in Matthieu Arnold (ed.), La correspondance de Luther. Étude historique, littéraire et théologique (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 1.

26. Clemen, Luthers Briefwechsel, 14, 355–356.

27. Clemen, Luthers Briefwechsel, 2, No. 345 (October 20, 1520); cf. Roper, “‘To His Most Learned and Dearest Friend,’” 284–285.

28. Clemen, Luthers Briefwechsel, 5, No. 1688 (end June 1530).

29. Jacques V. Pollet, Martin Bucer. Études sur la correspondance, 2 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1958–1962), 2, 370–371.

30. Traugott Schiess, “Der Briefwechsel Heinrich Bullingers,” Zwingliana 5 (1933): 396–408; cf. Schiess, “Ein Jahr aus Bullingers Briefwechsel,” Zwingliana 6 (1934): 16–34; Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 63.

31. The complexity of the publication surrounding Luther’s letters in the sixteenth century is fully expounded in Clemen, Luthers Briefwechsel, Band 14, 450 et seq. (“Der Űberlieferung des 16. Jahrhunderts”).

32. For an edited translation of a selection of Luther’s letters of spiritual advice, see Timothy Taggert (ed.), Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2003).

33. Cited in Donald R. Kelley, François Hotman: A Revolutionary’s Ordeal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 143.

34. Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, edited by Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, vols. X–XX. Thesaurus epistolicus Calvinianus (Brunswigae (et Berolini): apud C. A. Schwetschke et filium, 1863–1900), xii, 32 (Calvin to Viret, February 12, 1545). The affair was still an embarrassment to him three years later in 1548.

35. Bruening, Epistoli Petri Vireti, No. 64 (Viret to Farel, March 17, 1551); (Recueillie par Hippolyte Aubert; Fernand Aubert and successors), Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze (Geneva: Droz, 1960–), tome 1, No. 34 (Beza to Bullinger, August 27, 1553).

36. Françoise Bonali-Fiquet (ed.), Jean Calvin. Lettres à Monsieur et Madame de Falais, Textes littéraires français (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 9–10.

37. Joannis Calvini opera, tome 10, ix–xliv; Cornelis Augustijn, Frans Pieter van Stam [et al.] (eds.), Ioannis Calvini Epistolae. Ioannis Calvini Opera Omnia denuo recognita et adnotatione critical instructa notisque illustrata (Geneva: Droz, 2005–), introduction. For a small selection of Calvin’s letters of spiritual advice in English translation, see Jean-Daniel Benoît, Calvin in his Letters: A Study of Calvin’s Pastoral Counselling, Mainly from his Letters (Sutton Courtenay: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1991).

38. See, for example, the searchable online edition of Heinrich Bullinger’s correspondence so far published at the Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte (<http://www.irg.uzh.ch/hbbw.html>, accessed December 8, 2015). The same exists, too, for the volumes that have appeared so far, of Martin Bucer’s correspondence, furnished by the Bucer-Forschungsstelle at the Faculty of Theology in Erlangen (<http://www.bucer-forschungsstelle.theologie.uni-erlangen.de/>, accessed December 8, 2015). Transcriptions of the letters of Wolfgang Capito are now also available online in a beta-version from the “Electronic Capito Project” (directed by Erika Rummel) (<http://www.itergateway.org/capito/>, accessed December 8, 2015). The searchable inventory of the correspondence of Théodore de Bèze online (<http://www.droz.org/france/en/content/7-digital-resources>) was inoperative at the time of consultation (December 8, 2015).

39. Alexandra Kess, “Heinrich Bullinger’s Correspondence: A Brief Insight into a Long Story,” in Erika Rummel and Milton Kooistra (eds.), Reformation Sources: The Letters of Wolfgang Capito and His Fellow Reformers (Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 131–132.

40. Emile Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique [1894] (Paris: PUF, 2002), 9–12.

41. Arnold, La correspondance de Luther, 22–35.

42. Clemen, Luthers Briefwechsel, Band 2, No. 487 (Luther to Zwilling, May 8, 1522).

43. Ibid, Band 2, No. 490.

44. Ibid., Band 5, No. 1437 (Luther to Wenceslas Link, June 20, 1529).

45. Ibid., Band 10, No. 4013; No. 3871.

46. Horst Wenzel, “Luthers Briefe im Medienwechsel von der Manuskriptkultur zum Buchdruck,” in Thomas A. Brady Jr. (ed.), Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 203–229.

47. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 36–38.

48. Ibid., 110.

49. Olivier Millet, Correspondance de Wolfgang Capiton (1478–1541). Analyse et index (Strasbourg, 1982). Cf. Rummel, with Kooistra (eds.), The Correspondence of Wolfgang Capito, 2 vols. in progress (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2005–); C. H. Wilhelm Sillem (ed.), Briefsammlung des Hamburgischen Superintendent Joachim Westphal aus den Jahren 1530 bis 1575, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1903).

50. Clemen, Luthers Briefwechsel, Band 6, No. 1956.

51. František Hrubý, Ėtudiants tchèques aux écoles protestantes de l’Europe occidentale à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle (Brno: Universita J. E. Purkyně, 1970); cf. H. de Vries van Heekelingen (ed.), Genève, pépinière du Calvinisme hollandais. Correspondance des élèves de Théodore de Bèze après leur départ de Genève. 2 vols. (Fribourg, Fragnière frères, 1918–1924); Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–1558 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2006); for the period post-1558, Hastings Robinson (ed.), The Zurich Letters 1558–1579 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845).

52. Philippe Denis, Les églises d’étrangers en pays rhénans (1538–1564) (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1984).

53. Denis, “Calvin et les églises d’étrangers: Comment un ministre intervient dans une église autre que la sienne,” in Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser (ed.), Calvinus Ecclesiae Genevensis Custos (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1984), 69–92.

54. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, chaps. 4, 6.

55. Benedict, “The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy: France, 1555–1563,” in Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, and Marc Venard (eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585 (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999), 35–50; Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 304–310; Hugues Daussy, Le parti huguenot. Chronique d’une désillusion (1557–1572) (Geneva: Droz, 2014), chaps. 1–2.

56. Pollet, Martin Bucer, 1, 273–280.

57. Ibid., 2, 278–306.

58. Timothy Wengert, “ ‘We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever’: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon,” in Wengert (ed.), Philip Melanchthon, Speaker of the Reformation: Wittenberg’s Other Reformer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), chap. 11.

59. Matthias Dall’Asta et al. (eds.), Melanchthons Briefwechsel, 14 vols in prog. (‘Texte’) (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1991–), Bd. 11. [1542] (2010), Nos. 2894, 3012, 3013, 3105; 2956, 3061, 3097, 3108; 2967–2968; 3108; 3114.

60. Ernst W. Zeeden, “Aufgaben der Staatsgewalt im Dienste der Reformation. Untersuchüngen über die Briefe Calvins an Fürsten und Obrigkeiten,” Saeculum 15 (1964): 132–152; Daussy, “L’action diplomatique de Calvin en faveur des Églises réformées de France (1557–1564),” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 156 (2010): 197–209.

61. [08B], 11, No. 3048.

62. Ibid., Nos. 1982; 1984; 1988; 2000–2001, etc.

63. I owe this example to discussions with Silke Eldinger, who is preparing a doctorate at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau on this material.

64. Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), which also provides an appendix list of Sleidan’s extant correspondence.

65. Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009).

66. Brady Jr., “Phases and Strategies of the Schmalkaldic League: A Perspective after 450 Years,” in Brady Jr. (ed.), Communities, Politics and Reformation in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 109–128 emphasizes the role of correspondence in its manifestations.

67. H. Virck and O. Winckelmann (eds.), Politische Correspondenz der Stadt Strassburg im Zeitalter der Reformation, vols. 1–3 (Strasbourg, 1892–1898).

68. Mark Greengrass, “Two Sixteenth-Century Religious Minorities and their Scribal Networks,” in Heinz Schilling and István Geörgy Tóth (eds.), Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 317–327; Mark Greengrass and Thomas Freeman, “Scribal Communication and Scribal Publication in Early Calvinism,” in Irene Dingel and Herman J. Selderhuis (eds.), Calvin und Calvinismus. Europäische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 391–416.

69. Greengrass, “Informal Networks in Sixteenth-Century French Protestantism,” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 78–97.

70. Robert Friedmann, “The Epistles of the Hutterian Brethren: A Study in Anabaptist Literature,” in Harold S. Bender (ed.), Hutterite Studies: Collected and Published in Honor of His Seventieth Anniversary (Goshen, IA: Mennonite Historical Society, 1971), 157–183; cf. Werner O. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 208–210.

71. Thielman J. van Braght, The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1938).

FURTHER READING

The bibliography of this subject, when confined to material published in English, is particularly restricted.

Reformation correspondence in translation

Benoît, Jean-Daniel. Calvin in his Letters: A Study of Calvin’s Pastoral Counselling, mainly from his Letters. Sutton Courtenay: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1991.

Pelikan, Jaroslav and Helmut Lehmann (eds.) Luther’s Works, 55 vols. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1972, vols. 48–50 (selected letters).

Robinson, Hastings (ed.) The Zurich Letters 1558–1579. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845.

Rummel, Erika with Milton Kooistra (eds.) The Correspondence of Wolfgang Capito, 2 vols in prog. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2005–.

Taggert, Timothy (ed.) Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel. Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 2003.

Other studies

Bethencourt, Francisco and Florike Egmond (eds.) Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Euler, Carrie. Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–1558. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2006.

Friedmann, Robert. “The Epistles of the Hutterian Brethren: A Study in Anabaptist Literature.” In Hutterite Studies: Collected and Published in Honor of His Seventieth Anniversary, edited by Harold S. Bender, pp. 157–183. Goshen, IA: The Mennonite Historical Society, 1971.

Greengrass, Mark. “Two Sixteenth-Century Religious Minorities and their Scribal Networks.” In Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Heinz Schilling and István Geörgy Tóth, pp. 317–327. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Greengrass, Mark and Thomas Freeman. “Scribal Communication and Scribal Publication in Early Calvinism.” In Calvin und Calvinismus. Europäische Perspektiven, edited by Irene Dingel and Herman J. Selderhuis, pp. 391–416. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011.

Jardine, Lisa. Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Poster, Carol and Linda C. Mitchell. Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

Roper, Lyndal. “ ‘To His Most Learned and Dearest Friend’: Reading Luther’s Letters,” German History 28 (2010): 283–295.

Rummel, Erika and Milton Kooistra (eds.) Reformation Sources: The Letters of Wolfgang Capito and His Fellow Reformers in Alsace and Switzerland, Essays and Studies, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Toronto, ON: Victoria University, University of Toronto, 2007.

Schneider, Gary. The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005.

Wengert, Timothy. “ ‘We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever’: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon.” In Philip Melanchthon, Speaker of the Reformation: Wittenberg’s Other Reformer, edited by Timothy Wengert, pp. 19–44. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013.

APPENDIX I

Surviving letters (by year) from editions of the magisterial Protestant Reformers

Note: Only letters that can be reasonably securely dated by editors to a specific year have been included. The definition of what is a “letter” varies from editor to editor, and no effort has been made to harmonize their definitions. In some instances, letters that are not directly addressed to or from a particular Reformer have been included by particular editors for various reasons, and they have not been excluded from these calculations, which are only intended to give a broad, comparative overview.

Sources:

1. Clemen, O. (ed.), Luthers Briefwechsel (Weimarer Kritische Gesamtausgabe), 16 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlau Nachfolger, 1930–1985.

2. Egli, Emil, Georg Finsler, Walther Köhler, and Oskar Farner (eds.), Zwinglis Briefwechsel Corpus Reformatorum, vols. 94–98. Leipzig: M. Heinsius, 1911–1935.

3. Melanchthons Briefwechsel, 12 vols. (“Regesten”). Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977–2005.

4. Joannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, edited by Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, vols. X–XX. Thesaurus epistolicus Calvinianus (Brunswigae et Berolini): apud C. A. Schwetschke et filium, 1863–1900.

5. Bruening, Michael W. (ed.), Epistoli Petri Vireti: The previously unedited letters and a register of Pierre Viret’s correspondence. Geneva: Droz, 2012.

6. Millet, Olivier. Correspondance de Wolfgang Capiton (1478–1541). Analyse et index. Strasbourg, 1982.

7. Staedte, J. et al., Heinrich Bullinger Werke. Briefwechsel, vols. 1–16 in prog. Zurich: Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte and the Zwinglivereins Zürich, 1972–.

8. (Recueillie par Hippolyte Aubert; Fernand Aubert and successors (eds.)), Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze. Tomes I–XXXIX in prog. Geneva: Droz, 1960–.

PART IV

SITES, INSTITUTIONS, AND SOCIETY

CHAPTER 22

UNIVERSITY SCHOLARS OF THE REFORMATION

MICHAEL HEYD

HISTORICAL scholarship of the past two generations has clearly shown that the Reformation was much more than a movement of theologians, politicians, and a few popular leaders. The present Handbook is an evident manifestation of this change of perspective. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the Reformation began through the initiative of a university professor of theology, Martin Luther, and a typical academic exercise, the posting of Ninety-Five Theses (if indeed they were posted on October 31, 1517) calling for public disputation.[1] Moreover, in the course of the Reformation, continuing into the seventeenth century, numerous universities all over Europe turned Protestant, others were newly established as Protestant universities, to which should be added many important academies (chief among them—the Academy of Geneva). The universities and academies, in particular their faculties of theology, were the chief centers for the formulation of Protestant doctrine, and even more important, for the training of ministers and preachers who were the agents (alongside books and pamphlets) for spreading the Reformation messages to the broad public.

In this respect, university scholars constituted primary agents (though by no means exclusive ones) in the creation of knowledge about the divine. Yet, their role was fraught with several inherent tensions which this chapter will seek to explicate, and will attempt to follow the development of these tensions throughout the Reformation period and beyond.

First among these tensions was the seeming contradiction between, on the one hand, the stress on justification by faith alone (sola fide), and the insistence on any intellectual training on the other. If salvation was indeed acquired by faith alone, and owing exclusively to divine Grace (sola gratia), how important was it to gain the knowledge that the university scholars were offering? And as far as soteriological knowledge was concerned, namely knowledge about the way to religious truth, was their status in any way privileged related to their academic training?[2] These questions were often raised in the course of the Reformation: from the very beginning by the Zwickau Prophets (the so-called Schwärmer), then by the various Anabaptists and radical sects, down to the anti-academic tracts during the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century.

The response of university scholars, primarily of Martin Luther, right from the start was of course: sola scriptura. Scripture, and only Scripture, was the repository of trustworthy divine knowledge. In principle, everyone could read the Bible, and for that reason, as is well known, Luther set to translate it into German from 1521 onward. Yet Luther and his colleagues soon realized that Scripture was not as self-evident to the layman as might be thought. Herein lay the first and foremost claim of the university scholar to a certain monopoly over religious truth. The proper understanding of Scripture required the knowledge of languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) as well as sufficient theological training. Such knowledge and training could be acquired only in the university.

Yet the universities were traditional institutions, established from the late twelfth century onward, often under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, with a very different theological and intellectual purpose. How suited could they be to the new message of the Reformation? Here two additional, but related, tensions emerged. The first regarded the institutional and educational framework, that of the lectures, exercises, and disputations which characterized the medieval university. Was such a structure suited to the spread of the Reformation message which had focused on Scripture? The second tension related to the organization of knowledge. Except for the higher disciplines of theology, law, and medicine, the rest of the subjects studied at the medieval university (officially “the Seven Liberal Arts,” but in fact—mostly the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic to which were added physics and ethics to form the discipline of philosophy) had a propedeutic function in the eyes of theologians.[3] Was such a function relevant also for the New Theology espoused by the Protestant university scholars? What should be the relationship between the soteriological message promulgated by the Reformation, and these secular branches of knowledge? Since the Reformation as an intellectual movement originated in the university and wished to propagate its message, partly at least, within an academic context, particularly in order to train ministers and preachers, it could not ignore these challenges. This is the principal question I wish to examine. It is a question, however, which requires some fine distinctions, not always borne in mind by historians dealing with this problem. In examining the various ways in which Reformation scholars incorporated secular “worlds of knowledge,” one should distinguish between the adoption of methods, the reliance on external bodies of knowledge, and most important—the sources and ultimate aims of such knowledge.[4]

By the first half of the sixteenth century the secular disciplines, as well as theology itself, were shaped by two powerful intellectual traditions in the midst of which the Reformation itself developed: that of late medieval scholasticism on the one hand, and the more recent Humanist movement, newly arrived to the north of the Alps. Both these traditions had a marked impact on the artes liberales (particularly on rhetoric and dialectics) as well as on philosophy (ethics, physics, and metaphysics), and in the case of scholasticism, particularly on theology. How did Reformation scholars, with their emphasis on Scrutamini Scripturas (Let us examine Scripture) relate to these traditions, the worlds of knowledge they incorporated, and particularly—the organization of knowledge that they implied?

THE HUMANIST HERITAGE

We shall start with the attitude of Reformation scholars toward Humanism and the literae humaniores, as this issue surfaced right from the start, precisely because the Reformation came on the heels of the Umanisti in the universities north of the Alps. Whereas traditional historiography tended to emphasize the contradictions between Humanism and the Reformation (especially concerning their views of Free Will and the dignity of man), the received wisdom in the past half century or so is that the relationship between the two movements is much more complex.[5] Indeed, Reformation scholars from the very beginning relied heavily on the humanistic approach.

This is true even for Luther himself. His early training at Erfurt was already humanistic in many respects and the new University of Wittenberg, to which he arrived in 1509, was known as a bastion of Humanist scholars.[6] Throughout his career, however, Luther had recourse not only to humanistic linguistic tools (his reliance on Erasmus’s Greek edition of the New Testament for his theological breakthrough is most famous), nor just to the rhetorical skills for which the classical sources served as a model.[7] For him, the content of the humanistic disciplines, including ethics, were important, if not for the understanding of the divine message, then for the conduct and education of the “natural” man. Indeed, contrary to the traditional image that had focused on the confrontation between Luther and Erasmus concerning the question of Free Will, recent scholarship has shown that the relationship between Luther and Humanism was much richer and more complex.[8]

The reliance on Humanism, and on the worlds of knowledge it fostered, is especially clear in the educational and literary output of Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s ally and colleague at the University of Wittenberg. Young Melanchthon had clearly been a Christian Humanist, a student (and family relative) of Johannes Reuchlin and a correspondent and life-long admirer of Erasmus. After being nominated as Professor of Greek at Wittenberg in 1518, however, he became increasingly convinced by Luther’s theology and reform program. As is well known, he had been instrumental not only in introducing and legitimizing the teaching of the three classical languages into the Protestant curriculum, but of the liberal arts in general, first in Wittenberg and later in most Lutheran and Reformed universities and academies in Europe. These included not just the traditional trivium but also other branches of philosophy—ethics and physics, though emphatically not metaphysics—as well as the teaching of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) which had usually been neglected in late medieval universities. Melanchthon also laid special stress on the role of history and the importance of its instruction. In setting his educational program, from 1523/4 onward (as rector of the University of Wittenberg), Melanchthon was reacting to the anti-intellectual tendencies that characterized the early phases of the Reformation, particularly during the crisis of the university in 1521/2, and the challenge posed by the Zwickau Prophets. While adhering to the principle of sola scriptura, Melanchthon argued that the biblical message could not be understood without solid linguistic training, as well as a broader background in the studia humanioria. These taught the student not just to think and express himself clearly, but developed his critical judgment with respect to the texts he read.[9] Indeed, the humanistic textual approach became a principal perspective in the study of Scripture in Protestant universities in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as we shall see, in the study of philosophy as well. Furthermore, secular branches of knowledge like ethics and physics, besides being indispensable for a correct understanding of the soteriological message, were necessary for the conduct of civil affairs. The crucial notion for the understanding of Melanchthon’s humanistic, philosophical, and historical pursuits is the relationship between lex (law) and Evangelium (the soteriological message). Whereas for Luther there was a sharp distinction, indeed a hiatus, between lex and Evangelium, Melanchthon stressed the interactions between the two realms in conducting church affairs, in scholarship, and in pedagogy. The realm of law was clearly of importance for the visible church, if not for the true, invisible church. Moreover, Melanchthon aimed to incorporate the Protestant conception of history within the broader view of Universal History, or more precisely—to study and teach history (particularly ancient history) from an Evangelical perspective.[10]

Melanchthon’s immediate disciples and successors—Caspar Peucer (1525–1602), in Wittenberg, who was also his son-in-law, David Chytraeus (1531–1600) in Rostock, and Michael Neander (headmaster at the Latin school in Ilfeld) continued the humanistic and historical interests of their master. A profound interest in history can also be found among Melanchthon’s opponents within the Lutheran Church, first and foremost in his “nemesis” Matthias Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in composing the Magdeburg Centuries. It should be stressed, however, that for Reformation scholars, from Melanchthon onward, it was church history which held most of their attention. To this should be added an intensified engagement, on both sides of the confessional divide, with the church fathers.[11] In the following generations, chairs of history were established in many of the Protestant universities. While influenced by the humanistic scholarship which continued to develop throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a principal aim of Protestant Church history was naturally polemical—against Roman Catholicism.

The impact of Humanism on Calvinism is even more obvious, since many of the Reformed theologians, beginning with Calvin himself, were trained, like Melanchthon, as Humanists to begin with.[12] Nevertheless, important distinctions should be made. While Reformed scholars of the first generation clearly exhibit Humanist literary sensitivities and appreciation of the Classics, and whereas Reformed academies and universities would largely adopt the Melanchthonian Humanist program of studies (including his textbooks on dialectics), the substance of the Humanist world view (if indeed there is such a thing), particularly its view of the dignity of man and the freedom of will, were sharply rejected by most Reformed theologians, as they were rejected by their Lutheran colleagues. Yet the legacy of Humanism as a method, particularly as a method of textual exegesis; the literary, educational, even moral and intellectual value of the classical texts (as long as they are not taken as guides to salvation); many Humanist pedagogical principles; and perhaps most significantly the importance Humanists placed on history and historical understanding, all had their impact on Reformation scholars throughout the late sixteenth century and down to the late seventeenth. While the humanistic worlds of knowledge were seriously modified to suit the soteriological message of Lutheran and Calvinist orthodoxies, the classical substantive heritage, including its view of man and Free Will, would continue to have its mark on some “heretical” trends within Protestantism, and would re-emerge most forcefully toward the end of the seventeenth century with the gradual decline of Orthodoxy, paving the road to the Enlightenment.

THE SCHOLASTIC HERITAGE

Alongside history and the humanistic studies, the second intellectual tradition with which Protestant professors had to deal was scholasticism. It is here that the structure of the university itself played a decisive role. Traditional historiography claimed that scholastic philosophy and metaphysics re-entered the Protestant world only in the second half of the sixteenth century, particularly after 1560.[13] This image has changed dramatically in the past twenty years or so with recent scholarship revealing clear scholastic tendencies in the first two generations of Protestant theologians, including Luther and Calvin themselves.[14] At the same time, this research is gradually revealing the contours of Lutheran and Reformed scholasticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, contours which are specific and peculiar to the Reformed tradition, including its strong reliance on Scripture.[15] “Scholasticism,” this revisionist school stresses, is primarily a method rather than a body of knowledge, or doctrine. As such, it could be adopted by Reformation scholars without subscribing, necessarily, to any specific doctrine.[16] Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that “scholasticism,” as its name implies, had been primarily a “school philosophy (or theology),” namely, a system of knowledge taught at schools and universities, whose characteristics had been forged by its didactic purposes and by this academic framework. Thus, not only the liberal arts, but also Reformation theology itself could not fail to assume some “scholastic” features, whether in methodology, concepts, or even substantive matters once it began to be taught systematically in the universities and academies of the Protestant world.

Nevertheless, it is, in my opinion, important to note the historical dynamics and changing nature of so-called “Protestant scholasticism” in the course of the sixteenth century and up to its demise in the last third of the seventeenth.

Luther, after being exposed in his youth to scholastic training and thought, mostly of the Ockhamist type, gradually distanced himself from that heritage and by 1517 took a sharp critical stand against scholasticism, regarding it as completely unbiblical and replete with the vestiges of pagan, mainly Aristotelian philosophy.[17] In fact, Luther and Melanchthon soon started to reform the Wittenberg curriculum so as to free it from those “pagan” elements.[18] Yet, university structure and institutional traditions (such as the disputation), as well as some of its teaching techniques, could not fail to bear their mark. Recent scholarship has shown that Luther did not shrink from adopting scholastic terms, and using scholastic methods (not to mention the very practice of disputation!).[19] Moreover, the anti-intellectual manifestations of the Zwickau Prophets in 1521/2 and the Peasants’ War of 1524/5 and the increasing challenge of the radical Anabaptist movements (which Melanchthon encountered first hand in 1527), led both Luther, and even more so Melanchthon, to return at least to scholastic terminology, as well as to Aristotelian philosophy, especially in ethics and logic (dialectics). Indeed, Melanchthonian textbooks on dialectics, which combined a humanistic and a scholastic–Aristotelian approach, were to become standard learning material throughout most of the Protestant universities in the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Melanchthon’s emphasis on academic education (which earned him the accolade of Praeceptor Germaniae) had been a forceful instigation to incorporate a more systematic philosophical discourse, including natural philosophy into his theology.[20] Yet he adamantly rejected the employment of Aristotelian metaphysics in theological discussions.[21]

When it comes to Calvin, his avowed attitude toward scholasticism is again clearly negative, yet, as has recently been pointed out, it is mainly late medieval scholasticism, especially that taught at the Sorbonne, which bears the brunt of his criticism.[22] Indeed, the term “scholasticus” was also used by Calvin as a neutral designation of a scholar or the academic enterprise.[23] On several theological themes, such as Christology, he was clearly indebted to previous scholastic discussion, even if he acquired his knowledge of the scholastic tradition largely in the course of his career, between the first and the last edition of the Institutes. Although the Institutes were originally a catechetical type of commentary on the Credo,[24] the pattern of argument in many of the chapters of the Institutes follows the form of a scholastic disputation.[25] Calvin also made use of the scholastic distinctions as a methodological tool to answer various objections and to solve theological difficulties.[26] Nevertheless, it seems to me, the question is not so much the links and influences of the scholastic heritage on Calvin, but the extent to which he incorporated the scholastic theological world of knowledge—aims, authorities, methods, and target audience—into his own theology. Here, I believe, the answer tends to be negative.

This will change quite dramatically (although as to how dramatic it is, there is some controversy among scholars) in the next generation, with Calvin’s immediate successors. First, their theology developed from the beginning within an academic educational context, namely—a “scholastic” one, in the broad and neutral sense of the term. They had to find means to present the theology of the Reformers to the next generation in a systematic and synthetic manner, as well as in a clear and easy way. Second, it developed within a growing polemical–confessional context, facing no longer the older Roman Catholic traditions, but the need to confront the new, developing post-Tridentine Catholicism.[27] This new Catholic theology itself returned, not just to medieval scholasticism, but specifically to Thomist metaphysics. A polemical arena as it developed from the 1560s onward had to be based on some common ground and common language, and it is against this background that Lutheran and Reformed scholars increasingly turned to scholasticism, particularly of the Thomistic type. Such a turn also meant a renewed reliance on Aristotle, not only his logic and ethics, as Melanchthon had done, but also his metaphysics.[28]

The Aristotle that was introduced into the Protestant world in the second half of the sixteenth century, however, was to a large extent the Aristotle of the Humanists, an Aristotle that was combined with Cicero, and in some cases, Aristotle as he had been taught in Padua, under the influence of Zabarella. This perspective also influenced the way that Thomas was received by Protestant scholars. The first to reintroduce Thomas Aquinas to Reformed theology was Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), a Florentine Humanist and Augustinian monk, trained in Padua, who left Italy in 1542 to become a Reformed scholar and theologian in Strasbourg, Oxford, and Zurich.[29] In the next generation there should be mentioned, besides Théodore de Bèze (1516–1605), Calvin’s immediate successor in Geneva; Girolamo Zanchi (1516–1590), also of Italian origin, who had been a disciple of Vermigli and after teaching at Strasbourg for several years, taught at Heidelberg, and his younger colleague, Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583) who was largely responsible for the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 (both Zanchi and Ursinus moved to Neustadt after Heidelberg turned Lutheran in 1576);[30] Lambert Daneau (ca. 1530–1595) who taught in Geneva, Leiden, and later in Orthez-Lescar in Southern France;[31] and in the next generation, Bartholomäus Keckermann (1571–1609) who taught at Heidelberg from 1592 to 1601, and later back in his home town of Danzig, and to whom we shall return in this section. Among Lutheran theologians in that period, Aegidius Hunnius (1550–1603) who taught first at the University of Marburg, later in Wittenberg, is regarded as laying the foundation for Scholastic Orthodoxy.[32] In the next generation, most prominent among the Lutherans were Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) at Jena, Abraham Calov (1612–1685) at Rostock, Königsberg, Danzig, and finally at Wittenberg, and Johann Andreas Quenstedt (1617–1688), Calov’s father-in-law and Gerhard’s nephew, also in Wittenberg.

This “Protestant scholasticism” does not mean, as has sometimes been argued, that Protestant scholars abandoned or downplayed the role of Scripture and the doctrine of sola fide as the essential way to salvation. On the contrary, they adopted scholasticism, specifically Thomism, only as a means to articulate and defend the central tenets of Protestantism, but Scripture remained the basis for these tenets.[33] Yet Scripture could no longer serve (if ever it could) as the sole avenue in the training of future ministers and theologians. It had to be supplemented by a close study of logic, rhetoric, and in many cases metaphysics. In all these disciplines, the method and practice of disputation was deemed highly important.[34] At the same time, one cannot ignore the parallel development of biblical exegesis which was by no means forsaken in Protestant Orthodoxy after the Reformation.[35]

What characterizes this scholasticism, as we have seen, are primarily its academic and didactic aims as well as its polemical purposes; hence on the one hand, the stress on method, on simplicity and clarity, but also on brevity, given the need to train a growing number of students in as short a time as possible.[36] On the other hand, the polemical needs (whether of Lutherans versus Reformed or Reformed versus Lutherans, and both vis-à-vis the Roman Catholics) required a systematic training in Aristotelian dialectics, primarily the use of syllogism. Furthermore, to the analytic emphasis and inductive method favored by Melanchthon and the first generation of Reformers, there was now added the need to develop a theological system which would be deductive in its methods and synthetic in its aims. This typifies the work of Zanchi, Ursinus, Daneau, and other theologians in the post-1560 period.[37] At the same time, the humanistic heritage called for familiarity with the original texts themselves, even though, for the earlier stages of philosophical training in the schola privata (the pre-academic years) the textbooks written by Melanchthon and his disciples were used.

Reformed (and Lutheran) scholasticism of the late sixteenth century wished to incorporate other “worlds of knowledge,” however, beside metaphysics, but once again, on explicitly biblical grounds. These included the various topics of natural philosophy like physics, astronomy, and what would later be called chemistry.[38] Theologians like Lambert Daneau or Girolamo Zanchi wished to present a view of nature which would fit Aristotelian philosophy while being at the same time based on Scripture.[39] Indeed, and this is a crucial point, some Protestant scholars of the second half of the sixteenth century wished (once again, not least—for didactic purposes) to create a unified conception of knowledge which would include theology and metaphysics as well as physics.[40] They therefore tended to see Scripture not just as leading to salvation, but as a source of knowledge, including natural knowledge. Such a tendency would have far-reaching implications in the seventeenth century, implications to which we shall return in the final section.

The reintroduction of Aristotle, especially his metaphysics, however, did not go unopposed. Leading Reformers like Bullinger in Zurich were adamant against this trend.[41] In response, the early Protestant “scholastics” clearly distinguished between matter (or substance) and form. While Aristotle and Thomas could be useful in terms of the form of their arguments, this by no means meant accepting the substance of their thought.[42] On one crucial point, however, the founders of “Protestant scholasticism” (and their successors) clearly diverged from Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers of the first generation (though not from Melanchthon or Vermigli!): in regarding the logical capabilities of man as a gift of God, not totally impaired by the Fall, and hence useful as dialectical instruments for understanding the divine message.[43]

RAMISM

A somewhat different and far more influential critique of Aristotle came from the pen of Pierre de la Ramée, known as Peter Ramus (1515–1572).[44] Ramus did not wish to overthrow logic or rhetoric, on the contrary, he wanted to reform them. He shared many of the aims of the Protestant scholars of the sixteenth century: the predominance of didactics, the emphasis on method, on clarity, and on brevity, and the importance assigned to distinctions and on precise definitions.[45] Yet he believed that exclusive reliance on Aristotle could not achieve these aims. He suggested an alternative dialectic to the Aristotelian one, which he believed would be simpler, more practical, and easier to memorize. His purpose was once again didactic and this was also its main appeal to Reformation scholars in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. In circumventing metaphysics, and in stressing the moral and practical aims of Protestant education, Ramus offered an attractive solution to the dilemma posed at the beginning of this chapter: how to square the theological principles of the Reformation with secular worlds of knowledge such as logic.[46] He thus also wished to narrow the difference between the “scholastic” method and the “popular” one as formulated earlier by Andreas Hyperius.[47] Circumventing metaphysical speculations, Ramist dialectics and rhetoric were put at the service of “further reform,” of informing the broad public of the pure apostolic doctrine, and no less important—of attempting to form their morals and ensure their “living well” (bene vivere). This approach was particularly appropriate for the training of ministers in their task of delivering sermons in the late sixteenth century, and in regions where theological controversy (which required training in syllogistic argumentation and a metaphysical terminology) had been less critical.[48] As Howard Hotson has convincingly shown, this last point holds true not only for England (and New England), as traditional historiography has stressed, but also for northwest Germany, particularly the territory of Nassau-Dillenburg and its Academy of Herborn.[49]

As Hotson himself has further demonstrated, however, the Ramism adopted at Herborn was no longer “pure” Ramism, but rather a synthesis of Ramist principles of exposition with Melanchthonian reliance on Aristotle. Indeed, by the early seventeenth century a sort of “semi-Ramism” or “Philippo-Ramism” developed, which combined the advantages of Ramist dialectics with those of Aristotle and Melanchthon.[50] The person who introduced Ramism (or more precisely—Philippo-Ramism or semi-Ramism) into the Academy was the theology professor, Johannes Piscator.[51] This synthesis was especially true for theologians like Bartholomäus Keckermann who taught at Heidelberg for a few years, before returning to his home town of Danzig. In Reformed university centers like Heidelberg, the capital of the Palatinate, the inter-confessional debates could hardly be ignored, and for such debates, the training in Aristotelian dialectics, as well as metaphysics, was indispensable. Keckermann recognized the didactic advantages of Ramus (including his critique of the Humanist textual approach), and at the same time, insisted on the crucial importance of Aristotelian philosophy. He thus adopted a sort of “methodical Peripateticism.”[52] It was this kind of synthesis, rather than Ramism proper, which, according to Hotson, would ultimately defeat the Humanist type of Protestant scholarship which was manifest so gloriously in the work of thinkers such as Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger, and Isaac Casaubon.[53] This eclecticism, sacrificing textual analysis for a more open method (or methods) of teaching was obviously more appropriate for the growing influx of students to universities, academies, and gymnasia in the context of the so-called educational revolution of that period, both on the Continent and in the British Isles.[54]

ENCYCLOPEDISM

Keckermann is important also in being the harbinger of the next phase of Reformed scholasticism, that of the first half of the seventeenth century, which in some cases had an even more ambitious project—an encyclopedic unification of all knowledge. The seeds of this vision may be found already in Ramus himself as well as in Protestant Aristotelians like Zanchi and Daneau, as we have mentioned above. But the one who carried it out most systematically was the star student in Herborn, who was also a student of Keckermann, Johann Heinrich Alsted.[55] Alsted had several sources of inspiration for his grand project to encompass all knowledge in one comprehensive Encyclopaedia. Besides Ramus, he was equally influenced by Reformation scholars like Daneau, who had already sown the seeds of such a unified view of knowledge, and by Keckermann, who erected the first milestones for such an ambitious project, and who believed in the possibility, with the help of Aristotelian logic, of the instauration of at least the natural part of the divine image in man.[56] Alsted, however, went beyond Keckermann in employing another intellectual tradition, strikingly alien to original Reformed theology, that of Raymond Lull (1235–1315), of alchemical logic, and ultimately of alchemy itself.[57]

A consideration of the full impact of alchemy and Paracelsianism on Reformation thought lies beyond the scope of this chapter. From our perspective, it is important to note that Lullism, Paracelsianism, and Hermeticism constitute other “worlds of knowledge” that prima facie sat ill at ease with Reformation theology, but which, nevertheless, became increasingly influential, at least among some Protestant circles in the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth (and even beyond!). Alsted is a most significant example of this and he had a far-reaching impact on many disciples, including some of the Puritans in the British Isles, connected with the Hartlib circle, and most importantly, on the famous Czech educationalist Jan Amos Comenius (Komensky).[58] In some sense Alsted and Comenius, as well as other Protestant scholars of the seventeenth century, continued the program initiated by the early “scholastic” theologians like Zanchi and Daneau in the sixteenth century, of constructing a “pious Philosophy,” indeed, a Mosaic natural philosophy based on Scripture, which would avoid the dangers of pagan Aristotelian philosophy, yet incorporate philosophy into theology rather than reject it altogether.[59] What characterized this movement, besides its ambitious educational and universal program of Pansophia, however, is its initial optimistic perspective (way beyond the measured optimism of someone like Keckermann), in marked contrast to the pessimism of the early Reformers. When some of that optimism was shattered following the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, it was replaced by a millenarian orientation, also quite alien to the attitude of mainstream Reformation scholars.[60] This encyclopedic movement of educational reform, with some of its magical and Paracelsian roots, was somehow linked to the next challenge facing Reformation scholars, that of the New Experimental and Mechanistic Science.

PROTESTANT ORTHODOXY

This Ramist–Encyclopedist–Alchemical movement was, however, by no means characteristic of Reformation academics as a whole in the first half of the seventeenth century, and we should first say a word about the “scholastic” theologians who were busy fortifying Protestant Orthodoxy in that period. Several historical developments took place in the first half of the seventeenth century, or more precisely—in the post-1618 period. The appearance of the Rosicrucian tracts in 1613–1614 caused a real crisis that led mainstream Protestant theologians to take a more conservative stance and to reject the Paracelsian elements with which the Ramist–Encyclopedist movement was involved.[61] More importantly perhaps, following the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, its course, and its aftermath, German Protestantism was very much in disarray. The two important Reformed centers on the Continent, besides the British Isles, were now the Netherlands and Switzerland (to which Geneva, as a free city should be added). Third, the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) of 1618–1619 marked the emergence of an internal rift within the Reformed camp between the followers of Jacob Arminius (called Remonstrants in the Netherlands) and the “Orthodox” adherents of the doctrine of Predestination (the so-called “Counter-Remonstrants”). The Orthodox camp thus faced a new internal opponent. Indeed, beyond the traditional theological rivals—the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Anabaptists—Orthodox theologians in the seventeenth century had to deal not just with the Arminians, but with the middle-of-the-road disciples of John Cameron and Moïse Amyraut of the Academy of Saumur in France,[62] as well as with the Paracelsians and Millenarians we have mentioned above, the Socinians who denied the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and who became much more of a challenge in the seventeenth century than they had been in the sixteenth,[63] the “enthusiasts” who claimed to possess direct divine inspiration,[64] and finally, and most importantly perhaps, the challenge of Cartesianism and the new experimental philosophy of nature to which we shall return in the following section. Side by side with the need to consolidate Orthodoxy (whether Reformed or Lutheran), another distinguishing mark of at least some of the Reformation scholars of the seventeenth century would be the growing awareness of the need to emphasize piety, Christian ethics, and the practical implications of theology, alongside the insistence of “pure” doctrine.

While further developing the tools of “scholastic” theology, including incorporating elements of Aristotelian metaphysics in their efforts to defend their theological positions, Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century did not give up the primacy of Scripture and the principle of sola fide. This is true of both camps along the divide that had developed between the Arminians and the Counter-Remonstrants, or the “Orthodox” who formulated and stood behind the famous articles of Dort (Dordrecht) of 1618. Irrespective of the deep disagreements concerning human Free Will and divine Predestination, the style, methods, and terminology of the two sides of the debate were strikingly similar.[65] Nevertheless, Orthodox Protestantism in the seventeenth century was clearly not homogeneous in its nature, neither in its theological orientation, nor in the authorities on which it relied. Some theologians, like the controversial Pole Johannes Maccovius (Jan Makowsky, 1588–1644) who taught at Franeker, in the Netherlands from 1615 until his death in 1644, followed in the footsteps of his teacher Keckermann in employing Aristotelian philosophy (particularly the use of distinctions but also the use of deductions from scriptural passages) to defend Calvinist Orthodoxy, in his case a strict supra-lapsarian view of the doctrine of Predestination.[66] Gisbert Voetius, perhaps the most prominent theologian of his generation, who taught at the newly founded university at Utrecht, while also holding a strict supra-lapsarian interpretation of Predestination, was deeply influenced by the Puritan emphasis on piety and the moral life. In many ways, indeed, he is viewed as a harbinger of late seventeenth-century Pietism, but he saw no contradiction between his “scholastic” view of doctrine, as taught at the university, and his insistence that theology was a practical science and the primacy of Christian living, as he conveyed that in his preaching.[67]

The incorporation of (largely) Aristotelian metaphysics into Reformed Protestantism, and more specifically, the development of “scholastic” (i.e., academic) theology, raised, however, once again the perennial question of the proper relationship between theology and philosophy. From the very beginning, Protestant scholastics who reintroduced philosophy as a legitimate world of knowledge insisted that it should by no means be deemed a guide to salvation.[68] Yet the usefulness of philosophy for theology, albeit with limitations, was dealt with systematically by Keckermann at the turn of the seventeenth century.[69] While clearly distinguishing between the discipline of theology (which was basically a practice involving faith and life) and that of philosophy (which was primarily a speculative, theoretical discipline), Keckermann assigned (contrary to Luther, and in line with medieval scholastics) an important propedeutic role to philosophy, including Aristotelian metaphysics. Philosophy was “a habit of mind through which we know divine, natural, and human things” and as such had some substantive correlations in terms of subject matter with theology, and hence also had some practical implications.[70] Indeed, natural knowledge of God was possible, and by no means contradicted the supernatural knowledge bestowed by Scripture and accepted by faith. By toil and labor, “in the sweat of his brow,” man could restore some parts of the image of God that he had lost following the Fall. Logic was the main avenue in this direction, as it had its parallel in the mind of God himself.[71] Yet, knowledge of the “Book of Nature” had a similar value. It by no means overturned the “Book of Scripture.” This is a crucial point which had its origins in a Paracelsian tradition. Moreover, it would have far-reaching implications in the seventeenth century as we shall see in the following section. In stressing that philosophy (and human reason!) itself was a divine gift, and that man, for all his fallen nature, could still naturally apprehend some metaphysical truths, Keckermann distanced himself to some extent from the original distrust of human rationality manifested by Luther and Calvin (though less by Melanchthon!). The reincorporation of the philosophical and “secular” disciplines as aids to theological training was on the one hand required by the academic and educational exigencies of the period which called for developing a comprehensive and coherent curriculum.[72] On the other hand, as Keckermann himself stated, the employment of sound metaphysics was crucial for the debate with the Roman Catholics who avowedly relied on these same cognitive tools. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that for Keckermann, as for most Reformation scholars, the human disciplines and human reason could by no means reach the soteriological truths of the Trinity and of Christ the Savior as announced by Scripture. Philosophy remained “a handmaid of theology.”

THE NEW SCIENCE

This was to be the chief bone of contention in dealing with the new world of knowledge that emerged in the first half of the seventeenth century: the new experimental science and the philosophy of René Descartes. The loyalty to Aristotle, though strong, had been instrumental rather than fundamental, as we have just seen. Indeed, as far as philosophy courses proper at Protestant universities and academies were concerned, by the middle of the seventeenth century they had become increasingly eclectic, adhering to a kind of philosophia novantiqua.[73] Yet, both the new experimental science, and even more so Cartesian philosophy, threatened to set new and exclusive standards of truths. They also threatened the Protestant “scholastic” type of synthesis of all knowledge aimed at by Reformation scholars of the end of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth (including encyclopedists such as Alsted) who had attempted heroically to combine Aristotelian, Humanist, and scriptural methods, and sometimes also substantive worlds of knowledge, so as to ensure the propedeutic status of philosophy and science.[74]

Vis-à-vis this synthetic outlook, the new natural philosophers, especially on the Continent, insisted at first upon a strict segregationist conception of knowledge, that not only distinguished between philosophy and theology in terms of the degrees of knowledge on a consecutive continuum, but in terms of the very objects and the language employed in each discipline. By insisting on a separation of the “Book of Nature” from the “Book of Scripture” these natural philosophers risked undermining the propedeutic role of philosophy.[75] Yet they thus wished to ensure what I have elsewhere called a “negative autonomy” to the new natural philosophy.[76] Such an approach could also fit Protestant scholars who, for their own reasons, going back to the views of Luther and Calvin, insisted on a strict segregation between philosophy and theology.[77] They relied inter alia on the principle of accommodation, according to which in matters of physics or astronomy, Moses (i.e., Scripture) adapted his language to that of the “common man.” Thus, the Bible by no means should be read as a book of science.[78]

Yet, the educational and academic institutional framework, to which we have been constantly referring throughout this chapter, could not long sustain such a strict segregation, given the need to justify the teaching of the various disciplines and worlds of knowledge (particularly philosophy) as ultimately propedeutic to theology and to the Protestant soteriological message. For that reason the new natural philosophy had to be justified on theological grounds in order to be accepted by Protestant scholars.

This could be done more easily in academies, universities, and intellectual contexts in which Aristotelian philosophy, particularly Aristotelian metaphysics, was less entrenched. This was to some extent the case in England, the Netherlands, and somewhat later, in Geneva. This may have laid the ground for the acceptance of the new natural philosophy in a manner which would be relevant also for religious and theological concerns, ultimately leading to what would develop as the “natural theology” of the second half of the seventeenth century.

One of the early central figures in this process was John Wilkins (1614–1669), minister, theologian, and don at Wadham College, Oxford, popularizer of Copernicanism and the New Science, and in 1662 one of the founders of the Royal Society.[79] Like other supporters of the New Science, Wilkins relied inter alia on the principle of accommodation according to which, in matters not pertaining to salvation, the Bible spoke in a language suited to the understanding of the “vulgar.” Yet, in emphasizing that the “Book of Nature” was an open book that by ongoing discovery could manifest the existence, the power, the wisdom, and the glory of God, Wilkins was laying the foundations for a “natural theology” that in the next two generations would become increasingly dominant in England.[80]

Indeed as the seventeenth century progressed, it turned out that strict segregation between the realms of Scripture and of Nature could not be maintained for long. Yet, on the eve of the Enlightenment the new natural philosophy had imperceptibly become the queen of sciences, and theology, to some extent—its handmaid. Protestants, both in Britain and on the Continent (as well as overseas—in the American colonies) would have to turn to a different, Pietistic, “Revivalist,” less “scholarly” conception of religion in a self-conscious attempt to return to what they considered the original Reformation vision.

NOTES

1. For Luther’s own testimony, see WA 54: 185, 28–186, 10; LW 34: 337. On the question of the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses, whether they were indeed posted on the doors of the Castle Church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, see the summary of the debate in Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483–1521, trans. James L. Schaaf (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985), 199–202.

2. Indeed, these questions were raised from the very beginning of Christianity, most famously by Tertullian in the third century, but in fact already by Paul, most explicitly in Col. 2:8 (“See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ”).

3. On the structure and content of philosophy teaching in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see the detailed studies of Joseph S. Freedman, some of which will be referred to here (see nn. 40, 49, 50, 52, 54, 73).

4. For a sociological analysis of the problematic of the relationship between soteriological concerns and various worlds of knowledge, see Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Explorations in the Sociology of Knowledge: The Soteriological Axis in the Construction of Domains of Knowledge,” in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Ilana K. Silber (eds.), Cultural Traditions and Worlds of Knowledge: Explorations in the Sociology of Knowledge (vol. 7 of Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present) (London and Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988), 1–71. See also the other chapters in that volume.

5. In addition to a rich historiography, some of which will be referred to here (see nn. 6, 8, 9, 10, and 12), see now the book by Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially chap. 1. Rummel, however, tends to see an inherent contradiction—or at least a principal gap—between Humanism and the Reformation.

6. See Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwazbart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 123–124; Marilyn J. Harran, “Introduction” and “Luther as Professor,” in Harran (ed.), Luther and Learning: The Wittenberg University Luther Symposium (Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1985); and the important article by Lewis W. Spitz, “Luther and Humanism,” in the same collection, 69–94. On the humanistic orientation of Wittenberg in the year when Luther arrived there, see Maria Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg 1485–1517 (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1975); Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism, 18–19.

7. This is clear already from the program of university reform he set forth in his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in 1520. See also Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 42, 57, and in general, 27–74.

8. For a convenient summary and detailed bibliography of the subject, see Spitz’s article quoted in n. 6 as well as Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), chap. 10.

9. See on this whole subject the important article of Heinz Scheible, “Melanchthons Bildungsprogramm,” in Scheible, Melanchthon und die Reformation: Forschungsbeiträge, ed. Gerhard May and Rolf Decot (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Azbern, 1996), 99–114.

10. See on this subject Adalbert Klempt, Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung. Zum Wandel des Geschichtsdenkens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1960), chap. 1; Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2003); Asaph Ben-Tov, Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity: Melanchthonian Scholarship between Universal History and Pedagogy (Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2009), esp. chap. 1. Melanchthon’s principal historical work was the Chronicon Carionis, a work based on a German manuscript by the same name sent to Melanchthon in 1531 by the astrologer Johannes Nägelin (Carion) which he published in 1532, and which was translated into Latin in 1537. Melanchthon wrote a much extended version of that text in Latin, with the first volume published in 1558 and the second in 1560. Melanchthon prefaced his work with an Apologia explaining the use of history, or more precisely, of historical writings, for the ethical and political training of students, but even more, for the well being of the church. See Ben-Tov, Lutheran Humanists, 35–39.

11. On the tremendous scholarly output on church history in the age of the Reformation see Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity. On Patristics in the period see
Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), vol. 2.

12. See the somewhat dated article of Robert D. Linder, “Calvinism and Humanism: The First Generation,” Church History 44 (1975): 167–192, as well as Quirinus Breen, John Calvin: A Study in French Humanism (Grand Rapids, MI: Archon Books, 1968) and Ford L. Battles and André M. Hugo (eds.), Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969).

13. This historiography had also usually taken a negative view of this process, claiming that it had “spoiled” the original “pure” evangelical thrust of the first generation of Reformers. For typical examples see especially the classical work by Hans Emil Weber, Reformation, Orthodoxie und Rationalismus, vol. I, 1 (Güttersloh, 1937); Heinrich Heppe, Die Dogmatik der evangelisch-reformierten Kirche, rev. and intro. Ernst Bizer (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1958). The introduction by Bizer is especially important and characteristic of this traditional historiographical approach. For an overall review of the new historiography, see for example, Marten Wisse and Marcel Sarot, “Introduction: Reforming Views of Reformed Scholasticism,” in Maarten Wisse, Marcel Sarot, and Willemien Otten (eds.), Scholasticism Reformed (Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2010), 1–27.

14. The leading scholars in this “revisionist” school have been Willem J. Van Asselt in the Netherlands, and Richard A. Muller in the United States. See Wisse and Sarot, “Reforming Views of Reformed Scholasticism,” written as an Introduction to Wisse, Sarot, and Otten, Scholasticism Reformed, esp. 1–6.

15. In addition to the above, see the important collection of articles edited by Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Milton Keynes, Colorado Springs, CO, and Hyderabad: Paternoster, 1999).

16. See for example, the definition of L. M. De Rijk quoted in Martijn Bac and Theo Pleizier, “Rethinking the Sites of Truth,” in Wisse, Sarot, and Otten, Scholasticism Reformed, 36; Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4. For an important discussion of the term “scholastic” within the Reformed tradition, particularly highlighting the distinction between “scholastic” and “popular” (or “ecclesiastical”) with reference to Andreas Hyperius (1511–1564) who first developed this distinction within the Protestant world, see Donald Sinnema, “The Distinction between Scholastic and Popular: Andreas Hyperius and Reformed Scholasticism,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 127–143.

17. There is some controversy over the exact time in which he distanced himself from that tradition, and how abrupt it had been. By 1515–1516, in any case, he had adopted a strictly critical attitude in his Lectures on Romans, and most explicitly, in his Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam of September 1517 (WA, vol. 1, 221–228; LW, vol. 31, 112–113). In thesis 44, he famously said: “Immo theologus non sit nisi id fiat sine Aristotele” [Assuredly, no one can be a theologian except he become one without Aristotle]. Young Melanchthon was similarly critical of medieval scholasticism, and in 1519 clearly identified with Erasmus, Reuchlin, and Luther in their criticism. See Scheible, “Reuchlins Einfluss auf Melanchthon,” in Scheible, Melanchthon und die Reformation, 75.

18. See Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 32–49.

19. See David V. N. Bagchi, “Sic et Non: Luther and Scholasticism,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 10–15.

20. For the incorporation of (modified!) natural philosophy into his theology and educational oeuvre see Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy.

21. On the other hand, Melanchthon insisted on the close relationship between Dialectics and Rhetorics. See also Lowell C. Green, “Melanchthon’s Relation to Scholasticism,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 273–288.

22. See Muller, “Scholasticism in Calvin: A Question of Relation and Disjunction,” in Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39–61.

23. Muller, “Scholasticism in Calvin,” 43–44.

24. See Olivier Fatio, Méthode et théologie: Lambert Daneau et les débuts de la scolastique réformée (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 10.

25. Muller, “Scholasticism in Calvin,” 45–46. This is a form (slightly modified in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, under the impact of the developments in logic and rhetoric) which begins with an initial statement of a point (a thesis, rather than the medieval quaestio), to the various objections to it and the replies to those objections. Muller argues that this pattern has been obscured by most modern editions of the Institutes, in fact, from the Corpus Reformatorum onward.

26. See also David C. Steinmetz, “The Scholastic Calvin,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 17–30.

27. See, among others, Muller, “Approaches to Post-Reformation Protestantism: Reframing the Historiographical Question,” in Muller, After Calvin, 9–10.

28. See also on this subject the old but still useful study from John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science: A Historical Study (Nashville, TN and New York: Abingdon Press, 1960), chap. II.

29. For an emphasis on Vermigli’s Thomism, and the presentation of Vermigli as the pioneer of Reformed Scholasticism, see the earlier studies of John Patrick Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 441–445, and his book Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), especially chaps. 1, 3, 8, pp. 1–12, 42–67, 197–207. See, however, Frank A. James III, “Peter Martyr Vermigli: At the Crossroads of Late Medieval Scholasticism, Christian Humanism and Resurgent Augustinianism,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticsm, 62–78. James emphasizes Vermigli’s Augustinianism, rather than his Thomism.

30. On Zanchi, see the bio-bibliographical study of Christopher J. Burchill, “Girolamo Zanchi: Portrait of a Reformed Theologian and His Work,” Sixteenth Century Journal 15 (1984): 185–207. On Ursinus, see Derk Visser, “Ursinus, Zacharias,” in Hans J. Hildebrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. 4, 202.

31. On Lambert Daneau see the important study by Fatio, Méthode et théologie.

32. See the article by William R. Russell, “Hunnius, Aegidius” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, vol. 2, 276. See also Robert D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism: A Study of Prolegomena, vol. I (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1970). To some extent, Martin Chemnitz was also a connecting link between Melanchthon’s type of Aristotelianism and later metaphysical Lutheran scholasticism.

33. This is the principal argument of modern scholars like Richard Muller. See his collection of articles, After Calvin, esp. pp. 10, 31, 41–42, 76–77; see also the collection of articles edited by Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, esp. the article by Scott Clark, “The Authority of Reason in the Later Reformation: Scholasticism in Caspar Olevian and Antoine de la Faye,” 111–126.

34. Thus, already the Scholia in Vermigli’s biblical commentaries are structured like the traditional scholastic quaestio disputata; see Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism, 62–63. In a later generation, Antoine de la Faye in Geneva would defend the use of disputations in his Letter of Dedication to his Theses Theologicae of 1586, claiming that disputations were profitable as long as only the ways of the Lord are considered, when deceit, subtlety, self-love, and desire of victory are removed, and the desire of the truth and the love and reverence of God’s majesty are used therein. See, Scott Clark, “The Authority of Reason in the Later Reformation,” 124–125.

35. Most of Zanchi’s early work (as well as teaching) was exegetical in nature. See Burchill, “Girolamo Zanchi.” See also Muller, After Calvin, esp. chap. 10, dealing with “Henry Ainsworth and the Development of Protestant Exegesis”; see also Henning Graf Reventlow, History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 3: Renaissance, Reformation, Humanism, trans. James O. Duke (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010).

36. This is a theme strongly emphasized by Fatio concerning Lambert Daneau. He also stressed the importance of clear definitions at the beginning of the discussion of any topic. See Fatio, Méthode et théologie, chap. 2. Indeed, the stress on method was one of the chief characteristics of educational thought in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, as we shall see in the following section.

37. See Burchill, “Girolamo Zanchi,” 188, 195, 200, 203. On the introduction of the synthetic and deductive method, see also Fatio, Méthode et théologie, 35–43.

38. See Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science, chap. II.

39. In 1576 Daneau pubished a tract entitled Physice Christiana, sive christiana de rerum creatarum cognitione et usu. See Fatio, Méthode et théologie, bibliographical appendix, 25–29; see particularly Ann Blair, “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Later Renaissance,” Isis 91 (2000): 32–58.

40. The resurgence of metaphysics in that period, in the Protestant academic institutions as well as in Roman Catholic ones, also comes out from the systematic and detailed survey of philosophy textbooks carried out by Joseph Freedman; see Freedman, “The Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c.1570–c.1620,” Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993): 98–152, esp. 142–143. We shall return to Peter Ramus in the following section. The importance of scholastic metaphysics in the seventeenth century was first pointed out by Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulmetaphysik des 17. Jahrhuderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1939). It should be noted, however, that Wundt by that time was an avowed Nazi, and his book is clearly influenced by a German anti-Western ideology. For metaphysics in a Lutheran context see Walter Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Calver Verlag, 1976) and Sparn, “Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien,” in Helmut Holzhey and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (eds.) (in collaboration with Vilem Mudroch), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts. Bd. 4 (1). Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), 475–587.

41. See his letter to Beza of December 1, 1568, quoted by Fatio, Méthode et théologie, 39, 56 n. 34.

42. This, for example, is the response of Lambert Daneau to the objections of critics such as Bullinger. See Fatio, Méthode et théologie, 39, and 129–130 on Daneau’s ambivalent attitude toward the medieval scholasticism. Beza, for his part, clearly distinguished between “reason” which is substantive and can be provided only by God in His revealed message, and “reasoning,” which is instrumental: ibid., 41. These distinctions are also the basis for Muller’s thesis, referred to in n. 16.

43. This is a point made already by Melanchthon, Vermigli, Lambert Daneau, and many others, and was to be made more forcefully by Keckermann at the beginning of the next century. See Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism, 44; Fatio, Méthode et théologie, 38–43. Keckermann, however, will go a step further in believing that fallen human reason can be restored by the practice of logic. See Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 66–73.

44. The classical study of Ramus which situates him not only in the Humanist tradition, but also in the context of the development of medieval Arts Scholasticism, is from Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [first published, 1958]), esp. chap. 6. A critical reassessment of Ong’s study, however, may be found in the recent study by Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Hotson seeks to “rehabilitate” Ramus’s philosophical reputation, especially in stressing his didactic motives and his wish to simplify logical and philosophical studies in the lower echelons of the educational system, for students who did not necessarily wish to pursue the upper studies of medicine, law, and theology, see ibid., 38–68. For Ramus and his reform in its pedagogical, social, and political context see James Veazie Skalnik, Ramus and Reform: University and Reform at the End of the Renaissance (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002).

45. These were all stressed already by Vermigli who in some ways reminds one of Ramus, but if anything, had indirectly influenced him (to convert to Protestantism) rather than the other way round. See Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism, 62, esp. n. 53.

46. This question is posed explicitly by Perry Miller in his study of Puritanism in New England: “we are compelled to ask … how in Puritan thought the piety and the intellectual heritage were reconciled, how dogma and rationality were joined, how the concepts of man as fallen, and the saint as regenerated by irresistible grace were made compatible with the Puritan passion for learning, for argumentation and demonstration”; The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 112. Ramism, in Miller’s view, provided the answer to this question.

47. See above, n. 24. Indeed, one of Hyperius’s students in Herborn, an academy to which we shall next turn, who was also a Ramist, Wilhelm Zepper, sought explicitly to bridge that gap somewhat, criticizing the universities and academies of his day for overemphasizing the “scholastic” approach at the expense of the “popular” or “ecclesiastical” one. See Sinnema, “Andreas Hyperius and Reformed Scholasticism,” 139–140. This was also Perkins’s program at Cambridge. He was indeed concerned to bring theology as a scholarly pursuit out of the academy to a wider audience, so as to lead the hearers to “living blessedly forever.” On the influence of Ramism on William Perkins’s Theology in England, see Donald K. McKim, “The Functions of Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 503–517. Nevertheless Perkins by no means forsook Aristotelian concepts altogether, and surely not Calvin himself. See Paul R. Schaefer, “Protestant ‘Scholasticism’ at Elizabethan Cambridge: William Perkins and a Reformed Theology of the Heart,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 147–164, esp. 147–153.

48. It should be emphasized that in this respect Ramism also went against the Humanist view of scholarship, which upheld the need to constantly go back to the original authorities and their commentaries (mostly of classical Antiquity), rather than do with abbreviated textbooks and didactic summaries. This was indeed the attitude taken in such rising universities as Leiden in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, after a brief initial toying with Ramism. See Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 51–68.

49. See Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 15–24. Hotson emphasizes the geopolitical–ecclesiastical circumstances of the tiny principality of Nassau-Dillenburg which encouraged the adoption of Ramism in its programme of “further Reformation” under the leadership of Johannes Piscator. In such principalities as Nassau-Dillenburg, the pedagogic advantages of efficiency, brevity, and accessibility of the Ramist method were especially critical in quickly training ministers as well as state officials with minimum expense. See also Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 82–89. A similar point is made by Erland Sellberg concerning Sweden. See his article “The Usefulness of Ramism” in Mordechai Feingold, Joseph S. Freedman, and Wolfgang Rother (eds.), The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences (Basel: Schwabe & Co Ag Verlag, 2001), 107–126.

50. Some scholars have recently even raised doubts concerning the very distinction between Ramism, “Semi-Ramism,” and “Philippo-Ramism.” See esp. Freedman, “Writings of Petrus Ramus”, 98–152. This combination of Ramist methods of exposition and Aristotelian concepts was already practiced by Caspar Olevian (1536–1587) who had been teaching in Heidelberg since 1560 and after 1583 at Herborn. See Scott Clark, “The Authority of Reason in the Later Reformation: Scholasticism in Caspar Olevian and Antoine de la Faye,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Protestant Scholasticism, 111–126. Another scholar who combined Aristotelian with Ramist logic was Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf. His magnum opus of 1609 was entitled Syntagma theologiae Christianae, juxta leges ordinis methodici conformatum. See Robert Letham, “Amandus Polanus: A Neglected Theologian?” Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990): 463–476. See also the older, largely bio-bibliographical study by Ernst Staehelin, Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1955). On the Philippo-Ramist fusion (in spite of Melanchthon’s initial sharp critique of Ramus) see also Freedman, “Melanchthon’s Opinion of Ramus and the Utilization of Their Writings in Central Europe,” in Feingold, Freedman, and Rother (eds.), The Influence of Petrus Ramus, 68–91, esp. 86–88. The term “Philippo-Ramist” (Philippo-Rameus) was already current at that period, see ibid., n. 78.

51. On Piscator see Erich Wenneker, “Piscator,” in Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz and Traugott Bautz (eds.), Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 7 (Herzberg: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 1994), 640–644. Piscator, among other things, introduced Ramist methods in his biblical commentaries. See Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 118–119.

52. See Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 29–33; Commonplace Learning, 280–286. See also Hotson, “Philosophical Pedagogy in Reformed Central Europe between Ramus and Comenius: A Survey of the Continental Background of the ‘Three Foreigners,’” in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29–50, esp. 42–45. On Keckermann’s critique of Ramus for not giving due place to metaphysics, see also Freedman, “Writings of Petrus Ramus,” 129–130.

53. Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 280–294. Isaac Casaubon’s son, Meric Casaubon who, in the name of classical Humanist ideals would fight against Cartesianism as well as against philosophical “Enthusiasm” of all types, will clearly be a rearguard figure by the middle of the seventeenth century. See among others, Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995), chap. 3. In this respect, Hotson claims, the ground was also prepared for the reaction of the New Philosophy and the principle of libertas philsophandi to which we shall return in the last section of this chapter.

54. See the classical study by Lawrence Stone, “The Educational Revolution in England 1560–1640,” Past & Present 28 (1964): 41–80. For Germany, see the old but still useful study by Franz Eulenburg, Die Frequenz der deutschen Universitäten (Leipzig, 1904; repr. Berlin 1994). This eclecticism, and the social background underlying it, is also stressed by Freedman “Writings of Petrus Ramus”, esp. 122–123.

55. See now the detailed study by Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, and the shorter exposition in his article “Philosophical Pedagogy in Reformed Central Europe” referred to in n. 52.

56. Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 66–82. In this belief Keckermann may have gone beyond the previous generation of Protestant scholastics such as Vermigli, Beza, Daneau, and Ursinus.

57. Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 82–94.

58. In addition to Hotson’s two books referred to in nn. 43, 44, see his Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism (Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000). On the impact in Britain, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975). Comenius studied at Herborn between 1611 and 1613 and was deeply influenced by Alsted as well as by Piscator and other scholars and students there. See Milada Blekastad, Comenius:Versuch eines Umrisses von Leben, Werk und Schicksal des Jan Amos Komenský (Oslo: Univesitetsforlaget, and Prague: Academia, 1969), 24–35.

59. See on this subject the article of Blair, “Mosaic Physics,” 32–58. On another former student at Herborn who later became a professor of theology at Copenhagen, the Lutheran Conrad Aslacus (Aslakssøn), and held a similar vision, see two important articles by Jole Shackelford, “Unification and the Chemistry of the Reformation” in Max Reinhart (ed.), Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture (vol. 40 of Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998)), 291–312; and “Rosicrucianism, Lutheran Orthodoxy, and the Rejection of Paracelsianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Denmark,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1996): 181–204, esp. 188–192. On Comenius’s Physicae ad lumen divinum reformatae synopsis see also Blekastad, Comenius, 176–184.

60. See Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, chaps. 3, 5; and Hotson, Paradise Postponed. Hotson, however, tends to ascribe Alsted’s millenarianism, which developed in the late 1620s, to non-academic, and even not necessarily mainstream Reformed thinkers. See Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 154–174. It is worth noting that Francis Bacon’s thought in England (though not exactly a “Reformation scholar”) developed in parallel to that of Keckermann, and later, Alsted, and indeed served as a major inspiration for Puritans like Hartlib and Dury in the course of the English Revolution, alongside Alsted and Comenius. See Webster, The Great Instauration; Hotson, “Philosophical Pedagogy in Reformed Central Europe,” 47–48, where mention is made of Alsted’s favorable reference to Bacon in his Encyclopaedia of 1630. For an analysis of eschatological underpinnings of the encyclopedist movement in general and of Comenius’s programme in particular, see also Schmidt-Biggemann, “Enzyklopädie, Eschatologie und Ökumene. Die theologische Bedeutung von enzyklopädischem Wissen bei Comenius,” Frühneuzeit-Info 3 (1992): 19–28.

61. This, for example, is the thesis of Jole Shackelford with respect to Denmark. See his articles referred to in n. 59. In Denmark, indeed, the Gnesio-Lutherans became dominant in the 1620s, and the Philippists and Paracelsians were increasingly demoted from positions in the church and the University of Copenhagen.

62. Saumur and the controversies raised there have been the subject of extensive scholarship. See Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

63. On Socinians see Lech Szczucki, “Socinanism”, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, vol. 4, 83–7.

64. See on this topic Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable.

65. Muller, “Arminius and the Scholastic Tradition,” Calvin Theological Journal 24 (1989): 263–277.

66. On Maccovius and his use of philosophy, see Willem J. Van Asselt, “The Theologian’s Tool Kit: Johannes Maccovius (1588–1644) and the Development of Reformed Theological Distinctions,” Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006): 23–40. See also Martin I. Klauber, “The Use of Philosophy in the Theology of Johannes Maccovius,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995): 376–391
. Both Van Asselt and Klauber stress the instrumental use of philosophy by Maccovius, which by no means undermined his absolute reliance on Scripture as the exclusive source of saving truth. Maccovius, for example, clearly excluded the doctrine of God from his metaphysics, and by careful, sophisticated distinctions sought to avoid any deterministic implications of his strict view of Predestination. See Van Asselt, “The Theologian’s Tool Kit,” 33, 37–39. At the same time, it should be noted that Maccovius was castigated in the course of the Synod of Dort precisely for using excessive scholastic language. See Klauber, “The Use of Philosophy,” 382, and Sinnema, “Reformed Scholasticism and the Synod of Dort,” in B. J. Vander Walt (ed.), John Calvin’s Institutes: His Magnum Opus (Potchefstroom, South Africa: Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1984), 467–505.

67. The literature on Voetius is extensive, particularly in Dutch. For a helpful article in English see Joel R. Beeke, “Gisbertus Voetius: Toward a Reformed Marriage of Knowledge and Piety,” in Trueman and Scott Clark, Reformed Scholasticism, 227–243. As is well known, Voetius was also one of the most ardent opponents of Descartes and Cartesian philosophy in the Netherlands.

68. This had already been stressed by Peter Martyr Vermigli in his commentary on 1 Corinthians. Quoted in Donnelly, Calvinism and Scholasticism, 45. What should be believed, cannot be naturally known, at least not fully, surely not human fundamental sinfulness and depravity. Indeed, the knowledge of God drawn from reason alone can only lead to damnation, ibid., 45–57.

69. See Muller, “Vera Philosophia cum sacra Theologia nusquam pugnat: Keckermann on Philosophy, Theology and the Problem of Double Truth,” in Muller, After Calvin, chap. 7, 122–136. The following lines are largely based on this chapter.

70. Quotation in ibid., 126. It should be stressed that under the term “Philosophy,” Keckermann, like many academics and teachers of the time, included the sub-disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics, economics, and politics. Interestingly enough, considering our discussion in the section on the Humanist heritage, Keckermann did not regard history as a discipline.

71. See on this subject, Hotson, John Heinrich Alsted, chap. 2.

72. It should be remembered that Keckermann was head of a gymnasium in Danzig in the last years of his short life.

73. This, for example, had been the case at many of the Dutch universities as well as in some of the Huguenot academies in France, and in some of the Swiss universities, as well as in Geneva. See on the Netherlands, Paul Dibon, La philosophie néerlandaise au siècle d’Or, vol. I: L’Enseignement philosophique dans les universités à l’époque précartésienne (Paris: Elsevier, 1954); on some of the French and Swiss universities, as well as Geneva, see Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesianism in the Academy of Geneva (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, and Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1982). See also Freedman, “Aristotle and the Content of Philosophy Instruction at Central European Schools and Universities during the Reformation Era (1500–1650),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 (1993): 213–253.

74. We have alluded in the previous section to the attempt of Protestant Orthodox theologians of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth to incorporate the natural sciences within a biblical frame of reference. See Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science, chaps. II, III B.

75. The classical statement of this segregationist principle was formulated in Galileo Galilei’s famous letter to the Duchess Christina in 1615. The Bible, he claimed, did not wish to teach “how the Heavens go,” but “how to go to Heaven.” In Geneva, half a century later, the Cartesian Jean-Robert Chouet was able to introduce Cartesianism into his philosophy course in 1669 by insisting that he was teaching only philosophy and in no way meddling in theological matters. See Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment.

76. Heyd, “The Emergence of Modern Science as an Autonomous World of Knowledge,” in Eisenstadt and Silber, Cultural Traditions and Worlds of Knowledge, 165–180.

77. This, for instance, may have been the position of Christoph Wittich, one of the first Reformed theologians who adopted Copernicanism and Cartesianism; see Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science, 101. On the earlier views of Luther and Calvin see Edward Rosen, “Calvin’s Attitude toward Copernicus,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 431–441.

78. On the principle of accommodation see Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment, 83–86; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133–137; and from a broader perspective—Stephen Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).

79. The literature on Wilkins is fairly extensive. See among others, Barbara J. Shapiro, John Wilkins 1614–1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1969) as well as the excellent and extensive article by Hans Aarsleff, “John Wilkins” in Charles C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. xiv (New York: Scribenr’s, 1976), 361–381.

80. Wilkins’s treatise Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion was published in 1672, three years after his death, by his disciple John Tillotson.

FURTHER READING

Dillenberger, John. Protestant Thought and Natural Science: A Historical Interpretation. Nashville, TN and New York: Abingdon Press, 1960.

Fatio, Olivier. Méthode et Théologie: Lambert Daneau et les débuts de la scolastique réformée. Geneva: Droz, 1976.

Garber, Daniel and Michael Ayers (eds.) The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Heyd, Michael. Between Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesianism in the Academy of Geneva. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, and Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1982.

Hotson, Howard. Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Hotson, Howard. Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hunter, Ian. “The University Philosopher in Early Modern Germany.” In The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter, pp. 35–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Kusukawa, Sachiko. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Park, Katherine and Lorraine Daston (eds.) The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Ridder-Symoens, Hilde de (ed.) A History of the University in Europe, vol. 2: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Trueman, Carl R. and R. Scott Clark (eds.) Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment. Milton Keynes, Colorado Springs, CO, and Hyderabad: Paternoster, 1999.

CHAPTER 23

EDUCATION IN THE REFORMATION

CHARLOTTE METHUEN

INTRODUCTION

IN 1524, Luther wrote a letter to Germany’s city councilors, advising them to establish and maintain Christian schools in their territories. The state of education, he pointed out, not altogether disapprovingly, was parlous: across the German lands “schools are everywhere being left to go to wrack and ruin. The universities are growing weak, and monasteries are declining.” The problem, as Luther saw it, was that these were the wrong kind of schools, offering the wrong kind of education, focused on a theology and a form of religious life which he was convinced should be stamped out. It was for this reason, he suggested, that “no one is any longer willing to have his children get an education. ‘Why,’ they say, ‘should we bother to have them go to school if they are not to become priests, monks, or nuns ? ’Twere better they should learn a livelihood to earn.’”[1]

This, Luther suggested, was the work of the Devil, who had first caused the wrong kind of schools to be set up and was now causing children not to be educated at all. But by the grace of God, Luther remarked, the situation was changing: “We have today the finest and most learned group of men, adorned with languages and all the arts, who could also render real service if only we would make use of them as instructors of the young people.” Indeed, God urges parents to instruct their children.[2] To do this properly, it would be necessary to engage public schoolteachers and set up schools. This would be for the benefit of the whole community, for “a city’s best and greatest welfare, safety, and strength consist rather in its having many able, learned, wise, honorable, and well-educated citizens.”[3] Both boys and girls should attend school for one or two hours each day, working at home or learning a trade in the rest of the time so that “study and work will go hand-in-hand.” Only the particularly gifted, those who “give promise of becoming skilled teachers, preachers, or holders of other ecclesiastical positions,” should have longer school days, and undergo an education that would prepare them to be teachers or preachers. For, Luther noted, “There is great need of such advanced study, for the tonsured crowd is fast dwindling.”[4] Luther’s letter witnessed to the way that, in the course of the Reformation, a model of Protestant education was born.

This chapter explores the role of education in the Reformation. Beginning with a discussion of education in the late Middle Ages, it considers how Protestants across Europe, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, reformed—and also founded—schools and universities in order to educate children and young people in the principles of Reformation life and faith, and the extent to which this endeavor was successful. It discusses what was taught and the pedagogical principles that underlay this teaching. It considers further developments in educational structures and pedagogical theory in the seventeenth century, with a particular focus on the ideas of the educational reformer, Comenius, and the strategies of Catholic educators who responded, especially teaching orders such as the Jesuits and the Ursulines. Finally, it turns to the ways in which education formed society and shaped social hierarchies. Protestant education was intended to produce a certain kind of citizen for a certain kind of society. What did these citizens and this society look like?

EDUCATION IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

As Luther’s critique of medieval education implied, the association of religious and educational interests was not new. As early as the thirteenth century, papal legislation had required each parish to employ a cleric who could lead a schola. However, reiterations of this instruction were frequent, suggesting that it was not observed. Especially in rural areas, “parish schools” in the late medieval period—the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—were often probably limited to what we might today call a tutoring arrangement: elementary instruction, based on reading texts such as the Hail Mary or the Lord’s Prayer, given by the parish priest or another qualified person to a small group of children, usually boys. These were often transitory.[5] In other places, particularly towns, parish schools might be well organized and controlled by the civic authorities. The south German city of Esslingen founded “a school for our children” as early as 1329; although most of these “grammar” schools—the German lands distinguished between “Latin” and “German” schools—emerged between the later fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries.[6] Grendler helpfully distinguishes between “independent” schools, which owed no authority to anyone except the teacher or the founder (some of England’s public schools can be traced back to an independent medieval foundation: Eton was founded by Henry VI in 1440 to provide free education to seventy poor boys); church schools, which fell under the aegis of an ecclesiastical authority or institution, such as a bishop, a religious community, a cathedral chapter, or a larger parish church; and municipal schools, often supported by the town council.[7] Guilds and charitable institutions might also found schools.[8]

Although municipal schools were becoming more widespread, many late medieval schools were run by religious orders, including Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, Augustinian or Austin Friars and Canons, Benedictines, and Cistercians; female orders such as the Poor Clares often educated girls.[9] Some of these schools were grammar and song schools, with scholars expected to sing the offices as well as to study. Benedictine monasteries in Regensburg were open to boys from the city, while the schools run by the mendicant orders, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Augustinian friars tended to provide teaching only for members of the order. Evidence of educated women in Regensburg’s communities of female canons and Benedictine convents indicates that these too had schools, at least some of which provided education also for girls who did not intend to enter the convent.[10] Rutz has found evidence in the Rhineland that girls were admitted to the city schools or Stiftsschule, leading to the founding of schools for girls.[11] In addition, not all schools were for Christians: from the twelfth century until its synagogue was destroyed in 1519, Regensburg had a flourishing yeshiva; and Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and, to some extent, Bonn were known as centers of Jewish scholarship.[12]

In the Christian context, a distinction must be made between vernacular schools and Latin schools. The content of teaching at vernacular schools is not easy to reconstruct; it probably varied considerably from place to place. Most probably it offered basic religious instruction and teaching elementary skills in reading and perhaps writing. Because such elementary schools were more numerous than has often been assumed, vernacular literacy may also have been more widespread than has sometimes been suggested.[13] However, literacy rates are notoriously hard to estimate, and must have ranged widely across Europe: urban centers had higher rates of literacy than rural areas; members of the nobility were more likely to be literate than the lower classes; men were more literate than women (except possibly among the nobility). Thomas More claimed in 1533 that three-fifths of England’s population could read competently, but modern historians are skeptical, suggesting that perhaps one man in five and one woman in twenty could read, and still fewer could write.[14] Curricula for the Latin schools were more standardized, and also more international. Black has shown that grammars written in France were used in Italian schools in the thirteenth century, although he argues for a distinctive Italian pedagogic approach.[15] With the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, it became much easier to share such resources.

Latin schools focused on the liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics or logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). The focus of the “grammar” schools was generally precisely on grammar: Latin was the language not only of the church’s liturgy and life, but also of the higher schools or universities, and pupils needed to learn it in order to progress beyond elementary studies. Scholars who progressed to the universities initially continued their studies of the arts. Some, although not all, then continued to study in one of the “higher faculties” such as theology, law, or medicine.

The universities, derived from the medieval schools (hence the term scholastic for the philosophy and theology of this period), had started to come into being in the twelfth century, with the foundation of Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Modena. Vicenza, Cambridge, and Palencia followed in the early thirteenth century. Over the next two centuries, around twenty universities were founded in territories across what are now France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The mid-fourteenth century saw the establishment of the first universities in the German lands: Prague and Vienna, then, a generation later, Erfurt and Heidelberg. A further wave of university foundations in the fifteenth century brought the first Scottish universities: St. Andrews and Glasgow. From the fourteenth century, universities tended to be founded by the local ruler, in consultation with the diocesan bishop; in theory, approval had to be sought from the Pope, and, for universities in the Holy Roman Empire, the emperor. However, when Elector Frederick of Saxony founded the University of Wittenberg in 1502, he initially sought only imperial approval, waiting five years before applying to the Pope.[16] The organization of education, although still strongly focused on the needs of the church, was arguably becoming a more secular enterprise, just at the point when states were becoming more sacralized, taking on responsibility for ecclesiastical reform: civic education was part of a new focus on creating a civic society focused on God—what in England came to be seen as a “godly” society. As Töpfer has argued, schools were intended “to model and perform the ‘good order’” according to which society was to be structured.[17]

PROTESTANT EDUCATIONAL REFORMS

The Reformers did not inherit a blank educational slate. Indeed, Luther’s critique of the medieval system, cited in the Introduction, indicates that he was not only aware, but also suspicious, of the educational inheritance of the Middle Ages. In 1520, writing “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the reform of the Christian estate” Luther had called for a “good, thorough reformation” not only of the universities and especially their reliance on Aristotle and Peter Lombard’s Sentences, but also of the school system. He believed that education should first and foremost teach knowledge of the Gospel:

the foremost reading for everybody, both in the universities and in the schools, should be Holy Scripture—and for the younger boys, the Gospels. And would to God that every town had a girls’ school as well, where the girls would be taught the gospel for an hour every day either in German or in Latin … Is it not only right that every Christian man know the entire holy gospel by the age of nine or ten? Does he not derive his name and his life from the gospel? A spinner or a seamstress teaches her daughter her craft in her early years. But today even the great, learned prelates and the very bishops do not know the gospel.[18]

Luther seems initially to have hoped that this basic education might be located in the Christian household, but—perhaps under the influence of his colleague and friend, the Humanist Philipp Melanchthon—he became convinced that properly organized schools were in fact not only desirable but necessary. In 1523, Luther was instrumental in the drafting of church orders for Wittenberg and Leisnig, a small town southeast of Leipzig, which were intended to regulate and control the new form of religious life that was emerging in response to his critiques of the church. In his preface to the Leisnig order, Luther recommended that the houses of mendicant orders “might be converted into good schools for boys and girls.” Both orders envisaged that some of the income from the new parish chest be used to pay teachers: “a pious, irreproachable, and learned man” as schoolmaster for the “young boys” and “an upright, fully seasoned, irreproachable woman” to teach the girls under twelve. The children were to be taught “true Christian discipline, honour, and virtue” and to read and write German.[19] By 1524, Luther was exhorting city councils to establish schools to take advantage of the “abundance of arts, scholars, and books,” given by God, and to provide for “the welfare and salvation of all Germany.”[20]

Not only cities, but also the rulers of the German territories, responded. More experienced Reformers, often from Wittenberg or further south from Basel, were called in to advise on these reforms. In his own lifetime, Philip Melanchthon’s efforts to reform German schools and universities and his authorship of a series of introductory works on grammar, rhetoric, ethics, dialectics, and physics, all of which were used in schools across Germany, earned him the title praeceptor Germaniae, “Teacher of Germany.”[21] Johannes Bugenhagen, Johannes Brenz, Martin Bucer, and Simon Grynaeus were also key figures, advising not only on the introduction of the Reformation but on educational reform. By 1600, over one hundred new sets of regulations for schools, known as Schulordnungen, and often included in comprehensive church orders which sought to define every area of life, had been drawn up by German cities and territories. The most influential city orders included the teaching curriculum drafted for Eisleben in 1525 under the guidance of Philipp Melanchthon and Johannes Agricola; Nuremberg’s school order (1526), probably drafted by Philipp Melanchthon; the instructions for the introduction of the Reformation in Schwäbisch Hall (1526), composed by Johannes Brenz; the church orders of Braunschweig (1528), Hamburg (1529), and Lübeck (1531), all of which were largely the work of Johannes Bugenhagen; and Martin Bucer’s church order for Ulm (1531). Territorial church orders, incorporating Schulordnungen, were introduced into Hesse (drafted in 1526, revised and implemented in 1537, and further revised in 1566), Electoral Saxony (first introduced in 1528; revised in 1533), Pomerania (1535), Brandenburg (1540), the territory of Braunschweig (1543), and the Duchy of Württemberg (1559).[22] The church orders presented detailed instructions about the ordering of daily life, of which education was only one aspect. The Große Kirchenordnung of the South German Duchy of Württemberg is not untypical. It defined the faith of the church in Württemberg, based on the Confessio Augustana, and regulated the selection and appointment of pastors, preachers, and other ministers; it discussed aspects of civil life, including marriage (no longer under the jurisdiction of canon law); it regulated the common chest established to aid the poor and sick and to support other worthy causes including education; it sought to control medical practitioners, soothsayers, and magicians; it provided a Rügordnung, or system of admonishment, presumably intended to replace the sacrament of penance; and it set out an integrated school system, including details of the school day, the curriculum, and the methods of instruction.[23] Such church orders offer a striking reminder that the introduction of the Reformation implied a fundamental change not only to religious beliefs and practice, but also to the patterns and priorities of daily life. For the people of the sixteenth century, religion was woven into the fabric of society; reforms of religion inevitably brought with them reforms of society, and the reform of education was one aspect of this project.

Many of the school orders had a dual purpose. On the one hand, the whole population was to be instructed in the basics of the faith, and to learn basic skills in reading and writing German. This would (in theory at least) create a God-fearing population who could engage to some extent with vernacular translations of Scripture, and who could be relied on “in their turn, to bring their children up to be God-fearing Christians.” This was the remit of the German schools. On the other hand, the schools were to identify boys who were suitable candidates for more advanced education, with the intention “that some amongst them may grow up to be preachers, jurists, physicians.”[24] These careers required university education, which in turn required schools which were equipped to prepare future students for their studies: the so-called Latin schools, which would also educate the clerks and administrators who were urgently needed to assist with the administration of cities and territories. Through these two educational tracks—in Latin and German—the Reformation church orders perpetrated and systematized the different types of schools which had already begun to emerge in the late Middle Ages. However, they took very different forms in different places. While Württemberg’s Große Kirchenordnung, perhaps following Saxony’s, made provision for a system of German schools and teachers, the Landgrave of Hesse’s 1537 Edict “On Schools” did not, although it did require universal attendance at catechism classes, which must have amounted to much the same thing.[25]

One of the major challenges facing the Reformers concerned the funding of education. The provision of school buildings and the payment of schoolteachers for the German schools were generally deemed the responsibility of the parishes, paid for out of the poor chest into which everyone was meant to pay. The removal of the late medieval means of income generation for the church and the community, such as images, chantry chapels, and payments for masses resulted in a drop in income. The income from endowed funds, originally related to (for instance) an altar or chapel, could be diverted into the poor chest and from there disbursed in support of schools. However, individuals who had been prepared to donate funds to support a light (candles or an oil lamp) before an image or to pay for masses to be said for the soul of a relative, which supplemented the income arising from specific altars, might not be willing simply to donate the same amounts to the relief of the poor and the support of education. John Calvin’s early schooling had been financed by granting him a share of the income from the altar of La Gésine in the cathedral at Noyon. With the introduction of the Reformation, such arrangements, which had been common also in the German lands, were no longer possible.

One solution, as Luther himself had recommended, was to transform former monasteries and convents into schools. Income from former monastic lands and other property, now appropriated and administered by the civic authorities, could be directed (at least in part) to fund these schools. Monasteries were set up for community living and education and could easily be converted into boarding schools or university accommodation. Indeed, Luther’s own home, which was also his former Augustinian house appropriated by Frederick the Wise and transferred to Luther, was run by Katharina von Bora as a student hostel. In Württemberg, thirteen former monasteries and convents were transformed into Klosterschulen, preparing an elite group of boys for university education and for subsequent service in the Duchy as pastors, teachers, or administrators. These schools formed part of the Duchy’s scholarship system or Stift, founded in 1536.[26] In Tübingen, the university students funded by the Stift, known as the Stipendiaten, lived together in a community under the care of two superintendents and subject to regular examination by and reports to the duke on their academic progress, their beliefs, their preaching abilities, and their morals. By 1547 there were so many of them that they were moved to the former Augustinian monastery. Württemberg’s towns were each required to put aside an annual sum of up to 25 Gulden to support the education of poor but gifted boys. Selection was by means of an entrance examination, and the successful candidates had to agree to complete their education at the Klosterschulen, to study only at the University of Tübingen and at the end of their studies to make themselves available to the Duchy.

Life in the Klosterschulen was carefully regulated, bearing striking similarity to the medieval monastic day or university day, with fixed times for prayer and a daily six hours of study, three in the morning and three in the afternoon. These hours of study were also laid down for the Latin schools, which followed the same curriculum and (at least in theory) had the same hierarchy of classes. The boys’ day began at 4:00 a.m. in summer, or 5:00 a.m. in winter, with early morning prayers. These were followed by Bible study and an hour of Latin, and then by morning prayers at 8:00 or 9:00, and two more hours of study. After a break and a meal, they resumed their studies at noon for a further three hours, turning to Cicero, Latin syntax, rhetoric, and Greek. Evening prayers took place at around 4:00 p.m., followed by the evening meal. The boys were expected to sing in the church choir on Sundays and feast days, so that Saturday afternoons were spent in choir practice and study of the Gospel set for the following day. Life in the Stift was similarly ordered; although the Stipendiaten attended university lectures, they received additional classes, particularly in theology and the Bible, in the Stift, and were expected to practice their preaching as well as to engage in the university disputations. Württemberg’s scholarship system was intended to ensure a supply of reliable preachers of the new faith, and although its comprehensive nature makes it somewhat unusual, it was in no way unique. A scheme for selecting and funding suitable candidates to train for the ministry had been set up in Zurich as early as 1523; by 1537, and possibly earlier, a similar scholarship scheme was in place in Hesse, and there were almost certainly others.[27]

Educational reforms were not a German prerogative. As reforming ideas spread from Wittenberg and Zurich across the German lands and the Swiss Confederacy and into France, Scandinavia, England, and Scotland, calls for the reform of education spread with them. In Strasbourg Hohe Schule or Academy was founded in 1538; its founder and rector, Johann Sturm, led the school for forty-three years, and his ideas influenced educational reform in Switzerland, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic: as confessional divides deepened and took shape, the Strasbourg Academy managed to maintain an unusual openness to both Calvinists and Lutherans.[28] Calvin, who had taught at the Strasbourg Academy from 1539 to 1541, founded Geneva’s Academy in 1559, part of the ongoing reform of education there. Although Calvin and the Geneva consistory placed a strong emphasis on the responsibility of parents to educate their children, particularly in matters of religion, universal elementary education was also introduced in Geneva, albeit initially not very successfully. Schools were Reformed in 1559, and the academy became an important international center for the training of Reformed pastors.[29]

England’s Reformation injunctions highlighted the need for catechetical teaching, but offered no consistent policy on schools; nonetheless, John Morgan observes, “the combination of Reformation spirituality and Renaissance scholarship quickly produced in England, as on the continent, a seemingly ubiquitous desire to found schools.”[30] In Scotland, in contrast, like Geneva, educational reform was integral to ecclesiastical Reformation: the First Book of Discipline (1560) envisaged “a system whereby there would be at least a vernacular school in every rural parish where instruction in the catechism would also be given, a grammar school in every town, and an arts college, specializing in the humanist disciplines of rhetoric, logic and the biblical languages in every major town.”[31] These schools and colleges were to exist alongside—and provide students for—the three Scottish universities, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. In reality, however, the two decades following the Reformation proved a difficult period for the three Scottish universities, with declining enrollments and, as Reid observes, something of an existential crisis: “Cut off at a stroke from the papal authority that had created them, they not only had to re-orient their teaching and curriculum toward the new Protestant status quo, but had to find a new identity for themselves.”[32] Scotland’s universities mirrored experiences across Protestant Europe. The introduction of the Reformation saw student numbers at Wittenberg drop drastically in the early 1520s. Between 1528 and 1532, the University of Basel was forced to close completely, and even after it reopened, numbers of students remained low, with only around twenty-five or thirty students matriculating each year. An outbreak of plague in 1541 nearly closed the university down again; thereafter numbers began to improve, rising steadily until the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.[33] Universities did not immediately find their place in Reformation society.

These statistics offer a reminder that institutions could be more fragile in reality than they appeared from their statutes. School education was probably less substantial than the church orders might suggest. In a groundbreaking study, Gerald Strauss contrasted the Reformers’ pedagogical and child-rearing treatises and the teaching materials they produced with the depressing conditions reported in parish visitation records. His conclusion, that “the reformers failed to transform the minds and morals of the people despite their concerted efforts, within the classroom as without,” has been confirmed by further research.[34] In late sixteenth-century Saxony, sextons—regardless of their qualification to do so—were directed to instruct the children in every parish, using Luther’s
Small Catechism, the Psalms, and selections of proverbs and of Luther’s hymns and other prayers; however, Susan Karant-Nunn suggests “rural folk overwhelmingly … resisted sending their children to school,” possibly because the curriculum was so restricted and boring.[35] The provision of education for girls was particularly patchy, and Karant-Nunn concludes: “the Protestant reformers created more schools for girls, though probably not a larger proportion of educated girls, simply by insisting that the sexes henceforth be separated while learning.”[36] The closure of convents, and with them the educational opportunities they had offered to girls, dramatically reduced the number of girls having access to a higher standard of education. The daughters of royal or noble families, or of parents with a strong Humanist interest, might be offered a classical education.[37] Indeed, in the mid-1550s Olympia Fulvia Morata, a Calvinist scholar who had received a Humanist education, initially in Ferrara, her home town, and later in Steinfurt, taught Greek at the University of Heidelberg. However, despite these exceptions, and notwithstanding the fact that school provision differed significantly across the territories of Protestant Europe, almost all Reformers recognized some form of educational reform to be necessary if the church was successfully to be reformed.

PROTESTANT CURRICULA AND PEDAGOGY

By 1530, Luther had come to see education as the means of providing a new spiritual estate which could shape a godly society. This was not to be the corrupt spiritual estate of the medieval church, but one that “has the office of preaching and the service of the word and sacraments and which imparts the Spirit and salvation.” Those who were entrusted with carrying out this work included “pastors, teachers, preachers, lectors, priests (whom men call chaplains), sacristans, schoolmasters.”[38] Besides the spiritual estate, Luther recognized that other trained men (for they were all men) were required, “people who can do more than simply add, subtract, and read German,” but who required a higher level of education. Luther warned, however, that no form of education could ever be really adequate: “for preaching, governing, and administering justice, in both spiritual and worldly estates, all the learning and languages in the world are too little.”[39] Leaders must be prepared to be guided in their work by God’s will.

Although he had been influenced by the insights of Renaissance Humanism and continued to buy and read Erasmus’s works, Luther was no Humanist. His friend and colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, in contrast, was steeped in the recently formed traditions of Humanist learning and strongly influenced by Erasmus, as were Johannes Oecolampadius and Wolfgang Capito, and many of the leading Reformers of the Reformed tradition, including Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Calvin, and Peter Martyr Vermigli.[40] These Humanist-educated Reformers brought to their conception of education not only Luther’s ecclesiastical and theological concerns, but also a deep conviction that education was worth having for its own sake. In this they followed Erasmus: if Melanchthon was the praeceptor Germaniae, then Erasmus was the praeceptor Europae. His works on learning and education were best-sellers in their day, frequently translated into the European vernacular languages, and his influence in schools and educational theory can be traced across Europe: from England to Italy and from Spain to Poland.[41]

Despite his considerable experience as a teacher, Erasmus’s role was primarily as “a teacher of teachers,” acting “as a pedagogical counsellor or theoretician of practical pedagogy rather than as a pedagogical practitioner.”[42] His interests lay in the principles of education, which he explored in a series of writings, including practical textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, exploration of style, and more programmatic works, in particular De ratione studii (On methods of study; 1511/1514); De pueris instituendis (On the early education of children; 1529); and De civilitate morum puerilium (On good manners for boys; 1530).[43] Drawing on Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, Ovid, Quintilian, and Plutarch, but also on the Bible, the church fathers, and more recent authors, he here showed how both the lower, physical nature and the higher, intellectual, nature could and should be trained and exercised from an early age.[44] De pueris was concerned with the teaching of very young children; De ratione studiis discussed the teaching of older boys; while De civilitate was used as both a manual of good manners and as an introduction to Latin well into the seventeenth century in schools across Germany, England, the Low Countries, and no doubt beyond.[45]

Learning, Erasmus thought, should be fun. He recognized that children of different ages learn in different ways, that younger children learn best through play, and that everyone is encouraged by enjoyment: “a constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery.”[46] He recommended that the texts selected to introduce children to the classical languages “should be light and joyful, as pleasure in learning goes hand in hand with usefulness.” And he was convinced that violence was no friend to the educator.[47] He recommended a careful selection of works deemed suitable to introduce children at different stages of development not only to grammar, but also to morality and the principles of a Christian society.

For Erasmus, then, education was above all the means by which a stable foundation could be established not only for the student’s own life, but also for the life of society and the church. He encouraged the study of a wide range of literature, not only for its style and elegance, but for the moral truths it revealed. That is, the study of classical texts, in Erasmus’s view the best examples of human literary endeavor, was intended to provide “the linguistic, cultural and ethical base for Christian understanding.”[48] “None of the liberal arts is Christian,” he conceded, “because they neither treat of Christ nor were invented by Christians”; nonetheless, “they all concern Christ.”[49] His emphasis on the positive effect of education in turning the human mind toward God, and particularly his belief that human beings could be educated into good behavior which could help them to take a step toward salvation, sat somewhat uneasily with Reformation teachings about free will and the Fall. Indeed, it was precisely this latter question which had divided Erasmus and Luther in their 1525 conflict about free will: Erasmus believed that moral training could pave the way toward salvation, and that human reason could help Christians to turn toward, or open themselves to God, while Luther was adamant that salvation was God’s decision and promise, and that human reason could do nothing to aid this. Nonetheless, Erasmus’s educational ideas influenced and inspired several key Protestant Reformers, including Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin.

Melanchthon, while he emphasized that education, and in particular study of the liberal arts, could not bring about knowledge of salvation, was convinced that it could provide useful insights into the ethical and social order God wanted for his world.[50] The liberal arts, Melanchthon argued, not only prepared the student to study in one of the higher faculties of theology, law, or medicine, but also yielded insights into the nature of creation (including society, the human body, the natural world, and the heavens), and thus potentially a better understanding of God’s divine revelation through creation. In particular, Melanchthon held that mathematics formed the first steps for understanding the order of the natural world which was given to it by God and which was intended as a model for the order of society. He adopted a saying attributed to Plato—“God always geometrises”—to explain how the study of mathematics could offer a reliable revelation of God’s mind, arguing that because the human mind is made in the image of God, it reflects the mind of God in its ability to recognize order and number:

Let superior minds, originating from the heavens, think about where they come from; from time to time let them study this theme and realise that this most beautiful spectacle of celestial bodies and movements has not been set forth to humankind in vain, and let them inquire into the order of these most admirable things, because it is most appropriate to human nature and because it carries great usefulness for life … For as in all things it is best to be ruled by God, so in this consideration of studies, as we might call it whenever we contemplate the sky itself, let us be reminded of the Architect. Let us not think that he instituted this amazing order and transmitted the understanding of these movements to the human race for nothing.[51]

Mathematics, for Melanchthon, offered a way for fallen human reason to transcend the restrictions of the fallen, corrupted sub-lunar sphere and raise the mind to heaven, not only in the cosmological sense, but in the sense of understanding the mind of God. In some Protestant contexts, Melanchthon’s emphasis on the importance of the study of the natural world gave impetus to the development of what would become empirical science. Peter Harrison has argued that this, combined with a new concern with the theology of the Fall, “informed discussions about the foundations of knowledge and influenced methodological discussions in the nascent natural sciences.”[52] The contested relationship between theology and reason manifested itself in ongoing debates about the content of the Protestant curriculum. What was the right balance between religious education and education in the liberal arts? It is apparent from the heated debates about the arts curriculum at the University of Tübingen in the 1570s that this balance continued to give rise to conflict there,[53] and similar debates must surely have taken place in other European universities.

Key to these discussions was the place of Aristotle, traditionally—since the thirteenth century—the central author for the teaching of moral and natural philosophy. Luther had railed against Aristotle’s influence in the early years of the Reformation, and Melanchthon made a brave attempt at revising the Wittenberg curriculum to exclude him, but his works were soon reinstated as core texts. Charles Lohr observed that the number of Latin commentaries on Aristotle composed during the sixteenth century “exceeds that of the entire millennium from Boethius to Pomponazzi” (that is, from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries).[54] Many of these had Protestant authors: Protestant education was and remained strongly influenced by Aristotle’s thought.

COMENIUS AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PROTESTANT EDUCATION

Across Europe, the Protestant Reformation resulted in the reform of existing schools and the introduction of Humanist ideals into the curriculum, at least of the Latin schools and universities. What did not result was a system of universal education, although some form of schooling, including learning to read enough of the vernacular to understand the catechism, sometimes to write, and in some cases a basic ability at reckoning became more widely available. Moreover, the curricula of the Latin schools were not always suited to prepare schoolboys for their lives as merchants or even as clerks. As the seventeenth century dawned, calls for further educational reform were arising in some circles. Two further factors strengthened these calls. The first was the increasingly politicized tension between the emerging confessions. By the early seventeenth century, lines had been drawn, not only between Catholic and Protestant, but within Protestantism between Lutherans and Reformed. As Howard Hotson observes: “The ecclesiastical history of early seventeenth-century Protestant Germany presents a generally gloomy picture. Lutherans and Calvinists, locked in increasingly uncompromising fratricidal controversy, divide the heartland of the Reformation against itself, thereby unwittingly preparing for the Habsburg reconquest of subsequent decades.”[55] In Central Europe, from 1618, the horrors of the Thirty Years War, and in the British Isles those of the civil war, from the early 1640s, gave additional impetus to the quest for an education which would help to overcome confessional differences. A second factor, of growing significance during the century, was the increased interest in—and capabilities of—natural philosophy and the empirical method, which is now associated with the rise of natural science. In England, this resulted in “a controversial view that recognized an interrelationship of science, education and philosophical language,” a key proponent of which was Francis Bacon.[56]

It is against this background that the reforming pedagogy of Johannes Amos Comenius (1592–1670) must be understood. Comenius, born in Moravia, was a member (and later senior, or bishop) of the Bohemian Brethren, the unitas fratrum, who sat uneasily within the confessional categories of his era. Educated at Hohe Schule of Herborn and the University of Heidelberg, both at that period Reformed, in the course of his teaching career (much of which was spent in exile), he developed a vision for a new educational system, structured in three six-year stages: after six years in the home attending “mother school,” elementary schooling, from the age of 6, was to take place in the vernacular at the parish level; to be followed, from the age of 12, by secondary schooling in Latin, organized in urban centers; and finally, from the age of 18, by higher education in academies based in provincial capitals.[57] Comenius’s Didactics, originally drafted in Czech, was published in Latin in 1657. Perhaps more significant were the textbooks and teaching materials which he produced to accompany this program, in which the new empirical approach to science appeared alongside the classical canon.[58] Comenius was also one of the first to produce picture books for children, including the Orbis sensualium pictus (The world in pictures); he was also a pioneer in the use of drama for schoolteaching, with his Schola ludus (The school as play).[59] Comenius was very interested in how children could be helped to learn, and was one of the first to develop ideas of what today would be called developmental psychology.

Hugely influential in his own lifetime, Comenius drew on the Humanist educational principles articulated by Erasmus, applying them to his own context.[60] Although his work in some ways heralded the Enlightenment, his somewhat idiosyncratic philosophy was unattractive to Enlightenment thinkers, and his influence waned, only to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Comenius brought the idea of a universal education one step closer, and had provided both a school structure and the didactic tools to make this possible.

CATHOLIC SCHOOLS, THE JESUITS, AND THE URSULINES

This chapter has focused on the emerging Protestant territories, but Catholic education also underwent significant and often parallel changes in this period. The developments in education which had begun in fifteenth-century, pre-confessional Europe continued in Catholic as well as in Protestant lands, and Catholics too were influenced by Humanist principles. In addition, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a new urgency centered on Catholic catechesis: Catholics, especially those who lived in close proximity to Protestants, needed to be taught what they believed, and particularly how Catholic doctrine, which had been newly defined by the Council of Trent, differed from Protestant teachings. The Tridentine catechism was an important tool in this endeavor, but in many areas the Jesuits became the drivers of Catholic education.

Patterns of education varied across the Italian territories as they did across the German territories, and the majority of children were educated in independently organized schools or by tutors engaged by their parents. Tax returns in Florence in 1480 suggest that around 1,031 boys aged between 4 and 17 were undertaking some kind of formal education, whether in a vernacular, abbaco, or Latin school, or being tutored at home in preparation for seminary; this figure ignores girls and probably underreports the school attendance of younger boys.[61] In Venice, a survey of schoolteachers carried out in 1587 reveals the existence of a range of schools attended by a total of 4,595 boys and 30 girls. Comparing this data with that of the 1586 Venice census indicates that about 26 percent of boys and 0.2 percent of girls aged from 6 to 15 were attending schools.[62] In Italy, as elsewhere, Latin education was designed to educate the sons of noble or merchant families; however, many communes obliged their schoolmasters to teach a certain number of poor boys for free, while some families clearly made considerable sacrifices in order to educate their sons,[63] and there is intermittent evidence for small numbers of female teachers.[64] Educational opportunities for girls improved in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, which imposed a strict enclosure on all female religious whilst making provision for women’s orders to accept secular girls as pupils. The Ursulines became an influential teaching order, establishing schools for girls across Catholic Europe,[65] but other women’s orders were also instrumental in setting up schools for girls. By 1800, the Rhineland was peppered with schools for girls, almost all run by religious orders: Rutz suggests that whereas Protestants had isolated schools for girls, the internationally structured Catholic women’s orders offered what amounted to a system of confessional schooling for girls, which was replicated across the Catholic Netherlands and to some extent in the French system of collèges, which flourished from the mid-sixteenth century.[66] However, by the late seventeenth century, many former collèges had been reduced to the status of small town or even village schools: they focused on catechesis and on instilling the principles of Catholic teaching.[67] The few remaining collèges were run by the Jesuits, and explicitly intended for the education of a politically loyal, doctrinally orthodox elite.

The pivotal role of the Jesuit order in the educational program of Counter Reformation France mirrored its involvement elsewhere. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Jesuits became the educators of the Counter Reformation. Originally conceived not as a teaching, but as a missionary order, the Jesuits moved into education from the late 1540s onward. The schools established in the 1550s, modeled on the university of Paris, bore striking resemblances to the organization of Sturm’s Academy in Strasbourg, based on the same model. This Counter Reformation movement drew on some of the pedagogical principles that underlay Protestant education.

EDUCATION AND SOCIETY: A CONCLUSION

Education in the Reformation was unashamedly intended to shape society. The focus of Humanist pedagogy was not so much on the transmission of useful skills as on the instilling of the principles of good citizenship, of which religion was understood to be an essential part. Catechesis was deemed to be an essential part of education: if children learned nothing else, they should be able to recite and understand the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Creed, read and respond to a simple catechism, and (at least in the case of Protestants) sing hymns and psalms. However, in many areas across Protestant Europe, sixteenth-century visitation records raised real doubts about the success even of this enterprise.

Those who were deemed suitable, whether by talent or by birth, to progress further in their education would gain a significant expertise in Latin, a broad understanding of classical literature, understanding of the techniques of rhetoric and logic, alongside instruction in the Bible and the teachings of the church. In most Protestant areas, their schooldays were interspersed with regular attendance at church, and in many places the local schoolchildren sang in the services. In all of this, they were taught to value the orders of society as God-given. Protestant education was not intended to stimulate independent thought—although clearly sometimes it did—but to prepare responsible citizens to take their place in society: preaching the Gospel, instructing the next generation, maintaining God’s intended order for society through careful legal work, or sustaining God’s creation through the medical care of their fellow human beings. The point of education was not just eruditio, but eruditio et pietas.

NOTES

1. Martin Luther, “To the councilmen of all cities in Germany that they establish and maintain Christian schools,” in J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald, and H. T. Lehmann (eds.), Luther’s Works (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1955–1986) [hereafter LW], vol. 45, 347.

2. LW, 45, 351.

3. LW, 45, 356.

4. LW, 45, 371.

5. See, for the Diocese of York, Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 38–49, 93–95, 222.

6. David L. Sheffler, Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany: Regensburg, 1250–1500 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008), 22–25, esp. n. 27; Sabine Holtz, “Schule und Reichsstadt: Bildungsangebote in der Freien Reichsstadt Esslingen am Ende des späten Mittelalters,” in Martin Kintzinger, Sönke Lorenz, and Michael Walter (eds.), Schule und Schüler im Mittelalter: Beiträge zur europäischen Bildungsgeschichte des 9. bis 15. Jahrhunderts (Köln: Böhlau, 1996), 441–468, here 446. For other cities in the German lands, see Bernd Moeller, Hans Patze, and Karl Stackmann (eds.), Studien zum städtischen Bildungswesen des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Gottingen: V&R, 1983), esp.: Rudolf Endres, “Das Schulwesen in Franken in ausgehenden Mittelalter,” 173–215; Edith Ennen, “Die Lateinschule in Emmerich—niederrheinisches Beispiel einer bedeutender Schule in einer kleinen Stadt,” 235–243; Francis Rapp, “Die Lateinschule von Schlettstadt—eine große Schule für eine Kleinstadt,” 215–235; and Klaus Wriedt, “Schulen und bürgerliches Bildungswesen in Norddeutschland im Spätmittelalter,” 152–171; compare also Wriedt, Schule und Universität. Bildungsverhältnisse in norddeutschen Städten des Spätmittelalters (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005).

7. Paul F. Grendler, “Schooling in Western Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 775–787, here 775–778.

8. These categories are fluid: a parish school might start out as a church school and then become a municipal school, as in the case of the parish school at Esslingen, or might begin as a church school and become independent, as with Winchester College, founded in 1323 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester.

9. William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), part 1, chap. 2; Holtz, “Schule und Reichsstadt,” 448–451; Sheffler, Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany, 25–71.

10. Sheffler, Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany, 71–78.

11. Andreas Rutz, Bildung—Konfession—Geschlecht: religiöse Frauengemeinschaften und die katholische Mädchenbildung im Rheinland (16.–18. Jahrhundert) (Mainz: von Zabern, 2006), 93.

12. Sheffler, Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany, 79–82; Birgit E. Klein, “Jüdisches Schul- und Bildungswesen im mittelalterlichen Rheinland,” in Andreas Rutz (ed.), Das Rheinland als Schul- und Bildungslandschaft (1250–1750) (Köln: Böhlau, 2010), 191–209, here 195, 209.

13. Kurt Wesoly, “Elementare Schulbildung in Rheinland bis zu Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Rutz (ed.), Das Rheinland, 31–53, here 33. Compare also Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, 222.

14. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 44; Grendler, “Schooling in Western Europe,” 779–780; István Tóth, Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe (New York: Central European Press, 2000), 209.

15. Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 82–87.

16. Kenneth Appold, “Academic Life and Teaching in Post-Reformation Lutheranism,” in Robert Kolb (ed.), Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008), 65–115, here 76–77.

17. Thomas Töpfer, “Christliche Schule und Gemeiner Nutzen. Schulordnungen zwischen Normierung, Bildungsnachfrage und Schulwirklichkeit im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Irene Dingel and Armin Kohle (eds.), Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der Reformationszeit (Leipzig: Evangelischer Verlagsanstalt, 2014), 169–188, here 184.

18. LW, 44, 200, 206.

19. LW, 45, 175, 188–189.

20. LW, 45, 377–378.

21. Matthias Asche, “Philipp Melanchthon als christlicher Schulhumanist und Bildungsreformer. Wittenberg und der Export des humanistischen Bildungsprogramms,” in Friedrich Schweitzer, Sönke Lorenz, and Ernst Seidl (eds.), Philipp Melanchthon: seine Bedeutung für Kirche und Theologie, Bildung und Wissenschaft (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlagshaus, 2010), 75–94; Jürgen Leonhardt, “Melanchthon als Verfasse von Schulbüchern,” in Lutherstadt Eisleben (ed.), Philipp Melanchthon und das städtische Schulwesen. Begleitband zur Ausstellung (Halle: Stekovics, 1997), 147–159.

22. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 13; drawing on Georg Mertz, Das Schulwesen der deutschen Reformation im 16. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1902), 162–165. See also Eisleben (ed.), Philipp Melanchthon und das städtische Schulwesen.

23. Württembergische Große Kirchenordnung 1559 (Tübingen 1559; facsimile ed., Stuttgart: Schriftniederlage des Evangelischen Jugendwerks, 1968).

24. Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, 9; citing Bugenhagens Kirchenordnung für die Stadt Braunschweig, in Ludwig Hänselmann (ed.), Bugenhagens Kirchenordnung für die Stadt Braunschweig: nach dem niederdeutschen Drucke von 1528 (Wolfenbüttel: Zwißler, 1885), 45.

25. Wright has argued that these classes did not amount to a system of vernacular schools, but this may represent a misunderstanding of the methods used in the vernacular schools to teach reading, which, in the absence of vernacular grammars, seem to have been based largely on catechetical materials. William J. Wright, “The Impact of the Reformation on Hessian Education,” Church History 44 (1975): 182–198, here 187–188; Charlotte Methuen, “Securing the Reformation through Education: The Duke’s Scholarship System of Sixteenth Century Württemberg,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 841–851, here 849; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “The Reality of Early Lutheran Education: The Electoral District of Saxony,” Luther-Jahrbuch 57 (1990): 128–146.

26. For the following, see Methuen, “Securing the Reformation through Education,” 846–849. For a similar process in Hesse, see Wright, “Impact of the Reformation.”

27. For Zurich, see Anja-Silvia Göing, “Die Zürcher Schulprotokolle 1563: Spezifika einer Gattung,” in Hermann Selderhuis (ed.), Konfession, Migration, und Elitenbildung (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 141–170, here 168. For Hesse, see Wright, “Impact of the Reformation,” 189, 195–196.

28. See Matthieu Arnold (ed.), Johannes Sturm (1507–1589): Rhetor, Pädagoge und Diplomat (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), and particularly the articles by: Anton Schindling, “Scholae Lauinganae: Johannes Sturm, das Gymnasium in Lauingen und die Jesuiten in Dillingen,” 261–292; Zdzisław Pietrzyk, “Johannes Sturms Studenten aus der polnisch-litauischen Republik,” 293–302; Martin Holý, “Johannes Sturm, das Straßburger Gymnasium (Akademie) und die Böhmischen Länder in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” 303–317; and Martin Klöker, “Sturm in Riga: Einflüsse Johannes Sturms auf das altlivländische Bidlungswesen,” 321–336; compare also Dingel, “Eruditio et Pietas: die Wirkung der Reformation auf Schule und Universität,” in Michael Beyer, Jonas Flöter, and Markus Hein (eds.), Christlicher Glaube und weltliche Herrschaft: zum Gedenken an Günther Wartenberg (Leipzig: Evangelischer Verlags-Anstalt, 2008), 317–334, here 333–334.

29. Jeffrey R. Watt, “Calvinism, Childhood, and Education: The Evidence from the Genevan Consistory,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 439–456, esp. 445–450; Karin Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).

30. John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

31. Shona MacLean Vance, “Godly Citizens and Civic Unrest: Tensions in Schooling in Aberdeen in the Era of the Reformation,” European Review of History 7 (2000): 123–137, here 124.

32. Steven J. Reid, Humanism and Calvinism: Andrew Melville and the Universities of Scotland, 1560–1625 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15.

33. Amy Nelson Burnett, “Local Boys and Peripatetic Scholars: Theology Students in Basel, 1542–1642,” in Selderhuis, Konfession, Migration, und Elitenbildung, 109–139, here 109.

34. Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, esp. 300–308; Karant-Nunn, “Alas, a Lack: Trends in the Historiography of Pre-university Education in Early Modern Germany,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 788–798; Karant-Nunn, “The Reality of Early Lutheran Education”; Wright, “The Impact of the Reformation,” 182–198. For similar conclusions relating to Huguenot education, see Elizabeth K. Hudson, “The Protestant Struggle for Survival in Early Bourbon France: The Case of the Huguenot Schools,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 76 (1985): 271–295, here 280.

35. Karant-Nunn, “The Reality of Early Lutheran Education,” 133–134.

36. Karant-Nunn, “Alas, a Lack,” 791–792; compare the findings of Juliane Jacobi, “Zwischen ‘nötigen Wissenschaften’ und ‘Gottesfurcht’: Protestantische Mädchenschulen von der Reformation bis zum 18. Jahrhundert,” in Hans-Ulrich Musolff, Juliane Jacobi, and Jean-Luc Le Cam (eds.), Säkularisierung vor der Aufklärung? Bildung, Kirche und Religion 1500–1750 (Köln: Böhlau, 2008), 253–274, here 255–258.

37. Such families are discussed in A. A. MacDonald, “The Renaissance Household as Centre of Learning,” in Jan Willem Drijvers (ed.), Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-modern Europe and the Near East (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 289–298. The importance of the mother of the family in instructing the children of the house should not be forgotten: see Margaret L. King, “The School of Infancy: The Emergence of Mother as Teacher in Early Modern Times,” in Konrad Eisenbichler and Nicholas Terpstra (eds.), The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies: Essays in Honour of Paul F. Grendler (Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008), 41–85.

38. LW, 46, 220.

39. LW, 46, 215.

40. R. J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 2: The Prince of Humanists, 1501–1536 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 365.

41. Margolin, Erasme, précepteur de l’Europe.

42. Craig R. Thompson, “Introduction to Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings,” in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press: 1974-) [hereafter CWE] vol. 23, xxv; Margolin, “The Method of ‘Words and Things’ in Erasmus’s De pueris instituendis (1529) and Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658),” in Richard L. DeMolen (ed.), Essays on the Works of Erasmus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 220–238, here 223.

43. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe, vol. 1: The Making of a Humanist, 1467–1500 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 202–212; Gerold Schoch, “Die Bedeutung der Erziehung und Bildung aus der Sicht des Erasmus von Rotterdam,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Zurich, 1988, 180–188.

44. Margolin, Erasme, précepteur de l’Europe, 15–18; Karin Tilmans, “From institutio to Education: The Origin of Political Education in the Habsburg Netherlands,” in N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree, and Henk van Nierop (eds.), The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 41–61, here 45.

45. Thompson, “Introduction,” CWE, 23, xliii; Schoch, “Bedeutung der Erziehung und Bildung,” 187–188; Franz Bierlaire, “The De civilitate morum puerilium libellous,” in DeMolen, Essays on the Works of Erasmus, 239–251, here 242–243, 245, 246.

46. Erasmus to Christian Northoff (1497), Ep. 56, cited in J. K. Sowards, “Introduction to Erasmus: Literary and Educational writings 3 + 4,” CWE, 25, xxii.

47. Tilmans, “From institutio to Education,” 46–47.

48. Sowards, “Introduction to Erasmus,” CWE, 25, xxviii–xxix; Thompson, “Introduction,” CWE, 23, xxii–xxiii; Schoch, “Die Bedeutung der Erziehung und Bildung,” 239–240.

49. Erasmus, Antibarbari, CWE, 23, 90.

50. Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Methuen, “The Role of the Heavens in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon,” Journal for the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 385–403; reprinted in Michael L. LaBlanc (ed.), Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 90 (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2003), 116–127. For Melanchthon’s interest in and influence on a range of other scientific disciplines, see Stefan Rhein and Günter Frank (eds.), Melanchthon und die Naturwissenschaften seiner Zeit (Thorbecke: Sigmaringen, 1998).

51. Melanchthon, De astronomia et geographia, C. G. Bretschneider (ed.), Corpus Reformatorum, vols. 1–21 (Halle: C. A. Schwetschke, 1834–1860); 11, 294.

52. Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.

53. Norbert Hofmann, Die Artistenfakultät an der Universität Tübingen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1982), 141–143; Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 35–37, 61–63.

54. Charles H. Lohr, “Latin Aristotelianism and the Seventeenth-Century Calvinist Theology of Scientific Method,” in Daniel A. Di Liscia, Eckhard Kessler, and Charlotte Methuen (eds.), Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy of Nature: The Aristotle Commentary Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 369–380, here 372.

55. Howard Hotson, “Irenicism and Dogmatics in the Confessional Age: Pareus and Comenius in Heidelberg, 1614,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): 432–456, here 432.

56. J. L. Subbiondo, “Educational Reform in Seventeenth-Century England and John Wilkins’ Philosophical Language,” Language and Communication 21 (2001): 273–284, here 274.

57. Mark Greengrass, “Comenius, Johannes Amos (1592–1670),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oct. 2007 (<http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/view/article/67104>, accessed October 19, 2015); Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, “Comenius, Johann Amos,” in BBKL: Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz and Traugott Bautz (Herzberg/Nordhausen: Verlag Bautz 1975–), currently 36 volumes (also online at <http://www.bbkl.de>, last accessed October 19, 2015), 1: cols. 1107–1112.

58. Walter Sparn, “Johann Amos Comenius und die modern Welt,” in Norbert Kotowski and Jan B. Lasek (eds.), Johannes Amos Comenius und die Genese des modernen Europa (Bayreuth: Falcius Verlag, 1992), 20–22, here 21.

59. The former is available online in Latin with an English translation, <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28299/28299-h/28299-h.htm>, accessed October 19, 2015.

60. See Thomas Hubertus Kellner, “Das pädagogische Denken des Johann Amos Comenius vor dem Hintergrund (spät-)humanistischer Schul- und Bildungsvorstellungen,” Comenius-Jahrbuch 11/12 (2003/04): 96–123; Margolin, “The Method of ‘Words and Things.’”

61. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 75–76.

62. Ibid., 43–46. These figures omit those girls, normally the daughters of wealthy families, who lived and studied in Venetian convents; those children, many of whom may also have been girls, who were educated at home; and the probably quite large numbers of children—perhaps as many as 6 percent of those of school age—who on Sundays and feast days attended a catechesis class or “school of Christian doctrine” in their local parish.

63. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 102–108.

64. Ibid., 90–93.

65. Ibid., 96–100; Anne Conrad, Zwischen Kloster und Welt: Ursulinen und Jesuitinnen in der katholischen Reformbewegung des 16./17. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: von Zabern, 1991).

66. Rutz, Bildung—Konfession—Geschlecht, 423–424, 427 (map); George Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

67. Karen E. Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 122–135, 139–171; Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France, xi–xiii, 107–108, 115, 122–123.

FURTHER READING

Appold, Kenneth. “Academic Life and Teaching in Post-Reformation Lutheranism.” In Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675, edited by Robert Kolb, pp. 65–115. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008.

Arnold, Matthieu (ed.) Johannes Sturm (1507–1589): Rhetor, Pädagoge und Diplomat. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009.

Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Grendler, Paul F. “Schooling in Western Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 775–787.

Karant-Nunn, Susan C. “Alas, a Lack: Trends in the Historiography of Pre-university Education in Early Modern Germany,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 788–798.

Karant-Nunn, Susan C. “The Reality of Early Lutheran Education: The Electoral District of Saxony,” Luther-Jahrbuch 57 (1990): 128–146.

Maag, Karin. Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.

Methuen, Charlotte. “Securing the Reformation through Education: The Duke’s Scholarship System of Sixteenth Century Württemberg,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 841–851.

Moran, Jo Ann Hoeppner. The Growth of English Schooling, 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Morgan, John. Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education 1560–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Rutz, Andreas. Bildung—Konfession—Geschlecht: religiöse Frauengemeinschaften und die katholische Mädchenbildung im Rheinland (16.–18. Jahrhundert). Mainz: von Zabern, 2006.

Sheffler, David L. Schools and Schooling in Late Medieval Germany: Regensburg, 1250–1500. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008.

Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Töpfer, Thomas. “Christliche Schule und Gemeiner Nutzen. Schulordnungen zwischen Normierung, Bildungsnachfrage und Schulwirklichkeit im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert.” In Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der Reformationszeit, edited by Irene Dingel and Armin Kohle, pp. 169–188. Leipzig: Evangelischer Verlagsanstalt, 2014.

Tóth, István. Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe. New York: Central European Press, 2000.

Vance, Shona MacLean. “Godly Citizens and Civic Unrest: Tensions in Schooling in Aberdeen in the Era of the Reformation,” European Review of History 7 (2000): 123–137.

Watt, Jeffrey R. “Calvinism, Childhood, and Education: The Evidence from the Genevan Consistory,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 439–456.

Wright, William J. “The Impact of the Reformation on Hessian Education.” Church History 44 (1975): 182–198.

CHAPTER 24

LEGAL COURTS

JOEL F. HARRINGTON

“PROTESTANTISM,” as the chapters in this volume make clear, was far from a monolithic entity at any time during the early modern period. Even at the denominational level, the individual and collective experience of “becoming Lutheran” or “creating a Reformed culture” likewise remained a highly dynamic and variant process. As scholars over the past forty years have digested the implications of this diversity, the most important shift in all Reformation historiography has been away from a “top-down,” vertical notion of what we now call confessionalization (as it was originally conceived). In other words, a person’s self-identity as a Lutheran or a Catholic was just as likely to be shaped by conversations and interactions at the local level as by formal church pronouncements or state enforcement of the same. As a result, institutions previously viewed as coercive tools of political and religious elites, such as legal courts, are now increasingly studied for the ways interlocutors spoke about religious ideas and practices, and treated as places of genuine dialogue, not just forced conformity. Even the Genevan consistory—that famously strict morals court established by John Calvin in 1541 and long treated by historians as a classic example of top-down confessionalization—may now be characterized as less a blunt instrument of social discipline than “a form of mandatory forced counseling.”[1]

While for the most part a welcome development, this more nuanced approach to legal courts and confessional formation necessarily complicates the task of assessing the impact of new religious ideas and practice at the individual and collective level. Our project is further challenged by the difficulty of identifying “Protestant” or even “religious” factors amid various forensic interactions. The practices of emerging confessions was rarely identical with formal confessions or standard biblical interpretations, both static and often politically developed representations, thus depriving us of a common reference point for measuring the social impact of religious laws and courts. Many Protestant legal developments, moreover, had much in common with contemporary Catholic practices, thereby further obscuring the distinctiveness of the former. Criticism of the canon law of marriage, for instance, was by no means limited to sixteenth-century Lutherans and Calvinists, nor was the concurrent rise of the witch craze an explicitly confessional issue.[2] How many of the changes we see in early modern legal interactions, in other words, might be attributed to specific denominational influences and how many simply ascribed to the general social tenor?

The final obstacle to identifying the emergence of Protestant cultures in a legal setting is the nature of early modern courts themselves. The era’s distinctions between secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions or between public and private boundaries were very different from our own. In most Protestant cities, for instance, blasphemy and heresy were dealt with by civil authorities, as were cases of incest, bestiality, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and witchcraft. Church courts, by contrast, often handled instances of public drunkenness, marriage validity disputes, and domestic violence. Obviously secular and ecclesiastical courts differed significantly in law and procedures, but in the question of jurisdiction the decisive factor was often less the “religious” or “secular” nature of the offense per se (by any definition) than which court was prompted to act first. Of course, murder, treason, assault, and other serious violations were reserved to civil courts but even the judgments in such cases were often imbued with moral and religious dimensions, thus resisting simple classification as “purely secular” offenses.

Despite all these reservations and qualifications, assessing the formation of Protestant identities and cultures in the legal context is not an impossible quest. In this chapter, we will focus on three aspects of this process: Protestant legal innovations; changes in the jurisdiction, structure, and procedure of Protestant courts (chiefly ecclesiastical bodies); and evidence of new or different attitudes and behaviors emerging as a result of the first two sets of formal changes. The chronological focus will be mostly on short-term developments during the first century of the Reformation, but we will make some forays into the world following official cessation of religious warfare in 1648. Our geographic focus will be those areas in Europe where Protestant communities and courts were most established: the Holy Roman Empire, Swiss cantons, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Hungary.

LAW

The legal landscape on the eve of the Reformation was even more diverse than Western Europe’s patchwork of political entities would suggest. In the Holy Roman Empire alone, for instance, over 4,000 secular courts of various kinds enjoyed jurisdiction over life and death matters, each coming to decisions by different combinations of local customs, territorial codifications (such as the thirteenth-century regional codes of the Schwabenspiegel and the Sachsenspiegel), municipal and territorial statutes and ordinances, and imperial proclamations. Even more village courts followed their own distinctive rules and customs for lesser matters. Royal states, such as France and England, had made greater progress in legal standardization by the sixteenth century, but here too the situation was one of considerable variety and flux. To this mixture, we must add the laws of the church, known as canon law, and their own respective courts at different levels.

Remarkably, religious reforms following the break with Rome neither significantly exacerbated this cacophony nor did they provide an alternate, scripturally based unity to the law administered by secular or ecclesiastical courts. In large part this outcome was due to the generally conservative disposition of jurists, even evangelically inspired ones, as well as the institutional requirement of stability. The emergence of a distinctive Protestant legal tradition was itself a gradual and nuanced affair, much less characterized by denominational factions than by common theological assumptions. By the middle of the century, there were admittedly influential legal faculties at the Lutheran universities of Altdorf and Helmstedt and strong Reformed law schools at Heidelberg, Zurich, Geneva, St. Andrew’s, and Basel. But as Christoph Strohm points out, it is often very difficult to draw clear confessional boundaries among Protestant jurists in any meaningful way.[3] There was no distinctive Lutheran or Reformed position, for instance, on political sovereignty. In fact, the personal religious allegiances of sixteenth-century legal scholars throughout Europe appear to have had little effect on their learned interpretations and arguments as a whole. Some historians have argued for the influence of Protestant theology on the emergence of “public” (i.e., state) and natural law, but most of these developments took place later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[4] The loss of universally accepted legal authorities, such as the Pope and the emperor, undoubtedly influenced Reformed jurists such as Christoph Ehem (1528–1592), Hugues Doneau (aka Donellus; 1527–1591), and Ludwig Camerarius (1573–1651) in their early efforts to develop a more systematic secularization of law, but the same might be said of many contemporary Catholic writers, most notably Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). Most importantly, the later emergence of a new natural law was largely a theoretical development, with few implications for the daily business of legal courts. Top-down confessionalization based on academic law, in other words, seems a highly contestable premise. Most legal theory was simply not denominationally specific enough.

Neither did shared anti-papal sentiments prevent most Protestant jurists from embracing much of Catholic canon law, particularly as it had become so thoroughly intertwined with Roman civil law in the so-called ius commune.[5] Martin Luther, to no effect, greatly lamented this attachment among many of his co-religionists, including his own lieutenant, Philip Melanchthon.[6] “Every jurist is an enemy of Christ,” he fumed at one point, particularly in frustration over lawyers’ reluctance to renounce the canon law whose books he had memorably burned in his own formal break with the Roman Church.[7] A few newly Protestant jurisdictions initially prohibited the use of canon law, but by the 1540s it had become one of the foundations for Lutheran consistories. Like all major reformers, Luther feared and condemned antinomianism, yet as a theologian he was ill-equipped to offer any credible alternative to the richness, prestige, and universal admiration that the ius commune enjoyed among jurists of all denominations, including his fellow reformer John Calvin.

The Protestant reform of marriage law offers the starkest example of continuity in the face of rupture. On the one hand, Martin Luther famously declared marriage to be “something external and worldly thing, like clothing, food, a house, the court.”[8] Stripped of its sacramental status by Protestant theologians and jurists, marriage also supposedly forfeited its status as a matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction and became a res politica (political matter). Once clerical celibacy was effectively abolished in evangelical and Reformed lands, the secularization of marriage was complete. In the minds of many religious reformers, the task for lawyers and civil authorities was merely to construct definitions and procedures in conformance with Scripture (or at least their own interpretations of the same). Most famously, this new understanding of marriage included the introduction of divorce and remarriage, forbidden by canon law but apparently supported by both Jesus and Paul themselves (Matt. 19:9; 1 Cor. 7:13). “Papist inventions,” such as a notoriously convoluted system of impediments and dispensations, could be swept away with a single stroke, again based on their degree of adherence to Protestant readings of the Bible. “Unnatural abominations,” such as the canonical recognition of clandestine marriage vows, experienced the same fate as clerical celibacy and the concubinage it had engendered.

In practice, however, the emergence of a Protestant marriage law was a much more conservative matter.[9] The grounds for divorce and remarriage in most Protestant jurisdictions remained limited to adultery (especially if it had resulted in an illegitimate child) and malicious abandonment; cruelty alone (either saevitia or insidia) was rarely considered sufficient by legal authorities.[10] Obviously the implications for the modern institution of divorce are great, but during the early modern period itself, the practice remained highly restricted and rare. Even the Swiss city of Basel, the most active sixteenth-century court in this respect, granted divorces at one-tenth the modern U.S. rate; most Protestant courts saw one-hundredth of the divorce activity of a modern Western nation.[11]

Some impediments of affinity (e.g., godparenthood) were eliminated and in most jurisdictions forbidden degrees of consanguinity were reduced to second or third degree, with the power of dispensation simply shifted to civil authorities. Requirement of parental permission for the marriages of minors undoubtedly constituted an important change of Protestant law, as did the necessity of a witnessed church wedding. Both were also intensely debated at the Council of Trent, though only the second proposal ultimately succeeded. Even here, though, some Protestant jurisdictions surpassed their Catholic counterparts in their fidelity to medieval canon law. The Church of England, for instance, continued to recognize the validity of clandestine de praesenti vows (“I take you”) long after the Tridentine Catholic Church’s reforms, and in the Reformed Swiss cantons and the Palatine Electorate, de futuro marriage betrothals (“I will take you”) were until the seventeenth century recognized as binding, even without sexual relations.[12] Secularization of marriage, in other words, must be understood in very nuanced terms, chiefly limited to jurisdictional authority. The universal Protestant stance against “the pope and his laws” requires even more restrained credence.

The most significant legal changes of the first half of the early modern period, rather, were characterized by attempted codification at the imperial, royal, territorial, and municipal levels, regardless of religious denomination. The Holy Roman Empire alone witnessed hundreds of local “reformations” during the years between 1450 and 1600. Once again, Roman law, in its various forms, was a far greater influence than confessionally inspired interpretations of Scripture, even in the instance of marriage. Nor did Protestant and Catholic jurists differ in their continuing acceptance of much local customary law, or in their perpetuation of more deeply embedded assumptions. The prevailing anthropology of women, for instance, remained universally unchallenged, despite the Lutheran embrace of the canonical principle of equity.[13]

The greatest impact of the Reformation on law during the sixteenth century was more arguably the proliferation of various disciplinary and church ordinances, on matters ranging from public dancing to fornication and adultery to blasphemy and heresy.[14] This was not an insignificant development, but a few caveats are also in order. First, although bolstered by Protestant interpretations of Scriptures, the new ordinances were largely conservative in substance. In a survey of sixteenth-century Lutheran church ordinances in the empire, Annaliese Sprenger-Ruppenthal has found remarkable continuity on a range of issues, from tithing and clerical administration to rules about desacramentalized confession and confirmation.[15] Naturally new interpretations on clerical marriage and the Eucharist entailed some important changes, but here too an overriding adherence to canonical tradition was prominent. The most innovative new Protestant laws, particularly in the areas of education and poor relief, had minimal impact on the work of legal courts.[16] Second, many of the targets of the new ordinances—particularly drunkenness, fornication, Sabbath violations, and other ungodly living—were similar to those of new ordinances in Catholic lands, such as France and Spain. Undoubtedly religious fervor played a central role in such legislation, but not necessarily of a confessional character. Third, and perhaps most importantly, ordinances of this nature should be viewed primarily in terms of a desire for stricter enforcement of traditional norms, a subject to which we now turn.

COURTS

European legal jurisdictions at the beginning of the sixteenth century were too multifarious to permit many useful generalizations. Most obviously, the later Middle Ages witnessed a decline of private secular jurisdiction among lesser nobles and landowners and a concurrent expansion of royal or territorial claims of legal sovereignty. The fifteenth century in particular had also been a period of increasing encroachment by these same authorities, as well as by some independent cities, of episcopal jurisdiction. The bishop’s court, or Officialatus, together with its subsidiary archidiaconal courts, continued to hear cases deemed “spiritual” (including, most prominently, marriage validity cases); but at the same time neighboring secular courts—from the village to territorial level—increasingly took on overlapping property and morality disputes and even openly violated clerical immunity and other episcopal prerogatives. Bishops and their officials repeatedly protested such incursions but both enforcement mechanisms and overall momentum were on the side of ambitious territorial rulers and city states.[17]

Despite this trend, the formal introduction of the Reformation in various polities did not always coincide with a dramatic transformation of legal jurisdictions. Many civil courts—as in Catholic France and Spain—simply continued to adjudicate cases that we might think of as religious in nature, ranging from blasphemy and heresy to adultery and fornication. In parts of Lutheran Germany, for instance, official embrace of Protestant teachings of one sort or another triggered a more intense prosecution of diverse morals offenses with no jurisdictional change whatsoever. In every instance except England, the dominant civil authority explicitly assumed the iurisdictio ecclesiastica of the local Catholic bishop, including marriage validity cases, granting the territorial lord or town council the status of summus episcopus and using existing courts.[18] Both the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia confirmed this status as a cornerstone of the sovereign authority’s ius reformandi (although the status of marriage as an ecclesiastical matter remained in dispute). The most visible transformation of course was the creation of new Protestant church courts, though here too—as we shall see—it was often more a question of adapting existing bodies, such as lay synods or archidiaconal courts, to new confessional agendas, than creating entirely new bodies from scratch.

As newly Protestant jurisdictions assumed authority over all legal cases, the boundaries between the former secular and spiritual spheres became even more blurred. One presumed difference between civil criminal courts and ecclesiastical courts is that the former were merely concerned with punishment, while the latter were concerned with reform.[19] In practice, though, courts of both kinds overlapped in their goal of promoting an ordered and godly society.[20] Both made frequent allusions to Scripture in sentencing and both imposed penalties of public humiliation aimed at personal reform as much as punishment. Civil authorities in cities such as Strasbourg, Basel, Bern, and Zurich even reserved control over the right of excommunication, as did the rulers of territorial states such as the Rhineland-Palatinate and the Electorate Saxony.

Relationships between secular and religious courts varied widely during the first century of the Reformation. In a confessionally unified area, such as Calvin’s Geneva, up to half of the caseload of a civil court might consist of referrals from its ecclesiastical counterpart.[21] Scottish consistories likewise benefited from a close relationship with civil authorities, passing on many of their more difficult cases to a wide variety of courts, including the regional presbytery, the sheriff court, the burgh court, and the High Court of Judiciary.[22] In divided France, on the other hand, some rural Reformed pastors openly encouraged parishioners to question royal authority and to use their own consistories as tribunals of substitution—a God-given right of resistance to “magistrats inférieurs” according to Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva.[23] Many German imperial cities similarly competed mightily with Catholic episcopal courts throughout the sixteenth century, particularly over marital cases, while other urban courts—most notably Görlitz, Osnabrück, Hildesheim, and Erfurt—found more amicable arrangements of shared jurisdiction over marriage.[24] Dutch magistrates likewise displayed reticence in imposing their own moral strictures on non-Reformed members of their communities, thereby limiting the social impact of local consistories. The Reformed church in Holland, for instance, enjoyed a privileged public monopoly but its membership remained a minority of the population, perhaps as little as 10 percent during the late 1580s.[25]

The most conservative Protestant reform of legal jurisdiction was that of the Tudor Reformation. In large part this may be because prior to 1534, according to Martin Ingram, English ecclesiastical courts were “sophisticated and for the most part very serviceable institutions.”[26] During the century following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the courts became a popular site of contestation between English Protestants of various persuasions. In 1553, for example, a commission led by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer attempted to reform both diocesan (known as consistory) courts and smaller, archidiaconal bodies more along continental, Reformed lines.[27] This attempt failed, and in fact forty years later the new Elizabethan courts of High Commission were provided enhanced powers to support diocesan courts’ struggle against Puritans and other religious minorities.[28] Unlike Reformed consistories on the Continent, English church courts relied more on the ex officio actions of their own judges during visitations for disciplinary matters at the local level, who interrogated clerics and churchwardens on the morals of their congregations. The Presbyterian model of strong lay leadership in such matters was briefly considered but ultimately rejected by Elizabethan officials. Diocesan courts, meanwhile, continued to function primarily as marriage tribunals, drawing plaintiffs on a regional basis. Initially bishops and their archdeacons presided over such procedures; by the beginning of the seventeenth century this function was performed mostly by laymen trained in civil law.

The most significant Protestant impact on English church courts was an intensification of traditional rites of penance for moral offenses. In addition to going bareheaded and barefooted, penitents were required to wear white sheets and declare their sins openly and candidly during a church service, begging God (and sometimes their neighbors) for forgiveness and finally leading the congregation in prayer.[29] As the actual performance of penance declined in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart church, excommunication became a routine punishment for contumacy (i.e., refusal to obey court directives)—another contrast to the Scottish Reformed tradition, which treated the sanction as a final and desperate measure. Wealthy penitents were likewise permitted to commute their public penance into a money payment, a matter of outrage to English Protestants “of the hotter sort.”

As in most Protestant lands, there was considerable overlap in the business of church and secular courts, particularly in the general area of public morality. During the sixteenth century, witchcraft, sodomy, bigamy, and drunkenness were all classified as subject to secular jurisdiction.[30] At the same time, both kinds of courts handled various cases of sexual transgression. Protestant church courts in England took a noticeably more aggressive approach to cases of fornication and illegitimacy, even in the instance of “bridal pregnancies.” During the 1620s, popular responses to the Book of Sports gave rise in some courts to typical Protestant concerns over dancing and other ungodly behavior.[31] The internal strife over religious and political identity leading up to the English Civil War eventually led to a sudden collapse in 1640–1642 of the church courts so closely associated with the personal rule of Charles I. The restoration of ecclesiastical courts by Charles II in 1660 saw a revitalization of activity, particularly in marital and probate matters. Though weakened by the Toleration Act of 1689, English church courts remained a potent force well into the eighteenth century, at least on questions of marriage and “public morality.”

Lutheran rulers in Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire were nearly as conservative as their English counterparts in their modifications of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Many territorial rulers, such as the Landgrave of Hesse, initially assumed authority without creating any new central institution.[32] The Elector of Saxony likewise managed with ad hoc commissions for ecclesiastical matters until he established the first Lutheran consistory in 1539 at Wittenberg, whereupon the new court replaced the single judge of the Officialatus with a panel of laymen and two theologians, but remained otherwise conservative on both procedural and substantive issues.[33] All of the major Swiss and imperial cities, by contrast, followed the example of Zurich in 1525 and by 1540 had set up their own new marriage courts (although in most cases new marriage codes came still later).[34] While religious reformers indisputably played key roles in the establishment of the new legal jurisdictions, all municipal marriage courts and territorial consistories were presided over by lay judges, who made decisions based on their expertise in both canon and civil law.[35] Some early preachers and theologians felt betrayed by this exclusion, but by the next generation the full secularization of ecclesiastical courts was a fait accompli.

Reformed jurisdictions, perhaps predictably, witnessed the most striking transformation of ecclesiastical courts, though even here continuity prevailed. The greatest innovation was of course the local consistory, known in Scotland[36] as the kirk session and in Germany[37] and Hungary[38] as the parish presbytery. This church body usually met at least once a week (and in Scotland up to four times a week) to discuss matters of ecclesiastical administration, supervision of social assistance programs, and of course morals control. This last category could be expansive, including sexual offenses, disputed marriage vows, blasphemy, “superstitious” practices, Sabbath breach, dancing, gambling, and sometimes sorcery. Thanks to the work of Robert Kingdon and Raymond Mentzer in particular, it is no longer the case, as William Monter claimed forty years ago, that “the consistory is still poorly understood.”[39] Except in Geneva—where the court was composed of all of the city’s pastors and twelve elders—Reformed consistories were dominated by laymen, from initiation to investigation to rules of evidence and procedure.[40] Courts were also, again except for Geneva, local in nature, involving individual accusers, defendants, and judges, who all knew each other. In Scotland, kirk sessions emulated the composition and practices of the town bailies court;[41] in German and French lands pre-Reformation archidiaconal courts and lay synods were the most influential predecessors. Accusers—women as well as men—represented themselves during appearances, without the benefit of legal counsel. Both oaths on the “holy evangels touched” and the testimony of women were treated as lawful and reliable evidence.[42]

As Jeffrey Watt and others have stressed, even the consistory of Geneva displayed a consistent preference for private and less abrasive means of persuasion. In the words of Scott Mantesch, the ministers on the consistory considered themselves “spiritual shepherds,” seeking chiefly to “change inward attitude[s]‌ of the heart” and to reconcile estranged spouses and quarreling neighbors.[43] Failing success, the most common means of discipline—what Calvin called “preserving the order of the Lord’s Supper”—were the admonition, fines, and censure. Sometimes a form of public penance or humiliation was prescribed, such as sitting in sackcloth and barefoot on an elevated “seat of repentance” in a Scottish kirk for a number of successive Sundays, or carrying the “stone of shame” in a procession around a local German church.[44] In some instances, consistories might recommend corporal punishment, but rely on civil authorities for enforcement. Excommunication, while very well known and frequently applied in Geneva (9,256 times between 1542 and 1609),[45] was elsewhere the rarest punishment imposed.[46] Most church authorities treated it as a last resort for recalcitrant and impenitent offenders. The Perth kirk session—which heard cases of rape, adultery, violent assault, sorcery, and even murder— resorted to excommunication only eight times between 1576 and 1600, and nine times between 1618 and 1635.[47] Even then, as Andrew Spicer and others have pointed out, the goal of excommunication was to get an individual to repent, not to effect permanent separation.[48] The power to excommunicate was only granted to some consistories (known in French as dressées) and in all locations was a hotly contested prerogative between ecclesiastical and civil authorities. In Geneva the consistory had to wrest control of excommunication from the magistrates, and the Dutch and French exile churches in Elizabethan England found their power usurped by the diocesan (Anglican) bishop.[49] In Scotland, by contrast, consistorial excommunication might even be accompanied by formal banishment, outlawing as a rebel (known as “putting to the horn”), or in exceptional cases handing over to civil authorities for execution.[50]

IMPACT ON INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES

The fact that both Protestant laws and courts displayed considerable continuity in their essential structures does not mean that confessionally influenced plaintiffs and judges did not use them differently from their Catholic forebears or contemporaries. And at first glance all of the new courts indeed appear to have been much more active on questions of sexual and public morality. Reformed consistories in particular assumed a more interventionist role in the domestic sphere, with Robert Kingdon estimating that by the 1560s, at least one in fifteen members of the entire population of Geneva was summoned before the consistory for some violation of the new religious order.[51]

Such unprecedented ambition and scope in legal activity has led many scholars to emphasize the top-down “social disciplinary” aspects of Protestant legal courts. Two important caveats are in order however. The first is that both intensity of prosecution and of punishments fluctuated considerably over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.[52] Like legal jurisdictions in any time or place, Protestant courts—including the Genevan consistory—experienced waves of stricter enforcement throughout their existence. Second, and more important, the majority of cases involved individual plaintiffs seeking redress or resolution of a conflict: an intentional insult in a public setting or a defamatory rumor maliciously spread. And even supposedly ex officio investigations were prompted by “common bruit” or “general hue and cry,” which in turn greatly depended on gossip networks and unofficial informants.[53]

In other words, secular and religious leaders may have initiated more rigorous standards, but it was up to individual laypeople to identify potential offenders. In some instances the motivating factor may have been a perceived violation of “good neighborhood”;[54] in other cases the prompter to action might have had more personal origins. Judith Pollmann has also demonstrated the positive feeling of belonging that participation in the consistory’s work could engender in many unmarried women, leading them to provide information essential to the institution’s effectiveness.[55] Though denied the pulpit, such devoted women could in this way play an active role in the congregation’s governance. Even such a seemingly obvious example of social discipline as Protestant campaigns against fornication in fact turned on personal reputation and the neighbors who determined it.

Our brief overview of the impact Protestant courts had on the ideas and practices of people within their respective communities must therefore acknowledge more of a multilateral process than some confessionalization models permit. Certainly stricter laws and sterner judges made a difference in this respect, but so too did the interpretations of plaintiffs and defendants—interpretations that freely combined religious and moral standards with traditional communal values and individual or group self-interest. Any analysis must accordingly look for patterns not only in legal outcomes but also in language, perceptions, and social dynamics. And while we remain attuned to religious influences at work, our study of legal implementation will continue to blend Protestant ecclesiastical and secular courts, given their close cooperation on a variety of moral issues. The boundary between the “merely” immoral offenses punished by church courts and the criminally immoral offenses prosecuted by civil courts was simply too inconstant and porous to allow any other approach.

If there was an ideological cornerstone to all Protestant courts, it was a highly idealized model of the nuclear family, what Lyndal Roper has called “the holy household.” Marriage and the family provided the very foundation to a pious and orderly society, guided by the three bulwarks of patriarchal authority: in German lands known as the Hausvater (head of household), the Landesvater (political leader), and Gottesvater (divine creator).[56] Male authority in all these spheres remained a given, as did the need for female submission in all three. As Susanna Burghartz has amply demonstrated, the demise of clerical celibacy, the idealization of marriage, and the punishment of fornication were all part of this singular vision of a new evangelically based society.[57] While a few historians have stressed the ideal of husband–wife partnership among sixteenth-century Protestants, this concept does not appear to have been successfully internalized at any time during the early modern period, except perhaps at the highest level of society.[58]

Protestant valorization of the household probably had at best a mixed impact on disputed marriage vows, the most common form of marital litigation in Protestant courts (as they had been before the Reformation).[59] Cases of this nature were demand-driven, typified by traditional familial and communal concerns, such as unions of equal social status, pregnant or unwed mothers, and clandestine unions—all cases involving unpopular or otherwise controversial spousal choices. Admittedly new Protestant requirements of both publicity and parental consent clearly resulted in many invalidated vows, but the decisions of marriage courts and consistories were simply too varied over time and space to permit any meaningful generalization beyond the overriding concern among judges with domestic and communal order. Sometimes this meant civil or ecclesiastical courts showing leniency towards improperly formed unions; in other instances it entailed forcing recalcitrant husbands or fathers to live up to their financial obligations.[60]

One distinctly new challenge was the occurrence of mixed marriages between Protestants and Catholics, which all the Christian churches forbade and condemned, even equating such unions with rape, fornication, and adultery.[61] Many Catholic authorities supposedly perceived bi-confessional marriages as a graver sin than incest, and in 1596 Pope Clement VIII actually condemned all Catholics who married Protestants as heretics. At the same time, legal courts of all religious denominations, guided principally by the canon law of marriage, generally recognized such unions as valid, as long as the prescriptions for consent and publicity had been followed.[62]

Divorce with remarriage was indisputably one of the major innovations of Protestant law, but it is important to remember the fundamentally conservative impulse behind the change. Maintaining the integrity of a properly formed union remained the keystone of new Protestant legal agendas, thereby limiting divorce to a last resort in situations likely to give rise to adultery or bigamy. Protestant judges always attempted reconciliation and maintained a preference for temporary separation, or divortio quoad mensam et torum, the canonical equivalent of permanent separation. Reformed consistories appear to have been more sensitive than other Protestant courts on questions of domestic abuse, but even here the primacy of patriarchal authority remained in force. In an era before equitable alimony and restraining orders, wives of adulterous or abusive husbands also had strong economic incentives for remaining married.[63] The most common cause by far among female plaintiffs was thus not cruelty but desertion, seeking permission to remarry in the absence of a supportive spouse. Obtaining a divorce on any grounds required considerable persistence on the part of a plaintiff and remained uncommon before the nineteenth century.[64]

What did legal promotion of marital stability mean for women in general? Despite some modest gains for the wives of abusive or adulterous men, the current scholarly consensus is that patriarchal enforcement of Protestant marital and sexual standards had a disproportionately negative effect on women, regardless of marital status. A double standard in prosecution and punishment is particularly evident in courts’ enforcement of a wave of sixteenth-century marriage and police ordinances criminalizing sexual activity outside of marriage. Both single and married women generally received harsher sentences than their male partners—typically involving some combination of public shaming, imprisonment, flogging, and banishment—with a notable intensification during the seventeenth century.[65] Even in Sweden, where pre-Reformation punishment for fornication traditionally fell principally on the man, the burden of guilt shifted to their female partners unless they could be proven virgins (and in 1694 even that distinction was taken away).[66] Only the Genevan consistory appears to have pursued male and female fornicators and adulterers with the same aggressiveness, but even here there is a notable overall disparity in punishment.[67]

Protestant prosecution of fornication and adultery inevitably had a series of other legal repercussions, most notably an even greater stigmatization of illegitimate children. During the seventeenth century in particular, official illegitimacy rates dropped precipitously in German, Dutch, and English lands. Not surprisingly, anonymous abandonment of bastard newborns became more common, as did apparently outright infanticide. Many young, unmarried mothers alternately gave their babies to kin, friends, or strangers.[68] Here too, with the notable exception of Geneva and some of the Scottish kirks, the burden of prosecution more often fell on women than men.[69] Legal prosecution and punishment for abandonment and especially infanticide accordingly became more frequent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before literary and legal campaigns garnered greater sympathy for the fate of such women.[70]

The other domestic relationship that Reformed consistories in particular addressed was that between parents and their children. As in most cases of adultery, summons before a court usually stemmed from some perceived breach of public order, typically neighborhood complaints about either unruly or physically abused children. Traditional understanding of parental responsibilities and prerogatives prevailed, with the Genevan consistory occasionally admonishing parents (usually fathers) for being too harsh with their children, but more often encouraging greater strictness and even corporal punishment for unruly sons and daughters.[71] Only the fear of children being raised in the wrong religion consistently prompted Protestant legal authorities to cross the “threshold of honor” into the domestic sphere. Court cases on mixed marriages throughout Europe reveal considerable anxiety among parents and judges alike over the not-unfounded fear of child abduction by a spouse, other kin, or secular authorities of a different confession. Occasionally legal authorities even took children from widows or widowers and put them in orphanages to be raised “in the true faith.”[72]

In the Netherlands, Protestant secular authorities attempted to force the return of abducted children by closing Catholic churches and imprisoning priests. Within the Holy Roman Empire, disputes of this nature were increasingly appealed up the court system, occasionally even reaching the emperor himself.[73] Often, married couples from different confessions came up with their own imperfect solutions, such as raising girls in the faith of the mother and boys in the faith of the father, but even here such increasingly formalized arrangements sometimes resulted in legal action, well into the eighteenth century.

Beyond the household, the biggest impact of Protestant courts, especially consistories, seems to have been in resolving neighborhood quarrels of various sorts. In rural consistories and village courts, personal disputes constituted as much as half of the caseload. Here too, the most common insults—“thief” and “drunk” for men; “witch” and “slut” for women—tell us much about the perceived social order, in which explicitly evangelical values seem to have played a secondary role.[74] Prosecution followed the same traditional gendered norms, with men most likely to be summoned for assault, public drunkenness, or blasphemy, and women dominating the rolls in cases of fornication, slander, and magic.[75] The records of the early Genevan consistory suggest that women were also more likely to be attached to certain Catholic practices, such as possessing rosaries and saying prayers to the Virgin Mary.[76]

How much did the activity of Protestant legal courts influence individual and communal ideas and behavior? If we were to look for a lasting impact in such areas of religious conformity as drunkenness, gambling, dancing, and so on, we would naturally be disappointed. The Genevan consistory’s frequent excoriation of idleness and promotion of an industrious, frugal lifestyle might have resulted in some gradual internalization of a new moral ideal but this is extremely difficult to establish through court records. What we can say with some degree of confidence is that the new courts helped spread a Protestant language of sin and pollution, ultimately leading to a more secular notion of crime and deviancy. The pioneering work of Susanna Burghartz and Laura Gowing has shown how legal courts provided a venue for religious ideology to combine emotional and economic factors in defining all aspects of female sexuality.[77] The new domestic ideal, in particular, and in its greater premium on female “honor” resulted in ever greater suspicion not only of “women of bad reputation” (femmes de mauvais bruict) but any woman who dressed or coiffed herself provocatively, suggesting that she herself bore the primary responsibility for inciting sexual misconduct (Unzucht; paillardise).[78]

CONCLUSIONS

The geographical and chronological scope of this brief survey allows only three preliminary conclusions. First, both the Protestant law and new or reformed courts exhibited considerable continuity in form and substance. Canon law and ecclesiastical procedures continued to exercise considerable influence over all aspects of legislation and litigation. Exceptions to the dominant legal conservatism, such as the Protestant introduction of divorce and requirement of parental consent in marriage, unquestionably had a social impact, but much more so in later centuries.

Second, the appearance of new Protestant legal courts apparently coincided with a more general rise in overall civil and criminal litigation. Obviously such a complex phenomenon involved many factors, but we should not dismiss the role of Protestantism itself, particularly in its insistence on stricter enforcement of moral standards. The proliferation of new laws and courts, while conservative in substance, aggressively encouraged greater participation in litigation and prosecution. The Reformed Consistory in particular often served as a “social equalizer” in terms of providing greater legal access to all members of the community, particularly poor women.[79] At the same time, such individuals—again, particularly poor women—might just as easily find themselves on the accused side of increased legal activity, where personal reputation was often the most determinative factor. The much more intense criminal prosecution of fornication and witchcraft from the mid-sixteenth century on—a complicated subject with a rich historiography—was a heavily gendered affair, as was the greater prosecution of infanticide during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The disproportionate effect of Protestant legal courts on women in both respects in turn raises the question of popular manipulation. Certainly Protestant legal courts could be made to serve popular or private interests as much as magisterial or ministerial goals of religious reform. It is impossible from our perspective to gauge the genuine influence of religious teaching and beliefs in any litigation, even that of ecclesiastical courts. From the perspective of a plaintiff or informant, characterizing a conflict as a sin or a crime might merely be the most effective tactic to obtain the desired result. On the other hand, defendants might just as easily have been brought before church or civil courts out of genuine religious conviction or sense of danger posed to the community as a whole. All that can be stated with certainty is that the new legal courts provided additional spaces for conflict resolution, where the language, if not the beliefs, of new confessions prevailed.

Third and finally, this language and the thinking behind them deserve our attention as much as the ultimate decisions and punishments. In this respect, scholars have only just begun a shift from the perspective of the lawmakers and enforcers to that of the plaintiffs and the accused. This horizontal approach to confessionalization remains in its infancy, with considerable opportunities for discourse analysis of court protocols, particularly in the burgeoning field of the history of emotions. Words, gestures, smells, and sounds all evoked distinctive internal reactions in performers and observers alike. As we now recognize, the formation of distinctive Lutheran or Calvinist cultures was a gradual and multifarious process, in which legal courts did not so much form confessional identity in a determinative sense as provide a charged venue for such ideas to be worked out.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This chapter has greatly benefited from the suggestions and advice of several colleagues, particularly Sara Beam, Amy Burnett, Marc Forster, Mack Holt, Martin Ingram, Ray Mentzer, Hal Parker, Ulinka Rublack, Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Gerd Schwerhoff, Margo Todd, and Jeff Watt, many of whom shared forthcoming publications with me in manuscript form.

NOTES

1. Jeff Watt, “Gender on Trial: Consistories,” in Charles H. Parker and Gretchen Starr-Lebeau (eds.), Judging Faith, Punishing Sin: Inquisitions and Consistories in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). For the most thorough exposition of this perspective, see Robert M. Kingdon and Thomas Lambert, Reforming Geneva: Discipline, Faith and Anger in Calvin’s Geneva (Geneva: Droz, 2012). For a concise summary of the broader historiographical shift from a state-centered social discipline model of confessionalization to a more diverse and localized process, see the excellent introduction to Thomas Brockmann and Dieter J. Weiss (eds.), Das Konfessionalisierungsparadigma: Leistungen, Probleme, Grenzen (Munich: Aschendorff, 2013), 1–22.

2. Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Lederer and J. C. Grayson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972).

3. Christoph Strohm, “Konfessionelle Einflüsse auf das Werk reformierter Juristen—Fragestellungen, methodische Probleme, Hypothesen,” in Christoph Strohm and Heinrich de Wall (eds.), Konfessionalität und Jursiprudenz in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009), 7. See also Strohm, Calvinismus und Recht. Weltanschaulich-konfessionelle Aspekte im Werk reformierter Juisten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); and John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

4. Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, Vol I: 1600–1800, 2nd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012); Robert von Friedeburg, “Bausteine widertandsrechtlicher Argumente in der frühen Neuzeit (1523–1668): Konfessionen, klassische Verfassungsvorbilder, Naturrecht, direkter Befehl Gottes, historische Rechte der Gemeinwesen,” in Strohm, Konfessionalität und Jurisprudenz, 115–166.

5. See all the essays in Richard H. Helmholz (ed.), Canon Law in Protestant Lands (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992). For examples of Protest jurists resistant to the continuing influence of canon law, see Udo Wolter, “Die Fortgeltung des kanonischen Rechts und die Haltung der protestantischen Juristen zum kanonischen Recht in Deutschland bis in die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in ibid., 26 ff.; also Gerald Strauss, Law, Resistance, and the State: The Opposition to Roman Law in Reformation Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. 191–239.

6. Isabelle Deflers, “Konfession und Jurisprudenz bei Melanchton,” in Strohm, Konfessionalität und Jurisprudenz, 33–46.

7. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, 1883–1929), Tischreden 3, no. 3027.

8. “Von Ehesachen” (1530), in ibid., 30/III: 205.

9. See, most recently, Charles Donahue, “The Role of the Humanists and the Second Scholastic in the Development of European Marriage Law from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” in Jordan J. Ballor, Wim Decock, Michael Germann, and Laurent Waelkens (eds.), Law and Religion: The Legal Teachings of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 45–62. For the example of the Holy Roman Empire, see Dieter Schwab, Grundlagen und Gestalt der staatlichen Ehegesetzgebung in der Neuzeit bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bielefeld: Gieseking, 1967); Hartweg Dieterich, Das protestantische Eherecht in Deutschland bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Claudius Verlag, 1970); Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. 84–100.

10. Maurice E. Schild, “Ehe/Eherecht/Ehescheidung, VII Reformationszeit,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie 9 (1989): 339ff.; Alexandra Lutz, Ehepaare vor Gericht. Konflikte und Lebenswelten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2006), 134.

11. Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 269–270.

12. Raymond A. Mentzer, Jr., “The Reformed Churches of France and Medieval Canon Law,” in Helmholz, Canon Law, 176.

13. Ute Gerhard (ed.), Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1997). For a more progressive view of Lutheran legal changes, see Witte, Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

14. See Wilhelm Ebel, Geschichte des Gesetzgebung in Deutschland (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz, 1958), 58ff.; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 89–131; Uwe Sibeth, Eherecht und Staatsbildung. Ehegesetzgebung und Eherechtssprechung in der Landgrafschaft Hessen (-Kassel) in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Hessische Historische Kommission, 1994), 99ff.

15. Annaliese Sprengler-Ruppenthal, “Das kanonische Recht in Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Helmholz, Canon Law in Protestant Lands, 49–121; also Johannes Heckel, “Das Decretum Gratiani und das deutsche evangelische Kirchenrecht,” Studia Gratiani III (1955): 483ff.

16. While significant, such innovations seem to me inadequate support for John Witte Jr.’s claim that the Lutheran Reformation represented “a watershed in the flow of the Western legal tradition.” Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23.

17. See the example of marriage jurisdiction in Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 105–118.

18. See the example of the Swedish king in Mia Korpiola, Between Betrothal and Bedding: Marriage Formation in Sweden, 1200–1600 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009).

19. Sara Beam, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions: Consistories and Civil Authorities,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

20. See Heinz Schilling, “ ‘History of crime’ or ‘history of sin?’” in E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott (eds.), Politics and Society in Reformation Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 289–310; also Martin Ingram, “History of Sin or History of Crime? The Regulation of Personal Morality in England, 1450–1750,” in Heinz Schilling and Lars Behrisch (eds.), Institutionen, Instrumente und Akteure Sozialer Kontrolle und Disziplinierung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1999), 87–103.

21. William G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Republic (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 179; John Witte Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, vol. 1: Courtship, Engagement and Marriage (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 62–71; Bernard Lescaze, “Crime et criminels à Genève en 1572,” in Louis Binz (ed.), Pour une histoire qualitative. Etudes offerts à Sven Stelling-Michaud (Geneva: Presses universitaires romandes, 1975), 45–71.

22. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Chloë Kennedy, “Criminal Law and Religion in Post-Reformation Scotland,” Edinburgh Law Review 16 (2012): 178–197; Michael Graham, The Uses of Reform: “Godly Discipline” and Popular Behaviour in Scotland and Beyond, 1560–1610 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1996).

23. Serge Brunet, “Penser le Consistoire au début des trouble religeux (vers 1560–62),” in Mentzer, Françoise Moreil, and Philippe Chareyre, Dire l’interdit: The Vocabulary of Censure and Exclusion in the Early Modern Reformed Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 103–123.

24. Lars Behrisch, “Protestantische Sittenzucht und katholisches Ehegericht: Die Stadt Görlitz und das Bautzner Domkapitel im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Vera Isaiasz, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Monika Mommertz, and Matthias Pohlig (eds.) Stadt und Religion in der frühen Neuzeit. Soziale Ordnungen und ihre Repräsentationen (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2007), 33–66. Cf. the antagonistic relationship between the city of Freiburg and officiality of Constance described in Thomas Max Safley, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest: A Comparative Study, 1550–1600 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1984).

25. Christine Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2012), 45. See also Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2000); Judith Pollmann, “Off the Record: Problems in the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 423–438.

26. Ingram, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions: Church Courts in England,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin. See also R. B. Outhwaite, The Rise and Fall of the English Ecclesiastical Courts, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ronald A. Marchant, The Church under the Law: Justice, Administration and Discipline in the Diocese of York, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520–1570 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Michael G. Smith, The Church Courts, 1680–1840: From Canon to Ecclesiastical Law (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).

27. Ingram, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

28. Roland G. Usher, The Rise and Fall of the High Commission, 2nd ed. with intro. by Philip Tyler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Ingram, “Puritans and the Church Courts,” in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 58–91.

29. Ingram, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

30. Christopher W. Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 109ff.

31. Alistair Dougall, The Devil’s Book: Charles I, the Book of Sports and Puritanism in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011).

32. Sibeth, Eherecht und Staatsbildung, 179–180.

33. Ralf Frassek, Eherecht und Ehegerichtsbarkeit in der Reformationszeit. Der Aufbau neuer Rechtsstrukturen im sächsischen Raum unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Wirkungsgeschichte des Wittenberger Konsistoriums (Tübingen: Mohr, 2005).

34. Walther Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht und Genfer Konsistorium, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1932–42); Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 134–143.

35. The major exceptions among Lutheran consistories are those of Schleswig-Holstein: Lutz, Ehepaare vor Gericht, 68.

36. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism; Graham, The Uses of Reform.

37. Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society, trans. Stephen G. Burnett (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992); Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Dorf und Religion: Reformierte Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1995); Schmidt, “Chorgerichte und Kirchenkonvente. Ein strukturelle Vergleich,” in Franz Quarthal and Peter Blickle (eds.), Grenzerfahrungen—Grenzüberschreitungen. Oberschwaben und der Schweiz im späten Mittelalter und in der Frühneuzeit (Stuttgart, 1997); Timothy Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999); Paul Münch, Zucht und Ordnung. Reformierte Kirchenverfassungen im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert (Nassau-Dillenburg, Kurpfalz, Hessen-Kassel) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978).

38. Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

39. “Consistory of Geneva, 1559–69,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 38 (1976): 467. See esp. Mentzer, “Local Contexts and Regional Variations: Consistories,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

40. Murdock, “Excommunication and Moral Discipline in Hungarian Reformed Communities,” in Dire l’interdit, 213; Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

41. Todd, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions: Consistories,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

42. Ibid.; Jeffrey Watt, “Women and the Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (1993): 429–439; Suzannah Lipscomb, “Refractory Women: The Limits of Power in the French Reformed Church,” in Dire l’interdit, 19–24; Mentzer, “Marking the Taboo: Excommunication in French Reformed Churches,” in Mentzer (ed.), Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in Reformed Tradition (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Studies, 2002), 124.

43. Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 214ff.

44. Todd, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions”; Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 228–232.

45. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors, 199.

46. Murdock, “Excommunication and Moral Discipline”, in Dire l’interdit, 201–218; Edwin Bezzina, “The Consistory of Loudon, 1589–1602,” in ibid., 241, passim.

47. Todd, “ ‘None to Haunt, Frequent, nor Intercommune with Them’: The Problem of Excommunication in the Scottish Kirk,” in Mentzer, Dire l’interdit, 219–235.

48. Andrew Spicer, “L’Evesque en soit adverty’: Excommunication in the Exile Congregations,” in Mentzer, Dire l’interdit, 131.

49. Spicer, “Excommunication,” 125–148; Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 164–181.

50. Todd, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions.”

51. Robert Kingdon, “Les ‘supporteurs’ de la discipline ecclésiastique à Genève au Temps du Calvin,” in Dire l’interdit, 170.

52. Salomon Rizzo, “‘Qui refusera la Réconciliation sera l’interdit de la sainte Cène’: Entre exclusion et integration, la regulation consistoriale des conflits sociaux à Genève, 17–18. s.,” in Dire l’interdit, 179–199.

53. Lipscomb, “Refractory Women,” in Dire l’interdit, 13–28; also Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16–42. For a non-gendered characterization of such gossip networks, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, the Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

54. Todd, “Tribunals and Jurisdictions.”

55. Pollmann, “Honor, Gender, and Discipline in Dutch Reformed Churches,” in Dire l’interdit,” 29–42.

56. Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 39ff.

57. Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit. Orte der Unzucht. Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1999).

58. For a presentation of the companionate ideal, see Heide Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For a counter-example, see Lutz, Ehepaare, 373ff.

59. Watt, Making of Modern Marriage, 58–59; Safley, Let No Man Put Asunder, 170ff.; Cornelia Seeger, Nullité de marriage, divorce et separation de corps à Genève au temps de Calvin: Fondements doctrinaux, loi et jurisprudence (Lausanne: Société d’histoire de la Suisse romande, 1989), 305–374.

60. Manon van der Heijden, “Punishment versus Reconciliation: Marriage Control in 16th- and 17th-Century Holland,” in Herman Roodenburg and Peter Spierenburg (eds.), Social Control in Europe. Volume I: 1500–1800 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 55–77.

61. Dagmar Freist, Glaube—Liebe—Zwietracht. Konfessionell gemischte Ehen in Deutschland in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2017); Cecila Cristellon, “Due fedi in un corpo. Matrimoni misti fra delicta, carnis, scandalo, seduzione e sacramento nell’Europa di età moderna,” Quaderni Storici 145 (2014): 1–29.

62. Pollmann, “Honor, Gender, and Discipline,” 32–33.

63. Watt, “Gender on Trial,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

64. Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Sylvia Möhle, Ehekonflikte und sozialer Wandel. Göttingen 1740–1840 (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1997), 34–39; Lutz, Ehepaare, 127ff.; Siegrid Westphal, Ehen vor Gericht—Scheidungen und ihre Folgen am Reichskammergericht (Wetzler: Bechstein, 2008); Robert Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

65. Rublack, Crimes of Women; Renate Dürr, Mägde in der Stadt. Das Beispiel Schwäbisch Hall in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1995); Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 224–259.

66. Korpiola, Between Betrothal and Bedding.

67. Sara Beam has found that between 1540 and 1675, twelve women were executed in Geneva for adultery (versus seven men) and twenty-eight banished (versus twenty men). I am grateful to the author for sharing with me the manuscript of her forthcoming article, “Adultère, indices médiceux et le recul de la torture au XVIIe siècle.”

68. Harrington, The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Rainer Beck, “Illegitimität und voreheliche Sexualität in der ländlichen Gesellschaft Bayers während des Ancein régime,” in Richard van Dülmen (ed.), Studien zur historischen Kulturforschung 4, Dynamik der Tradition (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1992), 137–212; Stefan Breit, Leichtfertigkeit und ländliche Gesellschaft. Voreheliche Sexualität in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991).

69. Karen E. Spierling, “Putting Order to Disorder: Illegitimate Children, Their Parents, and the Consistory in Reformation Geneva,” in Dire l’interdit, 43–62; Todd, Culture of Protestantism, 283–284.

70. Otto Ulbricht, Kindsmord und Aufklärung in Deutschland (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990).

71. Schilling, “Reform and Supervision of Family Life in Germany and the Netherlands,” in Mentzer, Sin and the Calvinists, 15–62.

72. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Freist, Glaube—Liebe—Zwietracht.

73. Freist, “Der Fall von Albini. Rechtsstreitigkeiten um die väterliche Gewalt in konfessionell gemischten Ehen,” in Siegrid Westphal (ed.), In eigener Sache. Frauen vor den höchsten Gerichten des Alten Reiches (Cologne/Vienna: Böhlau, 2005), 245–270.

74. Mentzer, “La Réforme calviniste des moeurs à Nîmes,” in La construction de l’Identité réformée au XVIème et XVIIème siècles: le role des consistoires (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 17–48; Inken Schmidt-Voges, “The Ambivalence of Order: Gender and Peace in Domestic Litigation in 18th Century Germany,” in Karin Gottschalk (ed.), Gender Differences in European Legal Cultures: Historical Perspectives (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 71–82. See similar patterns in England: Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

75. Watt, “Settling Quarrels and Nurturing Repentance: The Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva,” in Sara K. Barker (ed.), Revisiting Geneva: Robert Kingdon and the Coming of the French Wars of Religion (St. Andrews: Centre for French History and Culture of the University of St. Andrews, 2012), 71–84; Heinrich Richard Schmidt, “La violence des hommes devant la justice dans une perspective européenne comparée,” in Danièle Tosato-Rigo and Nicole Staremberg Goy (eds.), Sous l’oeil du consistoire: sources consistoriales et histoire du contrôle social sous l’Ancien Régime, special issue of Études de Lettres (2004), 193–212.

76. Watt, “Gender on Trial,” in Judging Faith, Punishing Sin.

77. Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit, Orte der Unzucht; Gowing, Domestic Dangers.

78. Mentzer, “La Réforme calviniste,” 34; Murdock, “The Elders’ Gaze: Women and Consistorial Discipline in Late Sixteenth-Century France,” in Amy Nelson Burnett (ed.), John Calvin, Myth and Reality: Images and Impact of Geneva’s Reformer (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 69–90.

79. Lipscomb, “Refractory Women,” 24.

FURTHER READING

Harrington, Joel F. Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Helmholz, Richard H. (ed.) Canon Law in Protestant Lands. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992.

Korpiola, Mia. Between Betrothal and Bedding: Marriage Formation in Sweden, 1200–1600. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009.

Mentzer, Raymond, Françoise Moreil, and Philippe Chareyrex (eds.) Dire l’interdit: The Vocabulary of Censure and Exclusion in the Early Modern Reformed Tradition. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010.

Outhwaite, R. B. The Rise and Fall of the English Ecclesiastical Courts, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Parker, Charles H. and Gretchen Starr-Lebeau (eds.) Judging Faith, Punishing Sin: Inquisitions and Consistories in the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Todd, Margo. The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Witte, John, Jr. Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 25

RURAL SOCIETY

BEAT KÜMIN

NOW, dear brother and good friend, since, though not called by us, you have come here at the command of our lord [the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach] … you should take heed of our desires and wishes about how you should comport yourself in the future.

1. We hold you to be no lord but a servant and employee of the community, and you have not to command us, but we to command you. And we therefore command you to proclaim faithfully the Gospel and the Word of God loud and clear according to the truth and uncorrupted by human teachings.

2. If, however, you behave to the contrary and play the lord and live as you please, you should know that we will not only regard you as a false servant, but we will drive you like a ravening wolf into the net and tolerate you among us no more.

Item, in the past we often had trouble and enmity from the priests, who burdened us with collections, mass stipends, fees for the sacraments, and other inventions, which cost us a lot of money. Now, however, since we have been taught by the Gospel that these things are given to us freely by the Lord [Matt. 10:8] …, it is our opinion and decision that we are not legally obliged to pay you or anyone else such payments.[1]

In one of the most iconic documents of the rural Reformation dating from 1524, the parishioners of Wendelstein in Franconia left a new pastor appointed by their lord in little doubt about their beliefs and expectations. Here we are, literally at grass-roots level, but Luther’s call for the preaching of the “pure Gospel” echoes loud and clear. Alongside, the mayor and commune highlighted a willingness to serve and modest financial expectations as essential attributes of any good shepherd. The delicate balancing of theological, seigneurial, and local priorities will form the principal theme of this short survey.

Well into the nineteenth century, the (vast) majority of Europeans lived in the countryside. They obtained a livelihood through various forms of agriculture, often arable husbandry centered on nucleated villages, but also pastoral economies with scattered settlements, areas of market gardening (catering for the growing proportion of metropolitan consumers), regions specializing in mining, and pockets of proto-industrial (especially textile) production. The entire Continent depended on the smooth operation of its primary sector, so that several years of bad harvests—as in the 1590s—brought widespread hardship and suffering, in places even famine.[2]

In stark contrast to its significance, rural society long remained on the margins of Reformation scholarship. A religion based on the Word appeared beyond the grasp of a largely illiterate peasantry and attention thus focused on theologians, nobles, and the 10–20 percent of people who lived in towns, i.e., groups with easier access to education, sermons, and the new medium of print.[3] Echoing contemporary voices—particularly exasperated clerics complaining about the lack of pious commitment and doctrinal knowledge—historians classed country folk as at best superficially Christianized until the onset of orchestrated confessionalization campaigns from the late sixteenth century. For them, the rural world was one of “popular religion,” where a shallow familiarity with the rituals and prayers of the official church vied with pagan beliefs, recourse to soothsayers, and a great fear of the dark forces of witchcraft.[4]

The picture started to change from the 1970s, when the “early bourgeois revolution” (a Marxist interpretation of the Peasants’ War in the former GDR) and the concepts of “communalism”/“Communal Reformation” (observing comparable collective engagement in towns and villages) afforded the rural masses real agency in the religious sphere. Electrified by prospective access to the word of God, they—as we learnt from greater engagement with non-elite sources—yearned for evangelical preachers and hoped to eliminate worldly inequities through the application of “divine law,” originally by means of petitions and articles addressed to their superiors, but ultimately also by force.[5] Over the last few decades, this shift in perspective has spread well beyond the German lands and into the late medieval period. In England, for example, Eamon Duffy has found both vibrant support for the principal doctrines of the pre-Reformation Church and much overlap between the worlds of learned/urban and popular/rural religion. Regular Mass attendance, a highly diversified cult of saints, and numerous forms of prayers for the dead characterized the spiritual life of “corporate Christians” up and down the country who poured vast resources into their quest for salvation.[6] Given evidence of popular support for both traditional and reformist beliefs, scholars have come to question any communal predisposition for Catholicism or Protestantism, seeing local decisions as dependent on a host of personal, political, and socioeconomic, as well as confessional, factors.[7]

In what follows, the focus will rest firmly on the mainstream confessions, with more radical and marginal groups examined elsewhere in this volume.[8] Regionally and contextually, coverage will include the “default” position of strong princely/state control (as in England, Sweden, and most German territories) as well as pockets of substantial regional autonomy in the Holy Roman Empire. The argument is structured in four parts: following a sketch of the religious landscape in the late Middle Ages (i), attention turns to the spread of Lutheran beliefs in Central and Northern Europe (ii) and then to areas shaped by the Swiss Reformation and bi-confessional regimes (iii). The conclusion reassesses the factors that shaped and transformed religious knowledge outside the big centers and brought country folk to accept or reject the new doctrines.

(I) RURAL RELIGION IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

In an influential study first published nearly a century ago, Johan Huizinga drew a sharp distinction between the vibrant intellectual and ecclesiastical life in the high Middle Ages and a period of decline on the eve of the Reformation.[9] This notion has since been thoroughly reassessed: nobody disputes the—sometimes grave—issues of clerical non-residence, moral failures, and resource appropriations which obstructed an effective cure of souls, but there were great regional variations and also contrasting tendencies.[10] For a start, ecclesiastical authorities had laid good foundations for the spread of (at least elementary) religious knowledge throughout the Christian lands. Arguably the single most influential moment was Lateran IV, a council which required all men and women to receive the key sacraments in their local church. According to canon 21:

All the faithful of both sexes shall after they have reached the age of discretion faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their own [parish] priest and perform to the best of their ability the penance imposed, receiving reverently at least at Easter the sacrament of the Eucharist.[11]

Confession allowed priests to come face-to-face with their flock, testing awareness of the fundamentals of faith and hearing whether these were adhered to in everyday life. To support them in this difficult and delicate task, scribes produced during the thirteenth century a raft of officially-sanctioned advisory literature. Not every clerk acquired such books, of course (some in fact could not even read), but the possibility of “trickling down” from well-educated priests or sharing “best practice” among colleagues should not be underestimated and the sheer number of surviving texts testifies to a substantial pastoral offensive.[12] Then, from about the same time, there was the canon law expectation of regular visitations, i.e., the personal supervision of conditions on the ground by bishops or archdeacons. Many prelates neglected this duty because of secular or political distractions, but others went round their territories to interrogate parish representatives about the church fabric/finances, furnishings, worship, clerical diligence, and lay behavior. Once completed, the analysis of written returns by diocesan officials could lead to follow-up proceedings, court cases, and new synodal legislation, all with a view to improving religious provision (as well as protecting church assets).[13]

But the inculcation of Christian values was not just a top-down process. Prosperous individuals, religious guilds, and whole communities embarked on a remarkable campaign to “increase divine service.” On closer inspection, English chantries—once believed to be signs of individualization and separation—augmented the spiritual capital of the parish through the provision of clerks, resources, and musical literature; in parts of Southern France, literally everyone joined the local Saint Esprit fraternity and in Lombardy the consortia plebis had a similarly inclusive appeal.[14] In the south western parts of the Holy Roman Empire (as indeed elsewhere), we can trace a wave of collective and communal foundations; villagers clubbing together to endow a Mass, a stipendiary priest or—if they lived at some distance from the nearest church—a chapel of ease, sometimes even an entirely new parish. English women contributed through fundraising initiatives, church decorations, and the foundation of maidens’ guilds. Throughout Europe, again from around the thirteenth century, the emergence of distinct lay officials (churchwardens, Heiligenpfleger, trésoriers, operai) with independent funds allowed targeted enhancement of religious services. At Gries (South Tyrol) in 1422, for example, Jacob Gendlein and Hans Schücz, “who had both been elected and asked by the whole commune to serve as wardens of Our Lady parish” used income from various rents and collections to provide the church with candles, incense, and a fasting cloth.[15] In the politically autonomous valleys around Lake Lucerne, the nucleus of the Swiss Confederation, numerous communes even acquired the elusive “crown jewel” of collective influence: the right to appoint their own priest. The “mayor and common parishioners” of the tiny peasant republic of Gersau, for example, bought the advowson of their St. Marcellus church from a neighboring patrician in 1483.[16]

Not everything emerging from this engagement was strictly “orthodox” and to the taste of the leading university theologians at Basle, Prague, and the Sorbonne. Rural people drew no firm boundaries between religious and secular sociability, having no qualms about exuberant festivities on their church dedication days; selling home-brewed ale for the benefit of their fabric funds; or asking clergymen to sprinkle holy water over fields and meadows during the “beating of the bounds”—as we have seen, a good harvest was the lifeblood of premodern society and justified the tapping of all available powers.[17]

A minority, furthermore, developed fundamental doubts about the prevailing doctrines and rituals which they perceived to fall increasingly out of line with early Christian practice. Late medieval movements like the Hussites in Bohemia and the Lollards in England resented the steady accumulation of ecclesiastical wealth and the preoccupation with images, pilgrimages, and good works, desiring to reconnect more closely again with Scripture and the Early Church. While the Czech reformers survived the execution of founder Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415 to establish fully fledged alternative churches (partly due to congenial political and national circumstances), the English followers of Wyclif tended to gather in “known houses” (not least in secluded rural areas such as the Chilterns and Cotswolds), keeping their heads down and continuing to attend parish services. Even so, some elements of their spirituality—especially the focus on the Word, the critique of clerical prerogatives, new emphases in pious giving—provide intriguing precursors to the Reformation.[18]

(II) THE RURAL REFORMATION IN THE LUTHERAN HEARTLANDS

Luther’s message, therefore, did not hit upon a dumb and disinterested peasantry, but a network of informed, spiritually attuned, if extremely heterogeneous communities.[19] This goes some way toward explaining the passions roused among early supporters as well as opponents. But how could complex theological ideas penetrate beyond the intellectual and urban centers in the first place? There has been extensive debate on this issue, with some scholars privileging the impact of the first mass medium of print, others—because of prevailing illiteracy—visual communication using woodcuts (some of which advanced evangelical positions through Karsthans, a country laborer carrying a hoe (see Figure 25.1)). For a peasant context the key must surely lie in oral dissemination. The early Reformation saw unprecedented mouth-to-mouth propaganda in streets, markets, taverns, and private houses, alimented and sustained by a massive revival of preaching (extending well beyond the church pulpit into public space).[20] And yet, communication media should not be seen in isolation, least of all in the early German Reformation: sermons obviously drew on the published outputs of the leading Humanists and reformers; broadsheets fused written and visual elements into a powerful hybrid (with messages accessible at different levels, be it the sometimes crude depiction of hate figures like the Pope as Antichrist or a more detailed reasoning accessible through the commentary); while even a quintessentially oral genre like singing owed its ability to forge confessional identities to the surging output of hymn books produced by printers up and down the land.[21]

There can be no doubt about the popular appetite for the Gospel. This is how the commune of Blaufelden north of Schwäbisch-Hall pleaded with the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach in 1525:

We have a parish priest … who [is] of no use to the community, but … harmful, scandalous and ruinous to the salvation of souls … [He] is so infected with bad breath … that he is repulsive … Moreover, he cannot preach the holy and divine word to us … everything is concentrated on confession fees, … making offerings, founding anniversary masses … To sum up, he stinks of greed … [However,] We have here a preacher, the Rev. Hans Schilling … who preaches at our request. We can hear his sermons and he has instructed us diligently from holy Scripture … and that we should be subject and obedient to our authorities … we beg your grace to dismiss the above-mentioned parish priest and confer the parish on the Rev. Hans Schilling, so that we might be spiritually nourished by the divine Word.[22]

Small wonder that such intense engagement with religious issues produced a wide spectrum of opinions. What Luther denounced as ignorance and misunderstanding, most famously in Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants of 1525, should be seen as the result of diverging interpretations of principles like sola scriptura and diametrically opposed priorities regarding the balance of spiritual and worldly concerns. What counted for rural flocks in particular, according to an analysis of contemporary articles and pamphlets, were not so much the subtleties of Luther’s doctrine of justification, but direct and unmediated access to the Gospels, alongside the rights to choose their own pastors and to align the local church with existing communal organization. While town burghers concurred on these points, the rural Reformation insisted more strongly on the “this-worldly” applicability of divine law, i.e., the will of God as revealed in the Bible, which threatened established political authority as well as the feudal order.[23]

FIGURE 25.1 The Karsthans dialogue of contested authorship, first published at Strasbourg in 1521 and reprinted several times, posits a “good” peasant with evangelical leanings as arbiter between Luther (far left) and the Franciscan Thomas Murner (with the cat’s head), i.e., learned advocates of the new and old faith. Reformation broadsheets and pamphlets skillfully combined the use of written and visual media.

© <http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id311141420>: Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (from Hist. eccl. E. 376, 26; accessed April 15, 2015).

Calls for free access to natural resources and the abolition of serfdom illustrate the movement’s revolutionary potential. In the spring of 1524, the peasants of Stühlingen and Lupfen argued that “[w]‌ild game should be totally free … God and common law say that wild game was created to meet the needs of the common man” and that “[b]y right every man is born free. Neither we nor our forebears have committed any crime for which we should be made serfs.”[24] Most famously of all, the Upper Swabian bands assembled around Memmingen in February 1525 resented that
it has been the custom for us to be regarded as a lord’s personal property, which is deplorable since Christ redeemed us all with the shedding of his precious blood – the shepherd as well as the most highly placed, without exception. Thus, Scripture establishes that we are and will be free. (Isaiah 53, I Peter I, I Corinthians 7.) Not that we want to be completely free, with no authority over us. God does not teach us this.

(Romans 13, Wisdom 6, 1 Peter 2.)

Even during a military campaign, the interweaving of heated discussion and written exposition is tangible, as is the combination of practical secular concerns with biblical expertise, the latter personified by the co-authors of the Twelve Articles: the journeyman furrier Sebastian Lotzer and the Memmingen preacher Christoph Schappeler.[25]

The Peasants’ War of 1524–1526, easily the biggest premodern rising on German soil, had complex origins, including economic and political discontent, but many indicators point to the catalytic role of reformed ideas in general and anticlerical feelings in particular.[26] Take the selective targeting of wealthy monastic institutions (which straddled all the contentious spheres) and the sheer passion with which peasants attacked symbols of the old religion. At times, the violence took the form of rituals of inversion. Blesy Krieg was executed for the following deeds:

in the peasants’ rebellion he, along with others, entered the convent at Oberried [near Freiburg im Breisgau], therein smashed the pyx containing the Host with a black-smith’s hammer; carried the Host to the altar in a monstrance, which he then also smashed; thereafter took the Host from the monstrance and laid it on the altar … Thereupon he donned priest’s robes, sang Mass, elevated the Host which he had removed from the monstrance in mockery and contempt, displayed it to the others, who had to ring the Sanctus bells, and set it down again. Then he consumed the Host in the manner of a priest.[27]

After the defeat of the peasants, princes (acting as “emergency bishops”) and state-approved church authorities took charge of the institutionalization of reform. Ernestine Saxony led the way with a combination of visitations, ecclesiastical ordinances, and the new office of superintendent to oversee the implementation of all policy decisions. Alongside, Luther produced a series of practical aids assisting the internalization of the new faith: hymns for use in services as well as domestic religious observances; printed sermons on a wide range of practical and doctrinal issues (e.g., On the Estate of Marriage, 1522) and, above all, question-and-answer booklets containing brief expositions of scriptural texts and all the main tenets of reformed belief. In the preface to his famous Short Catechism of 1529, he explained:

In setting forth … Christian doctrine in such a simple, concise, and easy form, I have been compelled and driven by the wretched and lamentable state of affairs which I discovered lately when I acted as inspector. Merciful God, what misery I have seen, the common people knowing nothing at all of Christian doctrine, especially in the villages! and unfortunately many pastors are wellnigh unskilled and incapable of teaching; and though all are called Christians and partake of the Holy Sacrament, they know neither the Lord’s Prayer, nor the Creed, nor the Ten Commandments, but live like the poor cattle and senseless swine, though, now that the Gospel is come they have learnt well enough how they may abuse their liberty.[28]

At this early stage, progress was hampered by a lack of suitably enthusiastic and qualified personnel. Surveying adherence to recent Reformation articles in its territory, the city council of Ulm found in 1531 that Hans Zimmermann, chaplain at Geislingen, “believed what the … approved [General] Councils, believed. He also held that the Mass was right,” while Jeorius Bretzel, parson at Radelstetten, “is greatly confused on the Mass and the Sacrament.”[29] It was undoubtedly difficult to get the message across, certainly in the short- to medium-term and especially in the countryside. The formation of a confession proved a mammoth task stretching over several generations, requiring the eradication of practices like prayers for the dead or invocation of saints and sustained efforts to forge new religious identities. Visitation records continued to paint a rather dismal picture of Catholic survival and limited familiarity with reformed principles until at least the late sixteenth century, even though their inbuilt negative bias needs to be borne in mind.[30] In Upper Hesse, it took local exposure to rival Calvinist communities—and thus an alternative model of Protestantism—for a genuinely Lutheran consciousness to develop after the Thirty Years War.[31]

Important for the consolidation of the new church were thus the gradual emergence of a university-educated clerical profession, adequately supported by state-funded stipends/pensions, and the transformation of parish parsonages into “model” godly households, where ministers’ wives assisted their husbands in a range of tasks; where educational and charitable events found a congenial home; and where family members provided parishioners with first-hand impressions of what a Christian life might look like. Not all lived up to lofty ideals, but it is evident that many parsonages became spiritual and cultural centers in their local communities.[32] The most detailed investigation into a princely Reformation in the countryside, carried out for Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, confirms the importance of an orchestrated campaign involving central guidance through ordinances, the establishment of state-controlled ecclesiastical government (based on superintendents, a territorial consistory, and effective visitations—a system evolving well into the 1560s), pressure for a reformation of manners (regarding moral behavior, sexual relations, and conviviality) alongside improved clerical education and maintenance. Even so, village culture and popular spirituality continued to be characterized more by continuities than changes, with strong resistance against the reformers’ disciplinarian and disenchantment agendas in particular. Peasants were not “passive participants” in these processes—“parish politics,” not least the village elites’ desire to restrict the growing power of pastors, kept the overall impact of religious change limited until the early seventeenth century.[33]

The overall impression of very gradual transformations institutionalized “from above” applies equally to Scandinavia, the only other European region where Lutheranism acquired the status of a state religion. As in the empire, there were evangelical stirrings in cities like Malmö from the mid-1520s and scattered calls for the preaching of the pure Gospel, but the northernmost countries as a whole did not become solidly Protestant until the seventeenth century. Even in Denmark, where “popular support for the Reformation was undoubtedly strongest,” it proved enormously difficult to eradicate time-honored customs. Here, the evangelical message was spread not just by theologians and church officials, but also unorthodox figures like lay prophets.[34] Early reformist legislation sought to leverage anticlerical sentiment caused by financial extractions, arbitrary excommunications, and strict insistence on feast day observance: article 10 of the Ordinances of Västerås (1527), for example, spoke very directly to the peasantry by stating that for “desecration of holy days, no penalty is to be imposed on those who have been tilling the ground, or fishing, or catching birds; but persons discovered hunting or quarrelling shall be fined.” Gradually, parishioners got used to the new vernacular services, hymns, communion in both kinds, and Lutheran rectories, but there was limited spiritual engagement with the new religion in the first decades. Bishop Palladius of Lund lamented in 1557 that country folk remained “rooted in profound darkness … worshipped the old images … invoked the Virgin Mary … [and] continued to go on pilgrimages.”[35] Eventually, from the 1620s, a body of elders had to be appointed in every parish, with a view to bringing religious life more in line with the Gospel. In quarterly meetings with the minister, they would discuss all local problems and review the spiritual engagement and moral behavior of their neighbors. By that point, evidence for proto-Pietist leanings toward deeper religious experience can also be found.[36]

Outside of Denmark, Protestantism had an even more difficult start. The character of religious change in the region was that of a “princely Reformation,” albeit one limited by occasional rural rebellions—like the “church bell revolt” of 1531–1533 against confiscations imposed by King Gustavus I of Sweden to repay some of his debts—and a tradition of self-government at parish level, giving each Swedish and Finnish church a distinct local profile and some “de facto independence.”[37] Important formal steps were the Lutheran changes in worship agreed upon by the Swedish Parliament of 1544, the church refurbishment campaign from the 1570s, and above all the broad support for the Augsburg Confession at the Synod of Uppsala 1593, the latter also intended as a signal to the incoming Catholic monarch Sigismund of Poland. Difficulties remained in outlying areas like the eastern Finnish borderlands, where Russian orthodoxy commanded much loyalty, and Lapland, where evangelical missionaries faced the additional complications of an indigenous population with very different cultural traditions.[38]

Areas with disproportionate extents of political autonomy allow us rare “bottom-up” perspectives. A case in point is Dithmarschen on the North Sea coast, effectively a self-governing federation of parish republics until the military conquest by Denmark and Holstein in 1559.[39] Late medieval spirituality was “typical” in its mixture of Catholic fervor (for masses, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages) and folkloric elements. The richly ornamented church of the only “urban” community, Meldorf, testifies to sustained collective investment and intense communal pride. In 1524, its parson Nicolaus Boje—a graduate from a local family—invited the evangelical preacher Heinrich von Zütphen into the country. This proved a brave and premature move, as Dithmarschen had a reputation for resenting interference in its affairs. Only the year before, the federal regents (a body known as the 48) had unilaterally stripped the Dean of Hamburg of all his ecclesiastical and jurisdictional rights. Zütphen’s previous hosts, the city magistrates of Bremen, hesitated to release him, because—as we know from no lesser authority than Luther himself—“they knew well enough what kind of people those from Dithmarschen were.”[40] Having decided to bring the Gospel to the peasants, Zütphen and his sermons did gain support, but the stalwarts of the old faith reacted immediately, especially regents like Peter Swyn who feared that the Reformation would bring disorder and foreign policy complications. Following a summary trial, Zütphen was executed on December 10, 1524. The eventual adoption of the Reformation in 1533 again owed less to grass-roots pressure than political considerations, especially the Protestant ascendancy in neighboring Hanseatic cities. The new order took the form of a territorial church adapted to a republican framework. Four superintendents exercised spiritual authority under the overall direction of the regents, gradually fostering allegiance to Lutheran principles even before the forced takeover by Protestant neighbors.[41]

Clearer examples of evangelical zeal derive from “imperial villages,” communities directly subjected to the emperor. Over one hundred are known to have existed in the Middle Ages and, like other immediate estates, Reichsdörfer obtained the right to choose their confession.[42] The handful which preserved this special status until the end of the empire all turned Lutheran. Looking a little more closely at Gochsheim and Sennfeld near Schweinfurt, local government was exercised by the emperor’s representative (Reichsvogt) and a court of peasant jurors, who also appointed the churchwardens. Late medieval piety seems to have flourished, as suggested by morning Mass endowments in the church of Gochsheim and the dependent chapel at Sennfeld. Yet, for unrecorded reasons, both villages adopted the Reformation in 1540, with Sennfeld upgrading to full parish status at the same time and the rights of advowson passing to the communes soon after.[43]

Protestantism attracted widespread support and major church investment (see Figure 25.2), although this may also have served to keep the Catholic Reichsvogt—from 1575 the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg—at bay. When one of the latter’s officials, Christoph Heinrich von Erthal, desired burial at Gochsheim in 1592, the village mayor (Reichsschultheiss) insisted that the service should be conducted by their Lutheran pastor rather than a priest. This triggered a series of conflicts, culminating in absorption into Würzburg territory during the Thirty Years War. Formally, the takeover could be reversed with Swedish help in 1649, but the relationship with Würzburg remained difficult until the end of the empire.[44]

FIGURE 25.2 The post-Reformation refurbishment of the parish church of St. Michael in the imperial village of Gochsheim near Schweinfurt (present-day Bavaria) included a new font in 1545, a whole-scale renovation in 1583, and this octagonal stone pulpit. Installed in 1589, it was gradually embellished with relief sculptures and inscriptions. The middle panel features an Old Testament text (“Suchet den Herrn, weil er zu finden ist; rufet ihn an, weil er nahe ist”: Isaiah 55:6), those to the left and right a crucifix and the Apostle St. Peter, above the names of local pastors and churchwardens.

Picture by the author.

(III) RURAL RELIGION IN THE ORBIT OF THE SWISS REFORMATION

The origins, institutionalization, and spread of the reform movements led by Huldrych Zwingli, Jean Calvin, and their successors in Swiss city states have been well-studied. As in Lutheran areas, urban elites found it initially difficult to convince rural subjects of the need for fundamental religious and cultural change. Bern faced major resistance in its remote, semi-autonomous Oberland valleys and the French-speaking Pays de Vaud, but even in the immediate surroundings of the capital, implanting the new faith required sustained negotiation with local communities. Preaching the Gospel, enhanced pastoral care, and local influence on ecclesiastical jurisdiction were generally welcome, the disciplinarian agenda rather less so—mirroring the pattern in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach.[45]

Comparatively less attention has been paid to the situation in rural cantons and smaller territories of the Confederation. Taking Glarus—where Zwingli had held his first ecclesiastical post—as an example, reformed ideas initially attracted followers among the lower social groups represented in the decision-making assembly (Landsgemeinde), whereas the leading families stayed loyal to the old religion (just like in Dithmarschen). The principal clerical supporter was Fridolin Brunner, parish priest at Mollis, while his colleague in Glarus itself, Valentin Tschudi, steered a more moderate course. In a first step taken in 1525, the Landsgemeinde abolished the annual pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Einsiedeln, with iconoclastic riots in several parishes fueling religious tensions by 1528. Following two religious civil wars which nearly split the Confederation, a 1532 treaty committed Glarus to the principle of confessional parity. Adherents of Rome soon found themselves in a minority, despite sustained re-catholicization attempts by the five Forest Cantons in the 1560s. Politically, Glarus divided into two more or less autonomous parts, albeit without a formal separation into half-cantons (as happened in nearby Appenzell in 1597). Catholics now looked toward Schwyz and the Capuchin order for spiritual and practical support, evangelicals to the Reformed Church in Zurich.[46]

Switzerland underlines the point that rural communities with the power to make their own decisions did not necessarily adopt the Reformation. Around Lake Lucerne, the founding cantons had acquired such extensive ecclesiastical control over the course of the late Middle Ages that they managed to mold Catholicism to their liking: the influence of spiritual courts was all but gone, the power of bishops limited, and many parishes appointed their own priests (on conditions specified in temporary employment contracts known as Bestallungsbriefe). Prayers for the dead and a vibrant cult of saints have characterized “popular” religion in the area right into the modern period.[47] Rural Obwalden forcefully declined an invitation from the council of Zurich to attend a theological disputation on October 25, 1523:

We are always glad to be at your service, but we have no specially well-learned people, only pious and reverend priests who expound to us the holy Gospel and other holy Scriptures, such as were expounded to our forefathers and as the holy Popes and the Council have commanded us. This will we follow and believe to our lives’ end, and sooner suffer death therefor, until Pope and Council command us the contrary … Moreover, we are not disposed to believe that our Lord God has bestowed so much grace on Zwingli, more than on the dear Saints and Doctors, all of whom suffered death and martyrdom for the Faith’s sake: and we have not been specially informed that he leads a spiritual life above all others, but rather that he is more given to disturbance than to peace and quiet … [I]‌f we had hold of him and could contrive to make our own reckoning with him, we should so reward him that he would never do any more.[48]

Like its neighbors and military protectors, the rural republic of Gersau reveals little trace of evangelical sympathies; on the contrary: a small militia supported the Catholic side in the defeat of Zurich and Bern at the second Battle of Kappel in 1531, where Zwingli lost his life, and in 1570 the inhabitants erected a votive chapel dedicated to Mary as a helper saint which became the focal point of a local pilgrimage.[49]

From the late 1520s, therefore, the Confederation became a micro-laboratory for bi-confessional relations. In the valleys of the Grisons, a heartland of communal self-government with close links to the Swiss, some court districts opted for the Reformation, others stayed with the old faith, but all cooperated in the political marginalization of their secular lord, the Bishop of Chur, and the consolidation of collective lay control over church affairs. Recent research has traced the process in which traditional communal allegiances were very gradually superseded by confessional identities, often under external theological, diplomatic, and military pressures in the war-torn early decades of the seventeenth century. Following acrimonious conflicts, separate religious communities could establish themselves within the same political unit. The result was not state-/church-imposed “confessionalization,” but the demarcation of religious boundaries from below.

Similarly complex situations appear in the Swiss condominiums, i.e., areas jointly governed by cantons of different religious orientation. In a startling move, the First Peace of Kappel in 1529 had given each local community there the right to determine its confession by a majority vote (!), while the second treaty two years later marked Europe’s earliest official recognition of religious coexistence, albeit with a bias toward re-catholicization. The framework for worship thus became highly idiosyncratic, with followers of the old/new faiths sharing the same churches (Simultankirchen like that of St. Albin at Ermatingen/Thurgovia) and clashing over anything ranging from the timing of the respective services via processional routes to the allocation of ecclesiastical resources. At St. Mary, Zurzach (in the subject territory of Baden) for example, the Reformed congregation lobbied for a baptismal site of their own, while the Catholic majority—whose needs took precedence there—resisted any modification of sacred space. Encouraged by their confessional patron Zurich, the Zwinglians simply went ahead and inaugurated the new font in 1605, prompting traditionalists to pelt those attending the ceremony with stones. The issue came before the Swiss governor and ultimately the confederate Diet, where the Forest Cantons shied away from a major confrontation. Over time, such disputes resulted in a modus vivendi and ultimately a grudging toleration of members of the other faith, both at local level and in the political system at large.[50]

Widening the geographical horizon to regions where Calvinism took a firm hold, French Huguenots appear to have recruited primarily among nobles and townspeople. In the highly urbanized Netherlands, from the later sixteenth century the peasantry became more involved in both market exchange and religious tensions. In August 1566, at the time of the Iconoclastic Fury, the Catholic Governor of Lille reported to Regent Margaret of Parma:

Some of the followers of the new sect came over from the Pays de l’Alleu along the Leie River claiming they were on the way to one of their sermons. Instead they burst into [the surrounding localities of] Mesen, Quesnoy, Warneton and Comines and … raided and rioted in the churches, hospitals and monasteries smashing the statues and grave monuments.[51]

Vast swathes of countryside in the British Isles turned Protestant. Whatever the peculiarities in church government and chronology (in the 1550s England’s Queen Mary temporarily reversed her father’s break with Rome, while the more radical Scottish Reformation did not gain official backing until 1560), our key theme of multilateral long-term negotiation re-emerges again. Rather than a triumphant rise of the new religion, recent studies chart a protracted balancing of interests between central authorities, social elites, and local communities. Only during the long reign of Elizabeth did the new faith take firm root in England, hand-in-hand with growing anti-Catholicism (boosted not least by fears of a Spanish invasion). At grass-roots levels, medieval parish institutions such as vestries continued to function, albeit with increasing local government duties and more sustained interaction with regional and ecclesiastical bodies. Endowments for guilds, chantries, and Mass priests accrued to the crown; altars, statues, and wall paintings disappeared from all churches. In wills, pious bequests and appeals to the “holy company of heaven” gave way to expressions of sola gratia and a belief in the soul’s election. For many of the “hotter sort” of Protestants, however, the retention of an episcopal structure and the wearing of surplices smacked of a country only half-reformed and the official Church of England soon found itself challenged by both Catholic and Puritan dissenters.[52]

In Scotland, which followed a distinctly Calvinist model, the break with the past cut much deeper. Here, the creation of a comprehensive network of local consistory courts has been interpreted as the “single greatest factor in establishing a culture of Protestantism.” Religious and moral behavior was permanently monitored by local kirk sessions, with ministers and elders subjecting church absentees, drunkards, and adulterers to highly symbolic shaming penalties in front of their peers, while assisting the poor and afflicted with much-needed practical and pastoral support. In the longer term, local communities appear to have internalized the underlying reformed values and appreciated the related social services, although traditional “popular” pastimes proved resilient even here.[53]

Completing our survey with a glance at Eastern Europe, the almost total lack of parish records for Hungary and Transylvania makes any “reconstruction of Reformed religion … in the countryside … extremely difficult.” Like elsewhere, sermons and print provided the principal dissemination tools, while ministers monitored the godly behavior of their flocks in conjunction with village councils (e.g., in Zemplén county) or congregational presbyteries and—in selected areas—visitations by superintendents. Local officials were often reluctant to abandon old customs in favor of the more rigorous demands of Calvinist clergy. At Kápolna in 1639, for example, the pastor informed his superiors that elders thought a fine of wine sufficient for most offenses and refused to punish swearing or fornication altogether. In contrast to the Scottish rulers, furthermore, Transylvanian princes saw strong presbyteries as potentially destabilizing forces and hesitated to push ecclesiological reform too far.[54]

CONCLUSIONS

By the early sixteenth century, the Christian Church held a strong position in the European countryside. Source survival is generally thinner and more mediated than for the towns, but in the course of the late Middle Ages, knowledge of key doctrines had accumulated through various means, most directly in personal discussions during annual confession, more indirectly via the ever-increasing volume of pastoral literature and also by local initiatives to improve access to priestly services. In addition, many communities—like those in the Forest Cantons—had managed to gain influence over local religious affairs and there was no universal feeling of discontent. However, Luther’s call for sola scriptura—disseminated in an unprecedented multimedia campaign involving sermons, pamphlets, woodcuts, and songs—chimed with the German peasantry’s desire to follow the will of God as well as their discontent with church abuses and fed into their great rising of 1524–1526.

Elements like the deliberate targeting of monastic houses and the use of rituals of inversion underline the rebels’ awareness of spiritual issues. After their crushing defeat, the succeeding princely and magisterial Reformations took several generations to take root, with the professionalization of the clergy, a wide spectrum of printed religious literature, and regular visitations as key factors. The evangelical parsonage, in particular, became a local hub for the spread of confessional knowledge and a model of Christian life. Only occasionally, as in Dithmarschen and some imperial villages, can post-Peasant War evidence of bottom-up pressure for reform be detected, usually on clerical initiative and with initially reluctant local authorities. Compared to the Holy Roman Empire, the spread of Lutheranism to Scandinavia appears even more strongly directed from above.

Moving to areas influenced by the Swiss reformers, the Confederation itself nearly broke up as a result of the Reformation. Two civil wars between Zwinglian and Catholic members resulted in a pioneering acknowledgment of religious coexistence as early as 1531, with particularly original solutions devised for bi-confessional regions like the Grisons and the condominiums ruled by several cantons. As for international Calvinism (promoted by highly-trained ministers, exile communities, and frustrations about half-finished Reformations), it certainly spread into the north western, central, and eastern parts of the Continent, but the most “successful” implementation probably occurred in Scotland, where a comprehensive network of kirk sessions fostered a gradual internalization of godly principles. Yet even here the disciplinarian campaign met with resistance. Virtually no rural society welcomed wholesale attacks on traditional “popular culture” and a comparative analysis reveals selective regional targets: swearing in the Palatinate of the Holy Roman Empire, drunkenness at Emden in the Netherlands, and fornication/adultery at St. Andrews in Scotland.[55]

If there is a universal feature of rural Reformations across Europe, it is their negotiated character and long-term evolution. Far from a unilateral imposition of theological doctrines and central commands, religious change—or indeed continuity—was shaped and customized by local agents, who had gained religious expertise over many centuries and formed a discerning audience for the new Protestant messages. Access to the sacraments, a hard-working clergy, financial affordability, and a degree of lay control appealed right across the confessions, including Catholicism. The ultimate affiliation—normally crystallizing in the course of the seventeenth century and often (as in Upper Hesse) through confrontation with a rival confessional group—was the result of specific sociopolitical circumstances, political constellations, and local preferences rather than any inherent rural “propensity” toward one faith or another.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay has benefited from comments and suggestions by the editor and Arnd Reitemeier (Göttingen).

NOTES

1. “Wendelstein Ordinance of 19 October 1524,” in German History in Documents and Images <http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=4322> (accessed April 8, 2015).

2. Steve Hindle, “Rural Society,” in Beat Kümin (ed.), The European World 1500–1800, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2014), 48–57.

3. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chaps. 14–15; Arthur G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther, 2nd ed. (London: Batsford, 1989), 182 (Reformation as an “urban event”).

4. Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (London: Burns & Oates, 1977); Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

5. Max Steinmetz (ed.), Die frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie, 1985); Peter Blickle, The Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992).

6. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. Part I.

7. Immacolata Saulle Hippenmeyer, “Gemeindereformation—Gemeindekonfessionalisierung in Graubünden,” in Richard Schmidt, André Holenstein, and Andreas Würgler (eds.), Gemeinde, Reformation und Widerstand (Tübingen: bibliotheca academica, 1998), 261–280, esp. 279.

8. See esp. Chapters 10, 15, and 16 in this volume.

9. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Edward Arnold, 1927).

10. Kümin, “The English Parish in a European Perspective,” in Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kümin (eds.), The Parish in English Life 1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 15–32, esp. 18.

11. “The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), no. 21,” in Internet History Sourcebook <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.asp> (accessed April 9, 2015); for parish-related research resources see <http://my-parish.org> (accessed April 9, 2015).

12. Joseph Goering, “Pastoralia: The Popular Literature of the Care of Souls,” in F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (eds.), Medieval Latin (Washington, DC: Catholic Academy, 1996), 670–676; Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. chaps. 1–3.

13. A survey of the sources in Noël Coulet, Les visites pastorales (Turnhout: Brepols, 1977); detailed insights into the process in Katherine Wood-Legh (ed.), Kentish Visitations of Archbishop Warham and his Deputies 1511–1512 (Maidstone: Kent Archaeological Society, 1984).

14. Clive Burgess, “ ‘For the Increase of Divine Service’: Chantries in the Parish in Late Medieval Bristol,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 46–65; André Vauchez, Les laïcs au Moyen Age (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 115–116.

15. Rosi Fuhrmann, Kirche und Dorf: Religiöse Bedürfnisse und kirchliche Stiftung auf dem Lande vor der Reformation (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1995), surveys collective endowments; Katherine French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Hannes Obermair and Volker Stamm (eds.), Zur Ökonomie einer ländlichen Pfarrgemeinde im Spätmittelalter: Das Rechnungsbuch der Marienpfarrkirche Gries (Bozen) von 1422 bis 1440 (Bozen: Athesia, 2011), income/expenditure for the year 1422.

16. Kümin, “European Perspective,” 15–32 (lay powers); Gersau District Archive, Charters no. 12 (1483).

17. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 2; R. W. Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-industrial German Society,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1987), 1–16.

18. Thomas A. Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006).

19. Blickle, “Communal Reformation and Peasant Piety: The Peasant Reformation and its Late Medieval Origins,” Central European History 20 (1987): 216–228.

20. The classic formulation of this case is Scribner, “Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas,” in Popular Culture, 49–69.

21. A “Seven-Headed Papal Beast” broadsheet appears in Pamela Johnston and R. W. Scribner (eds.), The Reformation in Germany and Switzerland: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 46–47. For discussions of selected media see chapters in Part III of this volume.

22. Johnston and Scribner, Documents, 42.

23. Blickle, Communal Reformation, 98–100.

24. W. G. Naphy (ed.), Documents on the Continental Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 22 (articles nos. 41, 59).

25. Extract from article no. 3 in Michael G. Baylor (ed.), The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 231–238.

26. Henry J. Cohn, “Anticlericalism in the German Peasants’ War,” Past & Present 83 (1979): 3–31.

27. Tom Scott and R. W. Scribner (eds.), The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991), 108–109; see also Johnston and Scribner, Documents, 87.

28. B. J. Kidd (ed.), Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 205–206.

29. Johnston and Scribner, Documents, 122.

30. The bleak conclusions derived from visitation evidence in Gerald Strauss, “Success and Failure in the German Reformation,” Past & Present 67 (1975): 30–63, have been reassessed in Geoffrey Parker, “Success and Failure during the first Century of the Reformation,” Past & Present 136 (1992): 43–82.

31. David Mayes, Communal Christianity: The Life and Loss of a Peasant Vision in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004).

32. C. Scott Dixon and Louise Schorn-Schütte (eds.), The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003); Marjorie E. Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), esp. chap. 7. Specifically on the cultural role of the evangelical parsonage: Thomas A. Seidel and Christopher Spehr (eds.), Das evangelische Pfarrhaus: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2013).

33. “… [because] the customs, beliefs, and traditions of rural society were deeply entrenched”: Scott Dixon, The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 207 and passim.

34. Ole P. Grell, “Introduction,” in Grell (ed.), The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4 (quote) and 11; Jürgen Beyer, “Lutheran Popular Prophets in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Arv. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 51 (1995): 63–86.

35. Kidd, Documents, no. 101 (Västerås); C. V. Johansen, “Faith, Superstition and Witchcraft in Reformation Scandinavia,” in Grell, Scandinavian Reformation, 182. Until the early seventeenth century, Norwegian parishes had to be placated with concessions like the re-allowance of the Mass and worship of local saints, not to speak of unorthodox practices associated with cunning folk: ibid., 184–186.

36. Thorkild Lyby and O. P. Grell, “The Consolidation of Lutheranism in Denmark and Norway,” in Grell, Scandinavian Reformation, 136–139.

37. E. I. Kouri, “The Early Reformation in Sweden and Finland ca. 1520–1560,” in Grell, Scandinavian Reformation, 60, 69 (quote).

38. Ungun Montgomery, “The Institutionalisation of Lutheranism in Sweden and Finland,” in Grell, Scandinavian Reformation, 144, 159, 178. On the role of cultural exchange for the dissemination of Protestantism in the Baltic see now Otfried Czaika and Heinrich Holze (eds.), Migration und Kulturtransfer im Ostseeraum während der Frühen Neuzeit (Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2012).

39. William L. Urban, Dithmarschen: A Medieval Peasant Republic (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991).

40. Martin Luther, Van Broder Henrico in Dytmarschen vorbrent (Wittenberg: [Hans Weiß], 1525), 326.

41. Gerhard Köppen, “Die Reformation in Dithmarschen,” in Schleswig-Holsteinische Kirchengeschichte, vol. 3: Reformation (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1982), 259–277, esp. 262–268.

42. Kümin, “Rural Autonomy and Popular Politics in Imperial Villages,” German History 33 (2015): 194–213.

43. Fritz Zeilein, “Das freie Reichsdorf Gochsheim—Einführung,” in Rainer A. Müller (ed.), Reichsstädte in Franken, vol. 1 (Munich: Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, 1987), 379–387, esp. 383. The Reformation generally resulted in a substantial transfer of patronage rights away from religious houses to secular owners like princes, nobles, and—rarely—local communities.

44. Gochsheim Archive, GG, GO-ZM25001-UI/3-(020): Protection treaty 1575; Friedrich Weber, Geschichte der fränkischen Reichsdörfer Gochsheim und Sennfeld (Schweinfurt: Stoer, 1913), 97.

45. For a survey see Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). In 1531, a report on the Vaud stated that the “faces of the preachers are torn to shreds. They look like they’ve been beaten with cats. Alarm bells are rung whenever they’re around”: Naphy, Documents, 43; Heinrich R. Schmidt, “Morals Courts in Rural Berne during the Early Modern Period,” in Karin Maag (ed.), The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 155–181.

46. Ernst Tremp, “Glarus, 3.4.3: Reformation und Konfessionalismus,” in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz <http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D7374.php> (accessed April 9, 2015).

47. Tom Scott, “The Communal Reformation between Town and Country,” in Town, Country and Regions in Reformation Germany (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 57–75.

48. Kidd, Documents, 428–429.

49. Gersau District Archive, Stiftsurkundenbuch UKP, 277.

50. Randolph Head, “Kommunalismus zwischen den Konfessionen in Graubünden 1530–1620,” in Kümin (ed.), Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen (Zurich: Chronos, 2004), 21–57; Head, “Fragmented Dominion, Fragmented Churches: The Institutionalization of the Landfrieden in the Thurgau 1531–1610,” Archive for Reformation History 96 (2005): 117–144; Daniela Hacke, “Church, Space and Conflict: Religious Co-existence and Political Communication in Seventeenth-Century Switzerland,” German History 25 (2007): 285–312.

51. Naphy, Documents, 84; cf. Chapter 11 in this volume.

52. Strong emphasis on negotiation in Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the local impact e.g. Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise & Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–1560 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), esp. chap. 6; Dee Dyas (ed.), The English Parish Church through the Centuries (DVD, York: Christianity & Culture, 2010).

53. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 14 (quote), 178 and passim.

54. Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier 1600–60: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 9 (quote), 201–215, 292.

55. Ibid., 215.

FURTHER READING

(a) Sources

Johnston, Pamela and R. W. Scribner (eds.) The Reformation in Germany and Switzerland: Documents and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Scott, Tom and R. W. Scribner (eds.) The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991.

Wood-Legh, Katherine (ed.) Kentish Visitations of Archbishop Warham and his Deputies 1511–1512. Maidstone: Kent Archaeological Society, 1984.

(b) Secondary works

Blickle, Peter. The Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992.

Dixon, C. Scott. The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Dixon, C. Scott and Louise Schorn-Schütte (eds.) The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

Dyas, Dee (ed.) The English Parish Church through the Centuries. DVD, York: Christianity & Culture, 2010.

Grell, Ole P. (ed.) The Scandinavian Reformation: From Evangelical Movement to Institutionalisation of Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Kümin, Beat (ed.) Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen. Zurich: Chronos, 2004.

Mayes, David. Communal Christianity: The Life and Loss of a Peasant Vision in Early Modern Germany. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004.

Murdock, Graeme. Calvinism on the Frontier 1600–60: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Plummer, Marjorie E. From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008.

Schmidt, Heinrich R. “Morals Courts in Rural Berne during the Early Modern Period.” In The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Karin Maag, pp. 155–181. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997.

Todd, Margo. The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 26

CIVIC RELIGIONS

GUIDO MARNEF

CIVIC RELIGION IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

THE well-known French historian Fernand Braudel characterized early modern cities as electric transformers. They increased tensions and intensified exchanges.[1] It is therefore hardly surprising that cities were hotbeds of religious change and acted in the first half of the sixteenth century as hubs of Protestant reform movements. Yet we cannot fully understand this transformation process without looking at the preceding late medieval situation.

For late medieval men and women church and religion took an important—if not central—place in their life. The sacraments administered by the servants of the church at the crucial stages of their life—from birth to death—were essential keys for securing eternal life. In contrast to the situation in the countryside, people living in a city or town had access to a broad variety of ecclesiastical institutions and channels which could act as intermediaries for the salvation of their soul. For most believers, the parish church was the arena par excellence in which rituals were performed and the Christian faith was communicated on a regular basis. The number of parish churches could vary enormously. On the eve of the Reformation, London counted just over a hundred parish churches within the city walls but a booming city such as Antwerp had only five. Parish churches were however just one clerical element in the urban landscape. Most cities and towns hosted several convents belonging to a variety of male and female religious orders. Particularly important were the friars of the mendicant orders who had established houses in an increasing number of towns since the thirteenth century. Through their sermons, communal charity, and other activities they exercised a tangible influence upon urban society. In several cases, they also opened the doors of their convents for meetings of merchants, craft guilds, and confraternities.[2] Equally important were the many confraternities or religious brotherhoods. Some cities harbored an exceptionally high number of confraternities. There were for instance more than one hundred in fifteenth-century Rouen and one hundred and forty-seven in sixteenth-century Toledo.[3] Some of these confraternities were voluntary organizations mostly dominated and populated by male members. Others functioned within or even coincided with guilds. In both cases, mutual aid and prayers for the deceased brethren were key activities. Some brotherhoods were class based, others more open and socially mixed, while those linked to craft guilds were directly based on occupations.

The multilayered supply by parish churches, convents, and confraternities created a “religious urban polycentrism.”[4] Places for prayer, preaching, and even for sacraments such as the Eucharist and confession were multiple and created complementary and even competing religious zones within the city walls. City dwellers could seek the protection of several intercessors and develop loyalties to different institutions. In the meantime, the number of religious people active in cities increased. Around 1500 the clerical presence was considerably higher than two centuries earlier. Furthermore, most priests were better trained although this did not necessarily mean that they were well equipped for pastoral care. Exact figures about the share of the clergy in the global population are rather rare. In 1450 in Nuremberg there was one member of the clergy for every forty-five inhabitants, in Antwerp one for every forty-one inhabitants, and in Poitiers even one for every twenty inhabitants.[5] The privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the clergy regularly led to feelings of anticlericalism, especially in periods of economic crisis. There were, however, not only social and economic grievances. Laypeople also expected higher religious standards from clergy members who acted as spiritual intercessors. Therefore, they increasingly criticized religious men and women who did not respect the rule of their order, wasted money, or led a morally deficient life.

The theme of anticlericalism raises the question about the relationship between civil authorities and clerical institutions within the cities. In this regard, the French historian André Vauchez coined the term “civic religion” (religion civique in French) to indicate “a collection of religious phenomena—cultic, devotional and institutional—in which civil power plays a determining role, principally through the action of local and municipal authorities.”[6] As a consequence, the civil authorities did not leave the monopoly of the administration of the sacred to the clergy. They increasingly intervened in matters which had previously belonged to the exclusive competence of the ecclesiastical authorities, such as the supervision of hospitals and poor relief and the organization of processions. The transfer of competences did not, however, imply a rivalry between civil authorities and the church, in the sense that the former wanted to create alternative mechanisms for accessing the sacred. It was in the first place a transfer in terms of economic and financial administration. At the same time, by manifesting themselves emphatically in the realm of religion, city governments wanted to give their authority sacral legitimacy and tried to create a sense of sacred unity for their city. Processions and patron saints were important instruments for the realization of these ambitions. The accomplishment of this type of civic religion particularly materialized in the autonomous city states of Italy and to a certain extent also in the cities of the densely urbanized Low Countries. In the bonnes villes of France the development was rather weak since the royal power was often strong in religious matters and the ecclesiastical authorities maintained their influence in several towns.[7] A specific feature of the civic religion in the northern and central Italian cities was the central role played by communal governments in developing cults of saints.[8] These governments especially promoted patron saints who were expected to act as defenders and protectors, to bring welfare and to guarantee order and stability in their city. A number of mighty city states appropriated universal saints such as Milan (Saint Ambrose) and Venice (Saint Marc) while many others opted for less-known saints of local and often rather recent reputation. Bologna, where Saint Petronio was turned into a “new” civic patron saint, offers an interesting case in point. The historical Petronio served as Bishop of Bologna in the first half of the fifth century, but it was much later, in the second half of the thirteenth century, that Petronio’s cult gained momentum. Around 1257 an anonymous vernacular vita portrayed Petronio as someone who secured rights and privileges for the city and defended its independence. The vita was so to say an expression of Bologna’s communal identity. A few years later, the Bolognese city fathers proclaimed that forty candles should be brought to Saint Petronio’s shrine each day on his feast day. Annual candle offering to city patrons was a common phenomenon at the time. The climax of Petronio’s popularity came in the years after 1284 when Bologna asserted its independence from imperial control. A good hundred years later, the Bolognese materialized their adoration to Saint Petronio with the building of a (never completed) civic basilica at the Piazza Maggiore in the real center of their city. It was a civic project sustained by the communal government bodies and supported by all the citizens. Henceforth, Saint Petronio had an appropriate place for public liturgical worship.[9]

In the case of Saint Petronio and many other saints, solemn processions were excellent instruments for putting a patron saint in the spotlight and to mobilize the citizens under the banner of the local hero. These civic processions became excellent tools for representing governmental authority and sanctifying the ruling regime. In some cases city governments’ legislation even made participation in processions compulsory. The processional order articulated the proper place each participating group—government officials, clergy, craft guilds, confraternities, etc.—had in urban society and that place could vary from city to city and over time. The processions dedicated to a patron saint and other civic processions emphasized the unity and the communal identity of the city. They made clear that the city was in a certain way an integrated body. The trajectory followed by the participants articulated this idea in a territorial manner. Yet historians have questioned to what extent the intended unity and harmony corresponded to an effectively experienced reality. Conflicts between different interest groups could loom behind a façade of unity. The frequent competition about precedence in the processional order is a case in point.[10] Another point we have to keep in mind is that civic processions and processions in general were influenced by processes of state formation. The mighty Italian city states enjoyed a great deal of liberty for the organization of their civic rituals, but elsewhere in Europe city fathers usually had to take into account the interests of the emperor, king, or prince. In the first half of the sixteenth century, princes more and more interfered in the processional calendar, asking city governments to organize general processions. These processions highlighted the fortunes of the prince and his family, for instance by praying and giving thanks for a royal victory or for the birth of a princely scion.[11]

At the transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century most European cities were in any case lively laboratories of religious life. City governments had augmented their grasp on religious life but this does not mean that they succeeded in creating a kind of hegemonic civic religious culture. Urban society was in fact multilayered and comprised several corpora and groups which appropriated and reinterpreted norms and values proclaimed by civil or ecclesiastical authorities. As Gervase Rosser remarked, “urban culture was a powerful, multivalent language which offered itself for appropriation by any of a wide spectrum of town dwellers.”[12] Civic religious drama offers a striking example of this statement. This religious drama was part of the broader festive culture. It could be performed during processions but also separately at the end of a procession or on specific feast days. Passion or mystery plays were a popular phenomenon in many cities. Those who performed were mainly laypeople although involvement of the clergy was far from excluded. In northern France, so-called Abbayes des Conards or sociétés joyeuses formed real companies. In the towns of southern Germany, the Meistersinger organized themselves in associations which developed their own formal rules. Religious topics were prominently present in their repertoire. It was, however, in the key provinces of the Low Countries, particularly in Flanders and Brabant, that a dense network of permanent and well-organized civic theater companies had been developing since the first half of the fifteenth century, the so-called chambers of rhetoric. These chambers recruited primarily among the well-trained urban middle groups and acted as powerful vehicles and mirrors of urban culture. Their members tackled in their work religious and moral issues, without neglecting political and social problems.[13] In the course of the sixteenth century several chambers disconnected their activities from the traditional Catholic festive calendar and openly debated about the theological and religious questions that divided Europe. At a competition organized by an Antwerp chamber in 1559, participants recited poems which answered the assigned question “Who is worthy of Christ’s grace?” One of the participating rhetoricians articulated obvious Protestant ideas by declaring:

Should a person be worthy
of the holy grace poured out by Christ
when he does good and renounces sin?

Indeed not. Never more, to the end of time,
because our finest work is reviled by the prophet.

How shall we then say that someone
is worthy enough to receive this grace?

No one is made worthy through himself,

He who thinks so must suffer eternal death.

This poem and several others make clear how laymen reflected upon and debated the process of religious change.[14] Opinions such as those of the Netherlandish chambers of rhetoric are of course just one voice in a multivocal European civic society. Yet they seem to confirm what historians stated for other countries and regions, namely that there was an undisputable growth of lay engagement in religious life.[15]

THE EARLY REFORMATION: CITIES IN THE VANGUARD OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE

In the 1520s the Reform movement launched by Martin Luther profoundly changed the religious landscape of many German cities and towns. It is true that the overwhelming part of the German population lived in the countryside. Around 1500, there were only twenty-three cities existing with a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants and these represented 3.2 percent of the total population.[16] Yet there were many more smaller towns, most of which numbered between five hundred and 2,000 inhabitants. Taken together, cities and towns probably accounted for about 10 percent of the total German population.[17] It was, however, in the cities and substantial towns that the Reformation took shape. The presence of an extensive and varied religious infrastructure and of well-educated and culturally emancipated elites and middle classes favored the potential for religious change. Furthermore, the availability of adequate communication channels brought debates about salvation and religious Reform beyond the walls of church and university buildings into streets, squares, and inns. The religious turmoil that followed frequently intermingled with political or social grievances. It put civic unity under serious pressure and created major challenges for city governments. In line with the late medieval tradition, most city fathers were convinced that the political, social, and spiritual welfare of their city required uniformity in religious allegiance. Research during the last decades has focused on specific cities and towns and has revealed that there was not a single pattern for the urban reformation but rather diversity.[18] This is hardly surprising, since the political, social, and religious configuration of cities could be very diverse. Much research focused on the sixty-five free imperial cities (Reichsstädte) which had no lord but the emperor. Less attention has been paid to the ca. 2,000 territorial cities and towns (Landstädte) ruled by a prince—including prince-bishops. Several of these territorial cities—especially the big ones—had loosened the princely influence and acted in practice as “free cities.” As a consequence, territorial cities also enjoyed a degree of self-governance and could develop their own policies, including in religious matters.[19]

To start with, it is interesting to look at the decisive steps and processes developed in Martin Luther’s home town of Wittenberg. Wittenberg was a territorial town subject to Elector Frederick II of Saxony who resided in a recently built magnificent castle west of the town. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the town had about 2,000 inhabitants and accommodated a university founded by Elector Frederick in 1502.[20] The movement for church reform that started in the early 1520s reveals a lot about the position of the Wittenberg commune, the town council, and the territorial prince. At the beginning of October 1521 Wittenberg students protested against the activities and practices of the hermits of St. Anthony, and Luther’s fellow Augustinian Gabriel Zwilling preached vigorously against the Catholic Mass and monasticism. Two months later, students and citizens prevented priests from holding the Mass in the parish church. Masses were also disrupted in Frederick’s castle church and at those of the Augustinians and Franciscans. Around the same time, a crowd of citizens presented the town council a list of their demands. The town councilors, who had not interfered in the disturbances of the preceding days, now requested Elector Frederick to send commissioners to investigate the troubles. Yet this step did not stop public agitation. On Christmas Day 1521, Luther’s colleague Andreas Karlstadt celebrated a Reformed Mass and probably two thousand communicated in “both kinds”—eating the host and drinking the wine. The same happened during the first days of 1522. In January 1522, all images in the Augustinians’ church were removed and a general removal of images was announced. The reach of this evangelical movement forced the town council to proclaim an ordinance on January 24 regulating church affairs. A kind of Reformed Mass was allowed, begging was forbidden and a common chest for the poor set up, the convents of the Franciscans and Augustinians were closed, and their property inventoried. By taking and carrying out these measures, the town council tried to bring the reform movement under control. At the same time, several ideas articulated in Luther’s To the Christian Nobility materialized.[21]

Bob Scribner characterized Wittenberg’s early Reformation movement as a “social movement”: there were collective, non-institutional actions performed by identifiable groups of students and citizens with the intention of changing the existing order. The Wittenberg movement had a firm popular basis while the city council eventually endorsed the pleas for change against the will of the elector.[22] The evidence about two other towns, Zwickau in Ernestine Saxony and Leipzig in Albertine Saxony, shows how the position of and the interaction between the main players could lead to different outcomes. In Zwickau the town council supported Luther’s ideas from the beginning and took concrete measures in order to advance ecclesiastical reform. Therefore developments in Zwickau rather point to a Ratsreformation and not to a popular reform movement. Yet a real evangelical movement developed and pushed for further and more radical change when the town council’s policy was perceived as too cautious and too slow. In Leipzig the city authorities backed by Duke George of Saxony were hostile toward ecclesiastical Reform. The rich were proportionally overrepresented in the evangelical community. They belonged to the same class as the ruling elite and this explains why the town council was quite tolerant toward acts of unorthodoxy which were not too provocative.[23] The cases of Zwickau and Leipzig make clear how class relations played a role in the struggle for religious change.[24]

Since Scribner’s seminal article, the scope of research has widened, including not only imperial cities but also several territorial cities and north German cities.[25] The results reveal again local variety but highlight at the same time common trends and patterns. How the broadening of the geographical scope led to a better understanding of the early Reformation movements is illustrated by the evidence about the northwestern cities of the Hanseatic League, well-studied by Heinz Schilling.[26] In these cities the oligarchic ruling elites who had vested interests in the old ecclesiastical order were reluctant to proceed with religious Reform. As a consequence, the impetus for church reform in the line of Martin Luther came in the 1520s and 1530s from the broader communal world. Evangelical minded citizens not only voiced ecclesiastical but also secular demands. Their claims and forms of protest were often in line with late medieval repertoires of burgher protest against the political elite’s policy. In several cities, burgher committees with representatives of the artisan middle stratum and of families of rising social prominence put pressure on the ruling elites and pushed them toward an evangelical church order. The relationship with the territorial overlord was also one of the elements at stake. When the citizens succeeded in obtaining their desired church reform against the will of their Catholic prince, the city and the citizenry gained power and autonomy at the expense of the territorial level.[27] Heinz Schilling emphasized that urban burgher communalism or “republicanism” remained an important force throughout the sixteenth century.[28]

Where a church reform was successfully conducted, the city and town governments expanded their influence in the ecclesiastical domain. In this way, the Reformation movements strengthened an evolution which was already present in the civic religion context of the late Middle Ages. The aim of the civic authorities to supervise ecclesiastical institutions and to limit their jurisdictions and privileges reached a new phase once the city governments started the dissolution of convents and took over schools, poorhouses, and hospitals previously run by the clergy. As a consequence, there was a movement of “convergence”: the urban political community and the urban church started to coincide and the civic authorities tried to unite political and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in their hands.[29] The measures taken by city governments against the old ecclesiastical order were facilitated by widespread sentiments of anticlericalism. Clerical privileges and fiscal exemptions had been a thorn in laypeople’s flesh for a long time. Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers provided a firm theological justification for the abolition of the clergy’s privileged position. Yet the laity’s critical attitudes did not necessarily imply a fundamental hostility toward church and religion. They could also reflect a genuine sense of pastoral care and higher standards for the clergy—something that was equally expected from the new evangelical pastors.[30]

The processes of church reform that started in several cities did not only enhance the position of the civic authorities as supervisors and administrators of clergy and church property. They were also expected to make decisions in matters of doctrine. The so-called “Scripture mandates” or “preaching mandates” are an early example of this new challenge. By issuing a “Scripture mandate” the city fathers intervened in pulpit battles between rival preachers. They ordered the preachers involved to act “only according to Scripture.” Their motivation could be to decide in favor of a reform-minded preacher or to safeguard public order.[31] Religious disputations offer another example of the city authorities’ new competence. During these disputations adherents of church reform debated in the vernacular with representatives of the Catholic Church. Open-ended disputations were rare—in most cases they were stage-managed by civil authorities and functioned as a vehicle for the public endorsement of religious Reform. Here too, accordance to Scripture was the decisive element. The religious disputation convoked in March 1525 by the Nuremberg City Council illustrates very well how decision in religious matters had changed. The Nuremberg city hall acted as meeting place for both parties. The proceedings were public. Among the audience were not only the Council and the Great Council but also as many burghers as the Great Hall could accommodate. Christoph Scheurl, a city lawyer and convinced supporter of the evangelical movement, acted as chair. The issues debated such involved fundamental questions as “What is justification?” “What is the Sacrament of the Altar and what is its effect on us?” and “Do good works lead to justification, or does justification produce good works?” The city council decided in favor of the new evangelical teachings. The religious disputation marked the city fathers’ choice for the Reformation. Over the next months they took concrete measures, forbidding for instance the mendicant orders to preach any longer and outlawing the Catholic Mass in public churches.[32]

By deliberately opting for evangelical reforms and prohibiting Catholic sermons and ceremonies, the Nuremberg city council undoubtedly hoped to restore social harmony. The Nuremberg city secretary Lazarus Spengler clearly voiced this concern in a memorandum of March 3, 1525—the day the religious disputation started:

Some people who were inclined to the Word of God through Christian preaching, have been misled again by secret and public sermons and by the hearing of confessions as practiced hitherto, and their consciences disturbed … Second, from such divisive preaching there must certainly follow disunity of magistrates, the dissipation of morale, morals and manners, the fracturing of civic unity and finally disturbance and recalcitrance toward the clergy … or against the authorities who look on and permit them [to preach].[33]

Religious uniformity was, as Spengler understood, a firm impetus for civic unity but this was no easy goal as the case of Erfurt shows. Erfurt was a university town of 18,000 inhabitants. The Archbishop of Mainz was its overlord but in practice Erfurt enjoyed a semi-autonomous status. Helped by the Thuringian peasant uprisings, the leading Lutheran members of the city council succeeded in 1525 in obtaining the establishment of Lutheranism as the sole creed of Erfurt and in declaring Erfurt’s independence from the Archbishop of Mainz. In the next years it became clear that this change constituted a serious threat to both civic unity and the city’s virtual independence. The city government was divided by faction struggles. Furthermore, the Elector of Saxony who wanted to increase his influence in Thuringia found allies in the Lutheran councilors and preachers. Yet this alliance quickly proved to be a threat to the city’s autonomous position. Therefore, the city council had already decided in 1526 to conduct a policy of political‒religious neutrality and to allow again Catholic worship. For years, a treaty concluded between the city council and the Archbishop of Mainz acknowledged the latter’s position as overlord and confirmed the religious status quo leaving seven churches to the Catholics and six to the Lutherans. In the case of Erfurt, civic unity was realized at the cost of religious uniformity. This choice was linked with Erfurt’s peculiar social order, as the city government had to take into account the potential opposition of middle and lower segments of society who articulated political, economic, and social grievances. The early Lutheran movement profited from this sociopolitical discontent. In Nuremberg, where the social situation was much more stable, Lutheranism could be used to reinforce the position of the ruling elite. There the political and religious conservatism of Lutheranism was an attractive factor. Bob Scribner therefore concluded that the ideas of Martin Luther were not unifocal. City fathers and citizens could interpret his teachings in different ways, depending on the specific sociopolitical settings of the cities involved.[34]

Evidence of this kind indicates how openness and support for the early evangelical movement—or its rejection—was often entangled with specific political, economic, and social contexts. This makes it difficult if not impossible to formulate general statements about the social profile of those who supported this movement. The middling artisan classes were always well represented, but these inevitably formed a substantial part of the global urban population. Well-to-do merchants, intellectuals, representatives of the professions, printers, and artists likewise seem to have been disproportionally well represented. How the reform movement developed also mattered. Urban patricians were often reluctant or hesitant in the beginning while specific occupations such as weavers came to the fore during the peasant uprisings of 1524‒1525. Among the leaders of the reform movement the clergy was omnipresent. Most of them had an urban background and were university trained. Among the lay leaders were town councilors and trained jurists, important figures.[35]

Several historians have emphasized that the years 1526‒1530 marked a turning point in the cities’ role as motors of the evangelical movement. The alliance between rebellious peasants and specific urban groups during the Peasants’ War made city governments wary of the blending of evangelical ideas with social grievances and incited them to conduct a policy characterized by respect for authority and social discipline.[36] Around the same time a number of German princes abandoned their initial caution and opted for the Reformation so that the leadership of religious Reform fell into princely hands.[37] Some decades later, the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555)—in essence an act of imperial politics—strengthened the position of the princes. The many territorial cities in fact had to accept the choices and arrangements made by their overlords.[38] This does not mean that the role of the cities as loci of a lively religious civic life was over. The typical urban setting which favored vibrant cultural and religious life did not disappear. Furthermore, several cities succeeded in preserving a considerable degree of autonomy and continued to develop a vivid political culture.[39]

BROADENING THE SCOPE: CITIES AND THE REFORMED TRADITION

While Martin Luther and other reform-minded preachers were at work in the German cities, processes of religious change also started in the Swiss Confederation. There too, the decisive impetus for Reform came from cities. Zurich headed the movement, followed by among others Berne and Basel. In terms of population the Swiss cities were considerably smaller than their German counterparts but as territorial lords they ruled over the villages of the surrounding countryside. Zurich for instance counted between 5,000 and 8,000 inhabitants within its walls but together with the subjected countryside it numbered a population of 55,000. In this way the city could mobilize substantial financial and military resources.[40] In the fifteenth century most Swiss cities developed a civic religion type with features we already explained in the first section of this chapter. Thus city councils tried to erode ecclesiastical privileges and to realize a gradual integration of the church within the civic community. In the 1520s and 1530s the introduction and spread of the Reformed religion reveals several similarities with its developments in German cities. Urban Swiss Reformers had to win the sympathy and support of the civic authorities. In this regard, religious disputations once again had a catalytic effect. The disputations of Zurich (1523) and Berne (1528) were followed by an official introduction of the Reformation. Desire for religious Reform became entangled with social grievances. Links with the Peasants’ Revolt also caused feelings of disapproval and an authoritarian reaction among leading Reformers and city councils in the Swiss Confederation.[41]

Yet there were also differences. Apart from obvious theological divergences, Swiss Reformers developed a distinct type of civic religion. In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli wanted to realize a Christian civic commonwealth headed by a godly magistrate. According to Zwingli, the visible church corresponded with the structures of the city itself. City councilors had a divine function and were expected to administer justice in accordance with Scripture while theologians and ministers could act as useful advisors. As a consequence, Christian magistrates watched over morals and manners. Later on, church discipline became a hallmark of the Reformation in Calvin’s Geneva, but there too civic magistrates kept a hand on the domain of morals and manners.[42] All these efforts to realize a new, more godly, society had a real impact upon urban culture. Yet, some elements of the late medieval Catholic civic culture led a resilient life. In Zurich, the patron saints Felix and Regula and Charlemagne, the mythic founder of Zurich’s main parish church (the Grossmünster), continued to play a role in civic ritual. Zwingli and his successor Heinrich Bullinger deliberately condemned the veneration of saints but patron saints could still serve as role models. Pious pastors were allowed to tell their flock about the memory and the example of these saints. Until 1585 the annual Kirchweihe or Dedication Feast offered the inhabitants of Zurich and those of the surrounding countryside an occasion to celebrate their patron saints with great pomp. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Johann Jacob Breitinger, the orthodox pastor of the Grossmünster, was still fighting against the Dedication festivities organized in the countryside. At the same time, he remained an admirer of the martyrs Felix and Regula and started an act of Reformed appropriation. At his request, a Zurich pastor published two books in 1628 which claimed the two martyrs for the Protestant confession. Breitinger himself copied the medieval legend of Felix and Regula and added notes explaining that their articles of faith corresponded with those of the Reformed Church.[43]

In France and the Low Countries the fortunes of the Reformation were closely interwoven with the course of the French Wars of Religion and the Netherlandish Revolt.[44] The central question was how to accommodate two or even more religions in one single city. The limited size of dissident groups did not constitute a real threat to urban stability and social order and this was what mattered most—at least for the civic authorities. Things had changed, however, since the mid-1550s when the Reformed or Calvinist movement started to rapidly grow in both countries. The efficient organization, the formation of real counter-churches, and the readiness to resist hostile authorities caused major tensions in many cities and towns.[45]

The Calvinist Church in France rapidly expanded. Just as in the Low Countries, cities acted as important centers and pacemakers. The first two churches with a proper organization were established in 1555 in Poitiers and Paris. At the beginning of 1562, there were already six hundred and fifty churches and about 2,150 communities with a Reformed presence. In Nîmes, Montpellier, Montauban, Castres, and a number of smaller towns, Calvinists realized an entirely dominant position. In some important cities, such as Lyon and Rouen, they formed a substantial minority. When the Calvinists succeeded in seizing power they took immediate action: the confiscation of church property, expulsion of clergy, and acts of iconoclasm marked a militant agenda.[46] A climate of increasing politico-religious tension—especially after the massacre of Vassy (March 1562)—put the relationship between Catholics and Calvinists under constant pressure. City fathers and citizens who were used to living in a place with one single civic religion faced an enormous challenge. Catholics and Calvinists developed proper repertoires of ritual violence aimed at the cleansing of their communities of dangerous pollution. Contests about religious truth repeatedly led to ritual crowd violence and even massacres, often sparking a cycle of violence and counter-violence. The effects could be particularly devastating for civic communities.[47]

In theory, Protestants and Catholics thought that the sacred and the civic were joined in an ideal Christian community. At the same time they believed that this community had been corrupted and therefore should be restored in its original state by purging it from its errors. Yet, as Barbara Diefendorf has recently highlighted, Protestants and Catholics practiced a different form of ritual repair. When French Calvinists took over a city they cleansed churches of superstitious and idolatrous elements such as hosts and images and statues of saints. Catholics on the contrary were convinced that heresy polluted their ideal community. Hence Catholics launched attacks against Calvinists and started the ritual repair of sacred space polluted by Calvinists by organizing processions, Masses, and other ceremonies.[48] In some cases, acts of Catholic repair tapped into the repertoire of late medieval civic religion. On September 4, 1572, nearly two weeks after the Saint Bartholomew’s Night, a solemn procession of the relics of Saint Geneviève—Paris’s patron saint—moved through the streets of Paris thanking God for the “defeat of the Huguenots.”[49] A separation of civil and religious spheres was needed to overcome the spiral of mutual distrust and violence. Royal edicts of pacification proved how difficult this would be to realize. These edicts in fact contained a pretext for new violence.[50]

The expansion of the Calvinist movement in the Low Countries was less spectacular. Cycles of ritual crowd violence similar to those in France were absent, something that can partly be explained by the different attitudes of the clergy in both countries.[51] It was during the so-called Wonderyear or annus mirabilis (April 1566‒April 1567) that the Calvinist movement significantly grew for the first time and even tried to seize power in a number of cities.[52] One of the many things we learn from the politico-religious dynamics developed during the Wonderyear is that religious affiliations within urban communities were still very volatile. Antwerp, which acted as the big center of Protestantism and as the headquarters of the political resistance movement, offers an interesting case in point. At the beginning of April 1566 a group of confederated noblemen presented a request to the regent, Margaret of Parma, demanding the abolition of the Inquisition and the suspension of the heresy placards. The news of the presentation produced an atmosphere of confidence among the Protestants. Calvinists and Lutherans organized “hedge-preachings” outside the Antwerp city walls which attracted enormous audiences. On July 14, 25,000 listeners gathered outside Antwerp. Meetings of similar proportions also gathered around Ghent and Ypres. That Protestant preachers were able to attract thousands of new listeners within a short timespan indicates that there were still large religious middle groups.[53] Among these middle groups were “Protestantizing Catholics”: people who could no longer reconcile themselves to a number of practices or articles of the faith of the Catholic Church and found points in common with the Protestant Reformers, but who did not (or not yet) want to break with the Old Church. It was particularly the changing political context which pushed the middle groups to either Catholicism or Protestantism. This was what happened at the beginning of the Wonderyear when so much that had been forbidden suddenly became possible. This does not mean that most of these men and women converted to Protestantism. Everything seems to indicate that the majority of these middle groups did not reject the Catholic Church during the rule of the Duke of Alva. After a royal and papal pardon was proclaimed on July 16, 1570, thousands reconciled themselves with the Catholic Church. In the city of Antwerp there were no less than 14,128 people who acted in this way—a substantial part of the adult population.[54] That changing political circumstances or concrete events had a real impact on the religious mentality was also clear in France. Eruptions of Catholic violence and repression did not only cause intense indignation in Protestant ranks but also led to large-scale reconciliations with the Catholic Church. Especially after the Saint Bartholomew Massacre there were many defections among the French Calvinists.[55]

Politico-military developments eventually decided on the religious map of the Low Countries, leading to different types of civic religion in the Southern and the Northern Netherlands. In the cities conquered by Alexander Farnese in the 1580s, the Catholic religion was the only one allowed. The capitulation treaties negotiated between Farnese and the rebellious city governments in Brabant and Flanders only granted the Protestants a limited reconciliation period. At the end of this period they had to convert to Catholicism or leave the city. The majority opted for the latter choice—the city’s population dropped from about 82,000 in 1585 to 42,000 in 1589. Henceforth, there remained just one religion within the Antwerp city walls—with a strong preference for Counter Reformation measures developed in close collaboration between civic and ecclesiastical authorities. Similar patterns developed in other cities with a rebellious past.[56]

The Netherlandish Revolt led to a completely different religious constellation in the northern cities located in the united provinces of the Dutch Republic.[57] From the very beginning the Calvinists had been the staunchest supporters of the revolt. The civil authorities rewarded the Calvinists by giving their church the status of privileged public church, including a monopoly on public worship. Hence, church buildings were reserved for the Calvinists while people belonging to other religious were only allowed to practice their faith within the confines of their private homes. This privileged status was less than most Calvinist Church leaders had hoped for. Especially in the dominant province of Holland and also in Utrecht, Erastian city fathers wanted to limit the influence of the Calvinist Church. As a result, magistrates and Calvinist ministers frequently disputed the control of poor relief, the regulation of education, and the place of other confessions in civic society. The possibilities for Catholics, Lutherans, and Anabaptists to negotiate these issues varied from time to time and from place to place, but in most cities and towns a multiform religious landscape had established itself. Officially, there was one civic religion—the Calvinist one—but daily life reality was much more complex.

CONCLUSION: CIVIC RELIGIONS IN THE PLURAL?

In 1581, the Brussels city fathers ordered the public whipping of Liesken van den Poele because she had presented her new-born child for baptism in three different churches. First, a Catholic priest had baptized the child, then a Calvinist minister, and finally a Lutheran pastor.[58] Around the same time, the Catholic merchant Jan de Pottre noted in his diary how he experienced the developments in Brussels as a profound change. In July 1580 he wrote that “evil ruled” and he compared his city with “Noah’s Ark in which everything came together—good and evil, Reformed and Catholic.”[59] Liesken van den Poele’s case was certainly exceptional but the testimonies from Brussels—at that moment under Calvinist rule—make clear how the variety of religious beliefs confused and even baffled laypeople.

This brings us to the important question of how ordinary citizens experienced the complex processes of religious change launched since the 1520s. People who were contemporaries of the first generation of Protestant Reformers had grown up in a city where there was one civic religion and where the meaning and function of this religion and its institutions were integrated in their familiar urban framework. We may assume that feelings of change were strongest during the initial stages of the Protestant Reformation and in cities where there was a lasting presence of two or more religions. The testimonies which have been preserved in a written or printed form often pertain to Reform leaders or to those who made determined choices—those who died as martyrs for instance. Most city dwellers, however, were no religious zealots but cautious and pragmatic. As Christopher Friedrichs rightly commented, “for every instance of religious violence in European towns, there were many more cases in which religious passions kept from boiling over.”[60]

A study on the formation of religious identities among ordinary citizens living in Augsburg during the first centuries after the introduction of the Protestant Reformation reveals that these identities and loyalties were shaped by a mixture of influences, including political and social elements. Religious identities proved to be non-confessional in character. Augsburgers did not usually identify their faith by mentioning a specific creed. If they defined their religious belief, they did it by referring to what they did—for instance attending sermons held in a specific church or by a particular preacher. Most people were able to overcome religious boundaries. Religious agreement was not regarded as essential to maintain peaceful relations with neighbors.[61] Yet, over the long term this non-confessional orientation of religious identities would change. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) legally recognized the Lutheran confession and introduced a period of religious coexistence. In the 1580s the conflict about Gregory XIII’s calendar reform (the Kalenderstreit) showed the precarious character of this coexistence and the Thirty Years War accelerated the process of confessionalization. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) settled a system of confessional parity. Adherents of the Catholic and Lutheran confessions started to develop distinguishing features in the sphere of dress, rites, and social habits. Augsburg City Council conducted a policy of confessional neutrality based on pragmatic tolerance.[62] In this way, Augsburg became a city with two civic religions.

The case of Augsburg was, however, exceptional in the empire and in early modern Europe in general. In most cities there was one official church encompassing the bulk of the civic population. In Strasbourg, the 1548 Interim created new opportunities for Catholics, but they remained a small minority. Konrad Huber, Martin Bucer’s ex-secretary, strikingly wrote:

I know of no magistrates and only a very few burghers who attend the papist idolatries, which greatly riles them [the priests]. Only priestlings, whores, crazy old women, and epicureans and such attend their sermons. For a city of this size, the figure 200 or a few more adherents of their errors is not surprising.[63]

As in the case of Augsburg and Strasbourg, it was political leaders who decided about a city’s religious fate. Once the decisions were taken and the religious framework was fully established, political and ecclesiastical leaders could start a long-term process of religious education and church building. How ordinary city dwellers actually appropriated and interiorized their religious message during the following decades and beyond remains a question that deserves further research.

NOTES

1. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, vol. I (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), 421.

2. See e.g., for the Low Countries and Italy, Guido Marnef and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, “Civic Religion,” in Bruno Blondé et al. (eds.), Gouden Eeuwen. Stad en samenleving in de Lage Landen (1100–1600) (Tielt: Lannoo Campus, 2016); Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes 1125–1325 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).

3. Figures in Jacques Chiffoleau, La religion flamboyante 1320–1520 (Paris: Éditions Point, 2011), 80; William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 149.

4. Expression used by Chiffoleau, La religion flamboyante.

5. Figures in Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750 (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 66; Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis 1550–1577 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 49; Bernard Chevalier, Les bonnes villes de France du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1982), 242.

6. André Vauchez, “Introduction,” in Vauchez (ed.), La religion civique à l’époque médiévale et moderne (Chrétienté et Islam) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995), 1. English translation borrowed from Andrew Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c. 1300–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14.

7. Marnef and Van Bruaene, “Civic Religion,” 185–186; Brown, Civic Ceremony and Religion; Chevalier, “La religion civique dans les bonnes villes: sa portée et ses limites. Le cas de Tours,” in Vauchez, La religion civique, 337–349; Jean Michel Matz, “Le développement tardif d’une religion civique dans une ville épiscopale. Les processions à Angers (v. 1450–v. 1550),” in Vauchez, La religion civique, 351–366.

8. See for Italy, Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel Bornstein (Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), chap. 13; Thompson, Cities of God.

9. See for the cult of Saint Petronio, Thompson, Cities of God, 116–119, and for the building of the basilica, Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–13. See for a more general picture Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 232–239.

10. See the case of Regensburg in Olivier Richard, Mémoires bourgeoises. Memoria et identité urbaine à Ratisbonne à la fin du Moyen Âge (Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2009), 274–283.

11. Chevalier, “La religion civique,” 348; Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, 55.

12. Cervase Rosser, “Urban Culture and the Church 1300–1540,” in D. M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. I: 600–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 337.

13. See for an excellent study Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Om beters wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008).

14. Marnef, “Chambers of Rhetoric and the Transmission of Religious Ideas in the Low Countries,” in Heinz Schilling and István György Tóth (eds.), Religion and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 274–293 (the poem is quoted on p. 287).

15. See for instance Philip Benedict and Virginia Reinburg, “Religion and the Sacred,” in Mack P. Holt (ed.), Renaissance and Reformation France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 132; and Bernd Moeller, “Frömmigkeit in Deutschland um 1500,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965): 5–31.

16. Figures in Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1984), 29, 39. See also Berndt Hamm, Bürgertum und Glaube. Konturen der städtischen Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 20–23.

17. Robert W. Scribner, The German Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 26.

18. Already emphasized by Miriam U. Christman, “Cities in the Reformation,” in William Maltby (ed.), Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research II (St. Louis, MO: Center for Reformation Research, 1992), 108.

19. See the interesting observations in Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 212.

20. Ullinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 116–119.

21. Based on Scribner, “The Reformation as a Social Movement,” in Scribner (ed.), Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987): 146–149.

22. Ibid., 149–150.

23. Ibid., 151–173.

24. See for this aspect also the convincing evidence about Erfurt in Scribner, “Civic Unity and the Reformation in Erfurt,” in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements, 185–216.

25. See for some general surveys: Cameron, The European Reformation, chap. 15; Hamm, Bürgertum und Glaube, chap. 1, summarized in Hamm, “The Urban Reformation in the Holy Empire,” in Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History 1400–1600, Vol. II: Visions, Programs and Outcomes (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 193–220; Peter Blickle, Die Reformation im Reich (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2015), 87–113.

26. See for instance Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), esp. chaps. 2 and 4.

27. See for this aspect the well-documented case of Lemgo in the county of Lippe: Schilling, “Between the Territorial State and Urban Liberty: Lutheranism and Calvinism in the County of Lippe,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 263–283, esp. 268–269.

28. The evidence about a “communal Reformation” in the northwestern non-imperial cities contains an interesting addition to the influential book by Moeller, Reichsstadt und Reformation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, ³2011), first ed. 1962. In Moeller’s view there was a kind of congeniality between the communal spirit and the civic liberties of the south German imperial cities and the “urban” theology of Huldrych Zwingli and Martin Bucer who emphasized the communal character of the Christian faith.

29. See for the convergence pattern Hamm, “The Urban Reformation,” 195–196.

30. Scribner, The German Reformation, 38–39; Hamm, “The Urban Reformation,” 196.

31. Cameron, The European Reformation, 234–237, with a list of “Scripture mandates” issued between 1522 and 1531.

32. Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), 175–177; Cameron, European Reformations, 237–239. See also Blickle, Die Reformation in Reich, 94–95, 98–100, 111–112.

33. Pamela Johnston and Robert W. Scribner (eds.), The Reformation in Germany and Switzerland: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), document no. 2.10, p. 41.

34. Scribner, “Civic Unity,” 185–216.

35. Scribner, The German Reformation, 26–29; Scribner, “Preachers and People in the German Towns,” in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements, 123–143; Christman, “Cities in the Reformation,” 107–108.

36. The case of Erfurt though teaches that there were exceptions.

37. See for instance Hamm, “The Urban Reformation,” 206–209; Scribner, The German Reformation, 40–43. See for the German princes also Cameron, The European Reformation, 267–271.

38. See for this Peace Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations 1400–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 231–232.

39. Schilling, “Die deutschen Städte in den politischen und religiösen Umbruchen des ‘langen 16. Jahrhunderts,’” in Werner Freitag and Peter Johanek (eds.), Bünde—Städte—Gemeinden. Bilanz und Perspectiven der vergleichenden Landes- und Stadtgeschichte (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 326–330.

40. Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 47. See for figures about other Swiss cities Kaspar von Greyerz, “Switzerland,” in Robert W. Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikulás Teich (eds.), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30.

41. Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 37–38, and chaps. 2 and 3; Von Greyerz, “Switzerland,” 32–38, 40–41.

42. Von Greyerz, “Switzerland,” 38–39; Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, 59–60, 112. See also Chapter 9 in this volume.

43. Thomas Maissen, “La persistance des patrons: la représentation de Zurich avant et après la Réforme,” in Gérald Chaix (ed.), La ville à la Renaissance. Espaces—représentations—pouvoirs (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 59–80.

44. A comparative approach produced interesting and refreshing insights. See J. J. Woltjer, “Violence during the Wars of Religion in France and the Netherlands: A Comparison,” Dutch Review of Church History 76 (1996): 24–45; Judith Pollmann, “Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560–1585,” Past & Present 190 (2006): 83–120; Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, and Marc Venard (eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585 (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy, 1999).

45. See apart from the works mentioned in n. 44 also the useful surveys in Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Marnef, “The Netherlands,” in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation World (London: Routledge, 2000), 344–364.

46. Benedict, “The Wars of Religion, 1562–1598,” in Holt, Renaissance and Reformation, 150–153; Benedict, “The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy: France, 1565–1563,” in Benedict, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War, 35–50. See for the problem of the numbers Philip Benedict and Nicolas Fornerod, “Les 2150 ‘églises’ réformées de France de 1561–1562,” Revue historique 131 (2009): 529–560.

47. See the seminal article by Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past & Present 59 (1973): 51–91; see also Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France (Past & Present Supplement, 7) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

48. Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Rites of Repair: Restoring Community in the French Religious Wars,” in Murdock et al. (eds.), Ritual and Violence, 30–51.

49. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 176.

50. Penny Roberts, “Peace, Ritual and Sexual Violence during the Religious Wars,” in Murdock et al. (eds.), Ritual and Violence, 76–77.

51. Woltjer, “Violence during the Wars of Religion,” 42–43, and esp. Pollmann, “Countering the Reformation.”

52. See Marnef, “The Dynamics of Reformed Religious Militancy: The Netherlands, 1566–1585,” in Benedict, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War, 51–60.

53. See for these middle groups J. J. Woltjer, “Political Moderates and Religious Moderates in the Revolt of the Netherlands,” in Benedict, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War, 185–200.

54. Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, 56–58, 88–89, 127–129.

55. See for instance Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross; Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 243–244.

56. Marnef, “Protestant Conversions in an Age of Catholic Reformation: The Case of Sixteenth-Century Antwerp,” in Arie-Jan Glederblom, Jan L. de Jong, and Marc Van Vaeck (eds.), The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), 37–45.

57. See Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), chaps. 9 and 11.

58. National State Archives Brussels, Chambre des comptes. Régistres, 12710, fol. 217v‒218r°.

59. Dagboek van Jan de Pottre, 1549–1602, ed. Jules de Saint Genois (Ghent: Maatschappy der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen, 1861), 105.

60. Friedrichts, The Early Modern City, 76, 78.

61. Michele Zelinsky Hanson, Religious Identity in an Early Reformation Community: Augsburg, 1517–1555 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009), based on legal testimonies.

62. Bernd Roeck, “Rich and Poor in Reformation Augsburg: The City Council, the Fugger Bank and the Formation of a Bi-confessional Society,” in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds.), The Impact of the European Reformation: Princes, Clergy and People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 78–84.

63. Quoted in Brady, German Histories, 235.

FURTHER READING

(a) Sources

Duke, Alastair, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew Pettegree (eds.) Calvinism in Europe 1540–1610: A Collection of Documents. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.

Johnston, Pamela and Robert W. Scribner (eds.) The Reformation in Germany and Switzerland: Documents and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

(b) Secondary works

Abray, Lorna Jane. The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg 1500–1598. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Benedict, Philip, Guido Marnef, Henk Van Nierop, and Marc Venard (eds.) Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy, 1999.

Brady, Thomas A., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.) Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995.

Brown, Andrew. Civic Ceremony and Religion in Medieval Bruges c. 1300–1520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.

Diefendorf, Barbara B. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Dowley, Tim. Atlas of the European Reformations. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015.

Friedrichs, Christopher R. The Early Modern City 1450–1750. London and New York: Longman, 1995.

Greengrass, Mark. The French Reformation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Holt, Mack P. Renaissance and Reformation France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Hsia, R. Po-Chia (ed.) The German People and the Reformation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Karant-Nun, Susan. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping Religious Emotion in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Rublack, Ulinka. Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Scribner, Robert W. The German Reformation. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Scribner, Robert W. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. London: Hambledon Press, 1987.

Thompson, Augustine. Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes 1125–1325. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

Vauchez, André. The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993.

Vauchez, André (ed.) La religion civique à l’époque médiévale et moderne (Chrétienté et Islam). Rome: École française, 1995.

CHAPTER 27

EUROPEAN NOBILITIES AND THE REFORMATION

RONALD G. ASCH

THE German Reformation has been regarded as an urban event, which owed its later success to a large extent to the territorial princes who supported the Protestant movement.[1] Next to the princes—at this stage already half sovereign lords within the confines of their dominions—and their councilors the urban elites and middle classes are often seen as the driving force behind the Reformation. The lower German nobility, the imperial knights, or the noblemen who owed allegiance to a secular or ecclesiastical prince, played at best a subordinate role in the process which led to the rise of Protestantism in the Holy Roman Empire, or so it seems. Outside the empire, however, in particular in East Central Europe, in Hungary but also in France the advance of Protestantism would have been difficult to imagine without the support nobles gave to the new faith. What were the factors which shaped and determined nobles’ attitude to the confessional conflict? Was the propagation of the Gospel seen as a mission which could give new legitimacy to noble authority or was Protestantism perceived as a challenge not just to the Old Church but to the existing social order and noble privileges? Such are the questions with which we are confronted when we look at noble attitudes toward the Reformation.

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE RISE OF PROTESTANTISM

The Early Reformation and the Nobility

When Luther and his co-Reformers attacked the Pope and the ecclesiastical hierarchy they did, at first, enjoy considerable support among prominent German nobles. A man like Franz von Sickingen (1481–1523), one of the leading military entrepreneurs and warlords of the time or Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), also a Humanist and intellectual of noble origin, were in the early 1520s in the forefront of those who came out in support of Luther’s cause. In both cases a strong anticlericalism and commitment to an overall reform of both church and empire importantly shaped Sickingen’s and Hutten’s allegiance in the debate about Luther.[2] Yet both died before the impact of the Reformation became fully visible and their strong and outspoken support for Luther remained exceptional among members of the nobility during the early stages of the Reformation.[3]

A certain reluctance to support the Reformation can partly be explained by the structure of the late medieval church. Many bishops and other high-ranking clerics were themselves nobles and the late medieval church has often been described as the “nobility’s almshouse.”[4] After all, cathedral chapters, collegiate churches, monasteries, and convents offered a life of ease and prosperity to many younger sons and unmarried daughters of noble families. Higher positions at the head of a diocese or a rich abbey gave those who obtained them considerable secular power. In the Holy Roman Empire most bishops acted not only as spiritual shepherds of their flocks, a duty they normally used to take very lightly before the implementation of the Tridentine reforms; but in addition, they also ruled vast secular dominions; three of them, the Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier were members of the exclusive college of prince electors who chose the new emperor when his predecessor had died.

Not all bishops were necessarily members of the lower nobility. Some were the sons of princes, while others were occasionally of non-noble origin. However, given the fact that so many benefices were officially or unofficially reserved for noblemen, what interest should either the territorial nobilities or the imperial free knights (who were subject only to the emperor) have had to dismantle this wonderful edifice which benefited them so much? Even so, apart from the fact that an event such as the Reformation forced all sections of society to redefine their identity in a way which went far beyond the mere articulation of material interests, not all nobles benefited to the same extent from the spoils the late medieval church could offer. There were quite a number of bishoprics in the Holy Roman Empire, such as Würzburg in Franconia for example, but also some dioceses in the northwest as, for example, Osnabrück, where the canons holding benefices came primarily from outside the bishopric whereas local noblemen found it difficult to obtain canonries. This inevitably created tensions and those nobles who resented the privileges and wealth of the cathedral chapters staffed by outsiders were tempted to join the cause of the Reformation.[5]

In other cases there were attempts to transform the old prince bishoprics themselves into secular principalities. In fact, outside the empire Albrecht of Hohenzollern, the last Grand Master of the Teutonic order residing in Prussia, became a Protestant in the 1520s and in 1525 did manage to transform the state of the military order into a secular duchy. Albrecht of course belonged to a princely family (the Ansbach branch of the Hohenzollern). But why should a similar but less radical transformation be impossible in the many German prince bishoprics which would maintain the cathedral chapters and their benefices as sources of income for the nobility? In some German regions this was exactly what happened. The small Saxon bishoprics of Merseburg, Meißen, and Naumburg survived the Reformation, but were now governed by Protestant administrators, siblings of the House of Wettin, to which the Prince Electors and Dukes of Saxony belonged. The important point was that the cathedral chapters survived as well, providing the regional Protestant nobility with lucrative canonries and even a great deal of political power at the local level. This very special solution for dealing with old strongholds of the nobility within the late medieval church was made possible by the generally conservative character of the Reformation in Saxony.[6]

The Reformation as a Threat to the Church as “the Nobility’s Almshouse”

Elsewhere the choices for the nobility were starker. Openly supporting the Reformation meant as a rule that one had to abandon one’s hopes to gain a share of the rich spoils which in the past the church had offered to noblemen. By the mid-sixteenth century at the latest it had become clear that the emperor would do his utmost to prevent a secularization of the great prince bishoprics in Germany. This did not immediately exclude Protestants from access to benefices. In a number of bishoprics confessional allegiance remained—for the time being—of subordinate importance as a criterion for the appointment of officeholders or the election of canons; ties of patronage and kinship were more important, as Richard Ninnes has shown for Bamberg.[7] But as the sixteenth century drew to a close Protestants found their path to advancement blocked. Only some bishoprics and archbishoprics in the north and east, such as Bremen–Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt, which finally became part of greater territorial states as secular principalities at the end of the Thirty Years War, were an exception to this rule. However, before 1618 and even more so during the war the status of these bishoprics as de facto Protestant dominions had been more than precarious. Not until 1648 was the Protestant transformation of these old strongholds of the Reichskirche (imperial church) legalized and the cathedral canonries now offered an attractive source of income for well-connected Protestant nobles.

But joining the Reformation had its price and for a long time most nobles remained cautious about committing themselves too openly to one of the competing sides. There were exceptions to this rule and one finds zealots among the nobility as among the rest of the population. This might apply more to women than men, as women were less under pressure to conform and to adapt to political necessities and did not pursue political careers in their own right. Moreover, noble newcomers seem to have been more prone to flamboyant displays of confessional zeal than nobles belonging to older established family. They had to prove their loyalty to a cause or a dynasty to gain social recognition. Thus the Fuggers of Augsburg, who had risen as merchants and imperial bankers, had been ennobled in the late fifteenth century and were raised to the rank of counts of the empire by Charles V in 1530. The Fuggers were militant Catholics right from the beginning and wanted to be perceived as such, whereas a man such as Sebastian Schertlin von Burtenbach (1496–1577) who was of non-noble origin put great emphasis in his autobiography on his loyal support for the cause of the Reformation. In fact he fought in the Schmalkaldic War for the Protestant imperial cities and introduced Protestantism in his own lordship of Burtenbach near Augsburg.[8] Schertlin von Burtenbach belonged to the corporation of free imperial knights in Swabia which comprised both Protestant and Catholic nobles. Despite occasional tensions, the esprit de corps uniting nobles of different religious allegiances usually proved stronger than confessional conflicts in the empire after 1555. The fact that Lutherans and Catholics had found a modus vivendi in the Peace of Augsburg, which gave legal protection to Protestantism within the confines of the Confessio Augustana, made it certainly easier for nobles to cooperate across the confessional divide. Protestant imperial knights, like Catholics, took pride in being loyal vassals of the emperor and not a few fought in the late sixteenth century for the House of Habsburg against the Ottoman Empire, the common enemy of Christianity.

The Nobility in German Secular Principalities and in the Habsburg Monarchy

Princes, their theological and legal advisors, mostly called the shots in giving the movement for church reform an institutional framework in the empire. Few nobles decided to put up real resistance against such a Reformation imposed from above. The knighthood as a corporation dominating the territorial estates did try to insist on arrangements which ensured that existing ecclesiastical property would not be entirely secularized as the proceeds of eventual land sales replenished princes’ coffers.[9] Not only in Brandenburg but also in Mecklenburg and in particular in the various dominions of the house of Brunswick a number of ecclesiastical institutions survived as ecclesiastical endowments for unmarried noblewomen (Adlige Damenstifte). They were not very different from the medieval convents whose estates and privileges they had inherited, although the rules the Stiftsdamen (canonesses) had to observe were somewhat more flexible than those for the former nuns.[10] Whenever estates and rights of jurisdictions which had formerly belonged to ecclesiastical corporations were sold by princes in need of ready cash, nobles often managed to acquire new property at a favorable price. Thus in most German principalities the Reformation was based on an explicit or implicit understanding between the princes and their estates and in particular the nobility. The Reformation owed its later stability to this fact.

As has been pointed out, the nobility defended its corporate interests during the Reformation, but rarely took the initiative for the reform of the old medieval church. It often waited until the mists of political uncertainty had cleared, so that the risks entailed by choosing a clear confessional position could be limited accordingly. There were of course some exceptions to the rule. The success of the Reformation in the Habsburg hereditary principalities and in the lands of the crown of Bohemia (Bohemia itself, Moravia, and Silesia as well as, until 1618, Lusatia) was to a considerable extent based on noble support for the new faith. Bohemia was a special case. Here the Hussite rebellion of the early fifteenth century had shattered the power of the Roman Church which had never quite recovered from the blow. Moreover, royal authority before 1620 was rather weak. The great lords who belonged to a special chamber of barons in the Bohemian Diet were largely autonomous in ruling their vast estates which included many smaller or medium-sized towns. Admittedly in Bohemia confessional identities remained for a long time rather ill-defined and blurred, and perhaps even more so in Moravia where the influence of German Lutheranism was weaker than in Bohemia. Many nobles subscribed to an ideal of pre-confessional piety and religious tolerance and thus preferred to avoid any clear commitment to any single religious community. This pre-confessional piety, however, rarely survived the onslaught of a renewed, Tridentine Catholicism. The fact that so many leading nobles converted to Roman Catholicism after the 1580s may have been due to the fact that Rome offered them the clear dogmatic answers in a time of crisis and uncertainty which those who moved in a confessional no-man’s-land could not obtain.[11]

In Austria (the duchies of Upper and Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola) the conversion of most noblemen to Protestantism in the mid-sixteenth century may have been driven to some extent by the desire of many nobles to assert their autonomy in their relations with the staunchly Catholic Habsburg dynasty. The lack of strong urban elites who could have taken the lead in shaping the confessional landscape one way or another was probably also a factor. Moreover, the most important diocesan sees for the Habsburg lands lay outside the Austrian duchies.[12] This held true in particular for Salzburg and Passau, and may have exacerbated noble resentments against clerical arrogance, given the fact that the chapters of these dioceses were to a large extent staffed by non-Austrian noblemen or non-noble canons. Moreover, the University of Vienna only became an important center of the Counter Reformation when the Jesuits took over education in the arts and theological faculties in 1623/1624. To the extent that nobles in the second half of the sixteenth century sought to acquire a better education—and the more prosperous certainly did so—they were therefore often drawn to Protestant universities such as Wittenberg, Jena, Tübingen, and Altdorf.[13] Tübingen in particular which also offered special courses at a college reserved for noblemen, the Collegium Illustre founded in 1594/1595 by Duke Frederick of Württemberg attracted many students from Austria. Catholic efforts could overcome this Protestant educational ascendancy only during the course of the seventeenth century.

Once they had made their choice, many nobles came to see their religious allegiance as part of the cultural and social capital which gave legitimacy to their authority and their privileges.[14] Noble ancestors both male and female who had taken a prominent role in promoting the cause of the Reformation (or who had allegedly done so—mythmaking was as important for the confessional identity of a family as for the stories told about its genealogical origins) were given an important place in family histories. And in the same way in which territorial princes who had fought for the true faith held a central position in dynastic memory from the late sixteenth century onwards, the memory of members of the lower nobility who had defended the cause of the Reformation was cherished. Moreover, nobles defined their role as “Obrigkeit” (their role as magistrates and local lords) increasingly in confessional terms in the second half of the sixteenth century. Often nobles as lords of the local manor appointed the rector or vicar in a village because of the rights of advowson and patronage they held. Some, although subject in theory to the authority of a prince, even enacted their own church ordinances for the villages they ruled, just like the territorial princes. The von der Schulenburgs, one of the wealthiest families in Brandenburg, offer in the late sixteenth century a good example for an attempt to create their own version of noble supremacy in ecclesiastical matters in the Altmark within the confines of a larger territorial state.[15]

Lutheranism had developed an updated but still essentially conservative version of the medieval theory of the three orders.[16] It therefore found it comparatively easy to come to terms with such noble ambitions. A symbiosis between a new Protestant clericalism and the traditional noble claim to a privileged place not only in the secular social hierarchy but also within the church was not difficult to achieve and was only disturbed when the territorial prince and his officeholders tried to implement further reforms, by moving for example toward Calvinism, or, at the end of the seventeenth century, toward Pietism. Attempts to impose a “second” Calvinist Reformation often met with fierce resistance by the nobility, as for example in Brandenburg and Hesse-Kassel in the early seventeenth century.[17]

Reformed Protestantism in the Holy Roman Empire

If Calvinism found support at all among German nobles, these were noble families who were often part of wider European networks, which included the Netherlands and French Protestants. The counts of Nassau played a leading part in the Dutch Revolt—William of Orange belonged to a branch of this dynasty—and other counts from the area around Frankfurt, the Wetterau, such as the Solms or—from slightly further afield—the counts of Hohenlohe in Franconia (who intermarried with a branch of the counts of Nassau) joined the United Provinces’ fight against the king of Spain after 1570 or took part in the French Wars of Religion.[18]

Noblemen—not a few of them belonged to the higher nobility as counts of the empire—who embraced Calvinism often wanted to create distance between themselves and neighboring Lutheran principalities, seeking allies and patrons outside the empire to offset their lack of power and resources. On the other hand in the late sixteenth century in the empire the Elector Palatine’s court in Heidelberg also became an important center for Calvinist noblemen, as the Palatinate had turned to Reformed Protestantism in the 1560s.

In general, most German nobles regarded Calvinism with skepticism—as it tended to strengthen the position of the parish councils and synods and could in its more radical forms possibly support republican ideas. The danger that simple craftsmen or in extreme cases even peasants as members of local presbyteries or of regional synods would reject the authority of their betters seemed too great. In actual fact, Calvinism as established in the Palatinate or later in Hesse-Kassel prospered in Germany mostly in a somewhat emasculated and watered down Erastian version which was designed to avoid tensions with the traditional culture of social deference.

THE REFORMATION OUTSIDE GERMANY

Within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire the Reformation was mostly implemented by the territorial princes or the magistrates of free imperial cities; only the Habsburg principalities and Bohemia—where, however, Protestantism was to be defeated after 1618—were an exception to this rule. Despite the Confessio Augustana, most Protestants, even the Calvinists, subscribed to as many varieties of the Reformation in Germany as there were Protestant principalities and dynasties in the empire. In Western Europe, however, incipient national states provided the framework for the Reformation. England, for example, was already a comparatively centralized state by the early sixteenth century. The Reformation was closely linked to the idea of a royal supremacy in ecclesiastical matters and of the absolute sovereignty of the king-in-parliament. During the sixteenth century the peerage and the gentry largely followed the lead given by the crown in religious matters.

Protestantism in France

In France, on the other hand, the ruling dynasty opposed the Reformation at an early stage, so that Protestantism became a movement in opposition to the crown, led by prominent noble families and urban elites. France is in many ways a special case because the Wars of Religion that tore apart the country between 1562 and 1598 were also a conflict between competing noble factions. Among the foremost leaders of the Huguenots in the 1560s was Louis de Bourbon prince de Condé (killed in the Battle of Jarnac in 1569). The senior branch of the Bourbons who were related to the royal dynasty, headed by Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV of France), was even more important in giving support to Protestantism from the 1570s onwards. The Lord High Admiral of France, Gaspard the Coligny (killed during the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in 1572) was another ardent Protestant. So were members of the houses of de la Tour d’Auvergne (Dukes of Bouillon since 1591 and as such lords of the important fortress city of Sedan) and the La Trémoïlle. Significantly both families intermarried with the foremost Calvinist dynasty in Europe, the Nassau-Orange.

Admittedly research has demonstrated that a majority of French nobles, perhaps up to 80 percent, especially among the lesser nobility, either preferred to avoid any involvement in open conflict during the Wars of Religion or only took part in one or two campaigns and then returned to their estates.[19] Thus the confessional indifference or at least significant ambiguity in attitude which we can observe elsewhere can also be found in France. Nevertheless, among the wealthier and more prominent nobles the number of those prepared to identify with Protestantism was clearly much higher than among the rank and file. At the same time, Protestants never constituted more than about 30 percent of the body of the nobility even in those French provinces where Protestantism was dominant after 1560, such as the southwest of France.[20]

Within the Protestant rural communities, nobles could play a decisive role as patrons and protectors. The chapels of their castles served as places of worship for entire villages and nobles could constitute up to half of the lay members of the local synods. Some Protestant clergymen also were of noble descent. If Protestant communities were organized like a republic, this was very much an aristocratic republic.[21]

The majority of French nobles were never fully committed to one of the two warring sides in the long civil wars of the late sixteenth century. The zeal of the militant minority nevertheless needs to be explained. Denis Crouzet has argued that the end of the wars against the house of Habsburg (which had gone on for decades) in the late 1550s had a traumatic effect on the French nobility. They had to prove their heroism in war—in times of peace there was no chance for them to demonstrate their valor and acquire honor.[22] Crouzet, relying mostly on printed pamphlets and propaganda, less on correspondence and similar records, may be overstating his case. Yet leading nobles were doubtlessly in search of a cause worth fighting for after the peace with Spain (Cateau Cambresis 1559). Such a cause was not only to justify their claim to power and authority: it was also to give coherence to their widespread networks of clients.[23] While royal authority became precarious in the 1560s—Charles IX was a minor when he succeeded his brother Francis II in December 1560 and continued to be dominated by his mother Catherine de Medici in later years—tensions between noble factions became much more pronounced than in the past. The allegiance of clients and friends was all the more important, but could only be relied on when patrons and clients were fighting for a common cause and not just for place and profit. Supporting the Reformation, moreover, gave nobles access to a European network of committed Protestants which they could fall back on to counterbalance a possible defeat in the contest for influence at court. This was as important in France as it was in Germany. For Protestant nobles England and—since the 1570s—the new Dutch Republic but also the more proactive German princes such as the Elector Palatine became possible allies. Catholics, led by the house of Guise-Lorraine, looked to Spain for support.

Of course material and political interests should not be overemphasized. Once a family had chosen sides in the Wars of Religion a certain kind of religious self-fashioning could become a central part of its identity. Conspicuous acts of piety, providing benefices for the right kind of clergymen, displaying theological erudition, or writing books of devotion could all be part of this self-fashioning. In France as elsewhere, the women of the family frequently played a particularly prominent role in this process and tried to ensure that the next generation remained faithful to the ideals a dynasty had once decided to fight for. Antoinette de Bourbon (1493–1583), wife of Claude de Lorraine Duke of Guise and grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots, acquired a reputation as die hard Catholic and exerted a considerable influence on her grandsons and granddaughters through the example of her almost fanatical piety.[24] Among Protestants Jeanne d’Albret (d. 1572), Queen of Navarre and mother of Henry IV of France and later in the seventeenth century Marie de la Tour d’Auvergne, Duchess of Thouars (1601–1665) who was married to a de La Trémoïlle played a similar role.[25] Not just in France but elsewhere as well women showed a greater tendency than men to defend their inherited faith when Catholic rulers tried to persuade Protestants to convert or when they were openly persecuted. Even in mixed marriages Protestant mothers often tried to ensure that their children were educated in their own faith.[26]

The St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in 1572 was a severe setback for Protestants in France from which they never quite recovered. Moderate Catholics were almost as shocked by the brutal mass murder as Protestants. Many Catholic nobles saw the massacre as an attack on the nobility and its liberties as such.[27] The Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, was widely seen as a devious foreigner. Her advisors, some of them of Italian origin, were depicted as enemies of the traditional French constitution. The Protestant resistance theories which gained support among Huguenots after 1572 relied at least partly on a version of French history which regarded the kingdom as an elective monarchy in which the nobility descended from the Franks, the conquerors of France, and had always held a preeminent place. This version of French history is exemplified by François Hotman’s Franco Gallia, published in 1573.[28] Thus Protestantism and the fight for the liberties of the nobility became almost indistinguishable for many Huguenot nobles.

On the other hand, radical Catholics, in particular among the urban middle classes, increasingly came to see the nobility as unreliable in religious matters. If nobles were not outright enemies of the Roman Church they were still reluctant to commit themselves fully to the fight against heresy, regardless of any ties of friendship, kinship, and patronage which were so important to them. The attitude of the Catholic League or at least of its urban followers toward the nobility could verge on outright hostility during the last stages of the Wars of Religion, when Henry of Navarre’s claim to the French crown was at stake.[29] Religious radicalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, certainly posed a threat to the nobility’s position in society and politics. The fact that the new Bourbon monarchy found widespread support among both Protestant and Catholic nobles after 1598 was in part due to the longing for stability and domestic peace among French nobles after many years of turmoil.

Protestantism and Noble Elites in Northwestern Europe

In the Dutch Republic the fight against Spanish rule had begun in the 1560s as a struggle for the ancient noble and urban privileges, as well as a quest for religious freedom against a Roman Church which sought to suppress Protestantism. As the anti-Spanish movement became ever more radical both in political and in religious terms the more important noble families who had their strongholds mostly in the southern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands became, however, reluctant to support the revolt. Confronted by Calvinist iconoclasm and moral rigorism, most of them chose in the end to submit to Spanish rule. The house of Nassau-Orange was an exception here of course, as were many lesser nobles from the northern provinces who had less to lose than did the grandees with their traditionally close ties to the vice-regal court in Brussels.[30] Not a few of these lesser nobles had, by joining the sea beggars, burnt their boats—they could not easily expect a royal pardon and regarded Calvinism as providing a religious justification and inspiration for their fight against Spanish oppression.

Was radical Protestantism in its Calvinist form at odds with the core values of noble culture despite the support many French grandees gave to the Reformed Church? There is no denying the fact that the moral and religious rigorism of Calvinism could offend noble sensibilities. In Scotland in the late sixteenth century the relationship between the Kirk and its noble supporters was not free of serious tensions. The Reformation had triumphed—with English support—in defiance of royal policies which remained (until the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567) either openly opposed to the Reformation or at least reluctant to completely sever the ties with Rome. The support noble lords gave to the Reformation was therefore particularly important. In Scotland the attractions of the Reformation to nobles, as elsewhere where royal power was weak, lay partly in the fact that the Protestant clergy promoted the idea of noblemen taking on the “responsibilities of a godly magistracy.”[31] On the other hand, the ideal of strict social discipline preached by the very same clergymen could lead to severe conflicts. To do public penance in church on Sundays for adultery was not to the taste of every Scottish lord or laird. Neither were they glad to hear the censorious sermons of ministers waging war against sin and covetousness, or liked to be told that the nobility as an estate was “defiled with sacriledge, swearing, blasphemie, blood, adulteries, […] and oppressioun.”[32] Many Protestant lords therefore welcomed the re-strengthening of episcopal authority—bishops were likely to curb the fiery spirit of the more radical ministers—during the reign of James VI from the 1590s onwards.

In England, the Reformation was far more Erastian in nature than in Scotland. Few noble and gentry families chose to openly oppose the ecclesiastical policies of the crown during the sixteenth century. Most bishops in England before the Reformation had been of non-noble origin which may have contributed to the widespread anticlericalism of the landed elite. In any case the peerage and gentry also benefited greatly in the 1540s and 1550s from the massive sale of former monastic lands at discount prices, a result of both the dissolution of the monasteries enacted in the late 1530s and the financial problems of the crown.

There were nevertheless some aristocratic families who demonstrated strong allegiance to the Old Church in this period and sometimes even beyond the Elizabethan age. The senior branch of the Howards (Dukes of Norfolk and Earls of Arundel), the Percies (Earls of Northumberland who, however, became in the seventeenth century confirmed Protestants), and the Somersets (Earls of Worcester) are key examples. Most nobles and gentry families were flexible enough to adapt to the changing confessional predilections of succeeding Tudor monarchs. If they dissented from official policy in one way or another, the majority tried to keep a low profile. This was to change to some extent at the end of the sixteenth century. The generation of men and women growing up in the 1560s and 1570s was perhaps the first to receive a reasonably sound Protestant education, at home or at school, but also at university. Here they mixed with future clergymen. The resulting ties of sociability and friendship could well be maintained in later life and be the basis of close cooperation between ministers and gentry in imposing their ideals of piety, but also of a godly life on the rest of the population.[33]

It was common for gentry or noble families to take pride in being part of a spiritual elite. Militant Protestantism in its Puritan variety, which relied so much on “voluntary religion” (Patrick Collinson) gave them—in England as much as elsewhere—a chance to give a deeper meaning to their role as local officeholders and landlords.[34] Some even fought in the religious conflicts on the Continent and tried to live up to an ideal of warlike heroism which combined the revived traditions of chivalry with Protestant militancy and the fashionable neo-Stoicism of the period. The poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586 after having been wounded in the Battle of Zutphen in the Netherlands in the fight against Spanish troops, exemplifies this attitude. Sidney was widely celebrated as the perfect Christian knight and Protestant hero.[35] Upon his death, Elizabeth I was able to stage his funeral as a demonstration of fervent loyalty to the Tudor regime although Sidney had often been dissatisfied with the political pragmatism and seemingly only lukewarm Protestantism of the Queen. Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were not so fortunate. Increasingly the Puritan gentry and those peers who were similarly inclined came to see themselves as the true guardians of the Reformation and its legacy at a time when the ruling dynasty sought a compromise with the great Catholic powers, Spain in particular; and especially after 1620 pursued an ecclesiastical policy which was opposed to militant Calvinism in all its forms.

OUTLOOK AND CONCLUSION

In 1593 Henry IV of France converted to Protestantism. In his quest for the French crown he probably had little choice, but many of his Protestant followers and allies nevertheless saw this step as a betrayal.[36] After his death the Protestant nobility in France came under increasing pressure to convert as well. Careers in the army were still possible in the mid-seventeenth century but it now required a particular kind of courage and steadfastness to resist the temptation of choosing the king’s religion instead of remaining faithful to the convictions of a minority which after 1628/1629 lost most of its political privileges granted in 1598. The last high-ranking French nobleman to convert was the Viscount Turenne in 1668, but many had preceded him.[37] Admittedly Protestant provincial noblemen often refused to follow their betters, by preferring in the 1680s to emigrate, as French Protestantism was finally suppressed.

In other European countries, Protestant nobles had come under pressure much earlier. Prominent Bohemian and Austrian aristocrats had converted as early as the 1590s. A rational calculation of the improved career prospects such a step might create was not always easy to distinguish from real conviction.[38] In countries and regions where Protestantism had remained badly organized and failed to find common ground in a set of clear theological and religious principles enshrined in articles of religion and rules of worship the revived Catholic Church could appeal to nobles’ quest for stability in winning new converts. Thus in Poland, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Unitarians, and the Bohemian Brethren were in competition among Protestant nobles who rejected the Roman Church. But the divided Protestant community became a small minority over the course of the seventeenth century despite the former strength of the Protestant nobility which may have constituted up to 50 percent of the leading Polish families as late as 1570.[39]

After the turn of the sixteenth century the increasing attraction of the education provided by Jesuits and other orders at school or university became an ever more important factor in persuading Protestant nobles to join the Roman Church. In some parts of Europe the flourishing late Renaissance and Baroque culture of Italy may also have influenced noblemen’s and noblewomen’s predilection for a faith which seemed to subscribe to an ideal of culture which was more easily compatible with noble aesthetic sensibilities. The perceived pedantry of Protestant scholars and theologians who rejected the exuberance of baroque art seemed to militate against the conspicuous consumption in which at least at court nobles had to indulge if they wanted to maintain their status and prestige.

But of course political pressure was also of central importance for the success of Catholicism in winning supporters among the nobility. In Bohemia and the adjacent Habsburg dominions in 1618 Protestants had tried to stop the Catholic rollback by rising in rebellion against the ruling dynasty. But the Bohemian revolt was crushed in 1620 and those who had taken part in it forced into exile. Their property was confiscated and distributed to loyal Catholic noble families both from abroad and from within the Habsburg monarchy. Only in Silesia and—until the 1660s—in Lower Austria could Protestant nobles maintain their position for the time being.[40] In the end many preferred exile to conversion when they had to make a choice. This decision may have been facilitated by the fact that most expatriates had cousins or other relations who became or were Catholics (and who stayed at home). Family solidarity was often sufficiently strong to provide the exiled family members with financial support and political protection.

In England, by contrast, anti-popery had become an essential part of the social elite’s political culture. Attitudes hardened to the extent that the Stuarts could be depicted as increasingly unreliable in religious matters. Parliament and its liberties were seen as an essential part of a political and legal system which was to thwart any attempts to undermine Protestantism in England. During the English Civil War of the 1640s, the Puritan gentry and a number of militantly Protestant aristocratic families were in the forefront of resistance against Charles I. Other members of the elite, however, saw in a church ruled by bishops and rooted in the traditions of pre-Reformation piety the only bulwark against social unrest and political chaos. The radicalization of militant Protestant sects in the 1640s and 1650s seemed to prove that they had not been entirely mistaken.[41]

In England as much as elsewhere the nobility and gentry were torn between conflicting instincts. On the one hand it seemed a tempting prospect to take the lead of a movement which aimed to reform both the church and the world; its emphasis on the prominent role of laymen within the church appealed to the pride nobles took in being natural leaders and an elite. On the other hand, religious radicalism could pose a threat to the social order and the nobility’s own position. Such tendencies were not entirely absent from radical Catholicism, yet given the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church they could be more easily controlled than in Protestantism.

At the same time the inclination to embrace militant Protestantism was curtailed among nobles by the tendency to see all nobles of whatever persuasion as part of the same social community. This did not preclude bitter feuds and enmities but it did often create a common bond which made it possible—outside times of acute crisis—to transcend the confessional divide, even to the extent that mixed marriages were seen as acceptable.[42] In turn, clerical critics of the nobility often depicted nobles as somewhat lukewarm supporters of religious ideals. It is true that many nobles liked to choose from a variety of religious options in the hope of finding one which was compatible with their own sense of honor and their idea of what it meant to be a nobleman or a noblewoman. Rights of patronage, economic resources, and political power made it possible for nobles to some extent to create their own personal version of the religion which they officially professed.[43] Future research should pay more attention to this phenomenon. The great religious communities, Catholicism but also the various regional and national varieties of Protestantism, have too often been seen as monolithic. In reality individuals and in particular men and women who enjoyed power, prestige, and wealth, could be very selective in their religious practices and beliefs. This is not to deny that pressure to conform at least outwardly to official religious norms became greater over time. While confessional indifference may still have been widespread in the mid-sixteenth century, this became ever more difficult to maintain in later decades. If one refused to accept the religion established by law one often had no choice but to convert or to emigrate. That a sizable minority of nobles chose the latter option in the seventeenth century shows that by this time confessional allegiance had become part of their family tradition and their social identity.

NOTES

1. Heinz Schilling, Die Stadt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 24) (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1993), 94–98.

2. Volker Press, “Franz von Sickingen—Wortführer des Adels, Vorkämpfer der Reformation und Freund Huttens,” in Franz Brendle and Anton Schindling (eds.), Adel im Alten Reich, Gesammelte Vorträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen: Bibliotheca-Academia-Verlag, 1998), 319–332; Press, “Ulrich von Hutten und seine Zeit,” ibid., 299–318; cf. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 156–157.

3. Press, “Adel, Reich und Reformation,” in Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Das Alte Reich. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 329–379.

4. Klaus Schreiner, “Vom adligen Hauskloster zum ‘Spital des Adels’: Gesellschaftliche Verflechtungen Oberschwäbischer Benediktinerkonvente im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Gert Melville (ed.), Gemeinsam Leben: Spiritualität, Lebens- und Verfassungsformen klösterlicher Gemeinschaften in Kirche und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2013), 291–330, esp. 310–312.

5. Christian Hoffmann, Ritterschaftlicher Adel im geistlichen Fürstentum. Die Familie von Bar und das Hochstift Osnabrück (Osnabrück: Verein für Geschichte und Landeskunde von Osnabrück, 1996), 221–272; cf. for Würzburg, Press, “Adel,” 361–362.

6. For Saxony, Merseburg, and the other smaller bishoprics see Markus Cottin, “Quellen zur Geschichte der wettinischen Sekundogenitor Sachsen-Merseburg (1657–1738) in Domstiftsarchiv und -bibliothek Merseburg,” in Vincenz Czech (ed.), Fürsten ohne Land: Höfische Pracht in den sächsischen Sekundogenituren Weißenfels, Merseburg und Zeitz (Berlin: Lukas-Verlag, 2009), 273–303, at 274–276.

7. Richard J. Ninness, Between Opposition and Collaboration: Nobles, Bishops, and the German Reformations in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg, 1555–1619 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011).

8. Dietmar Schiersner, “Semper fidelis: Konfessionelle Spielräume und Selbstkonzepte im südwestdeutschen Adel der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Ronald G. Asch, Václav Bůžek, and Volker Trugenberger (eds.), Adel in Südwestdeutschland und Böhmen 1450–1850 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2013), 95–126, at 103–105; Franz von Rexroth, Der Landsknechtführer Sebastian Schertlin. Ein Bild seines Lebens und der beginnenden Neuzeit (Bonn: Röhrscheid Verlag, 1940).

9. Press, “Adel,” 346–351.

10. Frank Göse, “Adlige Führungsgruppen in nordostdeutschen Territorialstaaten des 16. Jahrthunderts,” in Peter Michael Hahn and Hellmuth Lorenz (eds.), Formen der Visualisierung von Herrschaft. Studien zu Adel, Fürst und Schloßbau vom 16. Bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1998), 139–210, at 186–188; for Brunswick see Hans Walter Krumwiede, Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens, vol. I. Von der Sachsenmission bis zum Ende des Reiches 1806 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 174–179.

11. Josef Hrdlicka, “Die Rolle des Adels im Prozess der Konfessionalisierung der böhmischen Länder am Anfang der Neuzeit,” in Asch et al., Adel, 77–94; Petr Mat’a, “Vorkonfessionelles, überkonfessionelles, transkonfessionelles Christentum. Prolegomonea zu einer Untersuchung der Konfessionalität des böhmischen und mährischen Hochadels zwischen Hussitismus und Zwangskatholisierung,” in Joachim Bahlcke, Karen Lambrecht, and Hans-Christian Maner (eds.), Konfessionelle Pluralität als Herausforderung, Koexistenz und Konflikt in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 2006), 307–331; cf. Jörg Deventer, “Adelskonfessionalisierung? Überlegungen zum Rollenspiel katholischer Adelseliten im Milieu der Bikonssionalität,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al. (eds.) Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten. Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), 442–460, as well as Jaroslav Panek, “The Religious Question and the Political System of Bohemia before and after the Battle of the White Mountain,” in Robert J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas (eds.), Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 129–148.

12. Press, “Adel,” 373–375; Gustav Reingrabner, “Der evangelische Adel in Niederösterreich. Überzeugung und Handeln,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich 90/91 (1975): 3–59; Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria: The Social and Cultural Dimension of Political Interaction 1521–1622 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

13. Alfred Kohler, “Bildung und Konfession. Zum Studium der Studenten aus den habsburgischen Ländern an Hochschulen im Reich (1560–1620),” in Grete Klingenstein et al. (eds.), Bildung, Politik und Gesellschaft. Studien zur Geschichte des europäischen Bildungswesens vom 16. Bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1978), 64–123.

14. Gerrit Walter, “Glaube, Freiheit und Kalkül. Zur Frage von ‘Anpassung’ und ‘Mobilität’ bei adligen Konfessionsentscheidungen im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Horst Carl and Sönke Lorenz (eds.), Gelungene Anpassung? Adelige Antworten auf gesellschaftliche Wandlungsvorgänge vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern: Thorbecke Verlag, 2005), 185–200; cf. Asch, “Religiöse Selbstinszenierung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskriege: Adel und Konfession in Westeuropa,” Historisches Jahrbuch 125 (2005): 67–100.

15. Christian Schulz, “Die Patronatskirche Osterwohle. Ihre Konzeption von 1621 als Abbild der himmlischen Glückseligkeit,” in Jiri Fajt, Wilfried Franzen, and Peter Knüvener (eds.), Die Altmark von 1300 bis 1600, Eine Kulturregion im Spannungsfeld von Magdeburg, Lübeck und Berlin (Berlin: Lukas-Verlag, 2011), 458–475, at 462; cf. Peter-Michael Hahn, Fürstliche Territorialhoheit und lokale Adelsgewalt: die herrschaftliche Durchdringung des ländlichen Raumes zwischen Elbe und Aller (1300–1700) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989).

16. Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Politica Christiana in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Robert v. Friedeburg (ed.), Politics, Law, Society, History and Religion in the Politica (1590s–1650s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Subject (Hildesheim: Olms, 2013), 59–86.

17. Bodo Nischan, Prince, People and Confession. The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Gerhard Menk, “Die Konfessionspolitik des Landgrafen Moritz,” in Menk (ed.), Landgraf Moritz der Gelehrte. Ein Kalvinist zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft (Marburg: Trautvetter & Fischer, 2000), 95–138.

18. Georg Schmidt, Der Wetterauer Grafenverein: Organisation und Politik einer Reichskorporation zwischen Reformation und Westfälischem Frieden (Marburg: Elwert Verlag, 1989).

19. Jean-Marie Constant, “Les barons français pendant les guerres de religion,” in Association Henri IV (ed.), Quatrième Centenaire de la Bataille de Courtras (Colloque de Coutras organisé par le GRAHC, 1987) (Pau: Société Henri IV, 1988), 48–62, at 54–60; cf. Jean-Marie Constant, “The Protestant Nobility in France during the Wars of Religions: A Leaven of Innovation in a Traditional World,” in Philip Benedict et al. (eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585 (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1999), 69–83.

20. Constant, “Protestant Nobility,” 69–73.

21. Yves Krumenacker, “Les nobles, protecteurs du peuple protestant en France (1598–1685),” in Ariane Boltanski and Franck Mercier (eds.), Le Salut par les armes. Noblesse et défense de l’orthodoxie (XIIIe–XVIIe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), 195–208, at 206–207, these observations describe admittedly the situation in the seventeenth century; cf. also Raymond Mentzer, Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994).

22. Denis Crouzet, La genèse de la Réforme Française, 1520–1562 (Paris: Sedes, 1999), 539–545.

23. Robert R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 84–86.

24. Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5–6, 177.

25. Sonja Kmec, Across the Channel: Noblewomen in Seventeenth-Century France and England; A Study of the Lives of Marie de La Tour “Queen of the Huguenots” and Charlotte de La Trémoïlle, Countess of Derby (Trier: Kliomedia, 2010).

26. Arndt Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus und konfessionelle Identität. Die protestantischen Herren und Ritter in den österreichischen Erblanden nach 1620 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2013), 64–66; cf. Dagmar Freist, “Between Conscience and Coercion: Mixed Marriages, Church, Secular Authority, and Family,” in Mary Lindemann and David Luebke (eds.), Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Early Modern Germany (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 185–212.

27. Arlette Jouanna, La France du XVIe siècle, 1483–1598 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 503–504.

28. Robert M. Kingdon, “Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,” in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193–218, at 206–214; cf. for similar arguments in England: Robert v. Friedeburg, Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530–1680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). For resistance theories within a different, mostly Lutheran, context see Arno Strohmeyer, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung: Widerstandsrecht bei den Österreichischen Ständen (1550–1650) (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2006).

29. See for example François Cromé, Dialogue d’entre le maheustre et le manant, ed. Peter M. Ascoli (Geneva: Droz, 1977).

30. Henk van Nierop, “The Nobility and the Revolt of the Netherlands: Between Church and King and Protestantism and Privileges,” in Benedict et al. (eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War, 83–98.

31. Keith Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 235.

32. Ibid. p. 237, quoting James Melville’s remarks to the Earl of Angus in 1584.

33. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 341–344, 359.

34. Cf. Patrick Collinson, “The English Conventicle,” in William J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), Voluntary Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 223–259.

35. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney`s “Arcadia” and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1997).

36. Ronald S. Love, Blood and Religion: The Conscience of Henry IV 1553–1593 (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

37. Susan Rosa, “ ‘Il etait possible aussi que cette conversion fût sincère’: Turenne’s Conversion in Context,” French Historical Studies 18 (1994): 632–666; cf. Leonhard Horowski, “Konversion und dynastische Strategie: Turenne und das Ende des französischen Hochadelscalvinismus,” in Ute Lotz-Heumann et al. (eds.), Konversion und Konfession in der Frühen Neuzeit (Heidelberg: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007), 171–211.

38. Thomas Winkelbauer, Fürst und Fürstendiener: Gundaker von Liechtenstein, ein österreichischer Aristokrat des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999), 85–144.

39. Joerg K. Hoensch, Geschichte Polens (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1983), 108; MacCulloch, Reformation, 360–365; Henryk Gmiterek, “Die Rezeption reformatorischer Ideen und religiöser Widerstandstheorien innerhalb der polnischen Eliten,” in Joachim Bahlcke, Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, and Norbert Kersken (eds.), Ständefreiheit und Staatsgestaltung in Ostmitteleuropa. Übernationale Gemeinsamkeiten in der politischen Kultur vom 16–18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 1996), 217–228.

40. On Lower Austria see Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus; for Silesia see Jörg Deventer, Gegenreformation in Schlesien. Die habsburgische Rekatholisierungspolitik in Glogau und Schweidnitz (1526–1707) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2003).

41. John Trevor Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan Gentry during and after the Civil Wars (London: Routledge, 1988); cf. Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), esp. 148–176, 224–242.

42. For mixed marriages—not all of them among nobles of course—see now Dagmar Freist, Glaube—Liebe—Zwietracht. Konfessionell gemischte Ehen in Deutschland in der Frühen Neuzei (forthcoming); and previous n. 27.

43. For Catholics this has been shown by Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

FURTHER READING

Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Boltanski, Ariane and Franck Mercier (eds.) Le Salut par les armes. Noblesse et défense de l’orthodoxie (XIIIe–XVIIe siècle). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011.

Brown, Keith. Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Constant, Jean-Marie. “The Protestant Nobility in France during the Wars of Religions: A Leaven of Innovation in a Traditional World.” In Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585, edited by Philip Benedict et al., pp. 69–83. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1999.

Evans, Robert J. W. and T. V. Thomas (eds.) Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.

Friedeburg, Robert von. Self-Defence and Religious Strife in Early Modern Europe: England and Germany, 1530–1680. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

Heal, Felicity and Clive Holmes. The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994.

Kmec, Sonja. Across the Channel: Noblewomen in Seventeenth-Century France and England; A Study of the Lives of Marie de La Tour “Queen of the Huguenots” and Charlotte de La Trémoïlle, Countess of Derby. Trier: Kliomedia, 2010.

MacHardy, Karin J. War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria: The Social and Cultural Dimension of Political Interaction 1521–1622. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Mentzer, Raymond. Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994.

Ninness, Richard J. Between Opposition and Collaboration: Nobles, Bishops, and the German Reformations in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg, 1555–1619. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011.

Nischan, Bodo. Prince, People and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Ohlmeyer, Jane. Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Schorn-Schütte, Luise. “Politica Christiana in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Politics, Law, Society, History and Religion in the Politica (1590s–1650s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Subject, edited by Robert von Friedeburg, pp. 59–86. Hildesheim: Olms, 2013.

van Nierop, Henk. “The Nobility and the Revolt of the Netherlands: Between Church and King and Protestantism and Privileges.” In Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585, edited by Philip Benedict et al., pp. 83–98. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1999.

PART V

IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL MEANINGS OF THE REFORMATIONS

CHAPTER 28

EXPLAINING CHANGE

CRAIG KOSLOFSKY

FROM CONSENSUS TO COMPLEXITY

DISCUSSIONS of the causes of the Reformation have long been synonymous with claims about its meaning or significance on a personal, spiritual, confessional, national, or world-historical level. Conversely, these levels have sought a single, overriding account of the causes of the Reformation (e.g., “Luther’s Reformation was the work of the devil”; or “the Reformation reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie”).[1] From the first decades of the Reformation through the nineteenth century, there was a kind of consensus on the causes of the Protestant Reformation: it began with Martin Luther. Swiss Protestants might argue for the place of the Zurich Reformer Ulrich Zwingli alongside Luther, but Martin Luther’s personal breakthrough from guilt and despair to faith in “a God of grace” stood as the foundation of the Reformation. His breakthrough was understood as both a personal, inner struggle and an act with immediate, broad resonance. In this foundational Protestant understanding, the Reformation is seen as the universal generalization and validation of Luther’s individual experience, connecting his conversion and theology with the spiritual needs of the people of Western Christendom in the sixteenth century.

The moral disarray and corruption of the Church of Rome, fostered by its fall from a theology of grace into a false emphasis on works, created a general spiritual crisis resolved by the arrival of Luther and his message of justification by faith alone. This decadence theory found the cause of the Reformation in the institutional, theological, or moral failings of medieval Christianity, denounced heroically by Luther and other Reformers. A simple, compelling story of institutional corruption challenged by individual integrity, the decadence theory has long been an integral part of Western thought and culture. It has become inherently persuasive to Protestants and Catholics, believers and skeptics alike, and it will remain the popular understanding of the cause of the Protestant Reformation—what most people “want to believe” about its origins—for the foreseeable future.

For scholars of the Reformation today, however, the causes of the movement are far more complex and uncertain. Writing in 1999, C. Scott Dixon pointed out that “we are still asking the most basic and elemental of questions” about its origins and development. Assessing the field in 2012, he identified “perhaps the biggest challenge facing Reformation historians today”: how does the movement relate to the age that fostered it? As perspectives on the Reformation have broadened and our knowledge of it has deepened, it has become harder to explain. We now realize that the Protestant consensus described above reflected the exclusion of other views, rather than a broad agreement about a decadent church reformed by a theology of justification by Scripture alone. In the nineteenth century, Roman Catholic intellectuals and historical materialists alike developed very different explanations for the division of Christendom in the sixteenth century. These alternatives were followed by more focused historical discussions of the origins of the Reformation; among them the work of Lucien Febvre was most influential.[2]

But this scholarship did not count for much in the Protestant academy in Germany, Britain, or North America, and the story of a hero proclaiming salvation by faith alone to a church with bad morals and worse theology remained dominant. Even attempts to recontextualize the Reformation and its origins by German Protestants such as Ernst Troeltsch (1865‒1923) were countered by the “Luther Renaissance” of Karl Holl (1866‒1926) and his followers, who created a hyper-coherent version of Luther’s theology as guarantor of the unity and modernity of the Reformation.[3] As scholars such as Volker Leppin have shown, Luther himself falls short of the doctrinal precision required by this view of the Reformation.[4] For example, the transformative spiritual breakthrough Luther described to his confessor Johannes Staupitz in 1518 was based on a mystical understanding of repentance—not justification by faith alone.[5] We are now realizing that from its very core, the Reformation was much less consistent, and much more closely tied to the Middle Ages, than any foundational account would allow.

THE APPEAL OF THE REFORMATION MESSAGE?

As academia became more diverse in the 1970s, perspectives on the Reformation broadened. Old and new arguments about the causes of the Reformation emerged as alternatives to the Protestant consensus. At the same time, the expansion of humanities scholarship deepened our knowledge of all aspects of the European Christendom of the medieval and early modern centuries. As a result, discussions about the causes of the Protestant Reformation grew much more contested and engaging. Now, alongside the claims reaching back to Ranke that defined the Reformation in terms of the nation (with Luther as a herald of German nationalism), the state (and its “liberation” from the authority of the church), and the individual (whose justification by faith defined Protestantism), scholars saw the Reformation as the result of social, political, and cultural forces expressed through urban elites, restive peasants, and new attitudes toward marriage and gender.[6] Theological studies also grew more complex, with explorations of every possible individual or school of thought that might have influenced Luther or his fellow travelers.[7]

By the late 1970s, two contrasting (but complementary) approaches to the Reformation had emerged. Theologians and church historians emphasized the irreducibility of faith and religion in Reformation studies. In their research, theology was the mover, never the moved. In contrast, social historians argued that the Reformation message could only be understood in its larger social context; some explicitly subordinated the Reformation to larger narratives of class and state formation. A 1979 debate between Bernd Moeller and Thomas A. Brady over the place of religious belief in Brady’s account of the establishment of the Reformation in Strasbourg epitomized the contrast between these two approaches.[8] All of these new (and old) claims about the causes of the Reformation were elegantly summarized by Euan Cameron in his 1991 The European Reformation. (A second edition published in 2012 confirmed the value and durability of this study.) After noting that scholars have retreated from “comprehensive, all-purpose large-scale explanations for adherence to the Reformation,” Cameron nevertheless (to his credit) assessed a series of claims about the appeal of the Reformation message in three broad categories: material and political explanations; social explanations based on the “fit” of the Reformation message to a specific group; and psychological or spiritual explanations.[9]

Claims that princes and city councils adopted the Reformation to take wealth and authority from the church are assessed first. Cameron agrees that rulers saw immense political benefits from the seizure of church authority and—one should add—from a theology that could cast their break with Rome as a Christian act of faith and conscience. Whether pressure to establish the Reformation came from the prince, a city council, or the middling ranks, it built upon—but then transcended—earlier questions of political anticlericalism, struggles between estates, and church authority. Despite the medieval roots of these questions, Cameron notes that “Something quite dramatic broke down the late-medieval equilibrium between ‘anticlerical’ distaste for the Church’s flaws and [the] ‘conventionally pious’ belief in its rituals.”[10] Cameron argues that political‒material explanations do not really address this “something”: I will argue below that it is an aspect of the cultural origins of the Reformation.

Recognizing a natural affinity between specific aspects of the Reformation message and specific political or social groups has generated a vast scholarship. Scholars have argued that beleaguered city councilors were drawn to Luther’s insistence on human sinfulness and moral inadequacy; that urban merchants and artisans preferred a simpler, cheaper, more practical version of Christianity; and that in cities and in the countryside, the oppressed and rebellious seized upon and expanded the Reformation’s challenge to (clerical) authority.[11] In Cameron’s view, these arguments are more suggestive than comprehensive, taking discrete parts of Protestant thought and specific social groups out of their larger and more complex contexts.[12]

From a wide variety of claims about the appeal of the Reformation message, only the foundational Protestant narrative of a “spiritual crisis” epitomized and then resolved by Luther is explicitly rejected by Cameron.[13] Claims about the sacrament of penance and the “burden of late-medieval religion” are dismissed for lack of evidence other than a particular reading of Luther’s personal experience. Further, in the crucial early years of the Reformation in the German lands, it is hard to document any group of individuals who understood salvation, grace, and guilt as Luther did. Conversely, many of Luther’s “followers” did not seem to understand his theological emphases, considering him a radical Humanist, a German nationalist, or a moral reformer. Scholars disagree on the theological consistency of Reformation preaching in the 1520s, but they agree that an intense interest in the real-world consequences of Reformed teaching—what it meant for clerical authority, the Mass, vows of celibacy, serfdom, or intercession for the dead—was the forefront of the movement.

After summarizing a range of positions on the Reformation’s origins, Cameron reasonably made a claim of his own. He argued that the “flattery” of the laity by the Reformers made the Protestant message popular and persuasive. The laity were elevated by Luther’s “priesthood of all believers,” and Reformed preaching and doctrine “honored lay participation” by portraying laypeople as fit to judge and act in church matters previously off-limits to them. Zwingli and other urban Reformers constituted their cities as a new kind of holy community: the traditional clergy (and the dead) were excluded, but laymen and their ministers formed a “Christian assembly” capable of governing city and church. Cameron’s common-sense claim about the sincere flattery of laypeople by Reformers overcomes many of the limitations of the other claims he examines. But Cameron’s answer raises further questions—why was this flattery so persuasive at this time? Why did a significant number of Christians start to act upon their resentment of “priests in whose expertise they had suddenly ceased to be confident”?[14] Again, one suspects that behind this straightforward argument there are questions best understood as cultural.

Cameron’s work proved useful, both to clear away old claims and to show what is still missing in our understanding of the causes of the Reformation. As he and others acknowledge, intense scholarly interest in every aspect of the Protestant Reformation has created a wealth of details and knowledge which in itself seems to make any “all-purpose model” impossible: airy generalizations simply collapse under the weight of accumulated scholarship. A complex story of equal parts faith, force, and fortune has emerged over the last fifty years as scholars have uncovered more detail from more perspectives, showing that the political and social origins of the Reformation do not conform to any simple pattern or model. Likewise recent scholarship, such as the work of Alister McGrath, shows that its intellectual origins were equally diverse.[15]

Further, as social history gave way to the more critical approaches that undergird cultural history, many social and cultural historians became suspicious of any “master narrative,” including those regarding the origins of the Reformation (whether nationalist, Protestant, or materialist). But this turn away from overarching narratives has vitiated their attempts to tell the story of the Reformation in any new way. More knowledge has produced less narrative, and today it is much easier to survey a long series of reformations (national or thematic) than to recount the origins of the Reformation (with a capital “R”) in any new way. This leaves the popular Protestant narrative unchallenged at the general level where it thrives. Ironically, Cameron documented and affirmed scholars’ rejection of the foundational Protestant narrative described above just as it grew more entrenched in teaching, catechism, and popular culture.

This overview of the field makes clear that most scholars no longer accept any “all-purpose model” of the causes of the Reformation—such claims are rejected both empirically (due to the quantity of research amassed) and theoretically (based on suspicion of all “master narratives”). One notes that the insightful chapter on “motives for establishing the Reformation” in Euan Cameron’s 1991 The European Reformation was one of the chapters not in need of an update for the 2012 second edition. But the current wealth of knowledge does offer two new ways to understand the causes of the Protestant Reformation: first, in lieu of a comprehensive, all-purpose model of the causes of the Reformation, scholars have built a much sturdier understanding of a set of conditions necessary for the emergence of the Protestant Reformation; second, the vast research on the cultural impact of the Reformation points the way toward a new narrative and “all-purpose model” of its causes, based in cultural history. We will examine these developments in the next two sections.

SOME NECESSARY CONDITIONS FOR THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

Because they have studied their subject in such detail, scholars of the Reformation are loath to generalize about its origins. No large-scale explanations can sail past such vast “reefs of known facts” (as Thomas Brady put it) without severe damage. But from this mass of facts and details, lower-order generalizations have emerged, and they allow for more empirically-grounded claims and comparisons. In other words, though unwilling to speak about the causes of the Protestant Reformation, historians have been glad to identify conditions without which the Reformation could not have happened. They have generated a set of necessary—though not sufficient—conditions for the emergence and growth of the Reformation. And there is in fact some consensus about these necessary conditions. For example, historians might disagree over the importance of urban elites or Luther’s theology of grace to the origins of the Protestant Reformation; but they agree that the Reformation could not have emerged as it did without the unique institutional politics of the Holy Roman Empire. Because these arguments about the essential conditions for the Reformation focus on discrete, specific issues (such as the available theologies of salvation at the start of the sixteenth century), rather than more abstract concepts (such as “the formation of the nation state”), they allow for comparison across kingdoms, theological positions, and social groups.

The Holy Roman Empire provides one set of conditions considered necessary for the emergence of the Reformation. Recently Thomas Brady has argued that as Europe recovered from the effects of the Black Death, the German lands took a distinct path. A series of political reforms “created a new kind of institutionalized public life” based on the emperor and the territorial princes. The challenges to traditional religious authority issuing from Wittenberg and Zurich were both “enabled and constrained” by the unique balance of power, authority, and institutions in the empire.[16] This sixteenth-century imperial settlement meant that church authority, and theological challenges to it, would affect the German lands very differently from other European polities. The fragmentation of political authority among some 300 interwoven semi-sovereign territories shifted the balance of initiative decisively in favor of the church, whose clergy could sell indulgences, tax peasants, or elect their king in ways that were inconceivable in smaller but more centralized polities like France, England, or Scotland. This fragmentation allowed Luther’s Saxon parishioners to walk over to Brandenburg territory to buy indulgences; it also allowed Luther to survive excommunication and condemnation by the imperial Diet and live out his days in Wittenberg.

The many levels of authority and power in the empire had already provided fertile soil for the emergence and survival of one revolt against the authority of Rome, the Hussite movement in the kingdom of Bohemia.[17] In the sixteenth century it was the imperial cities which served as laboratories in which new ideas from Wittenberg and Zurich could be put into practice. Subject only to the emperor and therefore de facto self-governing, these cities were centers of printing and trade and were essential to the establishment and spread of the Reformation. They stretched from Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Strasbourg to Lübeck and Hamburg, and ranged from small towns to include the largest cities in the empire. In 1521 they numbered about sixty-five, and over the course of the sixteenth century about fifty adopted the Reformation in some way.[18] It is difficult to imagine the history of the Reformation in Europe without them—English Reformers, for example, looked to their Protestant counterparts in imperial cities such as Nuremberg and Strasbourg for doctrine and guidance. Scholars began to study these cities closely after the publication of Bernd Moeller’s 1962 essay on the imperial cities, Reichstadt und Reformation (English edition: Imperial Cities and the Reformation, 1972), which unlocked this rich new field in Reformation history. In the words of Peter Blickle: “if it [the Reformation] previously had been situated—roughly speaking—between intellectual and political history, between the theology of Luther and its realization by territorial rulers, with the urban Reformation a third dimension of the process of the Reformation, namely the social history of the Reformation, opened up.”[19] Moeller showed that the unique position of the imperial cities within the structure of the Holy Roman Empire was essential to the Reformation. His successor in Göttingen, Thomas Kaufmann, has broadened this claim from German city states to European principalities, arguing that “the Reformation succeeded because it combined the specificity of the site where it was … enacted with the general authority of churchliness.” This was a powerful and unprecedented combination of regional focus and universal claims: whether in Saxony or Scotland, Reformation ideas were enacted within existing political units to create a local church with the same monopoly of spiritual authority the Church of Rome had claimed. Reform was swift, binding, and intolerant.[20]

This was necessary, as contemporaries saw it, because souls were at stake. But by what doctrine would they be saved? Scholars of theology have likewise identified intellectual conditions that were essential to the emergence of the Reformation. The role of Humanism has long been recognized.[21] But confusion as well as knowledge played a role. By the end of the fifteenth century, there was no clear soteriological consensus in the church. How did indulgences function? To whom could they be applied? Could a Christian cooperate in any way with his or her salvation? None of these questions had clear answers—nor was there a single site of doctrinal authority providing such answers. Alister McGrath has noted that “in certain areas of doctrine—most notably the doctrine of justification—there appears to have been considerable confusion during the first decades of the sixteenth century concerning the specifics of the official teaching of the church.”[22] This confusion fostered the Reformation in two ways: it provided a wide range of theological positions on salvation, and it suggested that the church had lost authority over its own doctrine. This wide-ranging academic speculation led theologians and their audiences into uncharted realms where “new” theologies, such as those of Luther and Karlstadt, could develop without even an agreement on their novelty. And as we will see below, authority over doctrine was at least as important as the content of the doctrine itself.

Among the many conditions considered necessary for the outbreak of the Reformation, we have focused here on the political and the intellectual. Beyond these, some are neither ecclesiastical nor regional. They could best be described as the cultural conditions expressed by the Protestant Reformation. These cultural conditions or factors may offer a way forward toward a new general understanding of the origins of the Reformation.

FROM CULTURAL HISTORY TO A CULTURAL NARRATIVE?

In the upheaval of the Reformation theologians repudiated the scholasticism they had spent years mastering; sons and daughters cut off payment for intercession for their dead parents’ souls; citizens mocked the relics of their patron saints; and monks and nuns married, abandoning the cloisters where their brothers and sisters had worked and prayed for centuries. These clergy, citizens, and peasants, who only a few years or even months earlier had bought indulgences, sung masses for the dead, or strained to touch the relics of a saint, briefly coalesced into a popular movement centered in the Holy Roman Empire. This movement then simultaneously fragmented, institutionalized, and “internationalized,” permanently reshaping Western Christendom. Scholars today are skeptical of comprehensive or “all-purpose” explanations for this upheaval, so the causes of the Reformation movement are poorly articulated. The effects of the Protestant Reformation, in contrast, are both broad and broadly agreed upon. The essays in Parts IV and V of this handbook show the extraordinary impact of the Reformation, especially in cultural terms. It left no relationship in medieval Christendom untouched—whether between men and women, rich and poor, clergy and laity, word and image, or the living and the dead. Reformation scholars have shown how cultural fields such as liturgy, the visual, the body, gender, sexuality, and emotion were transformed by Protestant ideas, Reformers, and institutions. A newcomer to the study of the Protestant Reformation might well ask: didn’t a movement with so much cultural impact also have cultural origins?

For the reasons described above, historians of the Reformation hesitate to build stories about causes or origins.[23] But current scholarship suggests that culture does in fact provide the basis for a new narrative of the origins of the Reformation, one that connects and clarifies more aspects of the movement, across Europe, than any other single vantage point. These cultural approaches to the Reformation gained ground in the 1980s. Seeking to avoid the impasse between theological and social/political approaches to the Reformation, scholars such as Natalie Davis, Bob Scribner, Lyndal Roper, and Hans-Jürgen Goertz began to put the role of values, symbols, and rituals at the center of their studies of the Reformation.[24] This approach brought the changing meanings of community, the visual, the body, the clergy, masculinity, the poor, and the dead into dialogue with their theological expression in the Reformation. If Moeller’s Imperial Cities and the Reformation (1962/1972) opened up social history as the third dimension of Reformation studies, then this cultural history of the Reformation revealed its fourth dimension.

Cultural historians of the Reformation build upon established theological and social/political approaches. The irreducible importance of religion to this age, and to the Reformation itself, is not contested. But cultural historians argue that our best access to this fundamentally religious world comes neither through the theology of its educated elites, nor through the transmission of this theology via preaching and other communication processes, but through an understanding of religious belief as practice in late medieval culture. The claim that religious faith is an “irreducible” factor does not, after all, tell us how to understand this faith. One can approach religious faith and practice solely in the terms of its adherents—the insights are considerable. But in the West, this privilege has never been claimed for the faith or practice of any religion except Christianity. All others have been viewed through a variety of lenses, from the colonial and orientalist to those of cultural anthropology or sociology. For better or worse, these lenses provide the optics for a comparative study of faith and practice constituted as “religion.” And comparison can offer especially valuable insights on religion and its transformations. Victor Lieberman’s claim that “strange parallels” shaped states and state religions across early modern Eurasia, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s deft comparison of early modern “religious” reformers from Saxony, the Punjab, Ming China, and the Songhay Empire of West Africa (in her contribution to this volume) place the Reformation in an exciting new framework of cultural politics.[25]

Cultural approaches tend to revise the fundamental insights of the social history of the Reformation in similar terms, expanding the social history of the Reformation by considering how late medieval society conceived of itself: these conceptions or social distinctions are accessible as culture in the sense of “society as it is imagined.” For Christians of the fifteenth century, the community of the living and the dead, for example, was self-evident. The conception of a Christian society that included only the living was itself a cultural innovation of the Reformation. The reinterpretation of “society” and “religion” thus converge into a single focus on late medieval culture as a system of social difference and distinction, conceived, expressed, and contested through religious practices, theological discourse, and church authority.

Understanding late medieval and Reformation culture as a system of inter-defined concepts allows a cultural narrative to take shape. In cultural terms it was no coincidence that in January 1522 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt published On the Removal of Images, the first iconoclast pamphlet of the Reformation, together with That There Should Be No Beggars among Christians, the first exposition of the “Protestant” view of poverty. For Karlstadt the honest (i.e., non-monastic) poor were the only “true images of Christ.”[26] He thus redefined both poverty and religious images, transforming their place in Protestant piety and society. This sense of late medieval culture as a system of inter-defined social values and differences allows us to tell the story of the Reformation in a branching, non-teleological cultural narrative. By observing the stresses on any one term in the system, we can consider the shifting place of other terms defined by complement or contrast with it. Thus, for example, the redefinition of prostitutes as diseased (arising in part from the arrival of syphilis in Europe) linked them with the Christian dead, whose churchyard burial among the living was increasingly seen from the late fifteenth century as a health threat.[27] Shifting attitudes toward prostitutes and the dead shaped new ways of viewing the body, sexuality, gender, and community.[28]

Cultural arguments illuminate the origins of the Reformation by revealing parallel shifts in a system of interrelated values and terms. For example, the medievalist Thomas Lentes has shown how the traditional belief in a close connection between the movements of the body and the state of the soul was denied by Luther, Zwingli, and Bucer.[29] He documents the start of this disconnection in the late fifteenth century, as traditional devotions such as the “Spiritual chivalry” (“Geistliche Ritterschaft”) that included the physical imitation of Christ’s Passion gave way to moral and textual understandings of piety.[30] Desiderius Erasmus epitomized this trend away from the corporeal and toward the Word in the Foreword to his 1516 edition of the New Testament: “An image, if it represents anything at all, represents only the form of the body,” he explained. The Scriptures, in contrast, “set before you the living picture of his sacred mind, Christ as he actually spoke … rendering him so completely present that you would see less of him if you had him directly in front of your eyes.” A relic or an image of Christ that one might kiss, such as a pax-board, could never compare with the Word: “Should anyone produce a tunic worn by Christ, we would hurry to the ends of the earth to kiss it. But you might assemble his entire wardrobe, and it would contain nothing that Christ did not express more explicitly and truly in the evangelic books.”[31] This re-evaluation of the relationship between the body and soul in explicit Humanist rhetoric could also be seen as a reformulation of the relationship between image and text, or between “outward” and “inward” forms of piety. The writings of Erasmus and Luther expressed, in the languages of Humanism and scholastic theology, an interconnected series of such cultural shifts and redefinitions.

The recent work of Carina Johnson on cultural exchange and hierarchy in the sixteenth century provides two examples of unexpected reappraisals in the system of late medieval culture. She shows how fifteenth-century reports of distant kingdoms in Asia, Africa, and America all described the idols and idolatry found in these lands, placing Christian worship and material culture in a new comparative light. News and evidence of the rich material culture of the Aztecs reached Europe in 1522, the same year that Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt accused unreformed Christians of idolatry in his On the Removal of Images. In the generation before the Reformation, idolatry shifted from a primarily historical category, encountered in the pages of the Old Testament, to a contemporary, living practice described in numerous books and pamphlets issuing from German presses. Johnson notes that in the 1520s references to and images of idolatry and cannibalism move back and forth between accounts of the New World and Reformation pamphlets, such as Pamphilus Gengenbach’s Klag über die Totenfresser (The Devourers of the Dead) of 1521. A new awareness of “global idolatry” shaped Reformation attitudes toward images and material sacrality.[32] Conversely, the annual display of imperial relics and regalia in Nuremberg was halted in the 1520s by the city’s council as it “moved to reframe sacrality away from material splendor.” These decisions limited the display of imperial authority in the city and in the empire, straining the city’s relationship with Charles V.[33]

The cultural conditions for the Reformation—new attitudes toward poverty, clergy, the body, text and image, and community—were often understood by Christians in the fifteenth century through the language of church reform as an intractable set of “problems.”[34] In the Reformation, diverse beliefs and emphases authorized similar solutions to these problems. The evidence today suggests that, historically speaking, their unity arose not from a consistent “Reformation doctrine of justification,” nor from a vision of a church reformed according to Scripture, but from the common cultural challenges they faced, and the common solutions authorized by their diverse views. Many disliked the venality of their (fellow) clergy or the externality of (someone else’s) piety; few contemporaries articulated a deep understanding of Luther or Zwingli’s theology in relation to these problems. But many understood that these Reformers offered solutions—and that was what mattered to those who supported new approaches to piety, institutional structure, and belief in the sixteenth century.

Consider for example the report of the Saxon nobleman Hans von Minckwitz, charged by Frederick the Wise with monitoring the parish visitation of Johann von Schleinitz, the Bishop of Meißen, in the spring of 1522.[35] The bishop sought out reforming priests in Herzberg, Lochau, Torgau, and Schmideberg who supported the new ideas from Wittenberg. Minckwitz had the delicate task of honoring the bishop’s authority while protecting these reforming clergy from any harm. On April 9 a Dean of the Meißen cathedral and an orthodox theologian (Dr. Hieronymus Dungersheim von Ochsenfart) interrogated the pastor of Lochau. Minckwitz reported:

In my presence [the] pastor of Lochau was addressed by the Dean of Meißen, on the bishop’s orders, regarding his unchristian teaching and that he had performed the marriage of a runaway monk during Lent, given people the sacrament in both kinds; and taught many unchristian things, such as: one owed obedience to no man, not to fast, not to pray, to eat meat and eggs during Lent, etc. To this he replied that his teaching was Christian and evangelical. They began to dispute with one another; also Dr. Ochsenfahrt spoke Latin and German with the pastor. What that all was—I didn’t understand the half of it. [emphasis added]

Later Hans von Minckwitz excused the lack of theological detail in his reports:

Gracious Elector and Lord. Yesterday … I was ordered to make a summary of the content of the discussions between the Bishop of Meißen and the preachers of Herzberg, Lochau, Torgau and Schmideberg. But for the reason I showed Herr Haubold, also because they spoke much Latin, I did not pay much attention.[36]

These reports reverse our standard approach to the relationship between culture and theology—typically we teach and understand the origins of the Reformation by starting with theology, then considering its social and cultural implications and effects (which went beyond the best-laid plans of any Reformer). But in this set of reports, the impact on daily life is foremost: the conversation begins with monastic vows, celibacy, marriage during Lent, lay communion, authority and obedience, and fasting. This clearly interests all parties, and it forms the bulk of the reports sent by Minckwitz. He notes that when the interrogation turned to theology, “I didn’t understand the half of it.” Later he explains that he “did not pay much attention” to the theological debates between the Bishop of Meißen, his theologians, and the evangelical pastors and preachers—in part because much of it was in Latin. Minckwitz was no simpleton, but he captured what his prince wanted to know—what actions the new ideas of Wittenberg were authorizing, and how the authorities of the traditional church were responding.

This interest in the uses of Protestant theology far beyond any comprehension of Protestant theology is reflected in a crisis which occupied Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, in his role as Deputy (governor) of English Calais in the 1530s. Lisle and his wife were conservative in religion, but in 1538 he was eager to show Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell that no “alleged … papish dregs did remain here with us in Calais.” To this end he licensed Adam Damplip, “a young priest, a[n]‌ Englishman comen out of Germany” to preach against the traditional Mass in Calais. Damplip’s sermons were well attended, and after one Lisle “swore [!] he never heard a better collation or sermon.” In 1538 the current Henrican doctrine on the Eucharist followed a Lutheran position of real presence through consubstantiation. Accordingly, Damplip preached against transubstantiation. But soon, to Lisle’s dismay, Calais erupted into religious strife. Damplip’s popularity grew among Calaisians acquainted with the Reformed theology of the Eucharist, while conservative Anglicans charged him as a “sacramentarian,” i.e., a denier of the real presence.

In sincere confusion, Lord Lisle wrote to Cromwell in late July, 1538 “concerning the blessed Sacrament of the Altar. And because your lordship knows I am not learned in such matters, nor no man in this town of whom I could take counsel concerning the same,” he sought Cromwell’s guidance.[37] Was Damplip a heretic? Or was he preaching in accord with the Ten Articles of 1536? “Because your lordship can discuss the scripture better than I can,” explained Lisle, “I do send you his opinions plainly opened in the pulpit before all men, to the intent you shall know all, whether they be good or bad.” The political stakes were high. Despite hearing numerous sermons from Damplip, evidence of personal conversations with him, and his written confession of faith, neither Lord Lisle nor the Council of Calais could assess his theological stance. Certification from Cromwell, a higher authority, was far more important than their individual grasp of Damplip’s theology. As with Hans von Minckwitz, the content of Protestant theology is quickly passed over in order to focus on its function or implications.

The Reformation was from the start a crisis of authority, and a struggle over authority. Often, what mattered most about the Reformation message was not its Latinate theological coherence, but the actions it authorized or the problems it solved. Therein lies the unity of the Reformation, and in one sense its “cause.” One might say that by the end of the fifteenth century the “available believable” within Western Christendom was changing.[38] The causes of the Protestant Reformation are best understood as cultural, as long-standing and interlocking relationships between body and soul, living and dead, sacred and profane, word and image, and laity and clergy began to shift in the fifteenth century. Within this system of meaning, relationships which had been unquestioned now became problems. Protestant beliefs and actions share a clear focus on the radical transformation of these relationships.

Even where the institutionalization of the Reformation was not possible for political reasons, these deeper cultural shifts are evident. Consider the Duchy of Saxony under Duke George: here, in Albertine Saxony, cultural forces got out ahead of any comprehension of the implications or complexities of Wittenberg theology—before extramural burial, for example, became associated with Protestant polities and beliefs, it was considered a wise public health practice embraced in 1536 by the one of the most anti-Lutheran of princes.[39] Attempts to increase secular authority over clergy offer another example of a relationship shifting before it became identified as an implication of Protestant theology.[40] And in a broader Eurasian context, Victor Lieberman has identified an ensemble of trends toward cultural integration including text-based cultic reforms, “a proliferation of schools, and a flourishing of vernacular literatures at the expense of sacred languages” such as Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Latin.[41] His extensive work documenting the “synchronized chronologies” that account for parallel developments in Eurasian religions and cultures as they relate to the state, trade, and economic development is subject to all the challenges to historians’ generalizations discussed above. But this analysis can help us conceptualize the origins of the Protestant Reformations as one example of a much larger set of developments promoting religious reform, cultural integration, and administrative centralization on the eastern and western edges of Eurasia, linked by new and intensified trade connections.

CONCLUSIONS

The Protestant Reformation was a cultural revolution whose effects on European society were deep and enduring. The upheaval of the Reformation calls forth attempts to explain its origins and development. A cultural approach to the Reformation examines the social distinctions deployed, reshaped, and refashioned during this period. By exploring the shifts and stabilities of various interconnected elements (such as the body, sexuality, poverty, gender, images, and community) within the system of late medieval culture, this cultural approach allows us to see the Reformation as one reflection of a series of cultural transformations from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century—some revolutionary (such as the Protestant Reformations), others more evolutionary (including Humanism and the Catholic Reformation). By examining these elements synoptically, a cultural history of the Reformation offers a new understanding of its origins in terms of fundamental sixteenth-century questions of community and salvation, body and soul.

NOTES

1. For an overview, see A. G. Dickens, John Tonkin, and Kenneth Powell, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).

2. C. Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 39, discussing the impact of Lucien Febvre, “Une question mal posée: les origines de la Réforme française et le problème des causes de la Réforme,” Revue historique 161 (1929): 1–73; and in English translation in Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History (London: Harper & Row, 1973), 44–107.

3. Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, 21.

4. Volker Leppin, “Wie reformatorisch war die Reformation?” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 99 (2002): 162–176, here 170.

5. Further analysis of this 1518 document in Leppin, “ ‘omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit.’ Zur Aufnahme mystischer Traditionen in Luthers erster Ablaßthese,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 93 (2002): 7–25.

6. A few of the most influential: Thomas A. Brady, Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg 1520–1555 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978); Peter Blickle, Gemeindereformation: die Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985; English ed. Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992).

7. See for example Heiko Obermann, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Obermann, Werden und Wertung der Reformation: vom Wegestreit zum Glaubenskampf (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1977); English trans. Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe (1981), trans. Dennis Martin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

8. See Bernd Moeller, “Stadt und Buch. Bemerkungen zur Struktur der reformatorischen Bewegung in Deutschland,” and Brady, Jr., “ ‘The Social History of the Reformation’ between ‘Romantic Idealism’ and ‘Sociologism’: A Reply,” in Wolfgang Mommsen, Peter Alter, and Robert W. Scribner (eds.), Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1979), 25–39, 40–43.

9. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 297–319.

10. Cameron, European Reformation, 303, emphasis in the original.

11. Ibid., 304–305, referencing work such as Gerald Strauss, “Protestant Dogma and City Government: The Case of Nuremberg,” Past & Present 36 (1967): 38–58.

12. Cameron, European Reformation, 309.

13. Ibid., 310–312.

14. Ibid., 318.

15. Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), concludes with a discussion of the “intellectual heterogeneity of the early Reformation,” 182–189. See for example David C. Fink, “Was There a ‘Reformation Doctrine of Justification’?” The Harvard Theological Review 103/2 (2010): 205–235.

16. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 405–409.

17. Ibid., 75–79.

18. Moeller, Reichsstadt und Reformation (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, G. Mohn, 1962); Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1972).

19. “Wurde sie [die Reformation]—grob gesprochen—bislang zwischen ideeller und politischer Geschichte verortet, zwischen der Theologie Luthers und ihrer Realisierung durch die Landesherren, so eröffnete sich mit der Stadtreformation eine gewissermaßen dritte Dimension des Reformationsprozesses, nämlich die soziale Geschichte der Reformation”; Blickle, Gemeindereformation, 15.

20. Thomas Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2009), 19; Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, 48.

21. McGrath, Intellectual Origins, 34–66; and the valuable synthesis in Donald J. Wilcox, In Search of God and Self: Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

22. McGrath, Intellectual Origins, 18.

23. For a broader analysis of causes and explanation in historical scholarship, see Emmanuel Akyeampong, Caroline Arni, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Mark Hewitson, and William H. Sewell, Jr., “Conversation: Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes,” The American Historical Review 120/4 (2015): 1369–1423.

24. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Pfaffenhaß und groß Geschrei. Die reformatorischen Bewegungen in Deutschland. 1517–1529 (Munich: Beck, 1987); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

25. Victor B. Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to ca.1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999) and his vast two-volume study: Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, ca.800–1830, vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland, and vol. 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [2009]); Merry E. Wiesner, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern World: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009).

26. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, Von abtuhung der Bylder/Und das keyn Betdler unther den Christen seyn soll (Wittenberg: Nickel Schirlentz, 1522).

27. See Roper, Holy Household, chap. 3, 89–131; Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), chaps. 2‒3, 17–77.

28. This is the argument made in Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (eds.), Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600, Veroffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 145 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999).

29. Thomas Lentes, “ ‘Andacht’ und ‘Gebarde’: Das religiöse Ausdrucksverhalten,” in Jussen and Koslofsky, Kulturelle Reformation, 29–68. Lyndal Roper has shown that Luther’s personal physicality is reflected in some of his most significant theological positions, but Luther does not advance any general claims for an active and desirable connection between bodily movements and the state of the soul. See “Martin Luther’s Body: The ‘Stout Doctor’ and His Biographers,” American Historical Review 115/2 (2010): 351–384.

30. Lentes, “Religiöse Ausdrucksverhalten,” in Jussen and Koslofsky, Kulturelle Reformation, 58–61, illus. 5, 6.

31. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings: A New Translation with Critical Commentary, ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 127. I discuss the history of gesture in Koslofsky, “The Kiss of Peace in the German Reformation,” in Karen Harvey (ed.), The Kiss in History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 12–32.

32. Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 32–70.

33. Ibid., 123–134.

34. Jussen and Koslofsky, Kulturelle Reformation, 9–27.

35. Karl Pallas, “Briefe und Akten zur Visitationsreise des Bischofs Johannes VII. von Meißen im Kurfürstentum Sachsen 1522,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 5/3 (1908): 217–310.

36. Ibid., 285, 295.

37. Muriel St. Clare Byrne (ed.), The Lisle Letters. Volume Five (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 151–167, 180–181.

38. Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 191–192.

39. Koslofsky, Reformation of the Dead, 40–77.

40. See Cameron, European Reformation, 301, and the literature cited there.

41. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. 2, Mainland Mirrors, esp. 260–270; Lieberman, “Transcending East–West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,” in Lieberman, Beyond Binary Histories, 37–102.

FURTHER READING

Brady, Thomas A. German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011.

Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Dixon, C. Scott. Contesting the Reformation. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Hamm, Berndt, Bernd Moeller, and Dorothea Wendebourg. Reformationstheorien: ein kirchenhistorischer Disput über Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995.

Johnson, Carina L. Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Lieberman, Victor B. (ed.) Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c.1830. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

McGrath, Alister E. The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Matheson, Peter. The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001.

Ocker, Christopher. “The German Reformation and Medieval Thought and Culture,” History Compass 10/1 (2012): 13–46.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Rublack, Ulinka. Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Thayer, Anne T. Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

Walsham, Alexandra. “Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44/2 (2014): 241–280.

CHAPTER 29

VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE

BRIDGET HEAL

INTRODUCTION

UNTIL a few decades ago, a general guide to the Protestant Reformation would certainly not have devoted significant time and space to an analysis of visual and material culture. Protestantism’s relationship with the visual was defined, in the eyes of both contemporaries and later commentators, not by creation but by destruction: by the breaking of sacred images. Iconoclasm was not, of course, a new phenomenon. The role of material images in Christian worship has always been contested. Sixteenth-century commentators were well aware of the controversies that had surrounded visual devotion from the time of the Early Church onward and that had surfaced most spectacularly in the Byzantine iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries. The Protestant destruction of the sixteenth century was, however, unprecedented in its scope. In numerous Swiss and German cities during the 1520s and 1530s adherents of the new faith responded to the invectives of Reformers such as Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Huldrych Zwingli against idolatry and clerical exploitation by attacking religious images. From the 1550s to 1570s a second period of iconoclasm destroyed much of the visual culture of Scotland and of parts of France and the Netherlands, this time associated with the spread of Calvinism and with political and religious revolt. England’s iconoclasm, which unlike its continental counterparts was generally subject to central government controls, was gradual in comparison. It started during the 1530s and lasted, off and on, until the 1640s. But in England too sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows, and ecclesiastical treasures all fell victim to the reforming zeal of the Protestant reformers.

Given the widespread and dramatic destruction of religious art that often accompanied the introduction of evangelical teaching, it is scarcely surprising that the Reformation was long seen as the enemy of visual culture. In Germany during the 1520s and 1530s some craftsmen petitioned town councils, claiming that they could no longer support themselves because of a dearth of commissions, and Humanist commentators lamented the demise of the arts. Later, the German Romantics blamed Protestants for killing the painter’s craft, and for much of the twentieth century academic art history followed their lead. In northern Europe—in Germany in particular—an era of exceptional artistic creativity ended abruptly, so the story went, because of religious turmoil and because of the Protestants’ destructive actions and negative attitudes toward images. Painters such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Holbein, and sculptors such as Tilman Riemenschenider and Veit Stoß died, and found few distinguished successors.[1] In France the situation was supposedly even worse. As one nineteenth-century French critic put it, “horror of art was and would remain one of the essential, characteristic traits of the Reformation in general and the Calvinist Reformation in particular.”[2] In the Netherlands the growth of genre painting was a response, scholars suggested, to Calvinist prohibitions. During the Dutch Republic’s Golden Age, artists turned from religious art to landscapes and still life, encouraged by Calvin’s emphasis on nature as the second book of God.[3] In England, the Reformation marked a watershed, a divide between the intensely visual piety of the late Middle Ages and a later landscape dominated by “the invisible, abstract and didactic word.”[4] Throughout Europe, it seemed, Protestantism devalued images and promoted an internalized faith, a faith that privileged hearing over seeing. Reformation art, where it existed as in Lutheran Germany, was merely polemical or pedagogical; it conveyed information in visual form but did nothing more, deliberately eschewing the intercessory iconographies, aesthetic pleasure, and affective power of late medieval and Renaissance visual culture. Such prejudices die hard: although the study of Protestant visual and material culture has, as we shall see, gained considerable momentum in recent decades we still encounter, even in relatively recent works, the belief that Reformation art, because of its didacticism and subordination to God’s Word, was less significant than what came before and after.[5]

THE REMOVAL AND DESTRUCTION OF IMAGES

The first reports of Reformation iconoclasm emanated from Wittenberg during the winter of 1521/22. At Christmas, while Martin Luther was being held in protective custody at the Wartburg, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt celebrated the first public evangelical Mass, administering communion in both kinds in Wittenberg’s castle chapel. On January 24 the town council issued an ordinance that reformed Wittenberg’s liturgy and stated that all but three altars should be removed from the parish church “in order to avoid idolatry.”[6] There was little actual destruction: Wittenberg’s Augustinian friars had already burned their images and altars, but later reports of extensive popular iconoclasm in the parish church find no corroboration in contemporary sources. Some of the church’s images and altars were removed in 1522; others probably remained in place until 1536. Subsequent perceptions of the events of 1521/22, of the so-called “Wittenberger Unruhen”, have been shaped, it seems, by Luther’s own interpretation, by his desire to vilify his opponent Karlstadt.[7] Luther’s account, and the polemical exchange over images that gained momentum after 1522, ensured that from an early stage iconoclasm was associated with radicalism. On January 26, 1522 Karlstadt published a pamphlet that offered the first full theological defense of Reformation iconoclasm: “On the Removal of Images.” He argued that images were prohibited in the Old Testament because men were, by nature, frivolous and inclined to worship them. They could not, as Pope Gregory the Great and numerous other medieval commentators had suggested, serve as books for the illiterate, for the laity could “learn nothing of salvation from them.”[8] Karlstadt’s position was refuted by the moderate and order-seeking Luther, who after his return from the Wartburg emphasized in his “Third Sermon after Invocavit” that images were a matter of Christian freedom. Karlstadt’s attack also provoked a polemical defense from Hieronymous Emser, Catholic court preacher in Dresden. Emser justified religious images by invoking Scripture and the traditions of the Early Church, arguing that they served to teach and to remind, to stimulate “virtue and devotion,” and to mark out sacred space.[9] The events of 1522 thus established key parameters for the theological debate over images that continued in Germany into the seventeenth century.

Both Lutheran and Catholic accounts of iconoclasm tended to emphasize mob violence, and such violence did certainly occur, for example during the Peasants’ War. In Germany and Switzerland during the early decades of the Reformation the stripping of churches was generally, however, politically legitimated and carefully controlled at a local level.[10] Even Karlstadt, the earliest and most vociferous evangelical opponent of religious images, did not advocate popular iconoclasm. Images should, he argued, be removed from churches in an orderly fashion by the proper authorities. While Reformation iconoclasm of course played out differently in different rural and urban contexts, the events in Zurich in 1524‒1526 provided an important model for other Swiss and South German cities and serve to highlight some recurring themes. Individual iconoclasts destroyed some altarpieces, crucifixes, and lamps in the city and in its rural hinterland in 1523 and early 1524. Eventually, determined to maintain public order and encouraged by its evangelical preachers, in June 1524, Zurich’s council decreed the removal of images. The city’s churches were closed to prevent the escalation of iconoclastic violence. Under the supervision of Huldrych Zwingli and his fellow lay priests and of representatives of the local guilds the churches were stripped of sculptures and altarpieces and whitewashed. Further destruction followed: of the church pews and finally, in 1526, of the altars themselves. Zwingli used the uprooted altar stones to build a new chancel screen in the Grossmünster, which bore a pulpit from which he preached. Here, as elsewhere where partially destroyed Catholic images remained in situ, the visual and material were used to demonstrate the triumph of the Reformed faith.[11]

From a historian’s perspective, the study of such iconoclasm opens up, as Margaret Aston so elegantly put it, two doors: one onto the theological debates that shaped the Reformation and another onto popular belief and practice.[12] In her detailed study of iconoclasm in Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel, Lee Wandel used various sources, including trial records of the individual iconoclasts who acted before the officially sanctioned removal of images, to examine the interaction of elite and popular belief. Iconoclasm in these urban centers reflected, she argued, a variety of concerns among local artisans and guild folk. The “voracious idols” consumed resources that should be spent on the poor, and an attack on images represented an attack on the Catholic Mass and on the clerical hierarchies of the church. Iconoclasm could also be connected with demands for freedom, and for the abolition of rent and tithes.[13] In the Netherlands the authority of the hedge preachers who advocated iconoclasm in 1566 derived, Phyllis Mack Crew suggested, from their perceived ability to restore authority, to reintegrate a society that had broken down during the decades preceding the Troubles.[14] In Switzerland, in Germany, and in the Netherlands the cleansing of churches also helped to force the pace of religious reform. Basel’s iconoclasts, for example, addressed their city council in 1529 saying “in three years of deliberations, you effected nothing; in this one hour we resolve everything.”[15] Iconoclasm therefore points toward popular agency, toward instances in which religious change was driven forward by the popular reception of evangelical ideas. It allows us to integrate church and social history, to examine both ideas and practices, and to understand religion as much more than just a set of theological beliefs and devotional customs.

Although traditional art historical scholarship tended, as we have seen, to view such events with horror, during the 1970s and 1980s a dynamic social history of art emerged and found in iconoclasm a prism through which to explore the status of the image. Iconoclasm reveals, scholars such as Martin Warnke, Horst Bredekamp, and David Freedberg suggested, things about an artwork that otherwise remain concealed beneath the traditional terms of art-historical analysis and debate. As Bredekamp argued in his 1975 study of image conflict from late antiquity to the era of the Hussites, the rejection of art makes its functions more dramatically visible than the discussion of those who commissioned it or affirmed its value.[16] Iconoclasts and their actions constitute an important object of study, because iconoclasts “believe in the social, the religious, the psychological power of images.”[17] For an Anglophone audience, Freedberg’s work must serve as representative here. His detailed analysis of the Netherlandish iconoclasm of 1566, “one of the greatest episodes of iconoclasm in Western history,” led him toward a much broader exploration of the psychological power of images.[18] The social and political contexts of the events of 1566 are well known, as is their devastating effect on the region’s rich visual heritage. Freedberg emphasized that while 1566 saw some spontaneous mob violence, preachers and bands of hired iconoclasts often played key roles in fomenting attacks. An English merchant, Richard Clough, observed, for example, in Antwerp “all the churches, chepelles and howsys of relygyon utterly defaysd, and no kynde of thynke left holle within theme, but brokyn and utterly dysstrdy, being done after syche order and with so fewe follkes that hytt is to be mervelyd att.”[19] The ire that religious images attracted in the particular context of the Dutch Revolt was, Freedberg convincingly argued, a response not only to a particular historical moment, to a specific polemic directed against the teaching and authority of the Catholic Church, but also to images’ psychological power.[20]

Because of this psychological power iconoclasm was and is, art-historical scholarship emphasizes, a recurrent response to images. It can be found in many different historical contexts, from eighth- and ninth-century Byzantium through to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century: Warnke referred to the Kunstpolitik of the National Socialists and to the destruction of Nazi memorials after 1945, while Bredekamp’s book opened with a discussion of the apotropaic use of images in Cambodia and iconoclasm in Chile. Iconoclasts believe, these studies suggest, that one can diminish the power of what is represented by destroying or mutilating its representation; their actions point to a widespread conflation between image and prototype. In Reformation Europe iconoclasts often targeted particular parts of images, the parts that evidenced vitality: the eyes, the head, and the hands. They also subjected images to imitations of judicial rituals, placing them in the stocks, hanging them, or burning them at the stake. They employed socially sanctioned methods to prove that images were no more than stone and wood, and to convince the undecided and skeptical of the truth of the Reformation message. In Basel in 1529, for example, a large crucifix was dragged to the marketplace, where it was addressed with the following words: “if you are God, then save yourself, if you are a man, bleed.”[21] When it did neither, it was destroyed. Recent studies develop these themes, and position Reformation iconoclasm in a widening comparative perspective, placing it in dialogue not only with well-known precedents, from Byzantium to Hussite Bohemia, but also with iconoclastic “moments” in world history including the destruction of the Bāmiyān Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.[22] Iconoclasm is not, they suggest, just about the removal or destruction of art; it is also about the creation of new meanings and can serve as a stimulus for the production of new objects and images. Iconoclasm could function, as we shall see in the case of the Netherlands, as a transformative rather than just a destructive moment, a stage in the remaking of visual culture.

LUTHERAN VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE

Any general survey of Reformation visual and material culture must, as this essay has done, open with iconoclasm, for it defined the Protestant relationship with religious images in the eyes of both contemporaries and later commentators. It also had broader implications for the understanding and evaluation of visual perception. The Protestant campaign against images revealed and publicized extensively cases of trickery involving the priestly manipulation of supposedly miraculous images. Such cases, Stuart Clark has argued, fed contemporary concerns about visual deceit, giving “widespread currency to the idea that the truth of a visual experience could be an uncertain and contentious thing.”[23] But as the events in Wittenberg in the winter of 1521/2 suggest, hostility to images was by no means universal among the evangelicals. Luther reacted strongly against Karlstadt’s iconoclasm, which he saw as a threat to proper order and to his own authority. Its radical connotations were confirmed by his observations of the events of the Peasants’ War (1524/5), of the destruction encouraged by Karlstadt and by Thomas Müntzer. In response, Luther provided theological defenses of images and pastoral justifications for their use, and these were taken up and modified repeatedly by later commentators. Images were, Luther argued in his “Third Sermon after Invocavit” preached on March 11, 1522, matters of Christian freedom and it was as wrong to compel their removal as it was to compel their adoration. Luther believed that the power of God’s Word would overcome the power of images: idolatrous pilgrimage images should be forcibly removed, but others would simply fall from favor as a result of proper evangelical preaching. Karlstadt had, Luther wrote in his 1525 tract “Against the Heavenly Prophets,” removed images from before people’s eyes, but left them embedded in their hearts. Luther, by contrast, “approached the task of destroying images by first tearing them out of the heart through God’s Word.” Images’ historical use was recorded in Scripture, and provided they were not worshipped they could usefully be employed for commemoration and instruction. For Luther and his followers the visual, though strictly subordinate to the verbal, could play a legitimate part in the proclamation of the Gospel and in individual religious experience. In his 1529 “Passional” Luther wrote that he had added images to the prayer book that he had originally published seven years earlier “for the sake of children and simple folk, who are moved to retain Godly stories better through images and likenesses than through mere words or teaching.”[24]

Lutherans’ use of visual propaganda was brilliantly elucidated by Bob Scribner, who argued that an excessive concentration on the printed word had distorted historians’ understanding of how the Reformation spread during an age of limited literacy. Scribner analyzed the ways in which Lutheran propagandists adapted the visual piety of the late Middle Ages to suit their own purposes. Some projects were very successful: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1521 Passional Christi und Antichristi, for example, a pamphlet illustrated with twenty-six woodcuts juxtaposing the life of Christ with the life of the Pope; or his Law and Gospel iconography, which became a staple of Lutheran domestic visual culture.[25] The visual culture of Lutheranism was also, however, shaped by illustrated bibles and catechisms, works that were used throughout the early modern period for instruction in churches, schools, and homes. Lutheran bibles were often illustrated, following the precedent set in Wittenberg by Luther’s 1522 New Testament and his 1534 complete Bible.[26] We know that Luther himself took a personal interest in the design and placement of the images for the 1534 Bible, and they provide a particularly wonderful example of visual exegesis. Here images did not merely illustrate stories but rather, like the cross-references printed in the Bible’s margins, guided the reader’s interpretation of Scripture. Luther’s catechisms also made extensive use of images. His 1529 Small Catechism, which went through more than sixty editions before his death and was crucial for the consolidation of his church, contains full-page illustrations: in this work, through which so many learned what it meant to be Lutheran, images are as important as texts. The early Wittenberg bibles, Luther’s 1529 “Passional,” and his catechisms provided the foundation for a rich Lutheran tradition of biblical image cycles (Bilderbibeln) and other works of visual pedagogy.

Lutheran visual culture extended well beyond prints and books. Luther’s moderation was crucial, but it alone does not provide a sufficient explanation for Lutheran attachment to images or for the flourishing of Lutheran visual culture during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. During the early decades of the Reformation Lutherans produced new images—printed propaganda—but they also, unlike Reformed and Radical evangelicals, preserved old ones. The “preserving power” of Lutheranism is now a well-studied phenomenon: altars, altarpieces, statues, paintings, and stained glass remained intact and in situ in many Lutheran churches. Relics and reliquaries were generally removed, but sometimes even saints’ shrines and medieval sacrament houses, intended for the display of the consecrated host, were preserved. Indeed, many Lutheran churches were so Catholic-looking that they puzzled visitors to the Holy Roman Empire: in 1538, an English Catholic, Thomas Goldwell, commented in a letter to his father that many of the towns that he had passed through en route from Ingolstadt to Innsbruck were populated by heretics, but still contained “goodly churches full of images.”[27] This “preserving power” may be explained in a variety of ways. Lutherans were determined to distance themselves from more radical evangelicals, from “enthusiasts” and “sacramentarians.” As Johannes Bugenhagen stated in his 1529 church ordinance for Hamburg, “we may not be iconoclasts.”[28] Medieval images were also valued for their aesthetic merits and as memorials. In Zwickau, for example Johann Petrejus, Lutheran pastor at the Church of St. Mary, tried in the 1560s to persuade the town council to remove from the choir area Michael Wolgemut’s splendid carved and polychromed altar from 1479 which depicted the Virgin and Child with saints. The council refused: although the altar could, they said, be considered idolatrous on account of its images, the teaching of God’s word rendered it harmless. Zwickau’s guilds also defended the masterpiece: it should remain on display, they said, “for the adornment [tzihr] of the church and in honour of our dear forefathers.”[29]

Alongside the extensive preservation of pre-Reformation images, Lutherans also developed their own traditions of church decoration. In Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach’s workshop not only devised new iconographies for printed propaganda but also produced numerous painted works in the service of the Lutheran church. Appointed court painter to the elector of Saxony in 1505, by the early 1520s Cranach had become a successful entrepreneur. He presided over a productive workshop that included, at its high point, his two sons and around fifteen apprentices, journeymen, and other employees. After his death in 1553 the workshop was run by his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger (d. 1586). Cranach the Elder also ran a successful publishing house, working with the Wittenberg goldsmith Christian Döring. Cranach served, in effect, as Luther’s publicist, and the two men became close friends. Like most early modern artists confronted by unfolding religious schism, Cranach the Elder did not, however, limit his output to the service of one confessional group. In around 1520‒1523, commissioned by Luther’s arch-opponent Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, he designed a cycle of images of Christ’s Passion for the new residence and collegiate church in Halle. He also worked for the Catholic Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg, producing in 1537‒1538 a cycle of Passion altarpieces inspired by the Halle example. These remained in place in Berlin’s collegiate church after Elector Joachim II’s conversion to Lutheranism (1539), but were finally removed in 1613 when Elector Johann Sigismund embraced Calvinism. Cranach also produced numerous works for Duke Georg of Saxony, a fierce opponent of the Reformation.[30]

FIGURE 29.1 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Wittenberg Altarpiece, front view, 1547, oil on panels, Stadtkirche, Wittenberg.

With the permission of the Stadtkirchengemeinde Wittenberg. Copyright: Jürgen M. Pietsch, Spröda.

While the nineteenth-century view of Cranach as the ultimate evangelical artist no longer pertains, it is certainly true that the output of his workshop defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century. The great altarpieces by Cranach the Elder and his workshop in Schneeberg (1539) and Wittenberg (1547), and by his son in Weimar (1555) adopted traditional formats but developed innovative iconographies, depicting the doctrine and rituals of the new church. The Wittenberg Altar (Figure 29.1), brilliantly analyzed by Joseph Koerner in his 2004 The Reformation of the Image, shows in its center the Last Supper, an image identified by Luther himself as particularly appropriate for placement on the altar. Here, as in many other Lutheran altarpieces, the present is merged with the biblical past: among the Apostles we see portraits of Luther himself as Junker Jörg and of local Wittenberg citizens. The altar’s left-hand panel shows Luther’s colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, baptizing a child; the right-hand panel shows Johannes Bugenhagen hearing confession. Beneath, in the altar’s predella, Luther preaches before a small congregation. One hand rests on the Bible, the other points toward a crucifix that appears to hover between the preacher and his hearers. The altarpiece is, Koerner suggests, a post-iconoclastic icon, an image that answers the acute question of how to visually represent a hidden God. Its crucifix “fills iconoclastic blanks,” but simultaneously, through its puzzling lack of physical presence (its impossibly wind-swept loincloth, its unnatural shadow, and its oddly constructed perspective) indicates its status as an interior image rather than a material artifact.[31] In keeping with Lutheran teaching on the Eucharist the Wittenberg altarpiece visualizes Christ’s real presence at communion, but it also celebrates the church as human activity—the preaching, baptism, communion, and confession administered by its ministers—rather than as physical space. The Cranach workshop also produced numerous printed and painted portraits of Luther, and double portraits of the Reformer and his wife, Katharina von Bora. These circulated throughout Lutheran Germany and beyond, satisfying contemporaries’ curiosity about the Reformer’s appearance and helping the new church to visualize Luther’s authority and charisma.[32] After Luther’s death (1546), and in particular during the era of relative doctrinal and institutional stability that followed the Formula of Concord (1577), typically Lutheran visual programs emerged. Churches were given new altars depicting, in many cases, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Epitaphs showed the Resurrection and other biblical scenes, portraits of the deceased, and often personifications of virtues. Pulpits bore depictions of the evangelists and of Christ, while fonts showed Christ’s baptism or typological scenes relating to it. Although Lutheran iconography was never uniform, it was characterized in general by its Christocentric focus and by its rejection of particular themes such as images of saints.[33]

Though Lucas Cranach’s importance for the history of Protestant visual culture is thoroughly established, his art-historical reputation remains mixed. Max J. Friedländer, writing in the mid-twentieth century, pointed to a decline from Cranach’s pre-Wittenberg, expressive style to the “frigid allegories” that he produced to serve the Reformation cause.[34] Koerner, in his infinitely more subtle analysis of the relationship between religious reform and image production, still argues that the didacticism required of Lutheran images detracted from their artistic value. They became, he suggests, “less visually seductive, less emotionally charged, [and] less semantically rich.”[35] The paintings and prints of the Reformation era will perhaps always fail to satisfy the aesthetic criteria prescribed by art history’s critical canon: they certainly tend to invite a type of analysis that privileges the discussion of content and meaning over that of form and style. But we should, as many recent studies have done, broaden our definition of art to include not only paintings, prints, and sculptures, but also artifacts such as metalwork, textiles, and domestic furnishings.[36] In Lutheran Nuremberg, for example, although Albrecht Dürer and Veit Stoß had no immediate heirs, gold- and silversmiths’ work continued to flourish: the exceptional creations of Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/8–1585) were highly valued by both Protestant and Catholic collectors.[37] Moreover, from an historian’s perspective the importance of images and material objects for the formation of Lutheran confessional consciousness is beyond dispute.

During the early decades of the Reformation the rejection of iconoclasm and the use of religious images for commemoration and instruction had, as we have seen, marked out Lutherans from more radical Reformers. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, the renewal of the Catholic Church and the spread of Reformed Protestantism accelerated the development of distinct confessional cultures. In response Lutherans continued, as ever, to distinguish their image use from that of the Catholics. They also, however, affirmed their commitment to images in the face of renewed criticism, this time from Calvinists. Images and iconoclasm became, during the final decades of the sixteenth century, an important theme in polemical battles between Reformed and Lutheran theologians. In some territories they were also defended by laypeople on the streets. In Anhalt, for example, faced with a Calvinist Reformation in 1596, Lutheran pastors resigned and parishioners boycotted communion and forcibly delayed the removal of images. When Moritz of Hesse-Kassel introduced Calvinist reforms in 1605‒1608 he also encountered opposition: in Marburg and in Schmalkalden there were riots triggered by the reform of the liturgy and the removal of images. At such moments Calvinist iconoclasm both exposed and reinforced Lutheran attachment to images. Inscriptions on altarpieces and epitaphs of the period, as well as sermons preached for the consecration of altars and other church furnishings, made images into symbols of Lutheran confessional allegiance.[38]

Lutheran confessional culture was defined in part, of course, by juxtaposition with its antitheses: idolatrous Catholicism and iconoclastic Calvinism. But Lutherans were also bound together by particular memories, rituals, and spiritual desires, which operated at the level of the confession, at the level of the local community, and at the level of the corporation and family. In the highly charged confessional atmosphere of the first half of the seventeenth century, images, as well as printed texts and public rituals, sought to create solidarity among Germany’s Lutherans by inviting them to remember the foundational history of their confession. Bekenntnisbilder, painted and printed images that depicted the handing over of the Augsburg Confession in 1530 and the key rituals and doctrines of the Lutheran church, fostered a supra-regional sense of Lutheran identity.[39] Images, like annals and chronicles, could also help to construct a localized Lutheran memory. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1539 Schneeberg Altar, for example, was plundered by Imperial troops during the Thirty Years War, and returned to its home only in 1649 after extensive petitioning by the town council and the Saxon elector. Both the pastor who consecrated it after its reinstallation and the local chronicler Christian Melzer celebrated it not only as a great work of art, but also as a reminder of Schneeberg’s early Reformation history.[40] Images also constructed confessional culture at the level of the family and domestic environment. Lutherans adorned walls, furniture, clothing, and other domestic items with biblical quotations, and with confessional slogans such as “Verbum Domini manet in aeternum” [the word of the Lord remains in eternity]. These were, of course, symbols of religious allegiance. They also testify to Lutheran belief in the efficacy of the Word, in its ability to mediate the divine and to make God present in the hearts of believers as well as to protect them from the machinations of the Devil.[41] Lutheran homes were often adorned, however, not only with the Word of God, but also with his image. On cupboards, stove tiles, oven plates, and other smaller items of domestic furnishing Lutherans depicted biblical scenes and portraits of Luther and his fellow Reformers. They brought evangelical images into daily life, where they served not only as statements of confessional loyalty but also as admonitions to piety and virtue.[42]

Like the development of Lutheran church decoration, the domestic use of images can be seen as part of a process of regulation and social discipline. But Lutheran use of images went well beyond this. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a re-evaluation of images took place in the context of a widespread movement for the renewal of piety.[43] Johann Arndt (1555–1621) was a key, if controversial, figure. Arndt played an important role in shaping Germany’s post-Reformation Protestant tradition: his True Christianity (1605‒1610) and his Paradies-Gärtlein (1612) were best-sellers, even though proper evangelical teaching on justification seemed, to some, to have disappeared beneath his extensive discussion of internal spirituality and renewal. In 1596 Arndt had written a brief tract, the Ikonographia, in response to the Calvinist iconoclasm in his native Anhalt. Here he combined traditional Lutheran defenses of images with arguments derived from very different sources, above all from the writings of the physician and alchemist Paracelsus. Arndt described a harmonious relationship between outer (physical) and inner (spiritual) images. Luther’s cautious endorsement of images’ ability to stimulate memory and devotion was given new vitality, for, as Arndt argued, “what is seen truly goes to [our] hearts.”[44] Although Arndt’s most influential writings were not, in their original editions, illustrated, they were filled with verbal images. Arndt and his followers showed a renewed willingness to use vivid, mystical language to describe the individual encounter with Christ and his physical suffering during the Passion. Their texts spoke, for example, of falling beneath the cross at Christ’s feet and of finding refuge in his wounds. In his Paradiesgärtlein Arndt asked Christ to “show me your hands and feet and your side, because I wish to see in this comforting mirror the merciful, paternal heart of my dear father in heaven.”[45] Such devotional literature encouraged the re-articulation of old images and the creation of new. Medieval images were described by seventeenth-century Lutheran commentators in ways that acknowledged their pathos, their ability to generate compassion. And artists turned to iconographies such as Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Ecce Homo (Christ bound and crowned with thorns), and the Arma Christi (the instruments of Christ’s Passion) to encourage empathetic identification with the Savior’s suffering. The crucifix, often a focal point for Lutheran confessional identity during conflicts with Calvinists, became the Lutheran devotional image par excellence: its representations encouraged contemplative immersion in their content and called forth emotional responses in their viewers.

To suggest, as studies of Reformation art have tended to do, that Lutheran images privileged understanding over feeling is to impose upon them a distinction that early modern commentators would not have recognized. Lutheran images had aimed, from the start, to stimulate memory by imprinting their messages on their viewers’ hearts and souls. But Arndt and his contemporaries did undoubtedly endow them with a new spiritual significance. Images now played a more important part in Einbildung or Verinnerlichung, in the process by which the intellectual—knowledge of God—became the affective—his presence in the soul. The image theology developed by Arndt and his contemporaries found visual expression above all in the use of religious emblems, symbolic pictures with brief accompanying texts. Emblems—moral, religious, and political—had, of course, enjoyed great popularity among Europe’s intellectual elite ever since the Renaissance. They were now employed in Lutheran devotional literature, and were used to decorate church furnishings and domestic artifacts. In 1679 an edition of Arndt’s True Christianity printed in Riga was richly illustrated with emblems, and these were reproduced in numerous later editions. In an emblem, image and text work closely together. As the 1679 edition of True Christianity put it, “these figures and writing should be bound together so that neither can be understood without the other.”[46] The religious emblem invited lingering contemplation by its viewer: it had to be decoded and in the process of decoding its message was internalized. An emblem catechism printed in Nuremberg in 1683 shows, for example, as an illustration of the third commandment (“remember the Sabbath and keep it sacred”) an altar adorned with an altarpiece depicting Christ’s crucifixion on which rested an open book bearing a heart. Where, asks the accompanying text, “should our heart better rest than in the church, in God’s word and communion, signified by the open book and altar?” Here word and image combine to imprint God’s message on Lutheran hearts and minds. As the preface to this catechism put it, the emblematic form of teaching “tempts and pleasures both the eyes and the soul [Gemüth], strengthens and enflames the spirit, explains and makes accessible the things [that it depicts], and impresses them better in the heart and in the memory, just like everything that is seen with the eyes.”[47]

VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE AFTER ICONOCLASM

Lutheran moderation provided uniquely fertile ground for development of a Protestant visual and material culture. In the Netherlands and in England, by contrast, Protestants’ relationship with art was shaped by iconoclasm. In both territories, the destruction of religious images, though not always as rapid and as comprehensive as we might expect, ultimately produced churches that looked very different from those found in the Lutheran regions of the Holy Roman Empire and in Lutheran Denmark and Sweden.[48] Pieter Saenredam’s 1628 painting of the interior of the Great or St. Bavo Church in Haarlem fulfills our expectations of a Calvinist church. The walls are whitewashed and the space is, in comparison to a pre-Reformation or a Lutheran church, empty. At St. Bavo thirty-three side altars were removed, and the church space was reorganized to focus the congregation’s attention on the pulpit and font in the nave rather than on the high altar at the east end.[49] But as Mia Mochizuki’s detailed reconstruction of the first hundred years of St. Bavo’s post-Reformation history shows, Saenredam’s image, like so many of the depictions of Dutch church interiors painted during the Golden Age, tells only part of the story. St. Bavo’s whitewash, a “signature of reform,” was no Calvinist innovation: the church had already started whitewashing its walls at least one hundred and forty years before iconoclasm.[50] There were also unexpected survivals: foreign visitors to the United Provinces commented, for example, on the presence of stained-glass windows and organs, which they felt were out of place in Reformed churches.[51] Most importantly, however, here as elsewhere the Reformation redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate. Driven by fear of idolatry, figural decoration was kept to a minimum, but churches were still filled with objects.

Saendram’s interior shows text paintings adorning two of St. Bavo’s columns. The church acquired, between 1580 and 1585, seven of these text paintings; similar, if less visually magnificent, images could be found in Reformed churches in Switzerland and in England. They were a form of didactic decoration, a permanent sermon that was placed in the choir area for the edification of the church’s congregation. The 1581 panel that replaced St. Bavo’s medieval high altarpiece bears, for example, within an ornate wooden frame, a description of the Last Supper written in gold calligraphy on a black background. On the reverse is an account of the Siege of Haarlem of 1572. Although it eschews figural representation, the panel is nonetheless visually compelling. It represents, Mochizuki argues, “a lost alternate paradigm for picture making that began … after iconoclasm as a way to redeem and purify the fallen image.”[52] The account of the Last Supper made visible God’s Word, his instruction for the commemorative act that lay at the heart of the Christian tradition; the panel’s reverse recorded a key event in local history, the prolonged siege of Haarlem by Spanish troops. Such memorials, both textual and figural, both communal and individual or dynastic, were a common element of Protestant church interiors. Given Protestant emphasis on the preaching of God’s Word, it is not surprising that the pulpit became the main liturgical focus of the Reformed church. Calvinist pulpits avoided the representations of Christ and the Apostles that continued to adorn Lutheran examples, but they were nonetheless often covered in elaborately carved ornamentation and inscriptions. Pulpit and font were often enclosed behind a low balustrade that, like the much higher medieval choir screens, marked out the church’s most important liturgical space.

While figural religious art was, by and large, removed from the Dutch Republic’s evangelical churches, in a domestic context paintings and prints of biblical scenes were valued highly by Protestants. Images that obeyed the strict tenets of Calvin’s theology did not depict God the Father: it was impossible, the Reformer argued, to visually represent his glory and majesty. But visualizations of stories that served for edification and admonition were acceptable. The Calvinist Reformation did not generate an outpouring of visual propaganda equivalent to that found in Lutheran Germany, but there were some polemical prints. In The Hague, for example, Hendrik Hondius produced in around 1599 the “Papist Pyramid,” an engraving showing a large snake wearing the papal tiara surrounded by smaller ones wearing bishops’ and cardinals’ hats. The papal serpent, labeled as the Antichrist, is struck by lightning bolts representing the Word of God. Adopting a didactic rather than a polemical approach, the Amsterdam engraver and publisher Claes Jansz. Visscher produced in 1639 the Theatrum Biblicum, a series of prints illustrating important stories from the Old and New Testaments, many of them adapted from plates designed by Catholic artists.[53] The Dutch Republic’s multi-confessional landscape was also reflected, of course, in the work of the most famous Protestant artist of all time, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). Rembrandt’s own religious allegiances have been much debated: he was raised in a Calvinist home, but many members of his wider family remained Catholic. Like many of his compatriots, Rembrandt was not officially a member of the Reformed Church but participated in some of its ceremonies. He worked against the backdrop of ongoing debates between orthodox Calvinists and moderate Remonstrants and also had connections to the Mennonites.[54] As an artist, Rembrandt was fascinated by biblical themes, and produced numerous etchings of biblical stories. His interpretations of these stories were increasingly informed by an emphasis on inner spiritual life. Rembrandt personalized traditional iconographies, making the individual’s encounter with the Bible the real focus of many of his images. His famous “Hundred Guilder Print” from 1649, for example, depicts several episodes from the Gospel of St. Matthew, including Christ healing the sick and receiving the little children. In a compelling visualization of God’s mercy toward mankind the ignorant and the suffering approach the radiant figure of Christ.

Neither Germany nor England produced a Protestant artist to rival Rembrandt. But in England, as in the Netherlands, the Reformation certainly did not constitute the total catastrophe for visual culture that was once thought. Much church art was certainly removed and destroyed during campaigns against idolatry under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I, but there was sufficient survival to provide material for renewed iconoclasm at the Civil War. In an influential article Patrick Collinson proposed a shift in around 1580 from the targeted iconoclasm of the first generation of Protestant Reformers to iconophobia—absolute hostility to art—among their spiritual successors.[55] This model has been modified in a number of important ways. At the start of Elizabeth’s reign godly Reformers sought the abolition of religious images, holding up the example of Edward VI. Elizabeth, however, adopted a position closer to that of the Lutherans. Her 1559 injunctions prescribed the removal of abused images rather than wholesale destruction. Some medieval imagery—stained glass, and even on occasion sculpted images of Christ, God, and the saints—survived intact and in situ in English parish churches until the 1640s.[56] Elizabeth also, to the consternation of her bishops, insisted on keeping a crucifix and candlesticks in the Chapels Royal, and her successor James I encouraged the more elaborate adornment of these private religious spaces.[57]

Like their northern Netherlandish counterparts, English Protestant churches presented some opportunities for aesthetic adornment and dynastic representation. New and sometimes ornately carved pulpits, communion tables, and pews were installed, and medieval wall paintings were replaced by depictions of the royal coat of arms and by biblical quotations. The words of the Decalogue were prescribed for the east end of all churches. Members of the wealthy elite commissioned elaborate funeral monuments. These often bore figural representations of the deceased, and sometimes also of the classical and Christian virtues, but rarely, unlike Lutheran monuments, included scriptural scenes.[58] Beyond the confines of the church and chapel, Tessa Watt demonstrated the extent to which visual communication remained important in mainstream Protestant culture, from the anti-papal woodcuts of the sixteenth century and illustrated broadsides to the images in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the 1568 Bishop’s Bible.[59] Most recently Tara Hamling’s study of domestic religious images in plasterwork, painting, and furniture has shown the extent to which England’s gentry used decorative art to “help fashion and publicize a ‘godly’ identity.” By the late sixteenth century images were being used, she suggests, to “place spiritual concerns at the heart of domestic life, to regulate behaviour and habits of thought and to promote and facilitate pious meditation.” Even in Scotland, where Reformation iconoclasm had been extremely thorough, traditional religious iconography returned in a domestic context during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Interesting parallels can be drawn with Lutheran Germany, where not only among the nobility but also at lower social levels domestic imagery was used to help foster a sense of confessional consciousness, as Siegfried Müller’s work on Oldenburg has shown.[60]

In England the early seventeenth century witnessed a shift in religious sensibility, and the return of a more permissive attitude toward religious imagery in churches as well as homes. Under James I some of the private chapels of the nobility were more elaborately decorated, incorporating figural stained glass and even, on occasion, sculpture. A number of college chapels in Oxford and Cambridge were refurbished, as were some parish churches, above all in London. The Anglican avant-garde—represented by figures such as Lancelot Andrewes and Matthew Wren—championed order and beauty in worship, invoking the verse from Psalm 96 that became a “campaign slogan” of Archbishop Laud: “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” Laud’s 1631 visitation of his London diocese was followed by a campaign of “general mending, beautifying, and adorning” of English churches, restoring them to a state of decency, magnificence, or, from a Puritan perspective, superstition.[61] As a reflection of the Laudian emphasis on the Eucharist, communion tables were placed at the east end and enclosed behind altar rails. Stained-glass windows, some bearing Christocentric imagery that would have been considered unacceptable under Elizabeth, painted and carved images and elaborate vestments, were all reintroduced. Much Laudian visual and material culture did not, of course, last long. In September 1641 the Long Parliament’s Act for the Suppression of Innovations prescribed the removal of altar rails and the destruction of “scandalous pictures.” Parliament subsequently ordered more wholesale destruction, the effects of which are recorded most famously in the diary of the Puritan soldier William Dowsing, who supervised the stripping of churches in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.[62] Yet for all its destructive force, Puritan iconoclasm did not, in the long run, determine the nature of Anglican visual and material culture. After 1660 a subdued version of Laud’s beauty of holiness returned, for example in the churches built by Christopher Wren.

CONCLUSION

Iconoclasm has always been and should always continue to be understood as a key element in the story of the Reformation’s relationship with art. It lets us see theology in action; it sheds light on popular attitudes toward reform; and it reveals much about late medieval and early modern attitudes toward sacred images. It should not, however, be seen as a purely negative element in that story. The hostile pronouncements of evangelical Reformers, the extensive stripping of Reformation churches, and the rationalist assumptions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars can no longer blind us to the existence of a rich and diverse Protestant visual and material culture. Art historians now speak of the generative power and creativity that iconoclasm unleashed. In Germany and in the Northern Netherlands Protestant criticism and destruction produced images such as Cranach’s Wittenberg Altar and the St. Bavo text panels, images whose authors found innovative ways to defend them from attack. Alongside these exceptional works, on which art historians have focused their attention, we must place the more quotidian visual culture of Protestantism: prints and book illustrations; church structures and furnishings; domestic imagery. Despite its fetishization of the Word, Protestant life was shaped by images and the visual. But can we really speak of the “emergence of a specifically Protestant visual culture” in Europe and beyond?[63] Surely not: any paradigm must distinguish Lutheran from Reformed, but must also acknowledge regional variation. Attitudes toward images of course evolved in response not only to theological prescription but also to local circumstance. Moreover, our understanding of Protestant visual culture is expanding to reflect the fact that historical interest now focuses on a “confessional age” (Germany) or a “long Reformation” (England) that lasted into the eighteenth century. Any discussion of Protestant visual culture must acknowledge not only the polemical and didactic works that constituted artists’ early responses to the Reformation but also the rich variety of religious images that were created for Protestant use during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that became part of confessional consciousness.

NOTES

1. Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reaktion, 2004), 28–30.

2. Quoted in Philip Benedict, “Calvinism as Culture? Preliminary Remarks on Calvinism and the Visual Arts,” in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 19–45, here 21.

3. See for example Reindert Falkenburg, “Calvinism and the Emergence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Landscape Art—A Critical Evaluation,” in Finney, Seeing beyond the Word, 343–368.

4. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 99.

5. See, for example, Dieter Koepplin, “Lutherische Kunst 1550–1650,” in Hans-Christoph Rublack (ed.), Die luthersiche Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992), 495–544; Traugott Koch, “Grundsätzliche Überlegungen zur Ikonographie evangelischer Kirchenmalerei in der Zeit der lutherischen Orthodoxie,” in Peter Poscharsky (ed)., Die Bilder in den lutherischen Kirchen. Ikonographische Studien (Munich: Scaneg, 1998), 5–20.

6. For a full discussion see Volker Leppin, “Kirchenausstattungen in territorialen Kirchenordnungen bis 1548,” in Sabine Arend and Gerald Dörner (eds.), Ordnungen für die Kirche—Wirkungen auf die Welt: Evangelische Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 137–156.

7. For information on the ongoing study of Wittenberg’s churches and their furnishings see <http://wittenberg.zwoelfmedien.net/site/home/kirche>, accessed August 17, 2015.
On 1521/22 see Natalie Krentz, Ritualwanel und Deutungshoheit: die frühe Reformation in der Residenzstadt Wittenberg (1500–1533) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 200–210.

8. Bryan Mangrum and Giuseppe Scavizzi (eds.), A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images. Three Treatises in Translation (Ottawa, ON: Victoria University Press, 1991), esp. 23, 25.

9. Ibid., 51.

10. See for example Gudrun Litz, Die reformatorische Bilderfrage in den schwäbischen Reichsstädten (Tübingen: Mohr Sieback, 2007).

11. Peter Jezler, “Der Bildersturm in Zürich 1523–1530,” in Cécile Dupeux et al. (eds.), Bildersturm: Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille? exhibition catalogue (Zurich: NZZ, 2000), 75–83.

12. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Vol. 1: Laws against Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15.

13. Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

14. Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

15. Wandel, Voracious Idols, 170.

16. Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium soziale Konflikte. Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975); Martin Warnke (ed.), Bildersturm: Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1973).

17. Christopher S. Wood, “Iconoclasts and Iconophiles: Horst Bredekamp in Conversation with Christopher S. Wood,” Art Bulletin XCIV/4 (December 2012): 515–527, here 518.

18. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), here 385.

19. Quoted in Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 109.

20. For a discussion see Caroline Bynum, “Are Things ‘Indifferent’? How Objects Change Our Understanding of Religious History,” German History 34/1 (2016): 88–112.

21. Quoted in Dupeux et al., Bildersturm, 128. See also 64 for a French example.

22. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, exhibition catalogue (Karlsruhe and Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2002); Anne McClanan and Jeff Johnson (eds.), Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

23. Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 172–176.

24. For translations of these texts see Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann (eds.), Luther’s Works (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1958–), vol. 51, 67–101 (“Third Sermon after Invocavit”), vol. 40, 77–222 (“Against the Heavenly Prophets”), and vol. 43, 11–45 (“Passional”).

25. Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Heimo Reinitzer, Gesetz und Evangelium: Über ein reformatorisches Bildthema, seine Tradition, Funktion und Wirkungsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Christians, 2006).

26. See Ph. Schmidt, Die Illustration der Lutherbibel (Basel: F. Reinhardt, 1977) and Hugo Reinitzer, Biblia deutsch. Luthers Bibelübersetzung und ihre Tradition, exhibition catalogue (Wolfenbüttel and Hamburg: H.A.B. and Friedrich Wittich, 1983).

27. Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 108.

28. Emil Sehling (ed.), Die evangelische Kirchenordnungen des XVI Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr, 1957–), vol. 5, 513.

29. For a discussion of this case see Bridget Heal, “ ‘Better Papist than Calvinist’: Art and Identity in Later Lutheran Germany,” German History 29/4 (2011): 584–609, esp. 588–590.

30. Koepplin, Lukas Cranach: Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, 2 vols. (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1974‒1976); Andreas Tacke, Der katholische Crananch. Zu zwei Großaufträgen von Lucas Cranach d. Ä., Simon Franck und der Cranach-Werkstatt 1520‒1540 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1992); Gunnar Heydenreich, Lucas Cranach the Elder: Painting Materials, Techniques and Workshop Practice (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Bodo Brinkmann et al. (eds.), Cranach, exhibition catalogue (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2007); Elke Anna Werner et al. (eds.), Cranach und die Kunst der Renaissance unter den Hohenzollern: Kirche, Hof und Stadtkultur, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009). Among recent Anglophone literature Steven Ozment, The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011) has attracted particular attention: for useful reviews see The American Historical Review 117/5 (December 2012): 1678; The English Historical Review 534 (October 2013): 1214–1216.

31. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 177–185.

32. Scribner, “Incombustible Luther: The Image of the Reformer in Early Modern Germany,” Past & Present 110 (1986): 38–68; Lyndal Roper, “Martin Luther’s Body: The ‘Stout Doctor’ and His Biographers,” American Historical Review 115/2 (2010): 351–384.

33. See, for example, Poscharsky, Die Bilder in den lutherischen Kirchen. For a detailed analysis of Lutheran funeral monuments see Oliver Meys, Memoria und Bekenntnis: die Grabdenkmäler evangelischer Landesherren im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation im Zeitalter der Konfessionaliserung (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2009).

34. Quoted in Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 30.

35. Ibid., 28. See also 226 ff.

36. For a useful discussion of art and craft see Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 2004), esp. 27.

37. On Jamnitzer see Gerhard Bott (ed.), Wenzel Jamnitzer und die Nürnberger Goldschmiedkunst 1500–1700, exhibition catalogue Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1985). Also Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 74‒80.

38. Bridget Heal, “‘Better Papist than Calvinist’”; Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur. Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 157–204; Jan Harasimowicz, Kunst als Glaubensbekenntnis: Beiträge zur Kunst- und Kluturgeschichte der Reformationszeit (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1996).

39. Angelika Marsch, Bilder zur Augsburger Konfession und ihren Jubiläen (Weißenhorn: Anton H. Konrad, 1980).

40. Mario Titze, “Wandel und Kontinuität. Der Schneeberger Cranach-Altar im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Thomas Pöpper and Susanne Wegmann (eds.), Das bild des neuen Glaubens. Das Cranach-Retabel in der Schneeberger St. Wolfgangskirche (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2011), 189–198.

41. Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 165.

42. Siegfried Müller, “Repräsentationen des Luthertums—Disziplinierung und konfessionelle Kultur in Bildern,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 29 (2002): 215–255. See also Andrew Morrall, “Protestant Pots: Morality and Social Ritual in the Early Modern Home,” Journal of Design History 15/4 (2002): 263–273.

43. For discussions of the plurality of Lutheran confessional culture during this period see Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur, esp. 16–21; Robert Kolb (ed.), Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008).

44. Johann Arndt, Ikonographia (1597), ed. Johann Anselm Steiger (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, Weidmann, 2014), 63.

45. Quoted and discussed further in Bridget Heal, “The Catholic Eye and the Protestant Ear: The Reformation as a Non-Visual Event?” in Peter Opitz (ed.), The Myth of the Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 321–355, here 336.

46. Quoted in Dietmar Peil, Zur »angewandten Emblematik« in protestantischen Erbauungsbüchern. Dilherr—Arndt—Francisci—Scriver (Heidelberg: Winter, 1978), 50.

47. Embelmatischer Catechismus / Oder Geist= und Sinnreiche Gedancken. Uber die Hauptstücke Christlicher Lehrer … (Nuremberg: Johann Andreæ Endters Söhne, 1683), Zuschrifft (n.p.), and 33–36.

48. On Denmark see Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, “The Arts and Lutheran Church Decoration,” in Opitz, The Myth of the Reformation, 356–367. See also Spicer (ed.), Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

49. Spicer, Calvinist Churches, 123.

50. Mia Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), here 1.

51. Spicer, Calvinist Churches, 150–151.

52. Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image, 127.

53. James R. Tanis, “Netherlandish Reformed Traditions in the Graphic Arts, 1550–1630,” in Finney, Seeing beyond the Word, 369‒396; Ilja M. Veldman, “Protestantism and the Arts: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” in ibid., 397–421.

54. For a general study see Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985). For more detailed discussions of his religious context see Volker Manuth, “Denomination and Iconography: The Choice of Subject Matter in the Biblical Painting of the Rembrandt Circle,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 22/4 (1993‒1994): 235–252; Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

55. Collinson, “From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation,” The Stenton Lecture 1985 (Reading: University of Reading, 1986).

56. On the 1640s see Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).

57. Felicity Heal, “Art and Iconoclasm,” in Anthony Milton (ed.), History of Anglicanism, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

58. Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

59. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

60. Tara Hamling, Decorating the “Godly Household”: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 23; Müller, “Repräsentationen des Luthertums.”

61. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 136.

62. Trevor Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001).

63. Hamling, Decorating the “Godly” Household, 5. See also William Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

FURTHER READING

Aston, Margaret. England’s Iconoclasts. Vol. 1: Laws against Images. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Bynum, Caroline. “Are Things ‘Indifferent’? How Objects Change Our Understanding of Religious History,” German History 34/1 (2016): 88‒112.

Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Fincham, Kenneth and Nicholas Tyacke. Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Finney, Paul Corby (ed.) Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999.

Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Hamling, Tara. Decorating the “Godly Household”: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Heal, Bridget. A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Heal, Bridget and Joseph Koerner (eds.) “Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe,” Art History 40/2 (Special issue, forthcoming).

Koerner, Joseph. The Reformation of the Image. London: Reaktion, 2004.

Mochizuki, Mia. The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Morrall, Andrew. Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Spicer, Andrew. Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Spicer, Andrew (ed.) Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Wandel, Lee Palmer. Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

CHAPTER 30

MUSIC

CHRISTOPHER BOYD BROWN

THE transformations of theology and religious practice in the Protestant Reformation were deliberate transformations of the aural culture—the “soundscape”—of early modern Europe.[1] Martin Luther offered a radical redefinition of Christians as defined primarily by what they heard: fides ex auditu.[2] Not only preaching but also singing was a central means of spreading the Reformation and of establishing it in early modern culture. Early modern Christians were divided by the questions of what Christians should hear (or not hear); what sounds should they participate in making? What was the spiritual significance (or danger) of that hearing and sound-making: music, sung or played; in churches or schools or streets or courts or homes; by choirs or congregations or professional musicians; in unison or polyphony; in Latin or in the vernacular; with religious or secular texts; with instruments or without them? Was music an instrument of divine power, a sensuous seduction from the spiritual, or a religiously indifferent adornment (adiaphoron)? Was the singing of Christians to be understood chiefly as a proclamation to be heard, or as the expression of an inner affection of the heart?

Study of the music of the Reformation has long been the preserve of specialists in musicology and hymnology, with scant attention from church historians. One of the great advances of recent scholarship, led by both musicologists and historians, has been to integrate accounts of early modern music into the social history of the Reformation. Much of the best of this scholarship has taken the form of detailed regional or local studies; the further challenge is to integrate these studies into a comprehensive but properly differentiated assessment of the role of music amid the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century, taking seriously both social and theological entailments, both sound and its absence.[3] This essay seeks not to provide an all-encompassing survey of the music of early modern Europe (or of the role of music in all contemporary religious traditions) but to identify the main issues in the relationship between the Protestant Reformations and early modern music in thought and practice as they have emerged in recent scholarship and to attempt a synthesis so far as possible.

In a world without sound recording, musical notation could of course be circulated from place to place; but music itself had to be produced or reproduced locally. Reformation music might emanate from centers like Wittenberg or Geneva through nearby and international networks of musical interrelationship but it survived because it was integrated into local cultures by local clergy, musicians, laity, and governments. Official prescriptive texts like the German church orders or the Book of Common Prayer generally left considerable space for variation, either by explicit delineation of options or by lack of specification; what was not specifically prohibited might be introduced beyond the official text.[4] To reconstruct the actual soundscape of Reformation Europe, therefore, historians must look at the full range of local sources: official and unofficial; ecclesiastical, civil, and judicial; printed and manuscript; learned and popular—everything from church orders, parish registers, council minutes, and court proceedings to hymnals, diaries, letters, private estate inventories, taking account of remarkable, transgressive, or marginal texts and incidents but also attending to the middle ground of prevalent but sometimes artistically, theologically, and politically unextraordinary music for its role in the soundscape of sixteenth-century Protestants.

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH, MUSIC, AND THE RENAISSANCE

Late medieval Europe had its own rich soundscape.[5] The Christian liturgy was sung in Latin with more or less elaboration in a tradition of chant ascribed (inaccurately) to Pope Gregory the Great, cultivated in monasteries and cathedral churches. Though music as an academic discipline in medieval schools was taught chiefly as a branch of mathematics, in the quadrivium schoolboys preparing for university study often earned their support by singing in choirs to support the liturgy. By the fifteenth century, polyphony had established itself, especially in northern Europe, as an alternative or augmentation to the traditional monophonic chant. Vernacular religious song did not have an official liturgical role in the medieval church but played a part in public religious processions and in popular devotions surrounding major festivals of the Christian year—though the most extensive specimens of vernacular song come not from the laity but from women’s religious communities, where vernacular song was used by nuns not fluent in Latin. Outside the church, music was central to the festivities of court, town, and countryside alike. The bourgeois in the towns could cultivate their own musical culture of considerable artistic complexity, such as the Meistersinger tradition in Germany. Popular ballads constituted an important means of spreading news across Europe. These different forms of music could overlap and combine: a famous example is the use of the secular vernacular song L’homme armé, originating after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, as the basis for numerous polyphonic settings of the Mass over the succeeding half-century.

Music found influential late medieval theological champions such as the composer and cleric Johann Tinctoris and the eminent theologian Gabriel Biel. Yet anxiety about the religious role of music was also part of the medieval inheritance. Though the medieval church celebrated its liturgy in chant, the strictest reforms of monastic life included severe restrictions on the role and extent of music beyond that. Aural elaboration could be taken as contrary to the simplicity of ascetic life; for orders such as the Carthusians, silence rather than sound was central to the austere ideal of monastic piety; influential moderate reforms like that of the Cistercians rejected the use of instruments and polyphony in their worship. Behind the medieval traditions stood the church fathers who had held deeply ambiguous views on the role and spiritual value of music. St. Augustine, for example, could be cited both for the spiritual power of St. Ambrose’s hymns and for the danger of music as an external, sensual seduction from the inner contemplation of the divine. The ascetic critique of music as an impediment rather than an aid to devotion was spread by popular preachers such as Savonarola.

Such concerns about music were shared not only by monastic and scholastic theologians but by Renaissance Humanists as well. The music of the Renaissance period was coeval with but fundamentally stood apart from the mainstream of the Humanist movement. Unlike ancient literature, no ancient music survived to be revived or imitated in the Renaissance. There were Humanist writers like Marsilio Ficino who deplored the inharmonious despisers of music, Humanist composers like Petrus Tritonius who composed quantitative polyphonic settings of Horace’s Odes, and Humanist theorists like Heinrich Glareanus who sought to reconcile ancient accounts of musical theory to contemporary practice. Nevertheless, music was seldom included alongside history, poetry, rhetoric, and moral philosophy in lists of the studia humanitatis which defined Renaissance Humanism; early modern music could not respond directly to the Humanist cry ad fontes.
[6]

For many influential literary Humanists, indeed, music was something to be regarded with suspicion. In addition to the church fathers, they had Plato behind them, who in the Republic had “purged” allowable music to a small handful of modes and instruments suitable for encouraging virtue. Erasmus denounced the instrumental music and polyphony of his day both as a barbaric, unclassical innovation and as a distraction from the edifying purity of the text. The use of music in the Old Testament served for Christians as a spiritual allegory; the actual use of musical instruments in Christian worship could be dismissed as carnal Judaizing (an opinion shared by Thomas Aquinas), an allurement to sensual immorality.[7] When pressed, Erasmus retrenched only to the extent of affirming the permissibility of clear, monophonic, restrained singing. At least with this qualification, and sometimes without it, Erasmus’s attitudes were widely (though not exclusively) influential. Humanist and traditional ascetic critiques combined at the beginning of the sixteenth century in a widespread hostility at least to musical polyphony and an uncertainty about the spiritual value of sound which the defenders of religious music had at least to address.[8]

Spiritual Silence: Zwingli and the Reformation in Zurich

Erasmus’s influence on Protestant attitudes toward music can be seen in a trajectory that parallels his influence on Protestant iconoclasm.[9] Ulrich Zwingli,[10] the Reformer of Zurich, sought to sharpen and to implement Erasmus’s ideal of Christian spirituality on both fronts. For Zwingli, the limitations of music were bound with a Platonizing understanding of spirituality as well as with his own exegesis and understanding of biblical authority. Christian worship was bound exclusively to what God had commanded specifically for Christians, without scope for human invention. The traditional liturgy seemed to Zwingli an illustration of Jesus’s warning against “vain repetitions” (Matthew 6:7). Instrumental music in worship, though mentioned in the Bible, was a Jewish practice without warrant for Christians. In interpreting New Testament passages that seemed to speak of Christian use of music (Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16), Zwingli argued that Paul was exhorting Christians to sing “in your hearts,” not with voices. True Christian worship was inward and spiritual, the “piety of the mind”; authentic prayer required no external words.

In the churches of Zurich, the organs, silenced at first, were by 1527 destroyed as systematically as the images had been. Though Zwingli’s critique of church music was directed in its details at the traditional chant of the medieval church, Zurich congregations after the Reformation did not sing in public worship, either. Music, as Zwingli described it, belonged to spaces that were not the church—“the theater of entertainments and the halls of princes”; the true church was defined by the expulsion of “noise” so that the reading and exposition of the Word of God and inward prayer would prevail. The sound distinctive of Zwingli’s reformation was the unison and antiphonal recitation (not singing) of Scripture by the whole congregation.

Outside of public worship, however, Zwingli encouraged and even contributed to Christian singing; he was an accomplished amateur musician, and three of his own compositions survive. Despite his own articulated theological position that seemed to exclude music from public worship as a matter of principle, he condoned the musical practice of other Reformed communities such as Strasbourg, where metrical psalms were sung in the vernacular, as acceptable and Christian. In Zurich itself, nevertheless, congregational song did not become part of the liturgy until 1598. Meanwhile, Reformed churches in fellowship with Zurich had to acknowledge at least the permissibility of Christian worship without music even if they did not altogether exclude it themselves.

Zwingli’s reserve about music in public worship was, like his iconoclasm, by no means an isolated mode of thought. The Wittenberg Reformer Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, though more influenced by late medieval mysticism than by Humanism, also argued for the removal of music from Christian worship. Instrumental music, polyphony, and even Gregorian chant itself distracted the musicians and their hearers from giving proper mental attention to God; such things belonged in theaters and courts rather than in church. In worship, Karlstadt conceded, there might at most be unison singing “if you insist.” In Wittenberg, however, Karlstadt he seems to have directed less energy toward implementing this musical program than he did at iconoclasm.[11]

Though the radical spiritual critique of music advanced by Zwingli and Karlstadt did not become the most typical mode of aural culture in the Reformation, it nevertheless drew deeply from the religious and cultural currents of late medieval and Renaissance Europe. Having been institutionalized in Zurich in the first generation of the reform, Zwingli’s pattern of theology and worship was advocated by the widely influential Heinrich Bullinger as his successor in the following decades. Its power continued to be felt and its appeal negotiated even where a reformed music was cultivated rather than spiritual silence.[12]

MUSIC AS PROPAGANDA IN THE EARLY REFORMATION

The most prevalent effect of the Reformation on the soundscape of sixteenth-century Europe was not silence but an explosion of sound: singing, in the vernacular, by the laity.[13] Though many of the individual elements of this musical outpouring can be found at least on a limited or local scale in the aural piety of the late Middle Ages, in their totality the musical changes of the Reformation struck contemporaries as being as notable and radical a departure as the abandonment of monastic life and the marriage of clergy. A century after the beginning of the Reformation, Roman Catholic observers lamented the flood of song from Luther’s Wittenberg that had filled “not only the churches and schools, but also private houses, workshops, marketplaces, streets, and fields.”[14]

Among prominent Reformers, Martin Luther was not necessarily the first to experiment with these various changes to the sixteenth-century soundscape. Karlstadt had attempted to transfer the liturgy into the vernacular in 1521, and Thomas Müntzer had offered his own congregational liturgy, translated from the Latin and using the traditional Gregorian melodies for his translated hymns and psalms, in his Deutzsch Kirchenampt of 1523. But Luther was the most comprehensive in seizing upon music joined with words—both traditional and new—spread through print and through word of mouth, as a means of spreading Christian doctrine, attacking the enemies of the Gospel, and creating religious community. By the end of 1523, he had begun to publish his own vernacular hymns and encouraged his friends and sympathizers to do likewise. These texts (in many cases the very same texts) served in a wide range of contexts, from public propaganda to private devotion to communal worship to pedagogy.

Luther’s own early compositions suggest the diversity of musical forms employed in support of the Reformation. He made use of existing vernacular religious songs, selecting texts that were theologically congenial—especially those on Christ as Savior—and by implication omitting others focusing on Mary or other saints. Many of these he expanded with additional stanzas. The selective use of existing songs assured singers that they had always known and given voice to the evangelical faith, however much it might have been obscured by clerical accretions. Luther also made new German translations of Latin hymns from the liturgy, especially those by Ambrose and Sedulius. Müntzer had also attempted this kind of translation, keeping the original meter and chant of the traditional hymns, but Luther was more daring in his musical adaptation, altering the Gregorian melodies and Latin meters to fit the accentual structures of the German language. Such translations placed texts that had previously been the property of the clergy into the mouths of the laity, and invoked the authority of the ancient fathers in support of evangelical teaching. (Among these translated Latin texts with different associations was the Eucharistic hymn attributed to the martyred Czech Reformer Jan Hus, which made its own connection between Luther and the fifteenth-century reform.)

Other traditional songs were deliberately replaced, keeping original melodies and meters but replacing the words to make a theological point: thus, the medieval pilgrim song In Gottes Namen fahren wir became Luther’s two hymns on the Ten Commandments, Dies sind die heil’gen zehn Gebot and Mensch, willstu leben seliglich. In addition to the exposition of the Commandments, the juxtaposition of the new text with the original melody and its former association could be understood to convey the message that Christian life was not a matter of special acts of devotion (like pilgrimage) but of keeping the divine (and scriptural) law. Such reworkings of existing texts, called contrafacta, became an important form of Reformation propaganda in the early years.[15]

Luther also employed the form of popular ballads, customarily used to convey news of battles and other important public events, to propagandize about the 1523 execution of his supporters in the Low Countries, the first Protestant “martyr song” in a genre which became especially important to the Anabaptists in succeeding decades (see section “Music in the Radical Reformation”). Other texts set to music were original proclamations of Luther’s own theology, such as his Nun freut euch lieben Christen g’mein, which narrated the drama of human sin and the bondage of the will followed by Christ’s incarnation and deliverance from sin and the Devil. Finally, Luther prepared metrical settings of liturgical and biblical texts, including the Nicene Creed and canticles from the New Testament but especially psalms. The metrical psalm, which seems to have been Luther’s own invention, became one of the most important international forms of Protestant aural culture. Luther’s most famous hymn, at least in modern context, was his versification of Psalm 46 as Ein feste Burg. Though not all early evangelical hymns were so directly derived from particular biblical texts, they were nonetheless identified as a whole with the Word of God in content as well as in effect.

Between 1523 and 1525, Luther wrote or adapted some twenty-seven texts set to music.[16] Luther was quickly joined in his new musical enterprise by a consort of other voices from across Germany, including fellow clergy and religious—the Pomeranian Reformer Paul Speratus, for example, but also the former Premonstratensian nun Elizabeth Cruciger, now married to the Wittenberg professor Caspar Cruciger—but also laity such as the Nürnberg city secretary Lazarus Spengler and the shoemaker—and Meistersinger—Hans Sachs. Sachs was especially prolific in creating ornate metrical psalms but also contrafacta of medieval religious songs, “corrected in a Christian way” [Christlich corrigiert], e.g., by replacing Mary or St. Christopher with Christ.

The 1520s saw an explosion of the printing of vernacular religious music in Germany: 262 editions compared with only sixty-six in the previous decade.[17] The new songs spread in print, first of all in the form of broadsheets, but by 1524 groups of songs were gathered into collections by enterprising printers as the first evangelical songbooks or hymnals, promoting themselves to the laity for use in household devotion and pedagogy. The broadsheets were easily transported for sale or copied in manuscript to be sent along with private letters; hymnals were overwhelmingly volumes of small format (octavo or smaller). But the songs were also uniquely capable of oral distribution without dependence on paper or literacy. Sometimes these forms of transmission were combined, as when a peddler appeared in the market with songsheets from which he sang to teach purchasers the melody. Gedanken sind zollfrei, as the proverb goes, but in the sixteenth century, the evangelical songs were nearly as unencumbered.

Though much of the furious activity of the early years of the Reformation subsided with time, the publication of Protestant hymns continued and even increased over the rest of the century. Though many of the polemical songs and contrafacta passed out of currency quickly, new polemical songs appeared and spread quickly when new conflicts arose—over the Interims, the papal introduction of the Gregorian calendar, or the Thirty Years War. Other forms of polemic were institutionalized, particularly anti-papal songs like Luther’s hymn Erhalt uns Herr or a processional song for ritually driving the Pope out of town which Luther endorsed in the 1540s. Militancy in song as well as a more stable tradition of spiritual music was a Protestant inheritance.

Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Music

Martin Luther’s own musical background was broadly rooted in the musical traditions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.[18] He was familiar with the chanted Latin liturgy not only from his years in the cloister (the Augustinian Hermits, though strictly classed as mendicant friars, sang the liturgy in choir like traditional monks) but also from his experience singing as a schoolboy. He was familiar with Renaissance polyphony as well, exchanging correspondence and music with the Bavarian court composer Ludwig Senfl and treasuring the compositions of Josquin des Pres for their masterful freedom. Luther, though he generally worked in cooperation with the Saxon court composer Johann Walther and the Wittenberg music publisher Georg Rhau, composed his own music for several of his hymns as well as one motet in four parts. He sang with students and visitors at his table—not only religious music but also Renaissance settings of Horatian odes or passages from Virgil.

Though Luther could criticize the misuse of music in service of false theology—the Mass, the invocation of the saints, and the monastic ideal in particular—he and his tradition were unique in the sixteenth century for their virtually total lack of reserve about music as such. Luther’s theology treasured music unambiguously in all its forms as a gift of God with its own divinely given power, one that deserved to be placed “next to theology.” Yet if fundamentally a gift of God, music was also a human art, and Luther’s embrace of music was part of a broader affirmation that “all the arts, especially music,” could and should be used in the service of God—though for Luther, this did not mean that music could only be used rightly for narrowly religious purposes. Its divinely given purpose included “innocent enjoyment” as well and the preservation of music that was not specifically religious, though it should not of course be immoral or indecent.

Luther’s embrace of music alongside the Word was supported by his conviction, sharpened in opposition to Karlstadt’s spiritualism, that the Word of God itself was not primarily a mental abstraction but an external, physical thing: a sound. For Luther, rather than competing with the Word of God as a sensuous distraction, music could serve to convey and reinforce the Word. Lutheran hymns, from the earliest days (as in Luther’s Nun freut euch), engaged in serious theological discourse even as they sought to be accessible and affective. Lutherans appealed to ancient hymns (and later to their own) as authorities in theological debates. In thinking about Christian singing, therefore, Lutherans tended, unlike most other sixteenth-century Christians, not to define singing primarily as a matter of prayer, directed to God from the human heart, but as proclamation [sonora praedicatio] through which God acted on human hearts through the sound of the word and music combined. Johann Brenz spoke for Luther’s distinctive tradition when he declared, “when we speak of the preaching of the Word of God, we do not understand only that preaching which takes place publicly in the pulpit, but also what takes place in the public songs of the church.”[19]

Lutheran public worship was almost invariably musical, though the degree of elaboration varied considerably depending on circumstances. Luther sought to retain as much of the traditional church music as possible, though he realized—in criticism of Müntzer’s liturgies—that changing the language of the texts would require musical changes as well. If Luther’s recommendations were followed, nearly everything in the service except the service and the prayers from the pulpit would have been sung or chanted, including the biblical lessons and, in a marked departure from medieval usage, the Words of Institution themselves at the center of the Mass. About the details of the conduct of the service there was considerable variation and flexibility. In country parishes, a congregation might sing most of the liturgy itself, adapted into hymns by Luther or others, or in the towns a school choir (the boys’ school, but sometimes also the girls’) might take a leading role, perhaps singing in polyphonic harmony in alternation with the congregation and alternating Latin (which the schoolboys were after all supposed to be learning) with the vernacular. The choir was intended to play a key role in leading and teaching the hymns to a lay congregation that might not possess its own hymnals or might not be fully literate. Between sung parts of the service, the organ might be played (no one used the organ to support congregational singing until the very end of the century), or other instruments might sound. At some point, however, in a Lutheran service, at least before or after the sermon, there would almost invariably be congregational song. By the end of the century, many churches had developed schedules associating particular German hymns with particular Sundays or festivals (and their appointed biblical readings) The great change was that not only Latin but German could also be sung, by the laity, and regarded as no less integral to the service—not that the evangelical congregation was obligated to sing everything itself.

Parallel traditions of hymn singing spread across linguistic lines to other countries in northern Europe. In Sweden, the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri, who had studied at Wittenberg, published a small collection of vernacular hymns in 1526; in Denmark, the first vernacular hymnal appeared in 1528, though Catholic complaints about evangelical hymn singing begin even earlier. These collections were quickly expanded and eventually adopted for officially sanctioned public use as the Reformation was institutionalized through royal mandates and the work of the Petri brothers in Sweden, or the organizational labors of the Wittenberg pastor Johann Bugenhagen in Denmark. The Scandinavian hymnals, which came typically to be called “Psalmbooks” even though they never limited themselves narrowly to versifications of the biblical Psalter, included translations from the German hymns from Wittenberg as well as new compositions by local authors and selected medieval vernacular hymns from the local tradition.

Though there is debate over how to evaluate the laity’s embrace of or resistance to this new role, especially as reflected in visitation reports, the evidence of hymn printing strongly suggests that the evangelical hymns became wildly popular at least in private use, whatever conflicts there may have been over public musical roles.[20] Though a few hymnals or psalm books were printed for official purposes and presumably acquired largely by clergy, church musicians, and parish churches themselves—not in quantities to supply whole congregation but enough to equip choirs—the vast majority of hymn printings, especially in Lutheran Germany, suggest by their format that they were intended for private ownership and use in the household as well as in the church. The printing of hymns was notable not only for its quantity but for its consistency over time, maintaining itself and even growing long after the initial flood of Reformation printing of the 1520s had subsided for most other genres.

Lutheran schools were saturated with music, whether exclusively with German texts in the vernacular schools or with Latin texts as well in the Latin schools.[21] Luther composed hymns on each of the parts of his Small Catechism that became a staple of parish and school instruction. This universal embrace of music was characteristic of a distinctly Lutheran strain of Humanism, diverging from Erasmus in music as well as in theology. Lutheran universities taught music not merely as a mathematical discipline but as a practical exercise [musica practica]—that is, musical performance.

Lutherans also sought to foster hymn singing in the home and workplace. Many of the common Lutheran hymnals seem (from their format and contents) to be intended at least in part for use in a domestic setting, but Lutheran clergy, cantors, and printers designed special collections for use at home, including hymns for morning and evening use, songs for children, and biblical stories. Many of these especially addressed themselves to women as the presumptive leaders of such household pedagogy and devotion. Other songs or whole collections were associated with particular professions and their daily work, imitating the musical styles already associated with the profession. Miners’ songs [Bergreihen] were an especially popular genre.

Though Luther and his followers were hesitant to introduce existing secular tunes into public worship because of their distracting associations with existing texts, they encouraged a freer musical range for domestic devotion. In at least a few cases, songs originally written to secular tunes for private use did eventually find their way into church use, the new religious association of the melody having supplanted the old worldly one. But this concern with the associations of specific tunes was not for Lutherans a concern over musical styles, of which they, following Luther, cultivated an exceptionally broad range. The singing of secular songs outside church was a matter of concern for Lutherans only if the lyrics themselves were immoral—especially those encouraging sexual sin or mocking established political authorities.

Even dancing, which, with its potential for sexual scandal and social disorder, was the common object of regulation by early modern local authorities, regardless of their confession, was problematic only in its avoidable abuse for most Lutherans. Luther, in a text that became scandalous for later Pietists, defended dancing as an appropriate conduit toward marriage against the “Papist” critics of dance whom he characterized as enemies of marriage as well. As post-Reformation Roman Catholics sought to strengthen the moral censure of dancing at least by prohibiting clergy from any attendance at dances (such as those held amid wedding celebrations), Lutherans even encouraged their clergy to attend, though of course in part to exercise a moderating influence on the festivities, in keeping with Luther’s advice that “honorable matrons and men” should be present—and his own model of occasional attendance.[22]

Luther’s exuberant model of music in service of the Gospel shaped a distinctive Lutheran musical culture, focused on music and the Word as sound and proclamation and less concerned with boundaries than many other confessional traditions of music—Catholic or Protestant—emerging from the sixteenth century.

MILITANT IN SONG: THE METRICAL PSALTER AND THE REFORMED CHURCHES

Strasbourg

Yet already in the 1520s Luther’s model was subject to revision and recasting into an alternative that embraced neither Zwingli’s suppression of church music nor the Wittenberg profusion.[23] The free imperial city of Strasbourg,[24] poised geographically and theologically between Wittenberg and Zurich and guided by its own evangelical clergy under the leadership of Martin Bucer, was the matrix for this alternate tradition.

Strasbourg quickly became a major center of evangelical printing, including the printing of the first generation of evangelical hymns by Luther. But Strasbourg’s printers, clergy, and musicians made their own distinctive selection and adaptation of this corpus. The Strasburgers embraced Luther’s psalm-hymns in particular, though not as an absolutely exclusive option, and local poets added new psalm-hymns of their own. In many cases the Strasburgers replaced the Wittenberg melodies with new compositions. Protestant singing in Strasbourg thus had its own sound, linked to Wittenberg but distinct from it.

Like Luther, Bucer hailed music as a “wonderful art and gift of God” with power to move the human spirit, and staked out a position in implicit rejection of Zwingli’s Zurich practice. He reproached “those who discard singing in the congregation of God”—by which Bucer explicitly affirmed that the Scriptures meant vocal singing and not simply inner jubilation. The employment of music in Christian worship was therefore not only possible but necessary, “to the praise of God and for the strengthening of faith.” Yet at this point Bucer pressed the argument farther than Luther had. If music is to serve these purposes, the language of church song must be the vernacular, rather than Latin, and the singers must be the whole congregation rather than the clergy or a choir. In Bucer’s understanding of music as divine gift, the ultimate conclusion was that it “should be used in no other way except for sacred praise, prayer, teaching, and admonition.”

The Reformed liturgy developed in Strasbourg was therefore entirely in the vernacular, giving a central place to unison congregational singing, chiefly of psalm-hymns and other scriptural canticles, though the repertoire expanded again somewhat in the 1530s as the city strengthened its theological and political ties with Wittenberg and the Schmalkaldic League. Choirs were abolished and replaced by cantors (precentors) to lead the congregation in its singing, though sometimes schoolchildren were enlisted. Organs were not destroyed, but their role became peripheral. Singing played a role in the Strasbourg schools, though compared with Lutheran educators, the eminent Erasmian pedagogue Johann Sturm was more concerned with keeping music carefully restrained—some instruction on Saturday afternoons and a few daily psalms—than with cultivating it throughout the curriculum.

The Strasbourg hymnals, culminating with the Gesangbuch of 1541, seem to have been an exception to the general pattern of Lutheran hymnal printing in that they were semi-official productions closely linked to the revisions of the Strasbourg church order rather than the independent work of printers for the private market. One exception was the Strasbourg edition of the German hymnal of the Hussite Bohemian Brethren, edited by the pastor’s widow Katharina Schütz Zell for household use. Zell’s preface echoed Bucer’s wish that spiritual music might displace worldly music altogether.[25] Strasbourg was a nexus joining Lutheran musical traditions into an evangelical model that would prove enormously influential, by way of John Calvin’s Genevan church and the Anglican Church under Edward and Elizabeth, on the musical lives of Reformed Protestants across Europe.

Music in the Radical Reformation

The adherents of the so-called Radical Reformation who failed to secure official local recognition for themselves also made use of music in ways that reflected both their connection to the magisterial reform movements from which they had separated themselves and the characteristics of their own theologies and social experience.[26] The earliest Swiss Anabaptists at first shared Zwingli’s categorical rejection of music in Christian worship and indeed complained that Thomas Müntzer was insufficiently reformed because he used a sung vernacular liturgy in his parish at Allstedt.[27] Nevertheless, by the end of the 1520s Anabaptists had begun to develop their own tradition of song. Unlike the metrical psalms of the Reformed tradition, however, Anabaptist hymns were not generally based on scriptural texts. Rather, Anabaptist singing focused especially on versified accounts of the suffering and death of contemporary martyrs. This was a genre Luther himself had pioneered with his hymn on the Augustinian martyrs of 1523, but the Anabaptists made it the center of their own sung devotion, alongside a selection of hymns expounding biblical doctrines. Because of their political situation, Anabaptists rarely had the opportunity to print their hymns and instead circulated them in manuscript; a rare exception was the 1564 publication of Etliche schöne Christliche Gesäng which continued to be reprinted under the title of Ausbund. Though Anabaptist collections contained hymns by spiritualists like Sebastian Franck who were not strictly within Anabaptist circles, and a few borrowings from other organized groups, particularly the Bohemian Brethren, Anabaptist hymnody was basically its own distinctive body of sound, identifying its participants as distinctive to any who might overhear.

Geneva

Calvin spent three years in Strasbourg (1538‒1541) while in exile from Geneva.[28] He served there as pastor of the French congregation and, in addition to observing the singing activities of the main German-speaking churches, began almost at once to make provision for his congregation to do the same. To produce a selected French metrical psalter using existing Strasbourg melodies, Calvin collaborated with the eminent French poet Clément Marot. After Calvin’s return to Geneva, he continued to promote the development of a French psalter. By 1562, with the help of Theodore Beza, a complete metrical psalter appeared from the Genevan presses and across France, protected by a royal privilege obtained by Beza at the Colloquy of Poissy.

Beginning in 1542, the Genevan psalters carried with them Calvin’s preface (expanded in 1543) framing the use of the metrical psalms within a distinctive theology of the role of sound in Christian worship.[29] Calvin declared that the public worship of Christians consisted of three things: preaching, the administration of the sacraments, and prayer. Essential to all of these was the understanding and attention of the heart, for which the use of a familiar language was necessary. He ridiculed the idea, associated with Roman Catholic sacramentology, that the words spoken could have a kind of magical effect apart from human understanding of them. But provided that the prayers of Christians proceeded from the heart in a known language, they could, by the testimony both of Scripture and of church history, be either spoken or sung. For Calvin, then, in distinction from Luther, Christian singing belonged firmly in the category of prayer rather than that of proclamation. Theologically, music was a God-given gift for stirring hearts to greater zeal as well as for refreshing and giving delight to human spirits, yet such is its power (as Plato testifies) that it must be used cautiously: “moderated” and “regulated.” For if music is joined with evil words then “venom and corruption are distilled to the depth of the heart by the melody.” Calvin ascribes to music a kind of nearly magical, unbound (“secret and almost unbelievable”) power even as he denies it to the sacramental words and elements.

Christian song must therefore have the right words: not only decent and seemly words that avoid obscenity but “holy.” No words can be more suited to that end than the words of “the Psalms of David which the Holy Spirit made and spoke through him.” When Christians sing these inspired words, “we are certain that God puts the words in our mouths, as if He Himself were singing in us to exalt His glory.” For the church in Geneva, then, more strictly than in Strasbourg, the psalms, together with a few other versified biblical texts and the Apostles’ Creed, were the exclusive content of congregational singing. Its importance was magnified by the structure of the Genevan liturgy which made psalm singing, led by a cantor, almost the only form of verbal participation by the congregation. The schools of Geneva made extensive use of the metrical psalms, especially as compared with the Strasbourg model, though in general Reformed higher schools gave less attention to advanced theoretical or practical instruction in music than did Lutheran ones.

Calvin was directly concerned with the music to be used with the psalms as well. Some boundaries were set by his central emphasis on intelligibility, which was violated by the use either of instruments or of polyphony in public worship. But the melodies themselves were also at issue. For Calvin the issue was not simply the distracting secular associations of existing melodies but the style of the music. The music used “in the Church in the presence of God and His angels” should be fundamentally different from the music used “to entertain men at table”: the music for the psalms should be “neither light nor frivolous” but convey “gravity and majesty appropriate to the subject.” The desire for a clear distinction between styles of sacred and secular music—always elusive in practice—was one that the fathers of Trent would share with Calvin.

Yet having posited a basic distinction between church music and household music, Calvin firmly endorsed the extension of Christian singing of the psalms into every sphere of life—“in the homes and in the fields,” as a source of consolation through meditation on God’s goodness, for one’s own enjoyment and benefit and that of one’s neighbors. For Calvin as for Bucer, the metrical psalms should thus supplant the worldly music “in use up to now.”

The polyphonic settings of the Genevan Psalter which began to appear beginning in 1545, including settings by Bourgeois and the 1565 complete psalter set by Claude Goudimel, can be seen as a constructive reconciliation of these directions in Calvin’s thought. These settings were intended for domestic use, placing the metrical psalm texts in the center of the household. Yet the music, by being set in parts and potentially played with instruments in addition to being sung, was distinct from the monophonic, unaccompanied singing in the church.

The Geneva Psalter was a work of considerable poetic and musical variety and excellence. There were one hundred and twenty-eight different melodies and one hundred and ten different stanzaic patterns employed among the one hundred and fifty psalms. Marot was one of the great French poets of the century and Beza was a genuinely gifted Humanist versifier. Work of lower poetic quality—most of Calvin’s own early contribution, for example—was gradually replaced with more polished material. The melodies, some inherited from the Strasbourg church, some based on Gregorian melodies, and some composed by Genevan musicians like Louis Bourgeois, had rhythms that at least to a modern ear may sound more sprightly than Calvin’s description of them suggests. Theologically, the texts of the Genevan Psalter gave the impression of being relatively literal translations of the underlying biblical text. Unlike Luther’s hymns, the Reformed metrical psalms did not make explicit application to contemporary confessional opponents or introduce the New Testament interpretation of the text.

These qualities of the French metrical psalter helped to secure its popularity at court, where Marot had been a popular poet, at the same time that the monarchy was seeking to suppress the Huguenot movement. On the lips of the French Huguenots themselves, the metrical psalms took on their political significance from the ways in which they were used, defining Reformed worship but also serving as a key means of Huguenot intrusion into public spaces. In that role, Theodore Beza’s versification of Psalm 68 became famous as the battle hymn of the Huguenots, the context clearly identifying the “enemies” against whom God was invoked as the Catholic League.

Reformed Protestants also defined themselves through the regulation of non-religious forms of public music. Calvin and the French Reformed churches tried to enforce discipline prohibiting dancing as well as indecent singing altogether. Psalm singing was the activity in which men and women could participate together without scandal,[30] and the seriousness of the Genevan effort to install the metrical psalms in every sphere of life was such that the council conceded that paid instrumentalists might be allowed on festive occasions, if the psalms were the music being played.

Though definitive bibliography of all the editions of the Huguenot Psalter—printed in Geneva, adapted in Lausanne and elsewhere in Francophone Reformed Switzerland, and then printed as circumstances allowed in Lyon, Paris, and elsewhere in France—is still awaited, it is clear that in all forms, the book was phenomenally successful.[31] One distinctive Reformed practice developed by the end of the century was to print or at least to bind together a metrical psalter and a Bible (or in England, possibly a Book of Common Prayer) in the same volume, providing a comprehensive aid to the Reformed Christian’s devotion in private and in church.

The Genevan Psalter spread rapidly in translation as well. In the Netherlands and in Germany, Reformed congregations sang versions of the Geneva Psalter (translated by Petrus Datheen and Ambrosius Lobwasser respectively) retaining the Genevan meters and melodies. Lobwasser’s psalter was then taken up by German-speaking Swiss Reformed churches and was the basis for translations into several eastern European languages.[32] In the Reformed churches of Germany, usually introduced as a “second reformation” in succession to an earlier Lutheran reform, the introduction of Lobwasser’s psalter became a key public mark of religious change, though often the musical strictures of Geneva were eased to some extent. In 1598, psalm singing became part of the public worship in Zurich itself.

Faced with the task of reconciling this diversity of musical practice within their own confessional circles, Reformed theologians tended to categorize Christian music as an adiaphoron—something which different Christian communities might make their own decision to use or not to use. This set the Reformed apart from Lutherans, who while they might agree in principle about freedom with regard to the use of particular musical forms, discerned in the Reformed invocation of the adiaphoristic principle an excuse for removing Lutheran musical practices which accordingly they were bound to resist. One of the chief means by which lay Lutherans who found themselves under new Calvinist rule expressed their resistance to confessional change was by continuing to sing Luther’s hymns instead of the newly-introduced Reformed metrical psalter.[33]

THE RINGING ISLAND: MUSIC IN REFORMATION ENGLAND

Pre-Reformation England stood out for the elaboration of its liturgical music as well as for the relative lack of influential criticism of it—both of which Erasmus, visiting from the Continent, found objectionable.[34] The English vernacular tradition of extra-liturgical religious music—surviving, for example, in the form of carols—was perhaps more extensive than in most places on the Continent. What criticism of religious music there was, was associated with the Lollard movement, and could therefore be dismissed as heretical. Ironically, the English association of rejection of music with Lollardy may have at first protected Protestant-minded church musicians such as John Taverner from persecution.[35]

The emergence of an English Protestant musical tradition came rather late. The Bible translator Miles Coverdale attempted to introduce continental Protestant models of singing into England with his 1535 volume of Ghoostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes, based on material from Wittenberg and Strasbourg hymnals. Coverdale’s preface, however, in describing the proper Christian use of music, took a view closer to Bucer’s than to Luther’s: psalms and hymns were to replace all other songs in every sphere of life. In the context of Henrician England, the songs were intended for domestic rather than parish use.[36]

Under Edward VI, the developing English Protestant establishment was significantly influenced by Heinrich Bullinger’s vigorous rejection of all church music, advocated in England by Thomas Becon’s 1547 Jewel of Joy, among other authors and works. Humanist critiques of music in general and polyphony in particular, including arguments that had originated in the late fifteenth century on the Continent, found a new audience among English Protestants.[37]

Nonetheless, the kernel of what would grow into a complete English metrical psalter emerged in 1549, under Edward’s reign, but in court circles for private use rather than for public liturgical employment. These metrical psalms began as the work of courtier Thomas Sternhold, continued by the Oxford clerk John Hopkins, men whose names continued to be attached to the composite work even as it expanded beyond their contributions. During the Marian exile, English Protestants on the Continent adopted the metrical psalter into their public worship and completed the collection, publishing a Genevan edition of all one hundred and fifty psalms by 1559 and a new edition in England in 1562.[38]

Sternhold may have known the French metrical psalms by Marot, but his own work and that of the English Protestants who followed was not a translation of the Geneva Psalter. Though early editions of Sternhold and Hopkins retained some of the Genevan melodies, the English psalms did not share the Geneva Psalter’s diversity of meters but was set mostly in the “common meter” associated with ballads—though it may have been Sternhold and Hopkins who popularized the meter rather than the other way around. By the end of the century, however, the range of melodies had been simplified and contracted to a handful. Like those of the Genevan Psalter, the texts of Sternhold and Hopkins were in general quite literal renderings of the psalms, though a close reading of the texts added by the Marian exiles suggests an effort to emphasize the character of the godly community under persecution.

In the Elizabethan church, the use of metrical psalms was specified nowhere in the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer itself or in the Injunctions of 1559, though permission for “a hymn or suchlike song” could include them. Nonetheless, the use of metrical psalms became the standard liturgical practice of late sixteenth-century English Protestants even in the absence of firm policy, partly through informal encouragement from bishops who had themselves used the psalms in worship in exile but also because of popular embrace of the Psalter.

The use of the metrical psalms seems to have been popular among sixteenth-century English Protestants of nearly all persuasions, with one hundred and eleven editions printed between 1549 and the end of the century. In Scotland, the Kirk developed its own distinctive version of Sternhold and Hopkins.[39] The English metrical psalter spread to the colonies in the new world as well; in Anglican Virginia, parishes continued to use Sternhold and Hopkins into the eighteenth century. In New England, Puritan divines sought to improve their metrical psalmody with a more accurate translation, the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, which declared “not only the lawfulness but also the necessity” of congregational singing while affirming its restriction to the psalms of David.[40]

As with the German Lutheran hymnals, the format of the English psalm editions suggests that private ownership (whether for church or domestic use or both) rather than official procurement was the destination of most of these.[41] At least in the Elizabethan age, the use of the metrical psalter was not associated narrowly with any specific party, though there were advocates of traditional chant on the one hand and of spiritual (and hence music-free) worship on the other who opposed it. The metrical psalms became almost ubiquitous not only in parish worship but in cathedral music as well. Other forms of music were also cultivated at both levels of Anglican religious life. Polyphonic music, performed by a parish choir, might be performed a few times a year, while for the chanting of prose psalms and other liturgical texts a distinctive syllabic Anglican style of plainchant was developed at Thomas Cranmer’s instigation.[42]

The use of an organ and other instruments seems to have varied from parish to parish. To some extent the distinctive instrumental emphasis of English churches in the Reformation seems to have been the cultivation of bells. Church bells in the Middle Ages had possessed a religious function undergirded by quasi-sacramental ritual: individual bells were given names and baptized, a rite that had to be performed by a bishop. They summoned the faithful to devotion toward the consecrated host elevated in the Mass or to pray specific prayers such as the Marian Angelus, but to the bells was also attributed spiritual power to drive away devils, plague, and turbulent weather alike. The ringing of bells for the dead was supposed to aid prayers for the soul of the departed or to function as such in its own right. Protestants across the board rejected such practices as superstitious. Yet the bells of Europe’s churches were generally retained where the Reformation took hold. In part, they served an important civic function in marking time and sounding alarm. But Protestants also developed their own new or reinterpreted use of bells. Lutherans used bells to summon hearers to pray the Lord’s Prayer and to note Christ’s presence in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. In Geneva, the bells were kept, unlike the organs, but their ringing was now designated to signal the singing of metrical psalms. But especially in England, bell ringing, after some restriction under Edward VI, expanded to become an especially important communal activity in Anglican parishes, able to command parish support as other kinds of music (that of organs, for example) may have been allowed to wane.[43]

Some kinds of music and musical activity outside church were of course considered worthy of censure, and a different drawing of boundaries here may have defined parties within the Anglican Church more than their preferences in church music as such. The Reformed Elizabethan clergy were critical of dance on the whole but focused their practical attention on the question of Sunday dancing; the official permission of such in King James’s “Book of Sports” was one of the main causes of offense to the Puritan faction.[44]

Beyond the metrical psalms, with their public, at least semi-official role, Elizabethan Protestants also had a more informal religious song in the form of godly ballads. These might in individual cases be more polemical or pedagogical, political or theological, but they provided English Protestants with a form for singing that allowed explicit engagement with contemporary issues in ways that the relatively literal psalms did not. They also provided catechetical texts alongside the psalms for use in schools, which if they were neither so well supported nor so fully integrated into musical life as their German Lutheran counterparts, they played an important role, transforming England into a “nation of Protestants.”

MUSIC AND SOCIETY IN THE REFORMATION

Protestant music established itself not only as an aural presence in churches but also as a major success in the early modern press—in Germany but also in Reformed Switzerland, France, and England. Protestant worship included vernacular singing by the congregation—though the quantity, character, and predominance of such singing in relation to other kinds of sound varied considerably. Protestant song was regarded as a form of God’s Word. Yet Protestant theologians differed significantly in their understanding of what this meant and how to define the relationship between what was audible and the inner faith of the heart.

Protestant music served to define community both in ordinary public worship and in the streets. The public processions of the medieval church, often involving the display of the Eucharistic host, had been one of the occasions for vernacular religious song before the Reformation. Protestants removed the Eucharistic connection but kept and expanded the vernacular singing: Lutheran hymns, or a sung litany (Luther’s or Cranmer’s adaptation), or a Genevan psalm—each of these very different in significance depending on the perspective of the local authorities, but accordingly capable either of sealing cohesion or sharpening lines of division.

In many ways the confessions of early modern European Christianity developed self-consciously distinctive musical cultures. Christians could be distinguished by what they sang and heard. Nevertheless, the confessional musical cultures of the late sixteenth century shared common features, partly out of a common medieval inheritance and partly out of shared participation in the cultural developments of the sixteenth century. Especially musical high culture retained much continuity across confessional lines; musicians and ambitious music could often move from Catholic to Lutheran to Anglican appointments without much difficulty. Even here, however, fault lines could appear as confessional groups shifted their musical strategies. In an ironic shift, Lutherans preserved many pieces of medieval liturgy and music that were abolished by post-Tridentine liturgical reforms in the Roman Catholic Church.

The cautiously hedged approbation of polyphonic music by the Council of Trent—even if the old fable that it was nearly abolished altogether until the fathers were swayed by a Palestrina Mass is fanciful—echoed concerns shared by Reformed churchmen: that above all texts should be intelligible, aided rather than impeded by the music to which they were set; that church music should be serious and clearly distinct from secular song.

On the Reformed side, the use of the psalms as the center of musical worship stood in continuity with the deep tradition of monastic piety, though this connection was scarcely affirmed either by the Calvinist theologians or their Catholic critics. Instead, psalm singing placed the Reformed church in continuity with ancient Israel, the people of God standing against the idolaters of Babylon even in exile—one constitutive element in what has been identified as an inchoate relative sympathy for Jewish contemporaries among the Reformed.[45]

Lutherans found the parallel too close and charged the Genevan psalter with “Judaizing” in its failure to find Christ at the center of the psalms. Catholic song, of course, was charged with idolatrous invocation of Mary and the other saints even as Lutherans lifted up medieval vernacular songs judged to be of evangelical character. In response to the popularity of Lutheran vernacular singing, one widespread Catholic response was to pull back from vernacular song, even the existing medieval ones that had been adopted by Protestant heretics. Those Catholics who instead attempted to produce orthodox collections of vernacular hymns found themselves suspect in the eyes of their co-religionists[46]—just as Protestants living in Roman Catholic contexts could be identified by what they were overheard to sing. Under persecution, a song might be the last sound to escape a Protestant martyr’s lips. For the critics of the new song, vernacular religious singing had, for the moment, become “Protestant.” The soundscape of Western Europe by the end of the sixteenth century had been indelibly shaped by the Reformation, whose music was both the instrument and one of the most resounding indications of its success.

NOTES

1. On the use of “soundscape” as an analytical category, see Alexander Fisher, Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

2. On the role of hearing in the Reformation, see Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 48.

3. Compare the synthetic survey by Andrew Pettegree, “Militant in Song,” in Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40–75.

4. Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 131.

5. See the surveys in Willis, Church Music, chap. 1; Daniel Trocmé-Latter, The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523–1541 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), chap. 1; and Hyun-Ah Kim, Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music in Early Modern England: John Merbecke the Orator and The Booke of Common Praier Noted (1550) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), chap. 2, as well as Iain Fenlon (ed.), Man and Music: The Renaissance: From the 1470s to the End of the 16th Century (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.)

6. Claude Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); see also Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller, “Musik als Lehrgegenstand an den deutschen Universitäten des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Die Musikforschung 40/4 (1987): 313–320.

7. On Erasmus’s views on music, see Jean Claude Margolin, Érasme et la musique, De Pétrarque à Descartes 9 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965); Charles Béné, “La musique religieuse chez Erasme et dans la Dispute de Lausanne,” in Eric Junod (ed.), La Dispute de Lausanne (1536): La théologie réformée après Zwingli et avant Calvin (Lausanne: Bibliothèque historique vaudoise, 1988).

8. Rob C. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470–1530 (New York: Routledge, 2005).

9. See Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

10. Charles Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); Markus Jenny, Zwinglis Stellung zur Musik im Gottesdienst (Zurich: Zwingli, 1966); Jenny, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin in ihren Liedern (Zurich: Theologischer, 1983); R. W. Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 61–62.

11. On Karlstadt, see Garside, Zwingli, 28–33; Robin A. Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 35–36; Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (2nd ed.) (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1968), 1: 491–493. Cf. Karlstadt’s 1524 letter to Thomas Müntzer, quoted in Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion, 44.

12. See Wegman, Crisis; Kim, Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music.

13. See Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Helga Robinson-Hammerstein, “The Lutheran Reformation and Its Music,” in The Transmission of Ideas in the Lutheran Reformation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 141–171; Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), chap. 1.

14. Thomas à Jesu, De procuranda salute (Antwerp, 1613), 541. See Brown, Singing the Gospel, 1, 206 n. 7.

15. See especially Oettinger, Music and Propaganda.

16. For the critical text and analysis of Luther’s hymns, see Jenny (ed.), Luthers geistliche Lieder und Kirchengesänge: Vollständige Neuedition in Ergänzung zu Band 35 der Weimarer Ausgabe, Archiv zur Weimarer Ausgabe der Werke Martin Luthers 4 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1985); Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music.

17. Brown, Singing the Gospel, 6.

18. On Luther and music, see Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music; Paul Westermeyer, “Theology and Music for Luther and Calvin,” in R. Ward Holder (ed.), Calvin and Luther: The Continuing Relationship (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). On the role of music in Lutheranism, see Patrice Veit, Das Kirchenlied in der Reformation Martin Luthers: Eine thematische und semantische Untersuchung, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europaische Geschichte Mainz 120 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1986); Brown, Singing the Gospel. For bibliography of early modern hymn editions, see Philipp Wackernagel, Bibliographie zur Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenliedes im XVI. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M, 1855; repr. Hildesheim, 1987); Konrad Ameln and Markus Jenny (eds.), Das Deutsche Kirchenlied, DKL: kritische Gesamtausgabe der Melodien 1 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1975); for texts, see Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zu Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1864‒1867; repr. Hildesheim, 1990); and for the seventeenth century, Albert Fischer and Wilhelm Tümpel, Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied des 17. Jahrhunderts, 6 vols. (Gütersloh, 1904‒1916; repr. Hildesheim, 1964). For music, see Johannes Zahn, Die Melodien der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenlieder, 6 vols. (Gütersloh, 1889‒1893; repr. Hildesheim, 1963) and Joachim Stalmann et al. (eds.), Das deutsche Kirchenlied: Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Melodien, Part III: Die Melodien aus gedruckten Quellen bis 1680, 4 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1993‒).

19. Johann Brenz, quoted in Walter Blankenburg, “Der Gottesdienstliche Liedgesang der Gemeinde,” Leiturgia: Handbuch des evangelischen Gottesdienstes 4 (Kassel: Stauda, 1961), 567f.

20. See Joseph Herl, Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Brown, Singing the Gospel.

21. See Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 230–236; Brown, Singing the Gospel, 54–75.

22. Martin Luther, Church Postil, Gospel for Epiphany 2, WA 17/2:64; LW 76:241; cf. Table Talk no. 5265, WA TR 5:35.

23. For the section title, see Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion, 40.

24. On Strasbourg’s Protestant music, see Trocmé-Latter, The Singing; Leaver, “Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes”: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535–1566 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 22–33.

25. Elsie Ann McKee, Reforming Popular Piety in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg: Katharina Schutz Zell and her Hymnbook, Studies in Reformed Theology and History 2.4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994); on Zell’s career with an edition of her writings, see McKee, Katharina Schütz Zell, 2 vols., Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 69 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999).

26. On Anabaptist hymnody, see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 197–231. Texts of Anabaptist hymnody are edited in Rudolf Wolkan, Die Lieder der Wiedertäufer (Berlin: Behr, 1903; repr. Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1965).

27. Garside, Zwingli, 58–60.

28. On Genevan psalmody, see Robert Weeda, Le psautier de Calvin: l’histoire d’un livre populaire au XVIe siècle, 1551–1598 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); Garside, “The Origins of Calvin’s Theology of Music,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 69 (1979); John D. Witvliet, “The Spirituality of the Psalter: Metrical Psalms in Liturgy and Life in Calvin’s Geneva,” Calvin Theological Journal 32 (1997): 273–297. For texts and music, see Pierre Pidoux, Le Psautier huguenot du XVI e siècle, 2 vols. (Basel: Bärenreiter, 1962).

29. Calvin’s French preface is edited with parallel English translation in Garside, The Origins of Calvin’s Theology of Music, 31–33.

30. Weeda, Le Psautier de Calvin, 78–80.

31. See Jean-Michel Noailly. “Présentation de la ‘Bibliographie des psaumes imprimés en vers français,’” in Véronique Ferrer and Anne Mantero (eds.), Les paraphrases bibliques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: actes du Colloque de Bordeaux des 22, 23 et 24 septembre (Geneva: Droz, 2006), 225–240.

32. See Eckhard Grunewald, Henning Jürgens, and Jan R. Luth (eds.), Der Genfer Psalter und seine Rezeption in Deutschland, der Schweiz und den Niederlanden: 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004).

33. Joyce L. Irwin, Neither Voice nor Heart Alone: German Lutheran Theology of Music in the Age of the Baroque, American University Studies VII/132 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993); Christopher Boyd Brown, “Paul Gerhardt in Context,” Journal of the Good Shepherd Institute 8 (2008): 18–22, 24–25.

34. See Willis, Church Music; Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the section title, see Marsh, Music and Society, 1.

35. See Wegman, Crisis, chap. 4.

36. Leaver, “Ghoostly psalmes.”

37. See Wegman, Crisis, chap. 4; Kim, Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music; Kim, The Renaissance Ethics of Music: Singing, Contemplation, and Musica Humana (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015).

38. Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 9.

39. Timothy Duguid, Metrical Psalmody in Print and Practice: English “Singing Psalms” and Scottish “Psalm Buiks,” ca. 1547–1640 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

40. Duguid, Metrical Psalmody, 231–232. For a modern reprint, see the Bay Psalm Book, ed. Wilberforce Eames (New York: Dodd & Mead, 1903).

41. Green, Print and Protestantism, 506–509.

42. Kim, Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music.

43. Weeda, Le Psautier de Calvin, 20; Marsh, Music and Society, chap. 9, 454–504; Willis, Church Music, 98–101.

44. Marsh, Music and Society, chap. 7, 328–390.

45. Heiko Oberman, The Two Reformations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 83–84. Robert Weeda makes an interesting effort to trace Reformed parallels with Jewish use of the psalms in his study of the Genevan Psalter.

46. Richard Wetzel and Erika Heitmeyer, Johann Leisentrit’s Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen, 1567: Hymnody of the Counter-Reformation in Germany (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013); Brown, Singing the Gospel, 21–24.

FURTHER READING

Brown, Christopher Boyd. Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Fisher, Alexander. Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Herl, Joseph. Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Leaver, Robin. Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007.

Marsh, Christopher. Music and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Oettinger, Rebecca Wagner. Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

Quitslund, Beth. The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Trocmé-Latter, Daniel. The Singing of the Strasbourg Protestants, 1523–1541. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.

Wegman, Rob C. The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470–1530. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Willis, Jonathan P. Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

CHAPTER 31

THE BODY IN THE REFORMATIONS

HERMAN ROODENBURG

IN 1641, Rembrandt painted a double portrait of Cornelis Anslo and his wife Aaltje Schouten (Figure 31.1). Anslo, a Mennonite pastor, was famed for his eloquence and great gifts of preaching. Rembrandt painted him preaching, though not in church before his congregation. We see Anslo at home, in his study. Perhaps he goes through the sermon of that morning, helping Aaltje to absorb its contents into her practice of piety, her daily prayers and meditation. Like their English and Scottish colleagues, Dutch ministers frequently practiced such “repetition” at home.[1] But who actually is the picture’s protagonist? Is it the preaching and gesturing Anslo? Or is it his wife, intently listening, her eyes turned inward, and holding a handkerchief in her hand? Looking closely, we even seem to spot a tear glistening on her eyelid.[2]

Art historians have mostly discussed her husband, intrigued as they are by a verse composed by the Mennonite poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel challenging the painter to depict Anslo’s voice (Ay Rembrant, maal Cornelis’ stem).[3] But did Rembrandt only focus on Anslo, on the pastor’s art of preaching as manifesting in his actio, his countenance, and gestures? Or did he also turn to Aaltje’s art of hearing, wanting the viewer to sense Anslo’s voice in her inward looking glance and her hand thoughtfully squeezing the handkerchief? Like the Word of God, represented through the opened bible on the table, it is her face, hands, and handkerchief that are brightly lit, whereas her husband’s face and gesturing hand are half shadowed. Perhaps Rembrandt sought to capture Anslo’s voice first and foremost through the mind’s eye of his audience, through Aaltje’s mental imaging captured through her intersensory response, her listening eyes, and listening hand.[4] Those who could view the painting at the Anslo home must have felt its affective, devotional intensity.[5] It must have reminded viewers of the sermon’s primary aim: to stir the emotions of the faithful through the preacher’s own emotions, his affective rhetoric.

If I am right, how exactly did such rhetoric work? Was the heart, the sermon’s major target since the sixteenth-century revival of Augustinian thought, merely a metaphor to Anslo and all Protestant clergymen? Or was their affective rhetoric still a largely embodied rhetoric, embracing their own bodies and the bodies of the faithful? How, according to the ministers and their parishioners, were mind, body, and soul entwined?

FIGURE 31.1 Rembrandt, The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and his Wife, 1641, oil on canvas, 173.7 × 207.6 cm.

Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Foto Jörg P. Anders.

Until recently, most Reformation scholars have understood the heart, the mind’s eye, and all other bodily notions employed in the period’s affective rhetoric in their metaphorical sense. Yet as Lyndal Roper reminds us, in a fine essay on Luther’s body, “Bodies … are not only cultural constructions but physical realities.” In other words, to discuss merely the metaphorical or merely the literal when studying the early modern body makes no sense. As argued by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, our metaphors of sensation are already fully involved in our sensory knowing—a phenomenological insight applying perfectly to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when most men and women perceived the world in vastly different ways than we do, making no sharp distinctions between their mental and bodily states.[6]

Taking Aaltje’s trace of a tear as an inspiration, this chapter explores these bodily states. Adopting a historical‒phenomenological view may help us in grasping how for most early modern believers the body’s metaphorical uses often coincided with its literal uses, lending the former their strikingly emotional, rhetorical force. While allowing for all the body’s metaphorical uses, I will focus on its concrete uses, on what Michael Schoenfeldt aptly described as the period’s “physiology of inner emotion.”[7] What went on behind Aaltje’s spotlighted forehead? Where behind her thoughtful eyes may the painting’s viewers, Mennonite or otherwise, have situated her mind’s eye? And how did this “inner sense” physiologically connect to her attentive ears, her heart, and her inner motions? In other words, how embodied were the Protestant arts of preaching and hearing and in which respects—bodily, sensory, or emotionally—did they distinguish themselves from the contemporary Catholic arts of preaching and hearing? Drawing on some excellent studies on rhetoric, medicine, and the practice of piety I will focus mostly on Tudor and Stuart England, but also look at the Netherlands and, occasionally, Germany.[8]

EMBODIED SOULS

As Ulinka Rublack has shown, the early modern heart was experienced as moving not just metaphorically but also in reality. It moved “by trembling, expanding and contracting.” Tracing how the elite and the common people perceived their bodily fluxes, she also explored how preachers and physicians wrote about the heart—about hearts literally contracting, running dry and even sinking, and hearts literally swelling or flowing over. They would have been surprised by our “anatomy of solid parts” (the term is Barbara Duden’s). In their perception, the heart, like the other bodily organs, could only do its work in function of all the humors and juices flowing through the body. These made it move and, when sufficiently moved and heated, produce such fluids itself. It could send fluids through the veins to the head and from there to the eyes: “(a)ll ‘good’ tears came from the heart and were hot.”[9]

Situated right behind the forehead, the mind’s eye was another bodily organ taken both literally and metaphorically. The English physician Robert Fludd included an evocative diagram in one of his writings, showing the mind’s eye, the oculus imaginationis, and a few of the mental images formed (Figure 31.2). Earlier anatomical diagrams, the oldest dating from the fourteenth century, depicted not only the mind’s eye but all the five “faculties” of the soul (Figures 31.3 and 31.4). It is difficult to say how widespread such images were. But we know that Catholic and Protestant preachers often referred to the faculties. Theirs was a physiology still shaped by Aristotelo‒Galenic theory, by its widely accepted faculty psychology, in which the working of the senses, the emotions, and the soul were all physiologically set out.

Painters with a Latin school education were likewise familiar with the theory. In the sixteenth century, depicting a meditating St. Jerome, they even created a modest pictorial tradition evoking the mind’s eye. Among these artists was Albrecht Dürer, who also made a famous diagram of the five faculties. Dürer portrayed the melancholy hermit having his right hand touch the side of his head, while his left hand gestures to the same spot—the seat of the mind’s eye—on the skull before him. A hundred years later the Dutch artist Hendrick ter Brugghen painted an almost identical scene, with St. Jerome again bending over the Bible and pointing to a skull lying next to it. Other painters, evoking the “phantasy” or “imagination”—to use the period’s own terms—preferred a more implicit portraying, just spotlighting the sitter’s forehead (Figures 31.5 and 31.6).[10] Rembrandt may have seen such examples. In illuminating Aaltje’s countenance, he made the viewers perceive her intense listening but most likely her mind’s eye, her inner imaging stirred by her husband’s eloquence, as well.[11]

FIGURE 31.2 The oculus imaginationis (mind’s eye).

From Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia (Oppenheim: De Bry, 1619), 2: 327.

FIGURE 31.3 Anatomical cut of the head.

From Gregor Reisch, Margarita Philosophica (Freiburg: Johannes Schott, 1503).

Aristotelo‒Galenic theory divided the soul into three entities. It distinguished the “nutritive soul,” proper to humans, animals, and plants and deemed responsible for growth, nutrition, and digestion. It also distinguished the “sensitive soul,” present in humans and animals and—the highest of the three entities—the “intellective soul.” The latter, only present in humans and the angels, housed the so-called “higher faculties,” those of the will and propositional thought. But the sensitive soul, housing the “lower faculties,” was the preachers’ primary concern. It was the soul responsible for sentience and, responding to the sense impressions received and the mental images formed, some basic adjudication and cognition. Out of this process the emotions, often described as the “passions of the soul,” finally arose. In other words, in their affective rhetoric all preachers, Catholic or Protestant, strove to mold the believers’ sensitive soul. Additionally, they appealed to the intellective soul, knowing that its higher faculties of will and reason had to assist the lower faculties in their first cognition.[12]

FIGURE 31.4 Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome, 1521, oil on panel, 60 × 48 cm.

Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga [Wikimedia Commons].

FIGURE 31.5 Hendrick ter Brugghen, Weeping Heraclitus (or St. Jerome), ca. 1621, oil on canvas, 125.5 × 102 cm.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund.

FIGURE 31.6 Pietro Paolini, Portrait of a Man Holding the Frontispiece to Dürer’s “Small Passion,” ca. 1635, oil on canvas, 126.4 × 103.5 cm.

Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester: Marion Stratton Gould Fund.

Besides the five outer senses—those of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—the theory discerned the five inner senses (or lower faculties) represented in the diagrams. But in the sixteenth century many authors chose to consolidate two or more faculties into one, distinguishing four or only three faculties, as Melanchthon did. When discussing all five, the theory still distinguished the so-called “common sense” (or sensus communis) from the “phantasy” or “imagination” (phantasia or imaginatio). Both faculties were located right behind the forehead, in Galen’s first ventricle of the brain. His second ventricle housed the two evaluative faculties, the cogitative and the estimative, responsible for basic adjudication and cognition, while the third ventricle situated at the back of the brain, accommodated “memory.”

The common sense was believed to distinguish, coordinate, and unify all the sense impressions coming through the outer senses and to transform them, in cooperation with the mind’s eye, into the soul’s mental images. In some of the diagrams the nerves transmitting the impressions from the five outer senses to the sensus communis were depicted as well. An awareness of synesthesia or, to use the less neurological notion of intersensoriality, was directly associated with the sensus communis.[13] But both the common sense and the mind’s eye could err, hence their joint cooperation with the two evaluative faculties which, assisted by reason and the will, assessed all formed images before storing them in the memory. All this preceded and produced the passions. An English author put it briefly:

For it is first necessary, before wee be moved by any Passions, that the senses in their proper seates, in which they are seldome deceived, apprehend the objects, and strait as messengers carrie them to the common sense, which sends their conceived formes to all the faculties. And then, that each facultie, as a Iudge may a fresh examine the whole matter, how it is, and conceive in the presented objects some shew of good, or ill, to bee desired, or shunned.[14]

As Elena Carrera explains, most medical authors between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries perceived the human passions as “cognitive-physiological events, located in the mind and body simultaneously.” Generally, the passions responded to the inner senses, to their evaluative perceptions of good or evil, the text’s “shew of good, or ill.”

The Dutch physician Johan van Beverwijk (1594‒1647) provided another brief description. In his view, the passions were “movements of the heart (gemoedt) or the soul in its sensitive part, which take place, either to desire something which the soul deems good or to shun which it deems evil.”[15] Emotion and cognition, then, went hand in hand. Few early modern physicians or preachers saw a binary opposition here. As Alec Ryrie comments, writing on Protestant preachers in England and Scotland, they would have been puzzled by the thought.[16] The soul was embodied, it “doing nothing without the body.”[17]

EMBODIED HEARTS

If the preachers’ affective rhetoric worked this way, if it sought to rouse the believers’ emotions through their outer and inner senses, the mind’s eye in particular, where does this leave their bodily fluxes or their hearts moving, contracting, or swelling? Was all the eloquence of the preachers, Catholic or Protestant, not powerless against the four Galenic humors, those of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood?

Several scholars, discerning a humoral determinism in their sources, have suggested as much. Relying heavily on the orthodox Galenist (and defective Jesuit) Thomas Wright, they argued that for most early modern thinkers the sensitive soul followed the humors, not the other way round. The passions did not arise responding to the inner senses housing in the ventricles of the brain. They emerged from the humors, each time their precarious balance was disturbed by some outer or inner cause. Gail Kern Paster contended that to alter the body’s humoral balance was “to alter the body’s passions and thus that state of mind and soul.”[18]

Paster and others see the four humors as an essential “explanatory force in the cultural history of the body.”[19] Like Rublack, Paster could show how the movements of the heart were taken literally and she also sketched in detail the agency accorded to the fluids and porous body. She even distinguished a humoral ecology, a “full immersion in and continuous interaction with a constantly changing natural and cultural environment.”[20]

There is an intriguing resemblance here with some recent phenomenological approaches, all focusing on the joint operation of brain, body, and environment and conveniently summarized under the heading of “situated cognition.” Going beyond the Cartesian mind‒body split, these and similar approaches are obviously helpful in understanding how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century believers may have felt about their souls, bodies, and the natural and cultural environment.[21] But the resemblance may be only partial, as Paster’s “psychophysiology” defines the interactions of the soul and the humors only in unidirectional terms. It accords agency to the humoral body, not to the sensitive soul, with its passions and basic cognition. But as Carrera and also Julie Solomon object, such determinism is not borne out by the sources, not even by Galen’s own writings though he sometimes seems to say as much.[22]

Among the sources adduced by Solomon is Melanchthon’s highly influential Commentarius de Anima. The Reformer put it clearly: “the order of nature must be taken into account that cognition precedes the movements of the heart.” Other Protestant authors quoted by Solomon are the French philosopher Pierre de la Primaudaye, as well as the English minister William Perkins, whose pressing for a “further reformation” was a major influence among English and Dutch Calvinists alike, and Robert Burton, a further English pastor, whose Anatomy of Melancholy was widely read on the Continent and defended a similar, non-determinist view. In Burton’s opinion, “the mind most effectually works upon the body, producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, as melancholy, despair, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself.”[23] His colleague Joseph Hall, less focused on spiritual desolation, concurred. The believer’s meditation “begins in the vnderstanding, ends in the affections; It begins in the braine, descends to the heart.”[24]

Such views were also dominant in Germany and the Dutch Republic. Rublack mentions the sixteenth-century physician and alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser, holding that the passions originate in the brain, though they are not felt there but in the moving heart.[25] Van Beverwijk adopted a similar stance. One learns from daily experience, he observed, “that the body is changed and affected by the movements of the soul.”[26] As Solomon summarizes her sources, “until Descartes and even after, most thinkers believed that the emotions were first stirred in the sensitive soul and only then registered in the body.” Only if the body was diseased—a point also mentioned by van Beverwijk—the humors might take over, altering the bodily organs and the “spirits” formed in them.[27]

Strictly speaking, then, the heart was the ultimate target of the arts of preaching and hearing. But it could only be touched, understood literally, through the faculties of the sensitive soul to which the passions, assisted by the higher faculties, the will in particular, responded. The passions, emerging in the soul, activated the “animal spirits,” the fluids associated with cognition. Acting, as Carrera notes, “as a transmitting agent between the brain and the rest of the body,” the animal spirits touched and moved the heart.[28] To quote Melanchthon again, “thus when we apprehend an object and judge whether it is good or bad the spirits in motion strike the heart upon recognition, which, as it is beaten and impelled, is moved and either seeks or flees the object.”[29] As the viewers of the Anslo portrait may have realized, it was this whole embodied process, induced by the pastor’s affective and embodied rhetoric, which finally produced Aaltje’s misted-over glance. Whether they knew all the scholarly distinctions in detail is another question. With the brain, the soul, the will, and the heart assigned such essential complementary roles, they and their ministers often used concepts interchangeably.

AFFECTIVE RHETORIC

How may Anslo have reached the souls and hearts of his congregation? What made Vondel write his verse and Rembrandt limn his portrait? Unfortunately, we don’t possess any direct evidence. But we know something about the eloquence of Hans de Ries (1553‒1638), another Mennonite pastor, who led the same Amsterdam community, the Waterlander congregration, before Anslo and was in fact his mentor. Like all good preachers, de Ries spoke extemporaneously: “his memory was very good.” He also put most of his eloquence not in pedantry, in “curiosity or superior knowing,” but in beteringhe, in “reproving” the faithful. As a witness tells us, “(he) delivered these stories very movingly (seer bewegelijck), often overcome with tears as if he lived through them himself, which caused a great impression and moving (bewegenisse) in his listeners.”[30]

Terms such as “affective rhetoric” or “affective piety” are still fairly new to the study of the two Reformations. Though already used by earlier scholars, they are increasingly adopted now among historians not so much attracted to doctrine, to the well-known “cantankerous, divisive and controversial figures,” as Julia Merritt wrote, but to the believers’ devotional lives, their religious affections and ways of sensing. In the process they have also queried the “innerworldly asceticism,” so often imputed to early modern Protestants, the Mennonite and Calvinist communities in particular. Obviously, de Ries’s moving eloquence, like so much Protestant preaching of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hardly fits the Weberian picture.[31]

As Arnold Hunt comments, Max Weber was “fundamentally mistaken.” Puritanism did not stifle; it embraced and promoted the human passions. Ryrie takes a milder view of the Weber thesis, but on the emotions his views echo Hunt’s. “Far from being suspicious of the emotions,” he concluded, “Reformed Protestants exalted them.”[32] Both scholars wrote about the daily practices of piety among English and Scottish Protestants. Susan Karant-Nunn investigated sermons, both Catholic and Protestant, published in sixteenth-century Germany and found how from the start of the two Reformations the faithful were urged to engage their hearts in their faith. These and other fine studies, for instance the investigations of sensory historians like Matthew Milner, have revised many of the older views on the Protestant arts of preaching and hearing and may be coupled to the recent investigations of Carrera, Solomon, and Stephen Pender on rhetoric and medicine. The sermon, embedded in the believers’ practice of piety, their praying and meditations, could be a highly sensory and affective event.[33] As the Puritan Lewis Bayly put it in his Practise of Pietie—for decades a best-seller both in England and the Dutch Republic—“labour not so much to heare the words of the Preacher sounding in thine eare, as to feele the operation of the spirit, working in thy heart.” To hear properly, concludes Jennifer Rae McDermott, was “not merely to listen to sounds but to be sounded.”[34]

An older, still inspiring study is Debora Shuger’s book on sacred rhetoric.[35] Discussing the numerous artes concionandi printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she demonstrated how they all professed the “grand style”—a style revealing a “deeply favorable view of the emotions” and, in line with this Augustinian premise, embracing an “aesthetic of vividness, drama and expressivity.” Dismissive of all “sophist” preaching, the kind of rhetoric out for shining and sparkling, these preaching manuals advocated a sincere and genuine eloquence, one that would move the believers’ hearts best.[36]

Shuger encountered this “grand style” in the Catholic artes concionandi, among them the important manuals written by Erasmus, Ludovico Carbo, and Luis de Granada, but likewise in Protestant manuals. Melanchthon already specified “that all preaching should arouse the emotions.” The sermon’s major aim was “renovation and life,” which the pastors could evoke in the faithful by “inserting better emotions into the soul.” Accordingly, he did not discriminate too sharply between docere and movere, between sermons instructing and sermons moving. He also emphasized that the Law and the Gospel converge in preaching. The churchgoers should be reproved but they should be comforted as well. Both elements should always determine the sermon’s most vital and emotional part, that of the applicatio or hortatio.[37]

As different as they are, the Protestant manuals all agree in their Augustinian, their strikingly performative, non-Stoic interest in the believers’ emotions. The most influential artes concionandi were written by the Flemish theologian Andreas Hyperius, William Perkins, and the German divines Bartholomeus Keckermann and Johann-Heinrich Alsted. Each of them underlined the sermon’s affective force, its unique quality to incite and inflame the audience. The manuals diverged in the importance accorded to elocutio, to all such rhetorical flourishes as amplification, tropes, figures of thought, etc. In his The Arte of Prophesying (1607; Latin version 1592) Perkins outlined a plain style, free of such flourishes, and many of the English and Dutch manuals adopted his view. But it was still a passionate plain style, deeming not the preacher’s elocutio but the Holy Spirit inspiring him as the “prime mover” of emotions. Keckermann’s Rhetoricae Ecclesiasticae (1600) and Alsted’s Theologia Prophetica (1622) defended again a “grander” style, believing that some deliberate eloquence was needed. But the differences were a matter of degree, rather than kind.[38]

EMBODIED RHETORIC

How did this grand style physically translate to the pulpits? Obviously, in moving the hearts of their parishioners the ministers had to mind their pronuntiatio and actio, the ways they raised or softened their voices and the ways they used their physiognomy, their postures, and gestures. The sermon’s delivery was the minister’s major tool in engaging not only the churchgoers’ aural but also their kinesthetic empathy and, through them, their inner senses and their emotions. But such bodily data are rare for the early modern period, just as we do not have a clue of the sermo corporis of Anslo. The thousands of sermons printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are of little help. As Lee Palmer Wandel cautioned, they “cannot signal the inflections, the facial gestures, the sweep of a hand.” But it was exactly such “untraceables,” she continued, that made the sermons meaningful “for an audience who not only heard the words, but saw the preacher embodying those words.”[39]

The artes concionandi are no help either, though Perkins (like Calvin and other Protestant authors before him) advised that in exhorting the faithful the preacher’s voice and gestures should be “fervent and vehement.”[40] The manuals mostly echoed the period’s general rhetorical treatises, which in their short chapters on pronuntiatio and actio just suggested adoption of the conventions of time and place.[41] The few sources we have, however, underline that the ministers’ delivery could be fervent and vehement, especially during the applicatio. The manuals dismiss glaring theatricality—arms waving, feet stamping, eyes rolling (or even weeping endlessly)—which most of them associate with the preaching of the Jesuits. But, as has been shown in relation to England and the Dutch Republic, the ministers’ own delivery was theatrical enough. During a harsh winter the Calvinist church council of Amsterdam even worried that the pastors would catch a cold, “descending exhausted and sweating” from the pulpit.[42]

While most pastors, Anslo included, may have displayed some measured theatricality, the pulpit delivery of the hotter sort among them could surely compete with the sermo corporis of the Jesuits. Going to hear Hugh Peters, a minister at the English Church in Rotterdam, the Dutch physicist Isaac Beeckman brought a notebook with him, not to take down Peters’s words but his fervent and controversial gesticulation.[43] Other devout Puritans, among them the Essex ministers William Fenner and John Rogers of Dedham, were also reputed for their delivery. Rogers, like many other Puritan preachers such as William Gouge and the Groningen professor William Ames, was said to reduce whole audiences to tears. Indeed, in his Treatise of the Affections Fenner even based his defense of fervent and vehement preaching on the believers’ physiology of inner emotion. He contended that the passions emerged in the intellective soul, in the will, and not, as Aristotle and most of Fenner’s contemporaries believed, in the sensitive soul. Directly involved with the passions, the will needed passionate preaching. In Fenner’s view, only the most vivid mental images could assist the will in arousing the passions necessary to move the believers’ “humours, bloud, spirits, members, even bones and all the body.”[44]

Ministers often complained about their parishioners chatting or even dozing away during the sermon, like the latter complained about their ministers making them doze away in the first place or at best performing poorly, struggling with a husky or a halting voice or not gesturing at all.[45] In the sixteenth century, with clergymen barely trained or not even available in the villages, the situation was often worse. Yet as Hunt and Ryrie also point out, there were enough pastors, certainly in the seventeenth century, who knew how to move the hearts of the faithful. In imagining how a contemporary Protestant sermon “might have sounded like,” writes Hunt, “we should therefore think of it as a dramatic, almost theatrical performance.”[46] Vehement preaching was vital. To quote a Dutch minister, one had to use the uyrken, the little hour one had, to the full, for the salvation or damnation of the faithful depended on the moment. As Hugh Latimer already cautioned: “take away preaching, take away salvation.” Edmund Grindal and Richard Greenham agreed, as did undoubtedly most Protestant divines.[47]

Obviously, if the parishioners’ salvation was at stake, a plain style denying the passions could only fail. A Dutch manual, written by the Calvinist theologian Johannes Hoornbeeck, held that each sermon should be “clear, transparent, and well constructed,” but also specified, like Perkins, that it should be “emotive, moving, penetrating” (patheticus, movens, penetrans). Especially in the applicatio, he agreed with Keckermann, preachers should adopt “the manner of lamenting loudly, of begging, moaning, praying insistently, and this from the heart and all one’s feeling.”[48]

Such indications were already given by St. Jerome, Prosper Aquitanicus, and Bernardus—Hoornbeeck quotes them all. But, pace Max Weber, they were still vital to Protestant pulpit delivery, both in England and the Netherlands. The ministers needed “heat,” needed what historians of rhetoric like to describe as “auto-affection.” In preparing themselves for the sermon they should already immerse themselves (not unlike the American “method school of acting”) in the emotions they wish to arouse in their parishioners. As Hoornbeeck explained, “The tears he wants his listeners to shed he should first shed himself, and doing so he inflames them through the compunction of his heart.” Perkins put it more poetically: “wood, that is capable of fire, doth not burne, vnles fire be put to it: & he must first be godly affected himselfe who would stirre vp godly affections in other men.” Both pastors actually echoed Horace’s well-known maxim: “if you want me to weep, you must first feel grief yourself” (si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi).[49]

As has been argued, such striking emotive investment may partly explain why until deep into the seventeenth century few ministers aspired to see their sermons into print. Only a few, wrote a contemporary observer, were “able and active both for Pulpit and Pen.”[50] Indeed, those who took the pen frequently apologized to the reader, esteeming the text a faint reflection of the original, affective, and embodied event.[51]

The London bishop John King admitted that he had “changed [his] tongue into a pen, and whereas [he] spake before with the gesture and countenance of a living man, have now buried [himself] in a dead letter of less effectual persuasion.” In a similar vein, the ardent John Rogers lamented the loss of the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, the “stirring passages that God brought to hand in the heat of preaching.” He also owned that in the sermons published he had skipped much of the applicatio, the most affective part. As such apologies reveal, both the art of preaching and the art of hearing mattered greatly to the faithful. But it was not only a problem of the sermons printed. Most preachers were also convinced that writing sermons out and just reading them from the pulpit would not suffice. It left no room for their own “heat,” for gaps to be filled by the Holy Spirit, Rogers’s “stirring passages.” As Perkins, de Ries, and many others believed, one should speak extemporaneously, using only the sketchiest of notes.[52]

These feelings went far back. Luther, firmly placing hearing above seeing, already preferred the sermon’s living to its written voice, as did John Calvin. Preparing himself thoroughly, preaching without any notes, he was reticent to see his sermons into print, though a diligent auditor, the Frenchman Denis Raguenier, recorded most of them in shorthand. Karant-Nunn found a similar and persistent reticence among Calvinist pastors in sixteenth-century Germany.[53]

Their Dutch colleagues followed suit.[54] To cite only a few of them, Gisbertus Voetius, a famed professor of theology, believed that a sermon’s “teaching and motions were represented much better and stronger through a living voice than through ink and paper.”[55] Not surprisingly, his pupil Johannes Hoornbeeck agreed. Though the first Dutch divine to write a fully-fledged ars concionandi, he published only one sermon himself, holding “that there is a particular force in the spoken word, which is not so much in writing.” He also cautioned the reader that with all the changes and additions made to the sermon it was now dressed in “another garment.” It was rather a “treatise” now, expanded with “so many names, issues and histories that in writing emerged.”[56]

Earlier, in 1623, the widely read minister Willem Teellinck (1579‒1629) had already advised his colleagues to use all the emotional force—all the beweeghlickheydt, as he called it—they could muster, “because the living voice has more power to move man than the mere written word.” In his infinite love God had not only given his children the Scriptures, on some of them he had even bestowed the gift of tongues, of becoming prophets, apostles, or ministers. Hence the minister’s conviction that especially in the applicatio “one should employ all the art of rhetoric to touch the soul.”[57]

RHETORIC AND ENARGEIA

Teellinck’s notion of beweeglijkheid, to use the modern Dutch spelling, reminds us of the rhetorical tool most vital to the preachers’ affective rhetoric, that of staging vividness. As we have seen, Anslo’s colleague Hans de Ries (and probably Anslo himself) brought his sermons “seer bewegelijck, thus causing a great moving (bewegenisse) in his listeners.”[58] Called enargeia in ancient Greece, Roman authors denoted rhetorical vividness either as demonstratio (as did the anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium) or as evidentia, the term preferred by Cicero and Quintilian and used most widely after the fifteenth century. Originally a literary concept, enargeia refers to the talents of poets, orators, or artists to make the acts or objects described appear as vividly as possible before the mind’s eye of their audience—ante oculos ponere, as the Rhetorica ad Herennium sketched the process. Like the broader rhetorical notion of movere, in the early modern period enargeia, in its intersensory appeal to the phantasia or imaginatio, was still a largely embodied concept.[59]

Preachers, both Catholic and Protestant, knew the concept well. A good sermon was a vivid sermon, one that could place “good” meditational images as lively as possible before the believers’ eyes. Keckermann, like Perkins a central influence on the Dutch Calvinist preaching manuals, urged all ministers to dramatize the biblical scenes “as in a theater.” The scenes should be placed before the mind’s eye, “surrounded with various striking details and circumstances, as if we were painting with living colors, so that the listener, carried outside himself, seems to behold the event as if placed in its midst.” The preacher might even address Christ in person (apostrophe) or have God and Christ speak to us (sermocinatio). None of this was new. These rhetorical techniques, including the harping on the circumstantiae, were already widely employed in late medieval preaching. But the message was clear. To quote John Donne, poet and divine, “Rhetorique will make absent and remote things present to your understanding.”[60]

In the Netherlands Teellinck may have been the first clergyman to employ beweeglijkheid as the Dutch equivalent of enargeia. Before him it was already adopted by the painter Karel van Mander in his Schilderboeck, the first painting manual written in Dutch, and the poet Samuel Coster. Vondel used the term as well, and so did Rembrandt. Vividness was a major rhetorical concept, not only to the art of preaching but to all the artes of the period. Indeed, the Anslo portrait may be seen as a perfect instance of painterly enargeia. Rembrandt even mentions the concept in one of the very few comments on his own art. In a letter to Constantijn Huygens, written in 1639, he explains how in two paintings of his Passion series he had committed himself to die meeste en de naetureelste beweechgelickheit (literally “the most and most natural moving”). As the Rembrandt specialists agree, he must have referred to the motions of the figures depicted, to their “vividness,” and to their ability, through such vividness, to move the viewers’ emotions.

This is also how Franciscus Junius, the author of The Painting of the Ancients (1638), and Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten defined the concept. Like Rembrandt, they described enargeia as the painter’s indispensable instrument of stirring the passions of the beholder.[61] As Junius noted, “This virtue seemeth to shew the whole matter; and it bringeth to passe, that the affections follow with such a lively representation, as if we were by at the doing of the things imagined.” Speaking concretely of images, he also explained that as viewers we ought to “suffer our mind to enter into a lively consideration of what wee see expressed; not otherwise than if wee were present, and saw not the counterfeited image but the reall performance of the thing.”[62]

Discussing the Anslo painting, the historian of rhetoric Heinrich Plett stressed the synesthesia, the intersensoriality, involved. Rembrandt must have imagined a viewer, he believes, “who both sees and hears—hears not with his ears but in his imagination.” In other words, his imagined beholder was “a euphantasiotos who completely realises the enargeia of Rembrandt’s art.”[63] He or she was a man or woman of “good phantasy” and so, of course (though not noted by Plett) was Aaltje. Absorbed in her husband’s preaching, she clearly hears in her imagination, hears in fact with all her senses: her soft and inward-looking eyes, her slightly opened mouth and her hand involuntarily squeezing the handkerchief.[64] It made her perhaps the painting’s first protagonist, making the viewers share in her “good phantasy.” Or were the viewers the final protagonists, realizing both the painter’s and, through Aaltje, the pastor’s enargeia?

Continuities and Resemblances

What, finally, were the differences with the Catholic arts of preaching and hearing? As it seems, emotional differences were at best a matter of degree. The hearts of both Catholic and Protestant believers could be metaphorically and literally touched by the eloquence of their preachers. Similarly, believers from both religions could let their tears flow abundantly, imagining themselves to be present at the spot, to directly witness the acts and figures evoked in detail by their priests and ministers. Late medieval preaching was often highly affective, but so were probably most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sermons when delivered from the pulpit. Both priests and ministers appealed to the outer and inner senses of their parishioners and through these to their hearts. Looking at the emotions only, we find striking continuities and striking resemblances—continuities from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries and resemblances between the two Reformations and early modern Catholicism.

The differences lay probably elsewhere, in the outer senses or rather the intersensoriality effected in the faithful through their common sense, their sensus communis. “Renaissance Christianity,” attests Matthew Milner, “revolved around what religious sensing meant.” Good sensing “literally shaped believers,” whether Catholic or Protestant. But how were they, in their practice of piety, to distinguish good from bad religious sensing?

Milner emphasizes how both religions, in outlining how the faithful ought to control their senses, still drew on Aristotelo‒Galenic theory. But both churches, sharing in the period’s sensory anxiety, constantly fought each other over the proper use of the senses.[65] In the seventeenth century sight was no longer the most debated sense. The role of material images, of paintings, prints, sculpture, or decoration, in helping the “phantasia” to create the most forceful mental images possible, was no longer as contested as it had been in the century before. In the Dutch Republic both the faithful belonging to the Calvinist churches and those belonging to such a relative open-minded Mennonite community as the Waterlanders were free to embellish their homes with physical images, especially if these could assist the members of the household in their daily prayers and meditations. The Anslo portrait is a case in point. In seventeenth-century England, many divines took the same view, among them Joseph Hall, whose Occasional Meditations, quickly translated into French, German, and Dutch, underlined the devotional essentiality of the corporeal eye.[66]

Far more conspicuous were the discussions over the sense of touch, those of its more proximate, more specifically tactile aspects in particular. During the early modern period, touch still encompassed what scholars today would describe as senses in themselves, among them the perceiving of pain (nociception) or the perceiving of hot and cold (thermoreception). The related senses of proprioception (perceiving one’s body positioned in space) and kinesthesia (essentially perceiving one’s own body and those of others moving in space) were likewise subsumed under the sense of touch.[67] Obviously, neither thermoreception (think of the ministers’ “heat” or the “stirring up” of the believers’ hearts) nor proprioception and kinesthesia (think of the kinesthetic empathy implied in Rembrandt’s beweegchelickheit or the believers’ seeing their ministers gesture and move) were ever discarded in the Protestant art of preaching. But nociception, so much part of the Catholic wish to share in the pain of Christ, to co-suffer with him, proved already controversial for Luther and Calvin.

In the happy phrase of sensory historian Constance Classen, the God of late medieval Catholicism was still a “touchable God.” His disciples could touch him in the flesh, and so could his tormentors.[68] Hence the surprising tactility of the period’s affective rhetoric. Drawing on the Rhetorica ad Herennium (complete copies of Cicero’s De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria emerged only in the first decades of the fifteenth century), the priests sought to evoke the most vivid mental images in the souls of their audiences through appealing most forcefully to their nociceptive imaginations, their empathy for pain. Masters in enargeia, in such rhetorical techniques as apostrophe or sermocinatio and making much of all the circumstantiae, all kinds of vivid detail, they dwelt amply on Christ’s tangibility, all the bloody savagery done to his innocent body. The numerous passion narratives, already widely read and listened to in the fourteenth century, and the numerous passion sermons, passion plays, and passion paintings all promoted this strikingly tactile affective piety.[69]

It found a distinct continuation in the Counter Reformation. As Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen showed, following the influence of their writings in early modern England, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, and Luis of Granada all enlarged on Christ’s physical suffering. Many Catholic meditation manuals did the same, inciting the faithful to make themselves mentally present at the scenes of his bodily agony. Sharing in his physical pain, assisted by the mediating figure of Mary, was still a prerequisite for salvation.[70] Luther and Calvin rejected the whole idea, the latter almost omitting all the physical particulars of Christ’s passion (as did Rembrandt in his Passion series). As they stipulated, to co-suffer, to identify so completely with his physical humanity, was to deny his divinity. Indeed, salvation was not even in the hands of human beings.

Instead, the Reformers stressed God’s otherness. Theirs was no longer a touchable but a distant and righteous God. Compassion, shedding any tears over the Passion, was condemned as well. Following Christ’s berating the Daughters of Jerusalem, that they should not weep for him but for themselves and their children, Luther cautioned that the faithful had better weep for their own sinfulness, which crucified Christ every day anew: “when you see the nails of Christ pierce his hands, believe with certainty that it is your work.”[71] The faithful were confronted with what Erwin Panofsky, in his famous study on Dürer, described as Christ’s “perpetual Passion.”[72] Accordingly, the minds of Protestants, those of the Calvinists in particular, were bent on regret and self-abasement. If they were horrified about what Christ’s executioners did to him, they should be as horrified about their own villainy, their permanent state of corruption; hence the rhetoric, all the ministers’ enargeia. Ashamed and weeping over their sinful lives, they could only beseech God to have mercy upon them.[73]

To come back to Aaltje and her hearing of the sermon, what kind of tear (if it is one) do we actually see on her eyelid? Like the Italian cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Protestant authors wrote their own tracts on weeping, pointing out that their religion, dismissing any tears of compassion with Christ, basically distinguished three kinds of tears. They spoke of “tears of contrition,” “tears of compunction,” and “tears of belief” (also called “tears of rejoicing”). Tears of contrition marked the first step in one’s inner devotion. These were the tears of repentance, of believers feeling contrite about their sinful lives. Tears of compunction marked a higher level of religious weeping. Here one’s tears of contrition already mingled with a sincere ardor for God. Effecting the believer’s inner renewal, these were the truly transforming, performative tears. Finally, constituting the third and highest stage were the tears of belief: tears of gratefulness for feeling one’s desire for God or even having sensed a glimpse of his grace. In view of her hearing the sermon, most likely its applicatio with its reproval and comfort meted out, Aaltje may well shed a tear of compunction. But a tear of rejoicing, of glimpsing God’s mercy, might fit her as well.

NOTES

1. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72–79. Strictly speaking, the Dutch Mennonites did not know the office of minister. Their pastors had the gift of preaching but like Anslo, a wealthy cloth merchant, they continued working in their professions. I am grateful to the art historian Yannis Hadjinicolau for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this text.

2. The painting, hanging in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie is currently being restored. Looking at its reproduction on the museum’s website, some tiny white strokes under Aaltje’s left eyelid seem to represent a tear. The restoration may clarify the issue, but also her eyes look slightly moist.

3. Playing with “seeing” and “hearing,” the full verse reads: “Ay Rembrant, maal Cornelis stem, / Het zichtbare deel is ’t minst van hem: / ’t Onzichtbre kent men slechts door d’ooren. / Wie Anslo zien wil, moet hem hooren.” Rembrandt made two preparatory drawings and an etching after one of them. Vondel may have seen one of these, but opinions differ on the moment he wrote the quatrain, before or after the painting was finished, and on its positive or negative charge. For a balanced discussion, also pointing to Aaltje’s “inward illumination,” see Stephanie Dickey, Rembrandt: Portraits in Print (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 45–62. On handkerchiefs depicted, see Dickey, “ ‘Met een wenende ziel … doch droge ogen.’ Women Holding Handkerchiefs in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraits,” in A. O. Reindert Falkenburg (ed.), Image and Self-Image in Netherlandish Art, 1550–1750 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1995), 332–367.

4. On the English “art of hearing,” also the title of a late sixteenth-century sermon on how to listen to the sermon, see Hunt’s inspiring The Art of Hearing; cf. Jennifer Rae McDermott, “ ‘The Melodie of Heaven’: Sermonizing the Open Ear in Early Modern England,” in Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (eds.), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2013), 177–197.

5. As an eighteenth-century relative reported, the painting always hung in the Anslo home, not (as was often assumed) in the Anslo hofje, a modest old people’s home founded by Anslo in 1616.

6. Lyndal Roper, “Martin Luther’s Body: The ‘Stout Doctor’ and his Biographers,” American Historical Review 115/ 2 (2010): 352; for the author’s psychoanalytic orientations, allowing for the interwining of body and mind, see her Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), “Introduction.” On sensation and metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Holly Dugan, “The Senses in Literature: Renaissance Poetry and the Paradox of Perception,” in Herman Roodenburg (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 149–168.

7. Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7–8; Schoenfeldt points to earlier scholars discussing “embodiments of emotion,” but historians of early modern Protestantism have long shied away from such questions. For a recent and helpful summary of “historical phenomenology,” see Dugan, “The Senses in Literature,” 151–153.

8. Following Alex Ryrie, who speaks of a “broad-based religious culture,” I will focus on the believers’ practice of piety, which often transcended the period’s dogmatic controversies; see his Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6–9.

9. Ulinka Rublack, “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 2, 6–7; an earlier, German version was published in 2000.

10. Laurinda Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca.1500–1700 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2013), 39–45, 106–107.

11. Stimulating is the art historian Horst Bredekamp’s notion of Bildakt or “picture act,” an act constituted here in the interaction between the painting and the viewers’ intense practice of piety. See Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

12. For some recent summaries of the period’s faculty psychology (also including the diagrams), see for example: François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 15–23; Elena Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,” in Elena Carrera (ed.), Emotions and Health, 1200–1700 (Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2013), 112–128.

13. On synesthesia as both a neurological condition and a popular literary device in early modern Europe, see Dugan, “The Senses in Literature,” 155–156.

14. Quoted in: Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection,” 96–97, 124. The passage derives from an English translation, dated 1634, of the French physician Ambroise Paré’s Oeuvres. It does not figure in the Oeuvres itself.

15. Johan van Beverwijk, Schat der Gesontheyt, in Alle de wercken, zo in de Medicyne als Chirurgie (Amsterdam: Jan Jacobsz. Schipper, 1640), 24.

16. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 4.

17. Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection,” 95–96; see also Julie R. Solomon, “You’ve Got to Have Soul: Understanding the Passions in Early Modern Culture,” in Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever (eds.), Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 195–228. Carrera’s and also Pender’s and Solomon’s views go against the cognitive stance of Barbara Rosenwein, who accords the emotions an assessment role but leaves the body largely out. See Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–845.

18. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 52, 104; see also Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

19. Paster, Humoring the Body, 20.

20. Paster, “The Body and its Passions,” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001), 45.

21. Philip Robbins and Murat Ayede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); the approaches (embedded cognition, embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind hypothesis) are clearly related but bring their own emphases. Paster quotes Andy Clark, representing the extended mind approach. See her Humoring the Body, 10, 34.

22. Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection”; Solomon, “You’ve Got to Have Soul,” 195–228; for a similar but less critical view, see Stephen Pender, “Subventing Disease: Anger, Passions, and the Non-Naturals,” in Jennifer C. Vaught (ed.), Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 193–218.

23. Solomon, “You’ve Got to Have Soul,” 209–211.

24. Quoted from Hall’s Arte of Divine Meditation (1606), in Ryrie, Being Protestant, 114.

25. Rublack, “Fluxes,” 6.

26. van Beverwijk, Schat der Gesontheyt, 22.

27. Solomon, “You’ve Got to Have Soul,” 200, 212.

28. Carrera, “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection,” 113.

29. Quoted in Solomon, “You’ve Got to Have Soul,” 209.

30. Quoted in Piet Visser, Broeders in de geest. De doopsgezinde bijdragen van Dierick and Jan Philipsz. Schabaelje tot de Nederlandse stichtelijke literatuur in de zeventiende eeuw, 2 vols.(Deventer: Sub Rosa, 1988), I, 328–329, II, 145 n. 207.

31. On the notion of “affective piety,” see Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 275 n.1; Merritt quoted in Ryrie, Being Protestant, 7.

32. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 81, 83; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 19.

33. See Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling; Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); see also various important essays in de Boer and Göttler (eds.), Religion and the Senses.

34. Quoted in Ryrie, Being Protestant, 360; McDermott, “Sermonizing,” 185.

35. Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Shuger, “The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric,” in John Corrigan (ed.), Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 115–132.

36. Shuger, “Philosophical Foundations,” 121; Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 91.

37. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 67–68.

38. Ibid., 69–70, 89–100.

39. Lee Palmer Wandel, “Switzerland,” in Larissa Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001); Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012), 233.

40. Quoted in James Thomas Ford, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” in Taylor, Preachers and People, 76.

41. Dilwyn Knox, “Ideas on Gesture and Universal Languages, c. 1550–c. 1650,” in John Henry and Sarah Hutton (eds.), New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt (London: Duckworth and the Istituto per gli Studi Filosofici, 1990), 105–109; Knox, “Order, Reason and Oratory: Rhetoric in Protestant Latin Schools,” in Peter Mack (ed.), Renaissance Rhetoric (London: Macmillan, 1994), 69–70, 72.

42. Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: Studies on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004), 168; on the “gift of tears” in the Counter Reformation, see Joseph Imorde, Affektübertragung (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2004).

43. Roodenburg, Eloquence, 167–179.

44. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 86–91; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 19; on Ames, see Hugo Visscher, Guilielmus Amesius. Zijn leven en werken (Haarlem: Stap, 1894), 206.

45. Roodenburg, Eloquence, 167–168; Hunt, Art of Hearing, 66–72; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 353–361.

46. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 90.

47. Milner, The Senses, 271; Eric Josef Carlson, “The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–1640,” in Taylor, Preachers and People, 256; Hunt, Art of Hearing.

48. Quotations taken from Teunis Brienen, De eerste homiletiek in Nederland. Ontstaan, vertaling, inhoud en verwerking van de homiletiek “De Ratione Concionandi” van Johannes Hoornbeeck (Kampen: De Groot Goudriaan, 2009), 166; the first edition of Hoornbeeck’s manual dates from 1645.

49. Hoornbeeck quoted in Brienen, Eerste homiletiek, 188; Perkins’s Arte of Prophesying quoted in Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 70. The historian Heinrich Plett speaks of “auto-affection.” See Plett, Enargeia, 9, 169. On “stirring up” as more than a dead metaphor, on its everyday connotation of fanning a fire in the ashes, see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 67–68. On preaching and Horace for a later period, see Roodenburg, “ ‘Si Vis me Flere …’ On Preachers, Passions and Pathos in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” in Jitse Dijkstra (ed.), Myths, Martyrs and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan Bremmer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 609–628. The quote from Horace (65–8 bc) comes from his Ars Poetica, taught at most (if not all) early modern Latin schools.

50. Quoted in Hunt, Art of Hearing, 120.

51. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 120–124; Ryrie, Being Protestant, 351–352.

52. Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,” in Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 113; Carlson, “Boring of the Ear,” 279–282; Milner, The Senses, 305; on other, more mundane motives prompting the ministers’ reticence to publish, see Ryrie, Being Protestant, 438. For an inspiring historical phenomenology of early modern hearing, see Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O Factor (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

53. Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46–50; Volker Mertens, “Lebendige Stimme und tote Schrift—Erscheinungsform und Selbstverständnis von Luthers Predigt,” in Mertens (ed.), Predigt im Kontext (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 257–280; Ford, “Preaching,” 79; Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling.

54. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 6, 13.

55. Quoted in Brienen, Eerste homiletiek, 227n.172.

56. Quoted in ibid., 227–228.

57. Willem Teellinck, Nieuwe Historie van den ouden mensche (Middelburg: Hans vander Hellen, 1623), 117–118.

58. Quoted in Visser, Broeders in de geest, vol. 1, 328–329: “Dese verhalingen dede hij seer bewegelijck, dickwils met tranen overstolpt sijnde, alsoo hyt selfs beleeft hadde, ’twelck geen cleyne nadruk en bewegenisse in de toehoorderen en wracht”; also vol. 2, 145 n. 207: he was seer goet van onthout.

59. On the notion of enargeia (or energeia, as other scholars prefer), see Valeska von Rosen, “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000): 171–172; Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 185; Plett, Enargeia, 79–84.

60. Quotations from Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 91, 195; on the late Middle Ages, see esp. Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996; on the passion paintings: James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979); more specifically on the Netherlands: Roodenburg, “Empathy in the Making: Crafting the Believer’s Emotions in the Late Medieval Low Countries,” in Herman Roodenburg and Catrien Santing (eds.), Batavian Phlegm? The Dutch and their Emotions in Pre-Modern Times [= BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 129 (2014): 2], 55–62.

61. Weststeijn, Visible World, 209–215; Weststeijn, “Between Mind and Body: Painting the Inner Movements according to Samuel van Hoogstraten and Franciscus Junius,” in Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Herman Roodenburg (eds.), Body and Embodiment in Netherlandish Art (Zwolle: Waanders, 2008), 261–281.

62. Franciscus Junius I, 265. Perhaps Teellinck influenced Junius, who as a young man lived for several years in Teellinck’s house. See C. S. M. Rademaker, “Young Franciscus Junius, 1591–1621,” in Rolf H. Bremmer (ed.), Franciscus Junius F.F. and His Circle (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), 10–12.

63. Cf. Plett, Enargeia, 171–173.

64. On Rembrandt’s interest in the absorptive states of his figures, cf. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 43.

65. On sensory anxiety, see Milner, The Senses, 171–173, 182, 349–350; Roodenburg, “Introduction,” 10–14.

66. W. J. op ’t Hof, “Het Nederlands gereformeerde Piëtisme en de Nadere Reformatie in relatie tot de (beeld)cultuur in de zeventiende eeuw,” Documentatieblad Nadere Reformatie 28 (2004): 2–33; Tara Hamling, “To See or Not to See? The Presence of Religious Imagery in the Protestant Household,” Art History 30 (2007): 2, 170–197; Almut Pollmer-Schmidt, “ ‘Invallende gedachten’: Gemälde als Gelegenheiten reformierter Meditation?” in Maria-Theresia Leuker (ed.), Die Sichtbare Welt. Visualität in der niederländischen Literatur und Kunst des 17. Jahrhunderts (Münster: Waxmann, 2012), 179–200.

67. On this, see Quiviger, Sensory World, 105.

68. Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012), chap. 2.

69. On the Low Countries and related studies on other regions and countries, see Roodenburg, “Empathy in the Making.”

70. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Brewer, 2012), 40–53.

71. Quoted in ibid., 55.

72. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 138–139.

73. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 252.

FURTHER READING

Carrera, Elena. “Anger and the Mind-Body Connection in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,” in Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, edited by Elena Carrera, pp. 112–128. Leiden and Boston, MA: E. J. Brill, 2013.

Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Karant-Nunn, Susan. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Milner, Matthew. The Senses and the English Reformation. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Roodenburg, Herman (ed.) A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Rublack, Ulrika. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 1–16.

Ryrie, Alec. Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Solomon, Julie R. “You’ve Got to Have Soul: Understanding the Passions in Early Modern Culture,” in Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, edited by Stephen Pender and Nancy S. Struever, pp. 195–228. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

van Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans. Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Brewer, 2012.

CHAPTER 32

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

KATHLEEN M. CROWTHER

WHENEVER I introduce undergraduate students to the topic of sexual and gender differences in the premodern period, I begin with a modern story. I tell them about the Spanish hurdler Maria Martínez-Patiño, who was barred from international competition in 1986 when she “failed” a sex determination test. Martínez-Patiño has one X and one Y chromosome instead of two X chromosomes. She has “androgen insensitivity syndrome,” a condition that prevents the development of male secondary sexual characteristics, and in some cases, like Martínez-Patiño’s, allows the development of female secondary sexual characteristics. Martínez-Patiño appealed the ruling and was subsequently reinstated, although her career was irreparably damaged.[1] I always ask the class to vote on whether they believe Martínez-Patiño is male or female. While a majority of students believe Martínez-Patiño is female, there is always a significant minority who assert that she is male. And even those who believe she is female differ in their reasoning. For some, the fact that Martínez-Patiño was raised female and believes herself to be female is paramount. For others, the fact that she lacks male organs, most notably a penis, is more important.

I never expect a class to reach a consensus on this case; rather, I use Martínez-Patiño’s case to point out that ideas about sex and gender are always complex and contradictory, even in the twenty-first century. The exercise also stresses the importance of stories in both defining and challenging beliefs about sex and gender. If I asked the class what sex a person with one X and one Y chromosome is, they would all agree that such a person is male. When I tell the story of a particular person with an X and a Y chromosome, most do not believe she is male, and even those who do think she is a highly abnormal male, despite a perfectly normal chromosomal arrangement.

Sixteenth-century Europeans also told many stories about sexual differences and gender identities. These stories came from a wide range of sources, including the Bible, ancient mythology, natural philosophical and medical texts, and travelers’ tales of exotic locales. The stories complicated and contradicted each other. While numerous stories told Europeans that women were physically and mentally weaker than men, there were stories about women who were rulers of kingdoms and powerful warriors, and about men who stayed at home while their wives conducted business. Although what might seem (from a modern perspective) like the most fundamental physical differences between men and women were not always constant. There were stories about women who urinated standing up and men who made babies without women.

In the sixteenth century, ideas about sexual difference were profoundly shaped by the religious upheavals of the Reformation. Protestant Reformers’ rejection of clerical celibacy and valorization of marriage as the foundation of society led them to articulate new views of the differences between men and women and their respective roles in marriage and in society as a whole. Protestant Reformers wrote extensively on gender, sexuality, and marriage and I summarize their main ideas in the first section of this essay, “The Reform of Marriage.” But views of sexual differences were also shaped by major changes in the fields of science and medicine, and by the dramatic rise in European exploration and colonization in this period. Sometimes new scientific views of the differences between men and women challenged those of Protestant Reformers, but more commonly scientific discoveries reinforced Protestant gender norms.

In the second section, on “Philosophical Writing on Sex and Gender,” I examine how developments in science and medicine, specifically the recovery of ancient Greek medical texts, the rise of anatomical dissections, and the new importance of alchemy, all shaped understandings of sexual differences. In the third section, on “Travelers’ Tales of Sexual Difference,” I discuss European travel literature. When Europeans encountered the peoples of the Caribbean, North and South America, and Africa they almost always commented on sexual difference, both on how the women and men of these regions differed from each other, but also on how the bodies and behaviors of both sexes differed from the bodies and behaviors expected of European men and women. Accounts of polygamy and promiscuity in exotic locales challenged European assumptions about marriage and sexuality, but also encouraged a sense of racial and religious superiority. Scientific, medical, and colonial discourses about sex difference both influenced and were influenced by Protestant writings. Protestant preachers regularly drew on medical sources to buttress their scriptural arguments about marriage. Conversely, the writers of travel literature (and the translators who adapted this literature for Protestant audiences) relied on the widespread currency of a domestic ideal of passive wives and dominant husbands to shock their readers with tales of aggressive women and submissive men.

THE REFORM OF MARRIAGE

One of the very earliest controversies of the Reformation was over clerical marriage. Beginning in the 1520s, reform-minded clergy began criticizing vows of celibacy, and some of the bolder ones actually got married.[2] The alleged sexual misbehavior of priests, monks, and nuns had long been a subject of criticism and satire. Protestant Reformers differed from earlier critics because they did not urge those who had taken vows of celibacy to practice greater self-discipline. Rather, they asserted that the entire system of clerical and monastic celibacy was based on a false understanding of human nature and of the relationship between human beings and God. Reformers differed sharply from Catholics in their views of human sexuality and its relationship to spirituality. Catholics continued to assert that celibacy was a spiritually superior state to matrimony. Protestants asserted that matrimony was a natural, divinely ordained, and holy state. Celibacy, by contrast, was unnatural, contrary to God’s plan for His creation, and physically impossible for most men and women to maintain.

Protestants condemned vows of celibacy on two grounds. First, abstinence from sex was a kind of “good work,” analogous to fasting and other forms of mortifying the flesh. Protestants rejected the Catholic theology of good works, in which virtuous acts, be they abstinence, fasting, pilgrimages, or charity toward one’s neighbors, earned the Christian favor in the eyes of God. They believed human beings were too depraved and corrupt to ever earn God’s love. Rather, human beings were only saved through the freely given and totally unmerited grace that came from Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.

Second, Protestant leaders across Europe cited the biblical story of Adam and Eve as proof that God intended human beings to live together in matrimony, and that celibacy was a violation of the divine plan for humankind. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was one of the first to articulate this scriptural argument. In The Estate of Marriage (1522), Luther wrote: “For this word which God speaks, ‘Be fruitful and multiply [Gen. 1:28],’ is not a command. It is more than a command, namely, a divine ordinance [werck] which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”[3] God intended men and women to marry, and it was wrong to prevent this as the Catholic Church did in requiring vows of celibacy from its priests.

Other Reformers followed suit, extolling marriage as a holy and a natural state, and denouncing celibacy as both immoral (because it violated God’s ordinance) and unnatural. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), Jean Calvin (1509–1564) cited God’s pronouncement that “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18) as scriptural evidence that marriage was an honorable and holy state, instituted by God Himself. Marriage was most definitely not inferior to the celibate state of Catholic priests, monks, and nuns. He also interpreted this passage to mean that the normal and natural condition of most men and women was to experience sexual desire, and therefore almost all men and women should marry or they would fall into sin. Like many other Reformers, he conceded that some rare individuals might be given the “gift of continence,” but that no man or woman could be sure that they had been granted this gift, or if they had that it had been granted to them for their entire lives. It was thus “intolerably presumptuous” to make life-long vows of celibacy.[4]

The Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, wrote one of the most influential Protestant books on marriage. In his Christian Marriage (1540) he followed Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli himself in asserting that God intended human beings to marry. According to Bullinger, God created marriage in Paradise before the Fall of humankind. Marriage was thus a holy state, eminently pleasing to God, and one to be entered into joyfully. To enter marriage, for Bullinger, was as close as human beings could now come to re-entering Paradise. He explicitly stated that sex within marriage was not sinful.[5] Bullinger declared that God created marriage for three reasons. The first was procreation. Marriage was instituted so that human beings might “be fruitful and multiply.” The second reason was so that human beings might avoid fornication. Marriage provided the only licit outlet for the natural, divinely implanted sexual urges of men and women. Finally, marriage was created so that both men and women would have the comfort and support of a life partner.[6]

Bullinger’s Christian Marriage went through three editions in German, and nine editions in English. The Lutheran writers Erasmus Sarcerius (1501–1559) and Cyriacus Spangenberg (1528–1604) incorporated portions of the text into their own treatises on marriage, albeit without attribution.[7] And Bullinger’s three causes of marriage were reiterated in the marriage ceremony in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In the first edition of 1549, the ceremony lists “the causes for the whiche matrimonie was ordeined.” The first cause is “the procreacion of children.” The second is “for a remedie agaynst sinne, and to avoide fornicacion.” And finally, marriage was established “for the mutuall societie, helpe, and coumfort, that the one oughte to have of the other, both in prosperitie and adversitie.”[8]

As this brief survey indicates, while different Protestant groups vehemently disagreed on a number of theological issues, on the subject of clerical marriage and the innate, divinely implanted sexual urges of both women and men there was a high degree of consensus. There was also a high degree of consensus on the ideal relations between wives and husbands. Protestants of various theological stripes agreed that God had made women and men different. Men were the more rational and virtuous sex, and God had given them dominion over women. According to contemporary medical theory, women’s bodies were cold and moist, while men’s were hot and dry. The greater heat of the male body accounted for the more active, vigorous qualities of men’s bodies and minds. The coolness of the female body rendered women sedentary and passive. Male dominance and female subordination were rooted in the different qualities of male and female bodies. Because these bodies were originally created by God, the hierarchical relationship between the sexes was divinely ordained.[9]

Even radical Protestant groups that implemented new forms of marriage tended to have very similar views on the differences between men and women as their more mainstream contemporaries. For example, Lyndal Roper describes a small group of Anabaptists near the city of Erlangen who called themselves the “Dreamers” and practiced “spiritual marriage.” They believed that a true marriage could only take place when the “spirit” (understood as the voice of God) directed a man and a woman to wed. Many Dreamers declared their preexisting marriages to be invalid and proceeded to enter into new marriages as the spirit commanded them. In at least one case, a woman in this group took the initiative and proposed to a man at the prompting of the spirit. Although the rearrangements of existing marriages in the Dreamer community were anathema to most Reformers, once these new, “spirit directed” marriages were established they looked very similar to other Protestant (and Catholic) marriages. The man was expected to be the head of the household and the wife was subservient to him.[10]

The Hutterites of Moravia, another radical group, believed marriage was too important to be left to the judgment of young people, who were apt to be moved by sexual attraction rather than rational considerations. Instead, Hutterite elders selected a few eligible marriage partners that a young man or a young woman could choose among. This community control over marriage fit into a larger communitarian ethos that included shared possession of goods and wealth and communal living rather than individual households. Hutterites too firmly believed that God had created women to be submissive and subordinate to men. Hutterite leaders routinely warned men against allowing their wives too much authority or giving them any opportunity to become proud and haughty, vices to which they believed women were particularly prone.[11]

The most notorious rearrangement of marriage in the sixteenth century was the institution of polygamy in Münster following the Anabaptist takeover of the city in 1534. The theologian Bernhard Rothmann (ca. 1495–ca. 1535) defended polygamy (and other aspects of the new Anabaptist regime) in his A Restitution of Christian Teaching, Faith, and Life (1534). Like other Reformers, Rothmann saw the origins of marriage in God’s command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply.” However, Rothmann used this passage to legitimate polygamy. Sexual intercourse was solely for procreation, and women who were pregnant were infertile for an extended period of time. Men, on the other hand, were always fertile, so men should have multiple wives so that they could continue being fruitful and multiplying. Rothmann and the Münster Anabaptists found further justification for polygamy in the fact that many Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives and concubines. Although this justification of polygamy was abhorrent to Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers, Rothmann’s description of sexual differences in his Restitution was nearly identical to theirs. Women were weaker physically, mentally, and spiritually, and they needed to be under the protection and control of a husband. In a city with a vast excess of women, this was another powerful justification for allowing each man control over many wives.[12]

Because Protestants believed that almost all men and women should be married and must engage in sexual intercourse, they devoted some attention to the subject of human sexuality. Of all Protestant writers, Martin Luther was the most explicit on this topic. In his The Estate of Marriage (1522), he drew on both scriptural and medical authority to make the case that human sexuality was natural and that celibacy was both spiritually and physically pernicious. Luther wrote that sexual intercourse was “more necessary than sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, and emptying the bowels and bladder.”[13] Just as it was impossible to go without sleep or food, so it was impossible to go without sex. If sexual drives were stifled, as they were when men and women took vows of celibacy, this led to “fornication, adultery, and secret sins, for this is a matter of nature and not of choice.”[14] Luther insisted that sexual urges were natural and common to both men and women because both men and women have an innate and divinely created desire to produce offspring. These sexual desires had to be channeled into marriage and legitimate procreation. Trying to deny sexual urges led not only to moral corruption, but to physical corruption as well. Luther espoused the common medical view that both men and women made “seed.” This seed was emitted during sexual intercourse, and in the right circumstances, male and female seed met in the woman’s uterus and combined to form a fetus. If this seed was not released on a regular basis, it would build up in the body and putrefy. Retained and rotten seed caused pain and disease. Luther noted:

Physicians are not amiss when they say: If this natural function [production and release of seed] is forcibly restrained it necessarily strikes into the flesh and blood and becomes a poison, whence the body becomes unhealthy, enervated, sweaty, and foul-smelling.[15]

He commented particularly that women who do not have babies, as God intended them to, were generally “weak and sickly.” By contrast, women who had borne many children were “healthier, cleanlier, and happier.”[16] Problems also arise when people are prevented from marrying by being forced to wait until they accumulate the resources to set up their own households. Luther advises that men should marry by the age of twenty and women between fourteen and fifteen because this is when the sexual and reproductive drive is at its peak. Marriage emerges as a “natural” and divinely ordained state that has been perverted by a corrupt church. Once the impediments to marriage have been lifted, “perversions” like fornication and sodomy will disappear.

Another defender of clerical marriage, the Zurich priest Wolfgang Wyssenburger, compared the need for sex with the need for food. His translation and interpretation of the relevant passage of Genesis were somewhat different than Luther’s, but he was led to the same basic conclusion. He read God’s command to Adam and Eve as “Grow and increase yourselves” (Wachset und mehret Euch). He argued that Adam and Eve were commanded to eat so that they might grow, and they were commanded to have sex so the human race might be increased. Both the desire for food and the desire for sex were “natural things” (natürlich dingen) that were “implanted” (ingepflanzt) in human beings by God.[17]

Luther and Wyssenburger asserted that the desire for sex was a natural inclination, like the urge to urinate or defecate. Many medical authorities would have agreed that all of these activities fell into the category of the “non-naturals,” things that were essential for keeping the body’s humors in balance.[18] However, the comparison is somewhat deceptive, as both preachers were surely aware. There really was not an incorrect or “unnatural” way to empty one’s bladder or bowels or to eat and drink. By contrast, there were multiple “unnatural” and immoral ways of having sex, and there was an extensive polemical literature decrying sexual sins, as well as secular and ecclesiastical laws forbidding various forms of sex. The only form of sexual desire that Protestants accepted as “natural” was desire for the opposite sex and for sexual activities that might lead to conception. Protestant writers like Luther use the term “natural” to mean both how people were inclined to behave, but also how they ought to behave.

Protestant writers also stressed the need for “sexual purity” in both men and women. Both men and women were expected to abstain from sexual activity until they were married (in a church, in front of witnesses), and from then on to confine all sexual activities to moderate amounts of intercourse with their spouse.[19] However, Protestants clearly perceived female sexuality as dangerous and disruptive in ways that male sexuality was not. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their approaches to prostitution. Protestants associated prostitution with Catholicism.[20] They lambasted Catholic toleration of brothels. They typically labeled the perceived sexual licentiousness and depravity of Catholic monastics and clerics “whoring.” And they routinely depicted the Pope as the great Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations. One of the first steps that cities and territories took when they became Protestant was to abolish brothels and criminalize prostitution. Although men who employed prostitutes were censured, punishment was meted out primarily to prostitutes, not to their clients. And these punishments grew progressively harsher throughout the seventeenth century. The figure of the prostitute loomed large in the Protestant imagination. As Lotte van de Pol writes in her study of prostitution in early modern Amsterdam, whoring “was a metaphor for everything regarded as rotten, godless, and depraved … The whore was the female personification of all evil.”[21] And whores could not always be distinguished from “respectable” women. Any woman one encountered might potentially be a whore. Women were widely considered to be the more lustful sex, an idea with roots in ancient medicine. And female honor remained connected to sexual purity in ways that male honor did not. Socially and symbolically, prostitution was the antithesis of the Protestant ideal of the sexually and morally pure married couple which formed the foundation of both the family and the community. Marriage was both the fundamental unit of society and a microcosm of social order. Protestants put increasing stress on the household, headed by a married couple, as a site of purity and order, and they contrasted marital “purity” with “whoredom” and disorder.[22]

MEDICAL AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING ON SEX AND GENDER

Luther’s confident assertion that, according to physicians, men and women who do not have sex will be “unhealthy, enervated, sweaty, and foul-smelling” suggests a consensus among learned medical men about sexual intercourse and its role in human health. In fact, there was a wide range of opinion in the sixteenth century on the topics of sexual difference and male and female sexuality.[23] Three new developments in medicine stimulated debate on sexual differences. The first of these developments was medical Humanism, that is, the recovery and translation of the works of ancient medical writers. In particular, all of the gynecological works attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates were translated into Latin and printed for the first time in the sixteenth century. The Hippocratic writers had postulated that the female body was fundamentally different from the male body. Hippocratic views of the differences between women and men proved highly influential in the sixteenth century.[24] The second development was the rise in importance of anatomical dissection. This development was connected to medical Humanism. Many of the most influential anatomists of the early modern period claimed that they were following in the footsteps of such ancient writers as Aristotle and Galen.[25] One of the most interesting problems for early modern anatomists was the mystery of reproduction. Accordingly, many dissectors devoted considerable attention to the anatomical differences between males and females, and to the processes of conception and generation.[26] The third development was in many ways the most radical, because it entailed a sharp break with the medical theory and practice that dated back to the ancient Greeks. This development was the rise of alchemy in the sixteenth century. The theory and practice of alchemy dated back to late antiquity. However, up until the sixteenth century, alchemy was primarily concerned with the transformation of metals. In the sixteenth century, alchemy became an all-encompassing theory of the workings of the natural world, including the human body.[27] Many alchemists proposed new ideas about the differences between men and women and about the processes of reproduction. I will discuss each of these developments in turn.

The belief that women and men were completely different received a decisive boost in the sixteenth century with the recovery and translation of the gynecological works of Hippocrates.[28] These texts were previously unknown to European physicians. Hippocratic gynecological texts start from the premise that women are fundamentally different from men and that women’s diseases require different treatment than men’s diseases. Further, for Hippocratic physicians, early marriage and motherhood were considered essential to a woman’s health and well being. Young virgins were highly susceptible to a range of dire medical problems. Hippocratic physicians advised that girls be married (and pregnant) as soon after menarche as possible, sometimes even before. This was emphatically not the case for men, who were expected to marry and father children at a much older age, though they might be sexually active before marriage.[29] Luther’s recommendation that girls should be married at the age of fourteen or fifteen, and his insistence that women who had borne children were healthier than those who were celibate or barren, echoes the advice of Hippocratic physicians. While Luther argued that both men and women experience sexual desire and that this desire should be channeled into marriage and procreation, and while he certainly argued that men who had sexual intercourse were healthier than those who did not, the importance of pregnancy and childbirth to women’s health had no parallel in the male body.

The second important change in medicine that impacted understanding of sexual differences was the rising importance of anatomical dissection. Although anatomists of different religious persuasions were interested in sex differences, Protestant anatomists investigated this topic with particular vigor. These anatomists include Felix Platter (1536–1614) and Caspar Bauhin (1560–1625), both professors at Basel; Caspar Bartholin (1585–1629), a professor at Copenhagen; and Helkiah Crooke (1576–1648), physician to James I of England. These anatomists found differences not only in male and female sexual organs, but throughout the body. Michael Stolberg suggests that anatomical findings helped to buttress Protestant arguments that marriage and parenthood were natural and divinely ordained.[30]

All anatomical “discoveries” about the female body provided evidence that women were designed by God to bear and rear children, and leading a celibate life was counter to God’s plan. One of these differences was a heart-shaped hole found in the female sternum, or in the xiphoid (the cartilaginous appendage at the end of the sternum), through which vessels carried blood from the uterus to the breasts, where it was transformed into milk.[31] Platter, Bauhin, and Crooke all described this hole. Although they acknowledged that it was not found in all women, they included the heart-shaped hole in their illustrations of the female skeleton, suggesting that it was a common and normal feature of female anatomy. Not only does the hole (which, according to modern anatomists, does not actually exist) facilitate the formation of food for the newborn baby, but its heart shape evokes maternal love. Catholic hagiography sometimes described miraculous shapes—crosses, crowns of thorns, the instruments of the Passion, the name of Jesus—inscribed on the inner organs of saints. Such anatomical evidence of sanctity was used in canonization proceedings.[32] Here in these Protestant anatomy texts the heart-shaped hole served a similar function. It was a natural, rather than a supernatural, sign of maternal care and devotion—a heart carved (by God) into the breastbone of women so that they can express their love for their children by feeding them.

The third major development in medicine relevant to understandings of sexual difference was the dramatic rise in the importance of alchemy. This was the most radical of the three developments, because it was a self-conscious break with the authoritative traditions of ancient Greek physicians and philosophers. Sixteenth-century alchemists proposed new ways of thinking about sexual differences and the roles of men and women in reproduction. The full impact of alchemical ideas, texts, and practices on understandings of sexual differences has yet to be determined, but I will present some of the current scholarship here.

In the Middle Ages (in both Europe and the Islamic world), alchemists were primarily interested in the transformation of metals. Alchemists believed that all metals were compounds of sulfur and mercury. In nature, sulfur and mercury joined together underneath the earth, and gradually developed into the various metals. The particular metal that developed depended on the purity of the sulfur and mercury, their proportions, and the amount of heat where the metal was developing. In a best-case scenario, very pure sulfur and mercury combined in just the right proportions and developed in a hot, dry underground location. In this case, the noblest metal of all—gold—would be formed. If the sulfur and mercury were tainted, or the maturation of the metal took place in cold, damp, or dirty conditions, then a less noble metal—like lead—would result. Alchemists believed that they could replicate and accelerate the natural process of the formation of metals. They could turn lead into gold by breaking the metal down into its constituent parts—sulfur and mercury—then refining and purifying these parts, and finally reconstituting the purified sulfur and mercury as gold by combining them and heating them. These laboratory processes were analogous to what went on under the earth, but alchemists claimed they could make these processes happen faster and more reliably than they occurred in nature. The joining together of sulfur and mercury to produce a metal was commonly compared to the sexual intercourse of male and female that produced a baby. Sulfur was the male principle because it was hot and active; mercury was the female principle because it was cold and passive.

Although the designation of sulfur as male and mercury as female was entirely consistent with Aristotle’s characterization of male and female, alchemical authors did not posit a rigid sexual binary. Instead, the boundaries between male and female were fluid. Metals were all composed of both sulfur and mercury and the metaphor of the hermaphrodite was important in alchemical writing. For example, Leah DeVun describes a fourteenth-century alchemical manuscript that characterizes the philosophers’ stone as hermaphroditic. The author analogizes the stone to Christ, who is a hermaphrodite because He combines in his person both human and divine, male and female (here the author fuses Jesus and Mary). The stone has the power to purify and regenerate metals, just as Christ has the power to purify and regenerate people.[33] In alchemical texts, gender was inherently unstable.[34]

Alchemy became considerably more prominent and influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it was in the Middle Ages. This was largely due to the work of Paracelsus (1493–1541).[35] Paracelsus made a twofold innovation in the field of alchemy. First, he added salt to sulfur and mercury as a basic principle or element. Second, he expanded these three principles to include all natural bodies, not just metals. In medieval alchemy, sulfur and mercury were the basic components of metals and minerals. The Paracelsian principles of salt, sulfur, and mercury were the basic components of the entire cosmos. In this way, Paracelsus made alchemy an all-encompassing science of matter, rather than more narrowly the science of metals.

Paracelsus was actually not particularly interested in changing lead into gold; he was far more interested in medicine than in metals. He saw his theory as a new way of understanding the body and explaining and curing disease. Under the influence of Paracelsus, the connections between organic and inorganic processes become much tighter. Medieval alchemists had used biological metaphors to describe the formation of metals in the earth. But the analogies between sulfur and semen and between mercury and menstrual blood were just that: analogies. In the sixteenth century these become more than analogies. If the entire cosmos, including the human body, is made of salt, sulfur, and mercury, then there is no essential difference between organic and inorganic phenomena. Further, just as alchemists could manipulate metals so too could they manipulate organic processes, including life and death.[36]

A number of alchemists believed it possible to create life in the laboratory. A pseudo-Paracelsian text, which was accepted as authentic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gave directions for creating an artificial human being, or a “homunculus”:

Let the Sperm of a man by it selfe be putrefied in a gourd glasse, sealed up, with the highest degree of putrefaction in Horse dung, for the space of forty days, or so long until it begin to bee alive, move, and stir, which may easily be seen. After this time it will bee something like a Man, yet transparent and without a body. Now after this, if it bee every day warily and prudently nourished and fed with the Arcanum of Mans blood, and bee for the space of forty weeks kept in a constant, equall heat of Horse-dung, it will become a true and living infant, having all the members of an infant which is born of a woman, but it will bee far lesse. This wee call Homunculus, or Artificiall.[37]

For pseudo-Paracelsus, the generative powers of the male seed are so great that the female body is only needed as a vessel and a source of heat. In fact, the female body is a dangerous place for the developing fetus. In a slightly earlier passage in the same text, pseudo-Paracelsus describes the formation of monsters, which he attributes to the power of the maternal imagination. This cannot happen in a vessel in an alchemical laboratory where the process of generation is controlled by a (male) alchemist. Pseudo-Paracelsus presents a fantasy of exclusively male reproduction, free of the corrupting influence of the female.

Alchemists found support at numerous Protestant courts in Central Europe. Indeed, some Protestant rulers, both male and female, actively participated in alchemical activities.[38] Paracelsian ideas found particularly strong support in Protestant areas, including among some radical Protestant groups.[39] At the court of the Lutheran Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1528–1589), the alchemist Anna Zieglerin (ca. 1550–1575) claimed to have concocted a “tincture” that could both transform base metals into gold and make a woman pregnant. Any baby conceived by this method would have a shorter than normal gestation period, and should be nourished on the tincture rather than on breast milk. Zieglerin claimed to have learned her alchemical secrets from her lover, Count Carl von Oettingen, the (fictitious) son of Paracelsus. Together, using the tincture, she and the count would produce a new race of pure human beings, free of the taint of original sin. These babies would be gestated in her womb and would bring about a regeneration of the world. In Zieglerin’s work we see the close connections between the generation and purification of metals and the generation and purification of human beings. Her writing is replete with religious symbolism and apocalyptic visions of herself as a “new Eve.” Zieglerin’s theorization of the homunculus drew on Paracelsian ideas but also on the apocalyptic expectations that were prevalent in Lutheran Germany in the sixteenth century.[40] Sadly, Zieglerin was accused of fraud and of attempting to poison members of the duke’s family, and was executed along with her male collaborators.[41]

Sixteenth-century medicine and natural philosophy were a rich and dynamic mixture of ancient, medieval, and modern ideas. Sex and gender were important topics of research and debate for Humanist physicians, anatomists, and alchemists and they offered many competing theories about the differences between men and women and their respective roles in reproduction. Although I have separated medical and scientific texts from religious writings and images, the boundaries between them were actually quite porous. As we have seen, Luther referred in his work on marriage to the writings of physicians, and Zieglerin’s alchemical writing was thoroughly imbued with Christian themes.

EXPLORATION, COLONIZATION, AND TRAVELERS’ TALES OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

In the midst of the religious controversies of the Reformation, Europeans were eagerly exploring and exploiting new regions of the globe. Although these activities began in the fifteenth century, they gained new economic, political, and cultural significance in the sixteenth century.[42] Readers across Europe were fascinated by accounts of strange lands and peoples, and these were translated into just about every European vernacular.[43] When early modern European Christians looked at “others”—whether these others were the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africans, Turks, Jews, or Chinese—they almost always “observed” and commented upon sexual differences, including male and female bodies, behaviors, clothing, social roles, and sexual proclivities.[44]

Travel literature fostered a sense of the superiority of European Christian civilization and culture, but at the same time called into question the “naturalness” of European beliefs and customs. Europeans sometimes characterized the differences between the sexes that they observed as “unnatural” or “against nature.” Unnatural bodies or behaviors were ones that deviated from Europeans’ sense of the divinely created order of the world. Europeans also characterized sexual differences in other peoples as “natural,” but this was generally in contrast to their own notions of what was “civilized.” In these cases, what was natural was at best primitive and at worst savage. Natural behavior was closer to animal behavior than to human. Finally, Europeans sometimes designated the bodies and behaviors of non-Europeans as “natural” in the positive sense that they were unspoiled by the corruption of civilization. This last sense of “natural” was more clearly articulated in the eighteenth century with the development of the concept of the “noble savage,” but it can be found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts as well.

These different designations—unnatural and natural, savage and innocent—can be found even within the same text, sometimes only a few sentences apart. Travel reports reveal complex and contradictory notions of the concept of “natural,” especially with regard to sexual differences. The discussion of sexual and gender differences in travel literature had particular salience for Protestant authors and readers. As we have seen, the Protestant valorization of marriage rested on assumptions about the “naturalness” of sexual differences and of sexual drives. Further, Protestant leaders across Europe increasingly demanded strict sexual purity outside of legitimate, church-sanctioned marriages and placed new emphasis on the patriarchal nuclear family as the bedrock of social order.[45] These demands too were premised on beliefs about the “natural,” divinely ordained social order. Yet travel literature was full of tales of societies where sex was promiscuous and not confined to marriage, where women wielded weapons and political power, and where both sexes spent most of their lives as naked as the day they were born.

I will focus here on two examples of travel literature prepared by Protestant authors and printers with a predominantly Protestant audience in mind. My first example is the Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), a Lutheran convert and a professor at the University of Basel. Münster’s Cosmographia was the first comprehensive description of the entire world in German. First published in 1544, it went through twenty-four editions, the last in 1628. Most of these editions were in German or Latin, but there were also translations into French, Italian, English, and Czech. Münster’s Cosmographia contains accounts of all of the known regions of the world: Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.[46] These accounts are drawn from a wide range of authors. The explicit moral purpose of the book is to display the wonders of God’s creation. The first picture in the book is of the creation of Adam and Eve, implying that all peoples of the world are the descendants of the first human beings, and the first chapter is on the creation of the world by God. For Münster, the geography, the flora and fauna, and the diverse peoples of the world are all part of the “Book of Nature.” Like Scripture, nature was a book authored by God. And like Scripture, nature revealed the wisdom and benevolence of God to human beings. The metaphor of the Book of Nature had particular resonance in Protestant intellectual culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[47]

However, it was one thing to describe each and every one of the plants and animals found throughout the world as a marvel of God’s creation. The metaphor of the Book of Nature worked in more ambiguous ways when it came to the variations of human beings and human cultures found throughout the globe. If all human beings were created by God, were all the different bodies and behaviors that humans exhibited “natural” because they were divinely created? Or were some “unnatural” and thus wrong? Nowhere were these questions more fraught than when they concerned the essential “natures” of men and women.

Münster’s account of the “New World” (New Welt) in the first edition of the Cosmographia is drawn from the writings of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. The first thing both men reported about the inhabitants of the Americas was that they were naked. According to Columbus, “the people run around naked just like animals without any shame” (lieffen die leüt gantz nacket darin gleich wie das viech on alle scham).[48] European Christians associated nakedness with the primitive state of innocence in the Garden of Eden. After the Fall, Adam and Eve felt shame and covered themselves with leaves. Shame was a mark of the fallen state of humanity, but it was also a marker of civilization. And within European society, the ability to feel shame marked certain people as superior to others. Children lacked a proper sense of shame, making them inferior to adults. Aristotle declared that women were “more void of shame or self-respect” than men, and this idea was widely disseminated in medieval and early modern Europe.[49] Vespucci, like Columbus, claims that the peoples he encountered were “completely naked, both men and women” (gantz nackend/man und frauwen). He also adds that they had no formal marriages. Rather, a man could take “as many women as he wanted” (so vil frawen haben als er begert), and separate himself from any of them he tired of “without disgrace” (on schmach).[50] Nakedness was also associated with sex, and Europeans perceived American natives to be more lustful and sexually promiscuous than Europeans.[51]

Both Columbus and Vespucci devoted particular attention to indigenous women, but they arrived at very different conclusions about the characters of these women. Columbus reports that he and his men captured a native woman, brought her on board their ship, plied her with wine and food, and dressed her in “beautiful clothing” (hübsch kleider), by which he clearly means a European-style gown. Rather than being terrified or infuriated by her kidnap and assault at the hands of Europeans, the woman is allegedly delighted with the food and drink and charmed by her lovely new clothes. When she returns to her people, they admire her dress and listen eagerly to her description of the Europeans. Once they have heard about the wonders on board Columbus’s ship, they are eager to trade “piles of gold” (gold umb häfen) for whatever trivial objects the sailors will part with.[52] This story evokes European stereotypes of women as inherently vain and easily captivated by pretty clothes. It suggests that the native women Columbus encountered were not really so different from European women and that they—and their male kin—would rapidly accept European civilization and culture once they were introduced to it.

By contrast, Vespucci’s report of his interactions with native women is much darker. He reports that a young man from his ship had gone ashore to talk with some of the locals. Three attractive women surrounded him and flirted with him. While they had him distracted, another woman came up behind him and clubbed him to death. Then the men came out and cut him to pieces and the whole group ate him, while his horrified comrades looked on from their ship. In Vespucci’s story, native women are seductive, deceitful, and dangerous. Münster drew selectively from the writings of Columbus and Vespucci. The elements he selected from Columbus’s texts emphasize the simplicity and childlike innocence of indigenous societies and suggest that they will eagerly learn from Europeans and embrace European culture, including Christianity and clothing. The parts of Vespucci that Münster included in his book paint a darker picture of the inhabitants of the “New World.” In both cases, it is the character of the women that is pivotal. Are native women simple and vain, like children, or are they seductive, deceitful, and dangerous? Despite the exotic location, both of these characterizations of women would have been deeply familiar to European readers.

In the 1544 edition of Münster’s Cosmographia, the section on the New World and Africa was very brief. In subsequent editions this material was greatly expanded. In a Latin edition of 1572, there is a section on the “manners and customs of the Egyptians” (De moribus et ritibus Aegyptiorum), which includes remarks about the social and bodily practices of Egyptian men and women:

Their women have been accustomed for a long time now to carry out the functions of conducting business, trading and bargaining. The men shelter within the walls of the houses and bear burdens on their heads, the women on their shoulders. The women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.[53]

Everything about the behavior of Egyptian women and men was counter to European expectations. Indeed, there is a note printed in the margin next to this passage: “customs contrary to nature” (Mores natura contrarii). In her study of premodern European views of masculinity, Patricia Simons argues that “[m]‌ale bodies were distinguished by their external genitals, an ability to eject urine and semen and assertive behavior, all of which can be called projective capacities.”[54] Men projected semen and urine from their bodies and they projected themselves into the rough and tumble world of buying, selling, and bartering where aggression, courage, and quick wit were required. Women’s bodies retained and nourished semen and women were supposed—at least ideally—to remain more closely tied to home and hearth where they nourished their families. Women who pissed standing up and drove hard bargains were unnatural beings, as were men who sat to urinate and stayed cozily ensconced behind the protective walls of their houses.

My second example of travel literature prepared by Protestants for a predominantly Protestant audience was the multi-volume series of works on overseas voyages published by two generations of the De Bry family.[55] The De Brys were Flemish Calvinists who emigrated to Frankfurt am Main and became wealthy and important printers. The first volume of their series appeared in 1590, and the last in 1634. They were published almost simultaneously in German and Latin. Like Münster’s text, the material in the De Bry volumes was drawn from a wide range of authors. The De Brys avoided explicit religious commentary in their volumes on overseas voyages so that their works would not be censored by Catholic authorities. However, these books display a marked Protestant bias. The De Brys consistently altered the texts they translated to emphasize the cruelty and barbarism of the Catholic Spanish conquerors. They also draw subtle comparisons between the “idolatry” of Catholicism and the pagan religions of Africa and the Americas.[56]

The first volume of their series on the East Indies was a book on the Congo in Africa translated from the Portuguese author Duarte Lopez.[57] One section of this work described a group of women in “Monomotapa” (a region in southern Africa encompassing parts of what are now Zimbabwe and Mozambique) who formed a highly feared elite unit of the king’s army. These women burned off their left breasts so they could shoot a bow and arrow without hindrance and they were known for their fierceness and tenacity on the battlefield. Like the ancient Amazons, the women of Monomotapa lived without men. At a certain time every year they had intercourse with men, whom they selected “according to their pleasure” (nach ihrem gefallen) in order to conceive children.[58] Here again we see women who subvert the European view of what is “natural” female (and male) behavior. Women were supposed to be cool, moist, weak, and passive. They were not supposed to be independent and self-sufficient, nor were they supposed to be skilled warriors. Yet the women of Monomotapa are more feared warriors than the men. They live independently of men. And they select men as sexual and reproductive partners according to their own desires.

The sixth volume of the De Brys East Indies series was on the Gold Coast of Africa, and was based on the account of the Dutch traveler Pieter de Marees. De Marees’s description of the inhabitants of Africa was even more sensational than Duarte Lopez’s. For example, De Marees described a grotesque and violent (and certainly fictitious) ritual practiced by the “heathen” warriors of Mozambique. When they won a battle, they would cut off the penises of their enemies, put the severed penises in their mouths, and then spit them out at the feet of their king. The king, in turn, distributed these penises to the nobility, and noblewomen wore strings of them as necklaces. The De Brys included an illustration detailing every stage in this ritual.[59] De Marees described African men as having much larger penises and much greater sexual drives than European men.[60] They had multiple wives and lived in polygamous households. He described African women as having long pendulous breasts, a physical characteristic that Europeans (or more precisely European men) found repulsive, and one they frequently associated with witches.[61] African women also lacked the maternal instincts that Europeans considered “natural.” In fact, both African mothers and fathers were largely indifferent to their children, who were only loosely supervised and rarely disciplined.[62]

Münster’s Cosmographia and the De Brys’s multiple volumes on Africa, Asia, and the New World display a European sense of superiority over other peoples and cultures. But, as Susanna Burghartz has pointed out in her study of the De Bry series, travel literature also reveals how fragile this sense of superiority was.[63] Tales of Amazon women who went to war, Egyptian men who sat down to urinate, African women who lacked maternal tenderness, and Native American and African men who were so sexually voracious that they kept multiple wives all challenged deeply held European beliefs about the different natures of men and women, about sexual norms, and about family structure. While these stories were circulating among Protestant readers, Protestant leaders sought to channel these beliefs about the sexual nature of all human beings and the different essential natures of men and women into a new vision of marriage, sexual purity, and social order. These stories, especially the ones containing gruesome violence and sexual perversions, were meant to titillate and to entertain, but they also raised troubling questions. Were all these variations of humanity part of God’s creation, or were some of them “heathen” aberrations? Were strange sexual practices and different gender norms natural or unnatural? These questions, and the ambivalence of the category of “natural” when applied to sexual differences, undermined Protestant arguments about marriage, family, and gender relations.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this essay I have emphasized the plurality of stories about sexual difference that circulated among Protestants in early modern Europe. Running through these stories are conflicting definitions of “natural.” For Protestants, men and women were fundamentally different because God had created them that way. Women were cooler, moister, weaker, and less rational. Their bodies were designed for childbearing. Men were hotter, dryer, stronger, and smarter. Their bodies too were designed to produce seed to make babies, although reproduction did not dominate their lives in the way it did for women. Women and men who married, wives who submitted to the authority of their husbands, and married couples who had many babies were behaving in ways that were at once “natural” and moral. Those who refused to marry and those who had sex in ways that would not lead to conception were behaving in ways that were both “unnatural” and immoral. Some medical writing supported the idea that men and women were fundamentally different in all aspects of their physical and mental make-up.

But medical literature was replete with anomalies: men who menstruated, women who grew beards, and hermaphrodites whose “true” sex was ambiguous. These anomalies were not “unnatural”; rather, medical writers sought “natural” explanations for them. Alchemical literature blurred the boundaries between the sexes even further, suggesting that bodies could be both masculine and feminine and proposing new modes of procreation. Alchemists too believed they were explaining and manipulating “natural” processes. Finally, travelers’ narratives present subversive visions of sexual differences and sexual activities. While Protestant preachers argued that a stable social order relied on a particular set of gender roles and relations that they designated “natural” and divinely ordained, the writers of travel literature presented reports of stable societies founded on radically different configurations of gender and sexuality.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, Protestant writers like Luther, Calvin, and Bullinger were optimistic that if all women and men were allowed to marry and encouraged to do so at a young age, they would follow their “natural” inclinations to have sex that would lead to babies. Only when people were prevented from marrying did they turn to fornication, or worse, to “unnatural” sexual activities. Later Protestants were less sanguine that “natural” sexual urges could be effectively channeled into stable and orderly marriages. They also believed that it was very difficult to get women to understand and accept their “natural” roles as submissive wives. This pessimism is indicated by later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on marriage, which is increasingly strident in tone. Much of this literature is dominated by admonitions to women to obey their husbands and avoid the feminine vices of pride, vanity, and lust.[64] There is an obvious, if rather painful, irony in the fact that Protestants found “natural” sexual differences and gender relations increasingly difficult to achieve and enforce.

But even in the early years of the Reformation there were tensions and ambiguities in understandings of what constituted “natural” sexual differences and “natural” relations between the sexes. These tensions and ambiguities are especially clear when we widen our scope beyond the writings of the Reformers to consider stories of sexual difference in scientific, medical, and colonial discourses. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people had a wide array of stories available to them to make sense of sexual differences, and these stories complicated and contradicted each other. As the case of Maria Martínez-Patiño with which I began this essay illustrates, these contradictions have never been successfully resolved.

NOTES

1. Anne Fausto-Sterling begins her book Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000) with a discussion of Martínez-Patiño’s story.

2. See Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), esp. chap. 1 on the earliest Lutheran clerical marriages between 1521 and 1523. See also Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) on the centrality of marriage and gender to the Reformation.

3. Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage in Hemut T. Lehman (ed.), Luther’s Works, vol 45 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press, 1955), 18.

4. Jean Calvin, Christianae religionis institution (Basel: per Thomam Platterum et Balthasarem Lasium, 1536). Quotes from Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960).

5. “Eeliche werck sind one sünd.” Quoted in Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit—Orte der Unzucht: Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999), 54–55. In this he differed from Luther who argued that sex was sinless before the Fall, but tainted by sin afterwards.

6. Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit; Detlef Roth, “Heinrich Bullingers Eheschriften,” Zwingliana 31 (2004): 275–309.

7. Roth, “Heinrich Bullingers Eheschriften,” 280–281.

8. The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the Sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after the use of the Churche of England (London: Edouardi Whitchurche, 1549).

9. Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. 127–128.

10. Roper, “Sexual Utopianism in the German Reformation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42/3 (1991): 394–418.

11. Wes Harrison, “The Role of Women in Anabaptist Thought and Practice: The Hutterite Experience of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23/1 (1992): 49–69.

12. James M. Stayer, “The Varieties of Anabaptist Biblicism: The Weight of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha in Several Sixteenth-century Anabaptist Groups,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 88/3 (2014): 365–372, esp. 369–370; Catherine Dejeumont, “La réforme du mariage dans la communauté anabaptiste de Münster: quelle utopie?” Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire 24 (2006): 27–57.

13. Luther, The Estate of Marriage, 18.

14. Ibid., 18 (emphasis added).

15. Ibid., 45.

16. Ibid., 46.

17. Quoted in Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit, 48.

18. On late medieval and early modern medical theory and practice, see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

19. Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit; Roper, Holy Household.

20. Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam, trans. Liz Waters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67.

21. van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, 69.

22. Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit. See also Burghartz, “Ordering Discourse and Society: Moral Politics, Marriage and Fornication during the Reformation and the Confessionalisation Process in Germany and Switzerland,” in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Social Control in Europe, Volume 1, 1500–1800 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 78–98.

23. There was, of course, a wide range of opinion on these topics in the Middle Ages, as Joan Cadden has amply demonstrated. Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

24. Helen King, The One-Sex Body on Trial (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

25. Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). See also Jerome J. Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” in Charles Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 335–370; Siraisi, “Vesalius and the Reading of Galen’s Teleology,” Renaissance Quarterly 50/1 (1997): 1–37.

26. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

27. William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

28. King, The One-Sex Body.

29. King, “Blood and the Goddesses,” in Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), chap. 4.

30. Michael Stolberg, “A Woman down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Isis 94/2 (2003): 274–299.

31. This anatomical discovery is discussed in Stolberg, “A Woman down to Her Bones,” 282–283.

32. Park, Secrets of Women.

33. Leah DeVun, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 193–218, esp. 203–216.

34. For further examples, see Allison B. Kavey, “Mercury Falling: Gender Malleability and Sexual Fluidity in Early Modern Popular Alchemy,” in L. Principe (ed.), Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2007), 125–135; Kathleen Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).

35. Webster Charles, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

36. Newman, Promethean Ambitions.

37. This quote is from a seventeenth-century English translation in A New Light of Alchymie … Also Nine Books of the Nature of Things, written by Paracelsus (London: Richard Cotes, 1630), excerpts reproduced in Stanton J. Linden (ed.), The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152–162, quote on 153. Newman discusses this text in Promethean Ambitions.

38. Bruce Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991); Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

39. Mitchell Hammond, “The Religious Roots of Paracelsus’s Medical Theory,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1998): 7–21.

40. Robin Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

41. Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations,” in Alisha Rankin and Elaine Leong (eds.), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Nummedal, “Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin,” Ambix 48/2 (2001): 56–68.

42. Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and the Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 5, “Looking at Others” (177–209).

43. On the popularity of travel literature, see Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Jutta Steffen-Schrade, “Ethnographische Illustrationen zwischen Propaganda und Unterhaltung. Ein Vergleich der Reisesammlungen von De Bry und Hulsius,” in Burghartz (ed.), Inszenierte Welten/Staging Worlds: Die west- und ostindischen Reisen der Verleger de Bry, 1590–1630/De Brys Illustrated Travel Reports, 1590–1630 (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2004), 157–195; Susi Colin, “The Wild Man and the Indian in Early 16th Century Book Illustration,” in Christian F. Feest (ed.), Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Aachen: Rader, 1987), 5–36; Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008).

44. I have put “observed” in quotation marks to indicate that much of what Europeans claimed to “see” when they encountered non-Europeans is demonstrably false and reflects European fantasies and projections rather than the actual lived experiences of the inhabitants of Africa, the Americas, and Asia.

45. Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

46. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia. Beschreibung aller Lender durch Sebastianum Münsterum: in welcher begriffen aller Voelker, Herrschaften, Stetten, und namhafftiger Flecken, herkommen: Sitten, Gebreüch, Ordnung … (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1544).

47. James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine: Volume 1 Ficino to Descartes (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Kathleen M. Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 5, “The Book of Nature”; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Eric Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010).

48. Münster, Cosmographia (1544), dcxxxvii.

49. Aristotle, The History of Animals (Book IX, Part 1), trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

50. Münster, Cosmographia (1544), dcxl.

51. Peter Mason, “Reading New World Bodies,” in Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds.), Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 148–167.

52. Münster, Cosmographia (1544), dcxxxviii.

53. Münster, Cosmographiae vniversalis, ex probatis qvibvsq’ve avtoribvs, tam historicis qva’m chorographis (Basel, 1572), 1311. “Eorum foeminae olim negociari, cauponari, institoriaque obire munera consueuerunt. Viri intra murorum parietes texere & onera capitibus gestare, mulieres vero humeris. Illae stantes micturire, hi sedentes.”

54. Simons, Sex of Men, 38.

55. Van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World.

56. Steffen-Schrade, “Ethnographische Illustrationen,” 157–195; Burghartz, “Fragile Superioritäten: Imaginäre Ordnung und visuelle Destabilisierung der Neuen Welten um 1600,” in Anna-Maria Blank, Vera Isaiasz, and Nadine Lehrmann (eds.), Bild-Macht-Unordnung. Visuelle Repräsentationen zwischen Stabilität und Konflikt (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2011), 25–54, esp. 36–41. There is a similar critique of Spanish Catholics in the English Protestant Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of Guiana of 1596. See Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 1–41.

57. Ernst van den Boogaart, “De Brys’ Africa,” in Burghartz (ed.), Inszenierte Welten, 95–155.

58. Duarte Lopes, Agostino de Reina, Johann Theodor de Bry, and Johann Israel de Bry, Regnvm Congo hoc est Warhaffte vnd Eigentliche Beschreibung deß Königreichs Congo in Africa, vnd deren angrentzenden Länder darinnen der Inwohner Glaub, Leben, Sitten vnd Kleydung … angezeigt wirdt (Frankfurt a. M.: de Bry, 1597), 67.

59. van den Boogaart, “De Brys’ Africa,” 109–114.

60. On European beliefs about African sexuality, see Kate Lowe, “The Stereotyping of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe,” in T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17–47, esp. 29–32; van Groesen, Representations of the Overseas World, 198.

61. van den Boogaart, “De Brys’ Africa,” 124. Lyndal Roper eloquently describes the horror evoked by the aging female body in European witchcraft literature: Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

62. van den Boogaart, “De Brys’ Africa,” 124–127.

63. Burghartz, “Fragile Superioritäten.”

64. For examples of later Lutheran marriage literature, see Crowther, “From Seven Sins to Lutheran Devils: Sin and Social Order in an Age of Confessionalization,” in Patrick Gilli (ed.), Les pathologies du pouvoir (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2016), pp. 481–520.

FURTHER READING

Cadden, Joan. The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Crowther, Kathleen M. Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

King, Helen. The One-Sex Body on Trial. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

Montrose, Louis. “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 1–41.

Nummedal, Tara. “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations.” In Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, edited by Alisha Rankin and Elaine Leong, pp. 125–141. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2010.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Simons, Patricia. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Stolberg, Michael. “A Woman down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Isis 94/2 (2003): 274–299.

van de Pol, Lotte. The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam, trans. Liz Waters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 33

THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL

UTE LOTZ-HEUMANN

INTRODUCTION

THE subject of this chapter “The Natural and Supernatural” has, without doubt, been for decades a growth area in research on the Protestant Reformation and the Age of the Reformations in general. It is, moreover, closely intertwined with other major research areas in early modern historiography: the subject of popular and elite (or official and unofficial) religion;[1] the question of differentiation between religion and magic in the early modern period; the historiographical debate about differences between the confessional churches; and, last but not least, the question of Protestantism and desacralization/secularization, which in turn is closely related to research into the relationship between Protestantism and the development of modern science.

This chapter will, first, provide an overview of the historiography on the natural and supernatural, taking into account as far as possible the above-mentioned overlaps with other areas of research. Second, it will introduce a case study from my own research on healing waters in order to provide readers with an example of the complex relationship between the supernatural and the natural after the Reformation and the changes which occurred within Protestantism over the course of the early modern period. Finally, this chapter will sketch an agenda for future research on Protestantism and the natural and supernatural in the early modern period.

TERMINOLOGY

The subject of this chapter is, in many ways, an elusive quarry. While the historiography in this field and related fields is rich and vibrant, definitions are hard to come by. In the following, I will, in line with trends in recent historiography, employ a number of pragmatic definitions which purposefully reduce complexity in order to enable the usage of certain terms in different contexts.

While medieval and early modern theology, following Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, aspired to a clear differentiation between “natural,” “preternatural,” and “supernatural” phenomena, their definition of these terms and their views of the exact nature of the natural, the preternatural, and the supernatural remained heterogeneous and complex. However, there was consensus among theologians that the natural world was created by God, and that miracles effected by God and surpassing “the ordinary powers of nature”[2] were to be considered supernatural phenomena. These were to be distinguished from the “preternatural”—“marvels” and “wonders”—which were worked by “the agency of created beings,”[3] not God, and which “only appeared miraculous in the eyes of the beholder” because “their actual ‘natural’ causes remained cloaked and hidden from the view of imperfect human beings.”[4] In the sixteenth century, preternatural phenomena were increasingly ascribed to the activities of the Devil and his minions: “Although demons, astral intelligence, and other spirits might manipulate natural causes with superhuman dexterity and thereby work marvels, as mere creatures they could never transcend from the preternatural to the supernatural and work genuine miracles.”[5]

While theologians thus tried to define the barrier between the preternatural and the supernatural, these fine distinctions were not translated into everyday perceptions in early modern Europe. In the cosmology shared among a broad spectrum of the population, God, the Devil, and a whole gamut of creatures including demons, angels, ghosts, and fairies were perceived as acting in the world in various ways. Therefore, the term “supernatural” is here pragmatically employed to encompass anything that contemporaries perceived as having origins outside of the realm of human understanding and/or of being outside and beyond the workings of “natural causes.”[6]

Similarly, the terms “religion,” “magic,” and “superstition” continue to plague early modern historians. “Superstition,” with its pejorative overtones, is no longer employed as a historiographical term. Historians have become aware that the term “superstition” was used as a weapon in early modern Europe: While Catholics condemned Protestants as heretics, Protestant clergy used the term “superstition” to denounce both Catholicism and all kinds of popular religious practices.[7] In contrast, the terms “religion” and “magic” have remained part of the vocabulary of Reformation historians, but their definition is far from clear, and the term “magic” has been viewed with increasing skepticism. Defining “religion,” in the early modern period or generally, is an extremely difficult undertaking, and so it is no surprise that Reformation historiography has not really engaged with the problem, let alone agreed on a definition. Most early modern historians would probably be comfortable with Talal Assad’s argument “that there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.”[8] Religion is a deeply cultural phenomenon and therefore malleable. As a result, early modern historians have concentrated their efforts on defining “sub-systems” of religion: popular and elite religion, official and unofficial religion, local religion, and the question of the confessional churches and confessional identities.

Historians’ efforts to define “popular” or “unofficial” religion have had direct bearing on their definition of magic. As we shall see, older historiography largely associated “magic” with the religion of the people, with religious practices that were not associated with the official churches. In contrast, recent historiography has come to the conclusion that, as Kaspar von Greyerz has put it, “in the history of religion and piety, at least of the pre-Enlightenment period, it is by no means possible to distinguish clearly between religion, magic, and astrology (which, in the final analysis, was based on magical ideas).”[9] “Magic,” therefore, is rapidly losing ground as a useful term to define aspects of early modern beliefs and practices. While this helps historians to move away from distinctions that put artificial boundaries on a fluid system of religious practices among all social groups in early modern Europe, the terms most often used as replacements, like “popular religion” or “popular piety,” are not well-defined either—but this may be the price we pay for trying to encompass fluidity in historiographical terms which, ideally, should be more narrowly defined.

Current historiography agrees that different early modern social milieus and regions, both Protestant and Catholic, shared a basic understanding of the world as constantly and deeply influenced, indeed determined, by the supernatural. This influence of the “other world,” as Bob Scribner has called it, was a reality in “this world” and it could be read by paying attention to all manner of signs and portents.[10]

Protestants shared with Catholics the cosmological belief that the natural world was dependent for its subsistence on the sustaining power of the supernatural. Both confessions accepted that supernatural power could intervene to interrupt natural processes as happened in the case of miracles, while supernatural events could insert themselves into natural space and time.[11]

We will explore confessional differences later in this section and in the section on “Lutheran Miracle Wells in Comparative Perspective”, but the largely shared cosmology described by Scribner is borne out especially when looking at witchcraft beliefs in early modern Europe. Belief in witchcraft—in the power of witches to harm other people by supernatural means and do evil in the world—was universal in early modern Europe, both socially and geographically. “Popular” and “elite” culture put different “twists” on these beliefs, with popular culture being focused on the immediate harm—the maleficium—committed by a witch, and elite culture, especially in Central Europe, adding the element of the witches’ pact with the Devil to the mix.[12] But overall, early modern witchcraft beliefs are a powerful reminder that shared beliefs in the supernatural permeated early modern European societies.

OVERVIEW OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

Since the 1970s, research on the natural and supernatural in the Protestant Reformation has been closely intertwined with research on what many scholars still call, for lack of a better term, “popular religion.” The major starting point for this research area was Keith Thomas’s book on Religion and the Decline of Magic, first published in 1971 and based on examples from English history. Thomas started from the assumption that “magic is dominant when control of the environment is weak,”[13] or, put differently, that early modern people sought to cope with their suffering and the unpredictability of their daily lives by taking recourse to whatever form of supernatural solution was available to them. In this sense, Thomas argued, magic and religion had very similar functions for early modern people. While acknowledging that “even in the years after the Reformation it would be wrong to regard magic and religion as two opposed and incompatible systems of belief,”[14] Thomas drew a clear line between the attitudes of the official Protestant church and “the people” toward magic. He argued that the Reformation church rejected most of the “magic” of the medieval church and strove to suppress any type of “popular magic” as well. In addition, he identified a long-term development in which there was an increasing gulf between the elites for whom magic ceased “to be intellectually acceptable” in the seventeenth century, and the rural population which continued to look to magic as a solution for everyday problems long into the nineteenth century.[15]

Two major works, both published in 1978, on popular and elite religion and their relationship to the supernatural had a strong influence on the subject in general, although they focused on early modern Catholicism rather than Protestantism. Robert Muchembled and Peter Burke both focused on the long-term relationship between popular and elite culture and their respective relationships to the supernatural. Both Muchembled and Burke agreed with Thomas that Reformers were largely successful in imposing their concepts of religious doctrines and practices on the people by the eighteenth century, when the elites started to regard popular culture as ignorant and superstitious.[16] However, Muchembled and Burke described the relationship between popular and elite culture during the early modern period very differently. Similar to Thomas, Muchembled saw popular culture as a “magical universe.” “Peasants’ desperate fight for survival” resulted in “a magical orientation,” an “animist interpretation of the world,” and “a profusion of the sacred.” While Muchembled, like Thomas, acknowledged overlaps between elite and popular culture, he regarded “Christianized popular culture” as “clearly distinct from the Christianity of the elites and from learned thought.”[17] In contrast, Burke warned not to overestimate the distance between clergy and laity, and diagnosed a marriage between Counter Reformation and popular culture which allowed for a measure of negotiation.[18] Two other works on Catholic Europe, William Christian’s Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (1981) and David Gentilcore’s From Bishop to Witch (1992), further stressed the ability of the Catholic Church to accommodate lay beliefs and attitudes toward the supernatural in the localities.[19]

Thus, a research consensus emerged which held that Catholicism with its sacred places and objects, its rituals and devotions was better placed than Protestantism to absorb or at least accommodate popular supernatural beliefs and practices. Inversely, with regard to early modern Protestantism, historians identified a much larger gap between the beliefs and practices of the people, seen as more rooted in the supernatural, and prescribed Protestant forms of worship which sought to eliminate much of the “magic” of medieval Catholicism. As a result, Protestant clergy were faced with a “vigorous religious subculture” which they could only denounce, but not accommodate.[20]

However, there were also other trends in historiography that pointed toward a different interpretation of the relationship between Protestantism, especially Lutheranism, and popular rituals and understanding of the supernatural. In 1959, Ernst Walter Zeeden, in his Faith and Act: The Survival of Medieval Ceremonies in the Lutheran Reformation, drew attention to what he called the “survival” of Catholic traditions and devotional practices in sixteenth-century Lutheranism. Zeeden identified these “remnants” in several areas, e.g., in popular piety, in liturgical practices, in church ordinances, and in church law. Focusing on the sixteenth century, Zeeden was careful not to make claims about the exact meaning and (chronological) extent of these “remnants,” and he called for more research on the subject; but his choice of the terms “survival” and “remnants” of course implied that what “caused trouble for the Lutheran authorities” in the sixteenth century vanished or was extirpated at some later point.[21]

In the 1980s, Robert Scribner’s work on German Lutheranism and popular culture fundamentally changed the research on Protestantism and the supernatural. In numerous articles, Scribner explored different aspects of the subject and concluded that in Lutheranism “the hard-edged sacramentalism of Catholicism was not replaced but modified into a weaker and more ill-defined form of sacrality.”[22] As a result, Scribner insisted that—although “the radical impulse of Reformation thought, with its repudiation of purgatory, the cult of the saints, relics, pilgrimages” “left, in its most radical application, no space for sacred time, persons, places or things, only an inner-worldly realm of purely human action in which acts of piety had no transcendental efficacy”[23]—this was never actually the case in post-Reformation Lutheranism. Scribner argued that the “desacralization” and “disenchantment of the world” (Max Weber) which had been attributed to Protestantism by generations of historians simply did not take place in the early modern period. Rather, “sharp contrasts between Catholics and Protestant belief and culture may be overdrawn, implying that what we should be looking for are the stages and phases of modification, the subtle variations of analogy and difference that made them part of the same mental world, inhabiting a pre-scientific universe that had not yet experienced anything like ‘secularisation.’”[24]

More recently, Alexandra Walsham has, on the basis of her own research on England, argued in favor of thinking “in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization, disenchantment and re-enchantment.” Walsham points out that the early Reformers employed a “rhetoric of rationality and enlightenment” intent on purging medieval Catholicism, and that therefore “Protestant theology did in many respects constitute a significant and original assault upon the assumptions that buttressed the medieval economy of the sacred.” However, according to Walsham, with later generations of Protestants, “processes of adaptation that facilitated the rehabilitation of aspects of the medieval ‘economy or system of the sacred’ in a distinctly Protestant guise” occurred.[25]

The Reformation historiography of the last several decades has explored this question from various perspectives, so that we have a much fuller, but still far from complete, picture of the relationship between Protestantism and the supernatural. Historians are now aware of a wide range of Protestant engagement with (and acceptance of) the supernatural, in all regions of Europe and on all social levels. There is a rich historiography on German Lutheranism as well as English Protestantism, whereas we have, so far, only historiographical spotlights on the Reformed confessions, on Zwinglianism, and on Calvinism in different parts of Europe. Historians working on Lutheranism especially have shown how the concept of “adiaphora” (literally, “things indifferent” to the faith)—combined with an openness of Lutheran confessional culture to grant local churches a measure of independence in such “indifferent matters”—led to negotiations with and accommodations of beliefs in the supernatural.[26]

Robert Scribner, in his works on German Lutheranism, documented the “evangelical belief in especially sacred time, places and things, and even to some extent persons”[27] in detail. He points to practices, spaces, and objects in Lutheranism which served to identify and engage with the sacred. For example, Lutherans regularly performed various kinds of processions around the fields with the aim of seeking divine protection through hymns and prayers. Scribner analyzed the interpretation of incombustible Luther portraits as miracles as well as Luther’s depiction as a prophet in both popular and elite (clerical) culture, an aspect of Protestant sacrality that has since received considerable attention in historiography. By emphasizing that Protestants ascribed special powers to material objects like bibles or hymn books and to prayers, Scribner identified an important shift between Catholicism and Protestantism. While early modern Protestants were no longer supposed to make use of sacramentals like holy water (although they did—in defiance of their clergy), Protestantism developed its own objects of sacrality. Lutherans, for example, placed a bible and a hymn book in the cradle during the time before baptism, while godly Protestants in England used the Bible as “a quasi-magical” object to ward off the Devil.[28]

Protestants’ engagement with the supernatural was also intense with regard to heavenly signs and prodigies. “Wonders,” like monstrous births, deformed animals, comets, bleeding vines, floods, earthquakes, the appearance of armies in the sky, etc., were interpreted as portents. They appeared in cheap pamphlets, but were also carefully recorded by Protestant clergymen all over Europe. Such “wonders” were, to use Alexandra Walsham’s term, “sermons in the sky,”[29] and they were overwhelmingly seen as announcing retribution from God for the sins of his people. As Philip Soergel writes, wonders were “the media through which God expressed highly specific dissatisfactions with humankind.”[30] In a similar vein Lutheran clergymen of the late sixteenth century started to use popular astrology in their sermons to warn of divine anger.[31] Accordingly, these portents were used by Protestant preachers to admonish their flock to repent their sins and ask God for forgiveness.[32] For example, as Margo Todd has shown, Calvinists in Scotland resorted to collective fast days because they were convinced that this “appeasement of divine wrath” was “their only recourse.” In resorting to these measures, Calvinist authorities also created a sacred time and sacred action within their confessional church.[33]

Another important element in the Protestant relationship with the supernatural were popular prophets and visions, and it has become clear that these abounded, especially during times of crisis and war. For example, during the period of the English Civil War and Interregnum, popular prophets were a common phenomenon and women among the more radical groups like the Quakers were especially prominent as prophets during those years.[34] On the Continent, popular prophecies during the Thirty Years War spoke to the same concerns as the apparitions and “wonders” mentioned above; they sought to convince people that the war was a punishment from God and that they needed to repent.[35] One the most famous examples was that of Heinz Keil, a vintner in the village of Gerlingen in Württemberg, who in 1648 met an angel in his vineyard. Keil used the language of Protestant sermons to call for repentance in the light of the continued suffering of the Thirty Years War which he interpreted as a punishment from God. The authorities in Württemberg did not believe in the reality of Keil’s visions and punished him with banishment, but the villagers of Gerlingen and their pastor certainly did.[36] Jürgen Beyer has described Lutheran popular prophets in northern Germany and Scandinavia as a continuance of the medieval tradition of apparitions of the dead, but adapted to the new theology: “They now operated within Lutheran definitions of repentance … and saints were exchanged for angels, who were usually dressed in white.”[37]

Next to popular prophets, historians have identified the stylization of clergymen as prophets and the creation of Protestant martyrs as major traits of European Protestantism. In both cases, the process of defining these persons as inspired by God and as exemplars of their faith with special powers often came close to representing them as “holy persons.” The Scottish Reformer John Knox, a self-described prophet, said of himself in 1565: “God hath revealed unto me secrets unknown to the world.”[38] Other Protestant clergy, like the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher who was stylized as a prophet after his death, were also said to have predicted future events in their sermons through revelations from God.[39] As we have seen above, the depictions of Luther as a prophet, which included the sacrality of objects like his portraits, showed certain characteristics of the cult of the saints. John Foxe, the English martyrologist, included incombustible organs of English Protestant martyrs in his Book of Martyrs. Such depictions blur the line between a martyr of the true faith and a saint whose death is accompanied by a miracle.[40]

Another major area in which Protestants deeply engaged with the supernatural was apparitions like ghosts, angels, and fairies. For example, Margo Todd has shown that fairies remained an integral part of the belief system of Scottish Calvinism at all social levels, so much so that, while James I had labeled fairy belief diabolical, presbyters had decidedly mixed attitudes and rarely prosecuted fairy belief rigorously.[41] Ghosts posed a more difficult problem for Protestant clergy because Protestant theology negated the idea of purgatory; ghosts could therefore not be the souls of the dead returned to earth. The world of the dead and the world of the living were supposed to be strictly separated.[42] However, lay Protestants—and the clergy themselves—continued to experience ghostly apparitions, so the clergy had to account for them. For example, Bruce Gordon’s analysis of the Book of Ghosts [Gespensterbuch] by the Zurich minister Ludwig Lavater reveals that Lavater interpreted ghosts as angels who took the form of dead persons. These angels could be either good or malevolent.[43] Alexandra Walsham has pointed out that “theologians created a small but significant loophole” when they conceded that, like miracles, God might still send angels at critical moments, thereby providing a place for angelic apparitions within English Protestantism.[44] Peter Marshall’s work on England shows that ghosts and fairies were mostly reinterpreted as demonic apparitions. However, their association with the same spaces as medieval revenants, namely churchyards, perpetuated certain older assumptions about the supernatural within Protestant culture.[45]

This brings us to the question of sacred spaces in Protestantism, another element highlighted in recent research. Several scholars have shown that, although Luther had originally rejected the idea of the church building as a sacred space and argued that it was the community that worshipped God which counted, not where it did so, Lutheranism reinstated church consecrations and developed an understanding of churches as “houses of God” which were richly decorated in his honor.[46] However, it remains to be seen how sacred spaces were conceived in different contexts and regions of Protestant Europe and how historians should interpret contemporary attitudes and actions toward these spaces. Bridget Heal has argued that, even though the ecclesiastical spaces in the Lutheran city of Nuremberg in Germany were left largely intact after the Reformation, “images and altars became little more than a backdrop for the performance of the Lutheran liturgy.”[47] Within Calvinism, there is a striking tension between the fact that the clergy emphatically stated that church buildings and cemeteries were no longer regarded as sacred spaces while, at the same time, protecting these spaces from profanation, and, as in Calvinist Scotland, giving in to the demand for burial in the kirk by the laity.[48] Similarly, Alexandra Walsham, in her book on The Reformation of the Landscape, points out that, while English Reformers destroyed monasteries and pilgrimage sites as sacred spaces in the landscape, they still saw the physical world as an instrument “of divine education and warning”[49]—which brings us back to the prodigies discussed above.

Miracles remained part and parcel of early modern Protestant belief and practice—a fact that recent research has made abundantly clear. The first generation of Reformers, including Luther and Calvin, had argued that the age of miracles was in the past. In their views, the occurrence of miracles had been largely restricted to the times of the Old and New Testaments, and the miracles performed by Jesus had been necessary to establish the Christian faith. Now that the truth had been revealed, new miracles were, in effect, superfluous and therefore God chose not to employ them.[50] Catholic miracles were, of course, described as “a silly superstition, madness, barbarity, and idolatry.”[51] However, there was never any doubt that God could disrupt the laws of nature to perform miracles if he so chose and, therefore, miracles remained a possibility. In fact, miracles became a more common occurrence in continental Lutheranism starting in the later sixteenth century.

Protestant miracles were largely associated with healing, such as the belief that communal prayer worked to effect miracles of spontaneous recovery from a seemingly incurable disease or bodily deformation. For example, Renate Dürr has analyzed the miracle cure of a woman named Katharina Hummel in the town of Leonberg in Württemberg in 1644. Hummel recovered from a birth defect and was able to walk again after a miracle occurred when the congregation was praying. The local clergy embraced this event as a Lutheran miracle and as a sign of hope in difficult times.[52] In addition, Protestant healing miracles were often connected with persons or places that were perceived as channels through which God performed the miracles, thereby also giving those persons or spaces an ambiguous status through their association with the sacred/supernatural. Examples of such persons were the English monarchs whose touch continued to be regarded as thaumaturgic, healing such diseases as scrofula.[53] Examples of places where healing miracles occurred were, above all, healing wells.

LUTHERAN MIRACLE WELLS IN COMPARATIVE CONTEXT

Lutheran miracle wells were a common phenomenon in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, which has so far received little attention in the historiography on religious culture. The Lutheran laity as well as Lutheran clergymen during this period embraced the concept of miraculous healing waters. In this section, these miracle wells will be analyzed as an example in order to explore the definitions of the natural and the supernatural, of the specific boundaries constructed between Lutheran and other interpretations of healing wells, and of the negotiations between official and unofficial religion inherent in this phenomenon.[54]

In 1556, in the place that later became known as the German spa town of Pyrmont, situated in the Lutheran county of Spiegelberg, a healing water was discovered and quickly acquired a reputation for miraculous cures. As a result, a spontaneous pilgrimage to this miracle well started, and for two years, thousands of people from all over Europe came to Pyrmont. While this event was already publicized to a considerable degree, the number of miracle wells in Lutheran territories rose steadily in the seventeenth century, and another miracle well almost one hundred years later, in 1646‒1647, which occurred in a village named Hornhausen in the Lutheran bishopric of Halberstadt, received even more attention: almost forty broadsheets and pamphlets have come down to us.

What was a healing water in the early modern period and how did it come to be defined as a Lutheran miracle well? Or, put more generally: How and why was the boundary between the natural and the supernatural defined? This was a widely debated question in early modern Germany. The healing quality of a specific well could only be determined by successful attribution and social consensus, that is, somebody had to claim that a specific well had healing qualities and then a sufficient number of people had to agree to that opinion for it to have social impact and to result in social practices, like using the water to treat ailments. But the healing quality in itself was far from the only question that mattered. It was followed by other questions: How or through whom or what did the healing qualities come into existence? Although contemporaries agreed until very far into the eighteenth century that—just as nature in general—all healing waters were God-given, this basic assumption still resulted in very different attributions of the exact nature of how healing waters came into existence and how they worked. In other words, although there was no purely “natural” or “supernatural” interpretation of healing waters, the “mixture” between “the natural” and “the supernatural” resulted in a spectrum of possible views. In my larger study, I have identified three basic interpretations of healing waters in early modern Germany, which are not to be understood as stable and unchanging entities, but they can be shown to employ similar understandings of the “natural” or “supernatural” origins of a healing well over a longer period of time.

Mostly physicians and some laymen engaged in a dominantly medical, or more specifically, balneological discourse. This representation of healing waters was decisively influenced by the first works of balneology, the study of the therapeutic use of springs, which had appeared in late medieval Italy. While this was certainly not a secularized representation in any modern sense of the word, it is striking that medical works generally give the influence of God a very specific place—and that place is in the preface. Authors describe healing waters as God-given in their prefaces or sometimes in the first sentence of a chapter, and then go on to write whole books about the natural origins of healing waters, about their healing qualities derived from mineral and other content, and about their proper application. These works stress observation and experience as a means of determining the specific healing qualities and medical applications of waters. For example, in his Booklet for Spa Visitors [Badenfahrtbüchlein] of 1560 Pictorius uses the dedication to note that healing waters are part of what he calls God’s “pharmacy,” but he warns that they can only work their good if proper dietary rules for their use are followed.[55]

In contrast to this, the Catholic interpretation of healing waters was fundamentally different: In Catholic discourse and practice, healing waters were defined as holy wells at pilgrimage sites and were therefore deeply integrated into the fabric of Catholic worship. As a consequence, miracles were not ascribed to a holy well as such, but to the saint who gave the well its name. A Catholic holy well did not stand alone; rather it was woven into a whole structure of the holy, encompassing, among other things, the relics and the statue of the saint.

Lutheran miracle wells were constructed in relation and contrast to both the spa waters as well as Catholic pilgrimage sites. The Lutheran interpretation of healing waters is very instructive when trying to gauge the negotiation and renegotiation of the understanding of the “supernatural” in the early modern period. In fact, the Lutheran interpretation of healing waters and miracle wells reflects the development of Lutheran attitudes toward miracles as described above. In 1532, Andreas Althamer voiced the opinion that “Faith must do it, not the holy-water spring, but faith and trust in God through Jesus Christ.”[56] And yet, miraculous wells became part and parcel of the Lutheran belief system—both “popular” and “elite”—starting in the later sixteenth century. What is more, these wells were publicized by Lutheran clergymen who accepted that cures worked through the wells were miracles. They enthusiastically embraced the terms “miracle” and “miracle well.” In their pamphlets and in the prayers they wrote specifically for use at these wells, they frequently drew parallels to biblical miracles. Metobius, in his 1556 pamphlet on Pyrmont, asserts:

Nowadays there are people who may say that in our times the almighty God does no longer show great miracles to mankind as he did in the time of Jesus Christ, his beloved son. But if they looked at this miracle, they would no longer be so ignorant about God and his miracles.[57]

So how did Lutheran pastors of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries re-sacralize their own religion, moving away from the potentially desacralizing tendency of early Lutheranism? While Lutheran miracle wells can be identified all over northern Germany during the early modern period, it is very striking that their heyday came toward the end of the Thirty Years War and in the years after it ended, when suffering was at its height. During this time period, several miracle wells were enthusiastically publicized by Lutheran clergymen, the most famous being the Hornhausen wells in 1646‒1647. The argumentative structures used in these Lutheran representations were fundamentally different from those in the medical discourse and the Catholic discourse of holy wells. In the Lutheran writings on the subject God permeates the texts. In this context, the Lutherans had to walk a fine line. On the one hand, they warned people not to “honor the well as god”[58] or give any credit to saints as mediators, but on the other hand they emphasized that the healing powers of the waters came directly from God and God alone. Lutheran clergy were, on the one hand, eager to stop what they considered superstitious (or Catholic) attitudes and practices of their flock, but on the other hand keen to give these wells and their perceived miracles a Protestant definition.

In contrast to the medical discourse, Lutheran miracle wells, just as Catholic holy wells, were not limited in the cures they could perform. Obviously, the definition of “miracle well” meant that the water of a well was seen as working against any illness in all people who approached the well with the right, i.e., pious, attitude. While medical pamphlets sought to define indications by experience, a miracle well was by definition a universal healing instrument. While medical pamphlets defined “the right attitude” to approach a healing well in terms of contemporary dietetics, the right attitude to approach a miracle well was as a pious believer. When a water source faltered, either by not performing a cure or by (temporarily) disappearing altogether, the medical discourse looked for practical faults in the treatment or to natural or practical explanations, e.g., earthquakes or the disturbance of wells through neighboring activities like mining. In contrast, the Lutheran discourse blamed the individual believer for approaching the miracle well with an impious attitude when an individual cure failed, and the community of believers for not thanking God sufficiently for his grace when the well failed altogether.

On the one hand, Lutheran miracle wells exhibit the confessional differences which characterized early modern Europe and which the clergy constantly tried to assert. Lutheran miracle wells obviously functioned in the context of a negotiation between the laity, who had an affinity toward sacramentalism, and the clergy who were willing to accept the wells as miraculous, but who tried to keep these miracles firmly within the confines of the basic tenets of the Lutheran faith. On the other hand, Lutheran miracle wells exhibit the religious culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe beyond confessional divisions. In spite of the rejection of Catholic saints and pilgrimages by Lutheran theologians, both Lutherans and Catholics firmly believed in the miracles worked through their respective wells.

At the same time, this “religious culture” already had a strong counterpoint in the medical representation of healing waters which insisted on the natural origins of the waters, on their limited healing qualities, and on experience and scientific tests. The Lutheran discourse therefore had to engage not only with the Catholic tradition of holy wells, but also with the medical representation of healing waters. Lutheran clergymen are railing in their pamphlets against spa physicians and the scientific exploration of healing waters. For example, Joachim Titelius, the Lutheran pastor of Polzin in Pomerania vehemently defended his miracle well against “scientists [‘Naturkünder’] and physicians.” He argues: “And while natural causes may be partly responsible that such wells and waters have such great powers … they are not simply and only natural things. Rather, God’s miraculous power and effectiveness is added to them and that’s why we often see cures that nature itself cannot perform.” And he concludes that miracle wells are “definitely not a natural thing alone, but that they are to be considered God’s miracles.”[59] Similarly, a clergyman called Georg Christoph Zimmermann defended in 1732 the well in Creilsheim in the territory of Brandenburg-Ansbach against “the forwardness of those who think they are smart and whose minds are aiming high; and who therefore search for the minerals that such a well contains.” “Although,” he says, “they can speak with reason about this, the most difficult questions remain unsolved because God alone knows everything about these waters and gives them their miraculous powers.”[60]

All in all, we can identify two interpretations that were relatively stable in the early modern period, the medical discourse and the Catholic discourse, while the Lutheran discourse was characterized by considerable swings: While opening the door for a “desacralized” interpretation of healing waters through the repudiation of miracles (and by implication of holy wells) during the Reformation era, it experienced a “re-sacralization” in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when popular demands and clerical interests combined to establish a specifically Lutheran representation of miracle wells. This was a relatively short-lived phenomenon, however. For, in contrast to the Catholic holy wells, which were firmly—and therefore also invulnerably—integrated into an established religious tradition, the fact that Lutheran miracle wells were a stand-alone phenomenon also made them more vulnerable and brought them into direct competition with the medical representation of healing waters. At the same time, the medical discourse became more “secularized” in that in the later eighteenth century references to the water as God’s gift become less and less frequent until they are dropped altogether. As a result, therefore, by the later eighteenth century, the interpretation of healing waters is almost completely dominated by medical and spa literature. While Catholic practices and the related discourse continue to this day as an inner-religious phenomenon, Lutheran clergymen receded from the subject, and Lutheran miracle wells, which had always been perceived as transient, ceased to exist.

These findings on early modern German healing waters still need to be set in a larger European context. So far, research on spas in England and Denmark after the Reformation, by Alexandra Walsham and Jens Johansen respectively, have led to slightly, but possibly significantly different results than what we have discussed above for Germany. While Protestant clergy in these two countries focused on the wells as gifts from God, English clergy were somewhat more ambiguous about the exact nature of the cures effected; they were occasionally willing to call them “miracles.” Danish clergy, on the other hand, stressed that God acted through nature, and tried to prevent “superstitious” practices at the wells by introducing Lutheran “spring sermons.”[61] Whether these are just differences by degree or whether these differences point toward more fundamental divergences in the interpretations of healing waters in Protestant Europe is an open question which requires further research.

CONCLUSION

The current historiographical situation and the brief analysis above of Lutheran miracle wells in early modern Germany reinforce a number of findings in recent research on the one hand and draw attention to a variety of still unresolved problems in historiography on the other.

The historiography surveyed here as well as the case study on Lutheran miracle wells confirm that, in the beginning, the Protestant Reformation did exhibit a tendency to desacralize the world, and, if not minimize, at least reduce the realm of the supernatural by rejecting many Catholic rituals and sacramentals. The historiography also agrees that this process never came to fruition. Rather, over time, Protestantism, and especially Lutheranism and the established church in England, made allowances for the continued presence of the supernatural in the lived experiences of the laity and the clergy. These findings also confirm Alexandra Walsham’s thesis that it may be helpful to think “in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization”[62] instead of looking for one process of desacralization or secularization in early modern history. However, in light of uncertainties in current historiography over how exactly to define and identify processes of de- or re-sacralization and the enduring unsolved question whether, ultimately, there was a process of secularization in the West, these issues require much further research.

For example, recent historiography has asserted the role of religion in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific development, and especially the role of Lutheran clergymen as physico-theologians who regarded nature and natural laws as the rational proof of God’s existence. Belief in the supernatural and scientific methodology was not a contradiction as such.[63] However, the case of the Lutheran miracle wells reveals that Lutheran clergy, when directly confronted with the increase in medical and scientific research into healing waters, fought to retain their supernatural interpretation of the waters’ healing powers. Sixteenth-century Lutheran Reformers who rejected miracles and their Lutheran colleagues who embraced miracle wells later on seem to have as little in common as the defenders of Lutheran miracle wells of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the physico-theologians. What is missing in current historiography is a clearer differentiation between the different contexts of such interpretations, of the larger social and discursive fields in which individuals or groups situated their attributions and interpretations. Who fought with whom over the interpretation of a particular phenomenon as natural or supernatural?

As the examples gathered from current historiography above have shown, continental Lutheranism and Church of England Protestantism are currently the best researched fields, with pockets of research on Reformed areas like Calvinist Scotland. While there were, indeed, no Calvinist miracle wells in post-Reformation Germany, it seems unlikely that Calvinism was the only Protestant confession that successfully suppressed the supernatural and therefore the last bastion of the Weber thesis in early modern Europe. In fact, historians increasingly argue that Calvinists also reinterpreted the supernatural in the light of their own doctrine and as proof have pointed to Calvinist miracles which were propagated by Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion.[64] However, the status of Calvinism and the Reformed confessions in all of this is not yet sufficiently researched and, as a result, still ill-defined. Clearly, more research is necessary before we can adequately describe the relationship between Calvinism, popular religion, and the supernatural. In addition, this kind of research needs to be extended to early modern radical groups like the Anabaptists and the Quakers as well. Ultimately, we need to develop a comparative approach, gauging in detail how different early modern churches and religious communities and their flock related to the natural and the supernatural.

Historiography has certainly come a long way from the previous assumption that only Catholicism was able to accommodate a wider array of beliefs in the supernatural. Protestants of different stripes have been shown to be less strict in their rejection of “Catholic remnants” (to use Zeeden’s terms) and therefore more able to accommodate popular beliefs. In this context, we need to more systematically combine research into Protestant popular piety and its need for sacramentals with research into the clergy’s accommodation of such popular beliefs. So far, Lutheran ministers have mostly been seen as being determined, but largely unsuccessful, in their attempt to enforce the new Lutheran standards of belief, which repudiated Catholic sacramentalism, among the population. Scribner assumed that Protestant pastors did not give in to “the popular desire for … sacred power,”[65] but Lutheran miracle wells and other examples from recent historiography show that Protestant ministers actually did accommodate their flock.

As part of such an integrative approach we need to move away—and we clearly are in the process of doing so—from earlier assumptions about “remnants” of medieval Catholicism or the idea that frustrated Protestant clergymen acted inconsistently with their beliefs when they “gave in” to popular demands for the supernatural.[66] The research surveyed in this chapter is increasingly distancing itself from these descriptions and instead taking historiographical trends seriously which, in areas like colonial studies, have long argued that something new and genuine could be created through processes of negotiation, accommodation, and appropriation. Seen in this light, it is worth asking whether the negotiations between “popular” and “elite (clerical)” understandings of the supernatural within early modern Protestantism should not be regarded as creating new, deeply Protestant (or rather, Lutheran, Calvinist, Zwinglian, etc.) concepts of the relationship between the supernatural and the natural. In close relation to this, Protestant clergymen should no longer be seen as frustrated “elites” grudgingly giving in to popular demands, but as active participants in these processes of adaptation and appropriation and deeply imbedded in an early modern cosmology that was constantly engaging with the supernatural world.

This brings us to another major desideratum in the history of the relationship between Protestantism and the supernatural, inherent in our continued use of the terms “popular/elite” and “official/unofficial” religion. In order to improve our understanding of what the supernatural meant in different Protestant traditions and contexts, we also need more research into different social milieus. While crude assumptions, e.g., that “popular” religion always had a stronger affinity toward the supernatural than “elite” religion, have long been overcome in Reformation research, the persistence of this social dichotomy, even as a convenient shorthand, prevents historians from exploring in detail how different social groups (down to the individual) defined their relationship to the supernatural and how they interacted with different supernatural phenomena in practice.

And finally, even if, as I argued at the beginning of this chapter, more fluid and less well-defined terms have helped recent research to identify as many aspects as possible of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in early modern Europe, we cannot give up on trying to define our terms more precisely. Of course, “religion,” “magic,” and “superstition” were and are all in the eyes of the beholder, and an early modern wise woman who combined a talisman, an herbal concoction, and a verse from the Bible to bring relief to a suffering child throws the hybridity of early modern lived experience into stark relief. However, historians also need to engage with questions of long-term developments and comparisons in time and space, and it behooves them to develop well-defined research terms for these purposes.

NOTES

1. See, e.g., Kathryn Edwards, “Popular Religion,” in David M. Whitford (ed.), Reformation and Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008), 331–354; Craig Harline, “Official Religion—Popular Religion in Recent Historiography of the Catholic Reformation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990): 239–262.

2. Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93–124, quotation 96.

3. Ibid., quotation 97.

4. Alexandra Walsham, “Miracles in Post-Reformation England,” in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 273–306, quotation 285.

5. Daston, “Marvelous Facts,” quotation 98.

6. See ibid., quotation 98; see also Walsham, “Miracles,” 286.

7. See Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

8. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), quotation 29.

9. Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), quotation 6.

10. Robert Scribner, “Elements of Popular Belief,” in Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden, Boston, MA, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 2001), 52–82, here 56–59.

11. Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation: From Sacramental World to Moralised Universe,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and Robert Scribner (eds.), Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 75–92, quotation 78.

12. See e.g., Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York and London: Viking, 1996); Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (ed.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffling, 2007).

13. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), quotation 648.

14. Ibid., quotation 267.

15. Ibid., quotation 663, see 663–668.

16. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 241; Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 107, 179, 185 (original French ed.: Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe–XVIIIe siècles) [Paris: Flammarion, 1978]).

17. Muchembled, Popular Culture, quotations 61, 106, 101, and 13.

18. See Burke, “Popular Piety,” in John W. O’Malley (ed.), Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research (St. Louis, MO: Center for Reformation Research, 1988), 113–131, here 117–123.

19. See William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992).

20. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), quotation 303; see also Geoffrey Parker, “Success and Failure during the First Century of the Reformation,” Past & Present 136 (1992): 43–82.

21. Ernst Walter Zeeden, Faith and Act: The Survival of Medieval Ceremonies in the Lutheran Reformation (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2012, originally published in German in 1959), quotation 113; see Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1965).

22. Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation,” quotation 76.

23. Scribner, “Elements of Popular Belief,” quotation 79.

24. Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation,” quotation 86.

25. Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” Historical Journal 51 (2008): 497–528, quotations 527, 505, 506, and 516.

26. See e.g., Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Renate Dürr, “Aneignungsprozesse in der lutherischen Kirchweihe (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert),” in Irene Dingel and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds.), Entfaltung und zeitgenössische Wirkung der Reformation im europäischen Kontext / Dissemination and Contemporary Impact of the Reformation in a European Context (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2015), 318–344.

27. Scribner, “The Impact of the Reformation on Daily Life,” in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit. Leben—Alltag—Kultur (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), 316–343, quotation 330.

28. See e.g., ibid.; Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation”; Andrew Cambers, “Demonic Possession, Literacy and ‘Superstition’ in Early Modern England,” Past & Present 202 (2009): 3–35, quotation 33.

29. See Walsham, “Sermons in the Sky: Apparitions in Early Modern Europe,” History Today (April 2001): 56–63.

30. Philip M. Soergel, Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), quotation 30; see also Robin Barnes, Astrology and Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Ken Kurihara, Celestial Wonders in Reformation Germany (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014).

31. See C. Scott Dixon, “Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany,” History 84 (1999): 403–418.

32. See, e.g. Walsham, “Sermons in the Sky”; Walsham, “Miracles,” 288ff.; Daston, “Marvelous Facts,” 102.

33. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), quotations 349 and 360.

34. See Phyllis Mack, “Women as Prophets during the English Civil War,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 19–45; Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); see also Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997).

35. See e.g. John Theibault, “Jeremiah in the Village: Prophecy, Preaching, Pamphlets, and Penance in the Thirty Years War,” Central European History 27 (1994): 441–460.

36. See David Warren Sabean, “A Prophet in the Thirty Years War: Penance as a Social Metaphor,” in Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 61–93; Norbert Haag, “Frömmigkeit und sozialer Protest: Hans Keil, der Prophet von Gerlingen,” Zeitschift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 48 (1989): 127–141.

37. See Jürgen Beyer, “A Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context,” in Robert Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds.), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 166–182, quotation 168; see also Beyer, “Lutheran Popular Prophets in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Performance of Untrained Speakers,” ARV: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 51 (1995): 63–86; Beyer, “Lutherische Propheten in Deutschland und Skandinavien im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert: Entstehung und Ausbreitung eines Kulturmusters zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit,” in Robert Bohn (ed.), Europa in Scandinavia: Kulturelle und soziale Dialoge in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994), 35–55.

38. Cited in Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 131; see also Dale Johnson, “Serving Two Masters: John Knox, Scripture and Prophecy,” in Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (eds.), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 133–153.

39. See Lotz-Heumann, “ ‘The Spirit of Prophecy Has Not Wholly Left the World’: The Stylisation of Archbishop James Ussher as a Prophet,” in Parish and Naphy, Religion and Superstition, 119–132.

40. See also Walsham, “Miracles,” 294.

41. See Todd, “Fairies, Egyptians and Elders: Multiple Cosmologies in Post-Reformation Scotland,” in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds.), The Impact of the European Reformation: Princes, Clergy and People (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 189–208.

42. See Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 178.

43. See Bruce Gordon, “Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation,” in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 87–109.

44. Walsham, “Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England,” Past & Present 208 (2010): 77–130, quotation 129; see also Laura Sangha, Angels and Belief in England, 1480–1700 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012).

45. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Marshall, “Deceptive Appearances: Ghosts and Reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” in Parish and Naphy, Religion and Superstition, 188–208; Marshall, “Protestants and Fairies in Early-Modern England,” in Scott C. Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Burington, VA: Ashgate, 2009), 139–160.

46. See Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Dürr, “Aneignungsprozesse.”

47. See Bridget Heal, “Sacred Image and Sacred Space in Lutheran Germany,” in Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 39–59, quotation 59.

48. See Coster and Spicer, “Introduction: The Dimensions of Sacred Space in Reformation Europe,” in Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, 1–16, here 6; see also the chapters by Christian Grosse and Andrew Spicer in the present volume; Todd, The Culture of Protestantism, 332–333.

49. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), quotation 337.

50. See Soergel, “From Legends to Lies: Protestant Attacks on Catholic Miracles in Late Reformation Germany,” Fides et Historia 21 (1989): 21–29 with reference to Johannes Marbach (1571); Daston, “Marvelous Facts,” 101; Walsham, “Miracles,” 284.

51. See Dürr, “Der schwierige Umgang mit dem schönen Wunder: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Wunderheilung aus dem Jahre 1644,” in Weib und Seele: Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität evangelischer Frauen in Württemberg (Ludwigsburg: Landeskirchliches Museum, 1998), 89–95, quotation 89 with reference to Johann Conrad Dannhauer, Epistoliographia (Strasbourg, 1683).

52. See Dürr, “Der schwierige Umgang”; Dürr, “Prophetie und Wunderglauben—zu den kulturellen Folgen der Reformation,” Historische Zeitschrift 281 (2005): 3–32.

53. See Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World,’” 511; Walsham, “Miracles,” 300ff.

54. See for the following in more detail: Lotz-Heumann, “Repräsentationen von Heilwassern und -quellen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Badeorte, lutherische Wunderquellen und katholische Wallfahrten,” in Matthias Pohlig, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Vera Isaiasz, Ruth Schilling, Heike Bock, and Stefan Ehrenpreis (eds.), Säkularisierungen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Methodische Probleme und empirische Fallstudien (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2008), 277–330; Lotz-Heumann, “Finding a Cure: Representations of Holy Wells and Healing Waters in Early Modern Germany,” in Kaspar von Greyerz, Silvia Flubacher, and Philipp Senn (eds.), Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Geschichte des Wissens im Dialog / Connecting Science and Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 233–253; Lotz-Heumann, “Lutherische Pfarrer, Wunderbrunnen und Volksreligiosität: Aneignungs- und Vermittlungsprozesse im europäischen Vergleich,” in Dingel and Lotz-Heumann, Entfaltung und zeitgenössische Wirkung, 197–213.

55. Georg Pictorius, Badenfartbüchlein. Gantz kurtzer bericht von allerhand einfachten/ und acht und dreissig componierter mineralischen teutsches lands wildbädern/ … (Frankfurt a.M. 1560 [repr. Freiburg i.B. 1980]), 9 [Aii r].

56. Quoted in Cameron, “For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed? Religion for the People in Early Modern Europa,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series 8 (1998): 165–187, here 175.

57. Reprinted in Hermann Engel, “Die Schriften von 1556 über die Pyrmonter Heilquellen,” in Andreas Lilge (ed.), Bad Pyrmont—Tal der sprudelnden Quellen: Zur Geschichte der Pyrmonter Heil- und Mineralquellen (Pyrmont: Stadt Bad Pyrmont, 1992), 29–45, quotation 40.

58. Ordinance for the Pyrmont Well [“Brunnenordnung”], repr. in Alfred Martin, Deutsches Badewesen in vergangenen Tagen (Jena, 1906), quotation 293.

59. Joachim Titelius, Einfältiger Bericht/ Von denen Heyl- oder Gesund-Brunnen/ absonderlich von Poltzin/ … (Stargard: Ernst, 1693), A2 r–A3 r.

60. Georg Christoph Zimmermann, Hygia Creilsheimensis, Oder Creilsheimischer Heyl- und Wunder-Bronnen/ Durch Gottes Gnade Anno 1701 entsprungen/ … (Creilsheim 1732, Widmungsrede).

61. See Chr. V. Johansen, “Holy Springs and Protestantism in Early Modern Denmark: A Medical Rationale for a Religious Practice,” Medical History 41 (1997): 59–69; Walsham, “Sacred Spas? Healing Springs and Religion in Post-Reformation Britain,” in Heal and Grell, The Impact of the European Reformation, 210–230.

62. Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World,’” quotation 527; see Pohlig, Lotz-Heumann, Isaiasz, Schilling, Bock, and Ehrenpreis (eds.), Säkularisierungen in der Frühen Neuzeit.

63. See e.g., Anne-Charlott Trepp, Von der Glückseligkeit alles zu wissen: Die Erforschung der Natur als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2009); Sara J. Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

64. See, e.g., Moshe Sluhovsky, “Calvinist Miracles and the Concept of the Miraculous in Sixteenth-Century Huguenot Thought,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 19 (1995): 5–25; Nicolas Balzamo, “L’impossible désenchantement du monde: Les protestants face aux miracles (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 156 (2010): 393–413.

65. Robert Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic and the ‘Disenchantment of the World,’” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–494, quotation 484.

66. See e.g., Gordon, “Malevolent Ghosts,” 108; Johnson, “Serving Two Masters: John Knox,” 145.

FURTHER READING

Beyer, Jürgen. “A Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context.” In Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800, edited by Robert Scribner and Trevor Johnson, pp. 166–182. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.

Coster, Will and Andrew Spicer (eds.) Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Gordon, Bruce. “Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation.” In The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, pp. 87–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Marshall, Peter. “Deceptive Appearances: Ghosts and Reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.” In Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, edited by Helen Parish and William G. Naphy, pp. 188–208. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Scribner, Robert. Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper. Leiden, Boston, MA, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 2001.

Soergel, Philip M. Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

Todd, Margo. “Fairies, Egyptians and Elders: Multiple Cosmologies in Post-Reformation Scotland.” In The Impact of the European Reformation: Princes, Clergy and People, edited by Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell, pp. 189–208. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Walsham, Alexandra. “Miracles in Post-Reformation England.” In Signs, Wonders, Miracles: Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church, edited by Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, pp. 273–306. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005.

Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” Historical Journal 51 (2008): 497–528.

CHAPTER 34

COMMERCE AND CONSUMPTION

CHRISTINE R. JOHNSON

INTRODUCTION

AS the Reformers reshaped believers’ understanding of their relationship with God, they also promoted new kinds of engagement with material goods. Contemplating the relationship between the tangible and the holy had a long tradition in the Christian West, and some elements of earlier approaches persisted in Protestant practices. New theological currents combined with an increasingly sophisticated, interconnected, and diverse economy in the sixteenth century to pose new questions and make possible new patterns.[1] Careful and imaginative research by scholars in the history of religion, commerce, art, and culture has revealed the array of profound and prosaic responses thereby unleashed. The following discussion considers both mainstream churches, e.g. Lutheran and Calvinist, and marginalized groups, e.g. Anabaptists, Quakers, Pietists, concentrating on areas of cross-confessional concern (although not necessarily agreement) and tracing developments from the initial Reformation through the middle of the eighteenth century. Amid the polyphony of Protestant voices one constant emerges: a focus on everyday actions. A pious life within a material world was defined by what one did, why one did it, how one dressed, where one worshipped, and when one repaid debts. In their conscious pursuit of spiritual gain through their attitudes and actions toward the material, early modern Protestants produced far more significant and better-documented results than Max Weber’s proposed connection between the “Protestant Ethic” and the “Spirit of Capitalism.” The goal of this essay is both to acknowledge the Weber thesis’ formative role and to demonstrate its obsolescence.

THE WEBER THESIS

The German sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (first formulated in 1904–1905), suggested that the apparent predominance of Protestants in industrial and financial capitalism might have historical, indeed theological, roots. Part historical survey, part construction of an “ideal type” of Protestantism that relied heavily on the preaching of seventeenth-century English Puritan divines, Weber’s description of the “Protestant Ethic” posited the following connections: believing themselves apart from a transcendent God and surrounded by a meaningless set of human relationships and material things, believers sought reassurance that God had predestined them for election. Unable to find relief through magical or sacramental means, believers looked to unceasing labor at a calling and the resulting success, both of which displayed God’s glory, as signs of God’s salvific grace. This systematization of human activity differed from monastic asceticism in its embeddedness in an everyday life that Protestantism upheld as the only proper site for human endeavor and simultaneously as a landscape of temptations to be overcome with the strict rationalization of consumption habits to serve God’s glory, not personal pleasure.[2]

Weber remained undecided about whether the Protestant ethic produced the modern capitalist ethos or only consistently demonstrated “elective affinities” (Wahlverwandtschaften) with it,[3] but his conviction that seemingly incompatible things, such as God and Mammon, could instead be mutually supporting has provided much scope for scholarly investigations. The stage is thus set to bring the relationship between the Protestant Reformations and the use and exchange of money and goods into a new light.

MATERIAL GOODS

In the medieval period, the incompatibility of heavenly aspirations and worldly involvement had found physical expression in the establishment of monasteries and the substitution of spiritual kinship for family blood-ties. Yet such separation from “the world,” as Leonard Little explained, did not remove clerics from the guardianship of material culture; with God seen as the proper, indeed required, recipient of worldly splendor, the world soon found them, through gifts of lands, buildings, ritual objects, and everything necessary for their maintenance. In the thirteenth century, the new mendicant orders (especially the Franciscans) took deliberate poverty into the world, relying on begging to satisfy daily needs. This visible want rendered the friars’ dependence on the laity all the more evident, as the friars’ lack of ownership was meant to induce charitable donations, not starvation and nakedness.[4] Thus, the baseline questions were not if but how and why to engage with the material world. The use of the material as an avenue for the spiritual was an essential feature of late medieval piety.

The Protestant spiritual reordering dismantled this previous web of meanings. As Reformers moved God to a heaven reachable only by his grace, they challenged the use of the material as a conduit to and from the spiritual. The title page of an early Reformation pamphlet, the Complaint against the Eaters of the Dead, graphically portrays this severing of material gifts and spiritual possibilities, showing Catholic clerical personnel greedily consuming a gutted human corpse. The accompanying poem accuses the clergy of living off the bequests of the dying which, since these gifts are unable to affect the soul’s fate, circulate merely within earthly relationships, and thus are as unnatural and gruesome as eating the dead.[5] In Protestant churches, gifts of beeswax candles, elaborate coverings, and other church ornaments were no longer solicited or recognized,[6] and gifts to God were ultimately redirected to an earthly purpose (see section titled “Charity”). Furthermore, religious images and artifacts lost their claim as particular sites of the holy. At best, images of holy figures were merely a pale reflection of the immaterial spirituality they were supposed to represent. At worst, they were a temptation to idolatry (see Chapter 29 by Bridget Heal in this volume). Relics, which bore no didactic purpose and whose link to the divine rested solely on physical communication, were uniformly rejected.

With the mediating role of the clergy negated and the sacrifice of the Mass condemned, Reformers also had little use for many other ritual objects that were valued parts of Catholic worship. The “blinde worshipers” condemned by George Joye thought they should honor God with “golde/perle/precious stones veluete clothe of golde, &c … & all the costly pleasant externe rytes and ceremonijs as sencings processions that can be deuised for to please great me[n]‌.”[7]

Even though, in Calvin’s formulation, “our God neither drinks nor eats, and therefore has no need of plates or cups,” the proper worship of God did require substantial consumption by mainstream Protestant congregations.[8] The principal expenditures were designed to create and promote the visible church as the gathering of the faithful. The presence of God was manifested through his Word and the performance of the sacraments of baptism and Communion. The preaching of the Word mandated extensive training for Protestant ministers, who then had to be maintained with a salary sufficient to recognize their training and maintain their dignity in the community. While the sermon was a vital vector for the transmission of the Word, other means of access were promoted and sanctioned. A new demand for vernacular language bibles, prayer books, and other guides to worship and contemplation was created by state requirements.[9] Ancillary devotional literature and manuals (such as those described in the chapters by Andrew Pettegree and Susan Karant-Nunn in this volume) also rolled off the presses. If the initial Reformation impetus was sustained in significant part by polemical pamphlets, the continuation of Lutheran and Calvinist communities demanded an ongoing engagement with the printed word.

Beyond access to the Word, almost all branches of Protestantism established common worship spaces. When official repression did not permit a permanent space, gatherings were held in barns, private homes, and in the open air, as shown the French Huguenots and the Dutch hedge preachers. That such measures were regarded as temporary and less desirable, however, can be seen in the swiftness with which permanent worship spaces were built or claimed once conditions improved.[10] Major items of the church interior that needed to be furnished and maintained were the pulpit, the pews, and the sacramental supplies.[11] As this volume’s chapters by Bridget Heal and Susan Karant-Nunn demonstrate, the physical environment and material components of the church service were used to promote and represent the congregation of the faithful as the sign of God’s grace on earth. The tangible could not be a conduit to heaven, therefore, but it could send a message.

The continuing need for material resources and the distinctly Protestant purposes to which they were put can be seen in the fate of goods and revenues confiscated from the Catholic Church. Ministers, schools, charitable efforts, and ecclesiastical buildings all received appropriated resources. For example, the Duke of Württemberg in 1536 ordered that the poor be given any remaining linen and wool cloths from ecclesiastical stores, that books and liturgical vestments be sold, and that benefices be used to either pay pastors’ salaries or fund poor relief.[12] In England, holders of impropriations (lay ownership of ecclesiastical tithes) for the most part continued to use part of the funds, as originally stipulated, to repair and maintain church chancels after the Reformation.[13]

In the initial phase of the Protestant challenge to Roman Catholicism, consumption was also consciously used to challenge restrictions deemed illegitimate and to declare allegiance to the Reformed religion. In Zurich during the 1522 Lenten fast, the deliberate eating of sausages provoked a public outcry (and a spirited defense from Huldyrich Zwingli). The Nuremberger Willibald Pirckheimer’s price for intervening on behalf of his sister’s convent—that she openly eat meat and other forbidden foods during a fasting period—arose from similar impulses.[14] The Augsburg Interim (1548–1555), the religious settlement imposed by the victorious Holy Roman Emperor on German Lutherans, intensified the association between material matters and theological allegiances. Debate raged over whether the use of church vestments and other liturgical ornaments, which had been stipulated in the Augsburg Interim, could properly be considered adiaphora (matters classified as theologically indifferent). For Melanchthon and his supporters, the Augsburg Interim preserved the essential elements of the faith; it was therefore useless to “brangle over vestments and the like.” For the opponents of the Interim (the Gnesio-Lutherans), in contrast: “When the adiaphora … are urged on us with such passion … as if they were essential to the worship of God … so are they no longer adiaphora, but godless things.”[15]

The Interim was quickly rendered moot by the renewal of hostilities and then the Peace of Augsburg, but debates among Protestants about the meaning of the material continued. When rulers in the German lands converted to Calvinism and attempted to reform the Lutheran practices of their subjects, the use of vestments and precious vessels, along with worship and Communion rituals, became flashpoints for pastoral and popular resistance. Meanwhile, the ostentatious plainness of groups like the Quakers and the Pietists set their members apart from mainstream Protestants around them.[16] The particular consumption of goods, and consumption of particular goods, continued to mark Protestant variety.[17]

The importance of material culture in revealing, and hence confirming, status distinctions has been well documented by scholars of early modern Europe. Sumptuary legislation, as it had since the Middle Ages, decreed permitted and forbidden fabrics, furs, articles of clothing, and jewelry according to social rank: “Brides of this [third] class may wear black, green or nail-colored cloaks of camelot with velvet borders one ell wide. Gowns may be made of damask or other silk material but not satin or velvet, nor must they be adorned with unnecessary frizzled lace.”[18] As these stipulations from Reformation Nuremberg attest, state-sanctioned Reformations specifically allowed those of higher ranks to wear finer fabrics and adorn them with precious trimmings. In England, much of the sumptuous cloth and plate dispersed during the Reformation found its way into the hands of the elite, who turned items no longer deemed proper signs of God’s status into signs of their own.[19] Distinctions of rank could be acceptable in church as well, as the seating arrangements in Leipzig’s Baroque churches reveal.[20] Thus propriety was expected alongside restraint, with what was regarded as necessary and what was regarded as superfluous varying across the ranks of mainstream Reformation society.[21]

Adherents of movements outside of state-sanctioned Protestantism were, by both necessity and conviction, less committed to material forms of expressing community and connecting with the Word of God. The various strands of Anabaptism and English radicalism established themselves without explicit material anchors. Even when their gatherings were tolerated, these groups eschewed physical expressions of their devotion to God and worshipped in deliberately plain meetinghouses. At the extreme of the immaterial, invisible church were those classified by R. Emmet McLaughlin as Platonic Radical Spiritualists, who rejected all externalities, including church services, the sacraments, and even the printed Word of God, as necessary or even conducive to salvation, which came alone through the Spirit (present in the human as well as the divine).[22]

PROPERTY

The Protestant Reformations occurred within the complex property system elaborated through Roman law, canon law, customary law, and individual disposition. Protestant institutions continued to be funded by mechanisms such as donations, pious endowments, state patronage, and tithe payments. Not least because the revenues of the church depended on them, existing property relationships were usually upheld. As Calvin proclaimed, “what every man possesses has not come to him by mere chance but by the distribution of the supreme Lord of all. For this reason, we cannot by evil devices deprive anyone of his possessions without fraudulently setting aside God’s dispensation.”[23] Even the great dissolution of the English monasteries proceeded through a careful series of legal maneuvers, and the eventual purchasers or recipients were formally guaranteed their accession.[24]

The continuation of previous property arrangements did not necessarily imply absolute possession; owners could be limited as to the use, transformation, and disposition of a particular asset. The customary acceptance of such restrictions made it possible for the faithful to articulate their relationship with material possessions in ways other than complete possession. Groups such as the Anabaptists used the available language of “stewardship” and “correct use” to describe resources held individually but for a common purpose, and declared themselves prepared to “share our possessions, gold, and all that we have, however little it may be; and to sweat and labor to meet the need of the poor, as the Spirit and Word of the Lord, and true brotherly love teach and imply.”[25]

Only rarely was a true “community of goods” created, in which all property was held by the group as a whole and distributed as deemed necessary by officers elected or appointed by the community.[26] The most sustained instance was the Hutterites, a branch of Anabaptism that emerged in Moravia after 1527, in which members labored collectively to provide for the community’s needs. However, those necessities that could not be obtained by communal efforts were acquired through commercial relations with the outside world, whether through selling ceramics in local markets, working as wage laborers on estates, purchasing supplies for craft labor, or buying property on which to found their settlements.[27]

The second instance of the institution of community property was the far briefer and more notorious Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (1534–1535). Prodded by a local preacher, a Dutch prophet, and a resolute band of citizens, the city council reordered Münster along radical lines, including declaring all goods the property of the community, to be shared as needed, and erasing all debts.[28] The Anabaptist Kingdom was transgressive in many ways; Münster’s territorial ruler hardly needed the abolition of property claims as an excuse to crush this challenge to his authority. Yet the establishment of a community of goods drew specific condemnation as well, with Melanchthon denouncing as “a seditious, godless, completely false teaching” the purported Münsterite claim that “no one can be saved who does not throw his goods into the common pot.”[29] Beyond Münster, Anabaptists were routinely accused of seeking to establish property in common, despite their equally routine denials. The prominent place occupied by the restructuring of property claims in the magistrates’ imagination illustrates how radical such a proposition was deemed by mainstream Reformers.

WORK

That Protestants were required to work unrelentingly at their earthly calling has long been regarded as the central component of the “Protestant work ethic.” This narrative, however, artificially distinguishes between Catholic and Protestant views on inactivity and reads back modern understandings of productive labor into the simultaneously more restricted and more expansive view of the Reformers and their followers.

Catholic and Protestant moralists shared a fear of idleness. Idleness was an invitation to disorderly thoughts and activities, and so human minds and hands must be kept occupied. If Luther’s early supporter Wenceslaus Linck fervently informed his readers that “idleness has produced and taught much evil” and noted that it was one of the sins that had condemned Sodom and Gomorrah, the Spanish Humanist Juan Luis Vives warned readers of his Instruction of a Christian Woman that “the deuylles subtilte neuer cometh more soner tha[n]‌ in idelnes.”[30]

What changed was the evaluation of many forms of ecclesiastical labor. Luther’s attack on monastic living relied on dismissing their regular routines, including prayers and contemplation, as something other than work. The mendicant orders, which eschewed the production of material goods to focus on preaching and other spiritual services, were likewise targeted for their failure to practice proper labor.[31]

Protestants resituated spiritual practices and their practitioners, while maintaining the value of (the right kind of) devotional and ecclesiastical labor. Regular church attendance, prayer within the home, and catechism learning were all expected, and for the particularly devout the time spent on personal spiritual activities could be substantial.[32] No longer the province of the distinctively spiritual adept, the work of serving as the vessel for God’s grace imposed significant obligations on all believers. Moreover, mainstream Protestantism also required ministers, i.e., religious specialists whose labor demanded proper training and compensation. Substantial resources were devoted to ministerial education, with universities from Marburg (1527) to Harvard (1636) founded to meet this new need. Study, preaching, and pastoral care were valued and rewarded activities, as long as they conformed to Protestant theology. Tending the Word of God was work.

Other types of activities, however ardently pursued, were regarded as improper pursuits, which God would never call someone to perform. Falstaff’s response to Prince Hal’s rebuking him for purse-taking, “Why, ’tis my vocation, Hal, and ’tis no sin, Hal, for a man to labor at his vocation” (Henry IV, Part I) serves its humorous purpose precisely because thievery was clearly not a “vocation.” Intensity of labor and dedication to the purpose did not absolve people of the obligation to meet the prescribed standards of honest labor. Certain types of work therefore fell under suspicion or outright condemnation because, whether legal or not, they failed to meet the needs of the community: “courses of life not warranted by Gods owne booke, such as are rather auocations from God and goodnesse, then vocations, as ordinarie cheating, brotheldrie, coniuring, and all other vnlawfull occupations or professions are not a sweet fauour to God, but altogether stinking in his nostrels.”[33]

COMMERCE

The work of the merchant was granted, except by a few outliers, the status of an accepted occupation necessary for the common good, because it supplied needed goods not otherwise available. Even Luther, who was quick to condemn merchants for shady practices and importing luxury commodities, acknowledged the importance of those who traded in items that serve “necessity and honor,” including “livestock, wool, grain, butter, [and] milk.”[34] For the author of a 1578 pamphlet defending the profession of soldiering, the best way to bolster the military vocation was to note its parallels to the commercial one:

Thus you may see, that although this trade or traffique of marchandise is very beneficial to euerie estate and common wealth … yet is by … some abused: but shall wee therefore condemne the trade? … not so: for the exercise of it may not be forborne, and the honest trading marchaunt is to be had in reuerence and estimation.[35]

With households expected to maintain standards of consumption appropriate to their estate, those who provided fitting goods for sale, whether guild members selling their own wares, retailers, or long-distance merchants, were part of the God-ordained earthly order.

What posed potential moral hazard were worldly intentions, deceptive practices, and excessive profits. The obvious implication is that there were then such things as proper intentions, practices, and profits. Like other engagements with earthly goods, such as production and consumption, engagement in trade to sustain life and maintain a suitable household was legitimate; pursuing commerce out of greed was not. Like other occupations, adhering to expected standards of workmanship and quality was a sign of commitment to the community. Operating in “bad faith,” like a baker who short-weighted his loaves, destroyed the trust that commerce was meant to encourage among community members.[36]

As Craig Muldrew has shown for early modern England, trust between community members was becoming more strained and simultaneously more vital as participation in credit relationships became increasingly necessary to sustain market exchange in a specie-poor economy. A household’s financial solvency depended on others’ paying their debts on time, enabling the household’s own debts to be satisfied. Credit relations thus precipitated a “moral competition” as households strove to establish their creditworthiness through reputations for honesty, prudence, and thrift. These prescribed virtues meshed well with the teachings of English Protestantism, in both its established and dissenting variations, which likewise emphasized obligations to one’s neighbors, restraint, and a certain level of disinterest in the acquisition of material goods.[37] Congruence, however, was not the only relationship between credit and faith, as the uncertainty of credit promises made vivid the transience of earthly things and the indispensability of trust (in God, if not in one’s debtors). The passage in the Lord’s Prayer rendered as “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” in the King James Bible spoke in the concrete, as well as the spiritual, language of the time.[38]

Profits were sanctioned as recompense for the labors and skills of merchants, just as craftsmen were entitled to earn income through selling the products of their workshops. Commercial profits, however, did not operate in the early modern period exactly like artisans’ earnings, in that market conditions were much less controlled. Prices for both purchase and sale were determined by a number of wildly fluctuating factors, including availability and demand, which meant that costs and labor often bore little relationship to prices. While merchants argued that the times of low (or negative) return on expenditure balanced out the times of high return, commercial profits still prompted skepticism because of their simultaneous opacity and visibility.

All of this was wholly conventional; what is significant is the continuation and repetition of the value and dangers of commerce. Reformers consciously integrated commercial activity into their teachings and continued to regard it as part of their purview, from Luther’s On Trade and Usury to the chapter in Richard Baxter’s 1673 Christian Directory on “Contracts in general, and about Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Usury &c.”[39] By the eighteenth century, the Pietist foundation in Halle financed its operations in part through the production and sale of pharmaceuticals, thus fulfilling the hopes of its founder Francke, who observed in 1702 that “it cannot be denied that such a wholesale trade … could yield significant profits for the support of our institutions.”[40]

USURY

Medieval canon law distilled various scriptural passages into a ban on the lending of money at interest, a practice seen as distinct from the widely practiced extension of formal and informal credit. Usury was attacked as a means of profiting from the vulnerability of one’s neighbors and as an unnatural means of “breeding” money. Open usury thus became the province of Jewish moneylenders, until ways were found for Christians to take over the function (and the profit potential) of lending money at interest, enabling the expulsion or marginalization of Jewish communities. These methods were well established by the sixteenth century and included the foundation of civic and charitable funds that paid interest on deposits and forced loans, an elaborate set of justifications and conditions under which “fees” could be charged for money lent, and the widespread use of instruments such as bills of exchange through which interest payments could be disguised.

With these accommodations, attitudes on usury were determined more by ties to the commercial milieu, where charging interest was now considered indispensable, than by theological allegiances. In the sixteenth century, both Catholics and Protestants could be found supporting tighter restrictions on lending, and both Catholics and Protestants could be found arguing for sanctioning lending at interest within certain parameters. All agreed that greed was sinful, but varied on if and how it should be controlled. At the most restrictive end were those who thought that lending at interest was inevitably prompted by (or at the very least produced) greed, that it was against both natural and divine law, and that it was corrosive to communal relations and charitable impulses.

Disagreement to this wholesale condemnation, according to Norman Jones, came from two angles.[41] First, in keeping with the more positive evaluation of trade as a necessary, and therefore potentially beneficial, component of earthly existence, some commentators saw lending as crucial to sustaining trade and hence, charging interest as allowable if it furthered the process of trade and was paid out of the proceeds of trade. Such arrangements were made to the benefit of both parties, and as a result could be contracted without evil intent. Lending at interest among merchants, therefore, conformed to the proper order, and biblical verses that seemed to read otherwise simply needed the proper exegesis. This approach distinguished allowable lending from “usury” through external signs (to whom one lent, and under what circumstances) and made it subject to moral and legal regulation.

In the second perspective, the Reformers’ dissatisfaction with external signs and works as a measure of the soul’s status lent weight to those who argued that ultimately the only feature distinguishing licit from illicit lending was the intent of the lender, which was impossible for earthly authorities to know. In the absence of such certainty, the magistrates’ task reverted to protecting the community, rather than the lender’s soul. This acknowledgment of the limits of human discipline, when combined with pessimism about general human ability to behave, produced room for a double standard, in lending practices as in other disciplinary issues. The godly or the gathered church could establish and maintain different community standards, while allowing the great tide of human error and greed to run its course free from exacting moral supervision. The willingness to relax official measures against usurers did not signal the waning of religious commitment, but rather a firm faith in God’s inscrutable plan. It also made a re-evaluation possible when the increasing use of and state sanction for interest-bearing investments granted them legitimacy by connecting them to community prosperity.[42]

By the eighteenth century, the expectation of interest on loans was commonplace in both Catholic and Protestant areas. Such acceptance of usury indicates that communal relationships were now seen as enhanced, or at least not troubled, by the trade in money. To the extent that usury enabled asymmetrical relationships between community members (in that lenders both assisted borrowers and profited from them), it reflected the tendency to seek and affirm hierarchies present from the earliest days of the Reformation.

CHARITY

Almsgiving was an established part of Christian morality and expenditure. Regarded within Catholicism as a “good work,” the provision of money, food, clothing, and other material needs to the poor often occurred in ritualized contexts, such as at funerals or at the church door. With the Reformation denial of the salvific efficacy of works, the process and purpose of charity quickly became a target of Reformers’ efforts. The reform of charity centered on the creation of a common chest, or charity fund, to which all alms were to be directed and which would be administered by appointed officials. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholic authorities likewise centralized many aspects of charitable giving, although the distinct lines of secular and ecclesiastical authority and the continuing adherence to ritual ultimately gave Catholic donors more options to shape their charity personally. Such outward parallelism, however, cloaked the continuing theological divide.

Why was charity important for Protestants? Aiding the needy was portrayed as an expression of love made possible through the presence of divine grace. It was therefore a sign of, not a means to, divine favor. Yet the fact that grace manifested itself in the supplying of bodily wants sent a distinct message about how the life of the earthly community was supposed to unfold. Here the injunction to “love thy neighbor” became the guiding principle, such that charity became one expression of the bonds that united members of the community together, rather than a specific act affirming a particular relationship.[43] Supervision, instruction, and admonition of the poor fell into the same category of community members’ obligations to each other, and so attaching strings to the provision of alms was contained within the imperative as well.

The restructuring of charity also rendered visible the benefits of restricting donations for church ornamentation and rejecting the sanctification of voluntary poverty. The new almsgiving situated the use of material goods in the realm of earthly connections, rather than as an avenue to the sacred. God had intended the fruits of the earth and the results of man’s labor to sustain earthly life. Not to use them for this purpose was therefore unholy. Pointing to the poor’s aspirations for material comfort and security also validated such expenditures by those with means. In his 1646 “Exhortation to his children,” the Dutch merchant and entrepreneur Louis de Geer urged them to “feel forever in God’s debt … and carry forward this charitable eulogy, always to remember the poor and behave righteously, and not think that your means lessen through such giving, but on the contrary, they will expand and grow, as seed that a fruitful Farmer sows.”[44]

THE STATE AS ECONOMIC REGULATOR AND ENABLER

Religious concerns were not only expressed through pastoral exhortation, but through monarchical and civic legislation. Amid all the decrees establishing new ecclesiastical systems, little change can be observed in economic regulation during the sixteenth century. In bi-confessional Augsburg, the city council passed new versions of that hardy perennial, the sumptuary law.[45] In England, parliaments under Henry VIII (before and after the break with Rome), (Protestant) Edward VI, and (Catholic) Mary I continued to restrict the export of goods deemed necessary for the realm, such as horses and brass; regulate the import of other goods that competed directly with homemade manufactures; and set quality standards for goods such as leather and woolen cloth. Acts against market manipulators, such as forestallers and regraters, as well as vagabonds, were confirmed, extended, and clarified.[46] The reform of religion necessitated no fundamental reordering in the supervision of economic life.

Rulers’ interest in the amplification, rather than just the preservation, of economic activity was spurred by the expanding possibilities and increasing competition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Territories both large and small turned to new methods of extraction, including alchemy, overseas expansion, and state restructuring of economic organization. In all cases, established thinking about economic practices and practitioners gave way to new ideas that transformed the state from the regulator of traditional community relationships to the embodiment of the community itself. Particularly for overseas colonization and trade, this shift had profound consequences for the moral valence of commerce. With the newly invigorated Protestant powers of England and the Dutch Republic staking their claims alongside the existing Spanish and Portuguese Empires, the Reformation not only ended the putative papal monopoly on grants of lands not already held by other Christian monarchs, but also added a confessionalized component to imperial competition.

Merchants, as the long distance adventurers and provisioners par excellence, played the vital role in implementing empire. The twinning of commercial and religious endeavor can readily be seen in Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse on Western Planting (1584), which noted in support of an English New World plantation,

That all other englishe Trades are growen beggerly or daungerous, especially in all the kinge of Spaine his Domynions, where our men are dryven to flinge their Bibles and prayer Bokes into the sea, and to forsweare and renownce their relligion and conscience and consequently theyr obedience to her Majestie.

By the seventeenth century commerce’s role in the global battle against Catholicism and Spain took definitive shape with the formation of monopoly companies such as the Dutch East India and West India Companies and the English East India Company. Appealing of course to profit-seeking investors, these state-sponsored commercial endeavors were also celebrated by many pious preachers and writers, such as the Dutch clergyman who proclaimed that the West India Company’s swift conquest of the Brazilian province of Bahia proved that “the course of the Reformation cannot be hindered.”[47]

By the end of the seventeenth century, the interests of Protestant states increasingly required toleration at home and flexibility abroad, rather than the maintenance of confessional purity. This change had two consequences for the Protestant evaluation of commerce, based as this evaluation was on commerce’s benefit to the community. First, the allowance for religious diversity did not remove religion as an object of state concern or as a desirable by-product of trading networks; instead, exchange would serve as the basis for voluntary conversion. The alliance between the British East India Company and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge was one manifestation of this new orientation.[48] Second, in the (increasingly frequent) cases in which appeals to specific Protestant visions were either counterproductive or superfluous, state and national interest readily occupied the role of the community (the commonwealth) that should be served by commercial activity.[49]

THE COMMERCE IN PEOPLE

This celebration of commerce and settlement as God-given anchors to national and imperial achievement positioned English and Dutch participation in the African slave trade as divinely sanctioned, while the availability of slaves for purchase in West African ports obviated any need to consider the circumstances of their enslavement.[50] Once in the English or Dutch Empires, African slaves’ connection to Protestant Christianity was always mediated through their status as property. If the 1661 Barbados Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes acknowledged that in addition to being “goods and Chattels” slaves were also to be treated “as being created Men though without the knowledge of God in the world,”[51] the chattel side of the “human chattel” absurdity was routinely privileged. Conversion to Christianity threatened the distinction, visible in the Barbados Act, between the free and the enslaved and, hence, threw into question the enslaved convert’s status. In the British Empire, such concerns prompted repeated clarifications at the colonial and metropolitan level that the manumission of converts was not required. In the Cape Town colony, the Dutch Reformed Church’s guidance was less clear, and settlers, rightly fearing that baptism would either require manumission or restrict the future sale of slaves, baptized the slave children in their households only under limited circumstances.[52]

The Anglican Church’s acceptance of the compatibility of Christianity with chattel slavery was thus vital to the spread of Christianity among enslaved people in the British Atlantic. By 1750, African chattel slavery had become entrenched in the economic and religious practices of the British Caribbean and North American colonies. The commerce in people was frequently celebrated as a providential inversion of missionary travel and as an (equally providential) provision of economic support for Protestant colonies and religious activities. The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts responded to Charles Codrington’s bequest of his Barbados plantation by using it (and the slaves that worked the land) as an income source for its missionary activities. For those who felt compelled to distance themselves from the institution of slavery, Protestant teachings emerged that allowed them to tolerate it as either irrelevant to the salvation of souls, or as part of God’s yet-to-be-revealed plan.[53]

TREASURE (IN HEAVEN)

The terrible traffic in human beings stands in vivid contrast to the language of commercial transaction and profit with which the salvation of the soul was evoked in sermons, devotional literature, and eulogies. In the 1618 funerary sermon for the German merchant Johann Beck, both the “good Christian” and the “good merchant” need, among other shared characteristics, integrity, proper preparation, industry, perseverance, and wisdom.[54] In this context, the deployment of these parallels might seem self-serving, but this language appeared so routinely as to transcend the suspicion of strategic use. “Is not hee a wise marchant, that changeth lead for golde, a copiehold for an inheritance, and for a house a kingdome? so doe all those that be mercifull to the poore” proclaimed Adam Hill in 1593, and in 1710 Matthew Henry compared the actions of the faithful with those of a merchant’s agent: “we have no stock of our own to trade with, but trade as factors with our masters stock.”[55]

A similar richness (pun intended) is visible in the metaphors surrounding wealth and treasure in religious texts. The explicit message, of course, was that worldly goods would never compare to “treasure in heaven.” Yet comparisons between “the inestmable riches, treasures spirituall and heauenly, which Christe doth possess” and the far less precious “riches in the worlde or a thousand worldes,”[56] relied on the value of earthly possessions to make this metaphor work. In heaven, the promise of ease, plenty, and magnificence that on earth threatened to degenerate into idleness, gluttony, and luxury, would be fulfilled by God. The cultural and spiritual meaning of material goods, the first topic addressed in this essay, was thus as inescapable in the abstract as it was in the flesh.

CONCLUSION

Protestants saw commerce and consumption as necessary, and hence providential, aspects of human existence. They navigated this world of earthly exchange by using scriptural precepts, God’s plan as revealed in history, and, above all, the well being of the community as landmarks to judge the rightness of their way. This emphasis on communal benefit connected profitable exchange with moral purpose and, except for a few radical groups, authorized distinctions of rank and wealth as befitting a properly ordered society. A flourishing community was a sign of God’s favor and an instrument of God’s will. When by the eighteenth century reason of state, rather than virtue, increasingly set the agenda, commerce and consumption were primed to be endorsed as indispensable contributors to the public good.

The reconstruction of such witting affinities between Protestant practices and economic participation has been one of the most productive lines of inquiry in recent scholarship. This disruption of neat divisions between spiritual expectations and temporal tasks opens a number of promising research paths. Scholars have only begun to define the relationships between religious re-evaluation and new economic arrangements—from influence and accommodation to rejection. Mainstream Protestantism’s role in sustaining and shaping market routines has received far less attention than its effect on the social order. Recent insights into the use of pious practices, such as devotional language, providential theology, and deliberate plainness, to manage anxieties about worldly pursuits and the salvation of the soul suggest that early modern Protestants could readily see spiritual and economic engagement as compatible, posing new questions about the extent and the consequences of this collaboration.

NOTES

1. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

2. This summary is based on the revised version: Max Weber, “Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie von Max Weber (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), vol. 1.

3. Weber, “Protestantische Ethik,” 83.

4. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).

5. Pamphilius Gengenbach, Diß ist ein jemerliche clag uber die Todtenfresser (Augsburg, n.p., 1522).

6. For the centrality of material gifts in pre-Reformation England and their rejection afterwards, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

7. George Joye, George Ioye confuteth, Vvinschesters false articles (Antwerp, n.p., 1543), xxiijr.

8. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), vol. 1, 19.

9. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 485.

10. Elizabeth Tingle, “Stability in the Urban Community in a Time of War: Police, Protestantism and Poor Relief in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion, 1562–89,” European History Quarterly 36/4 (2006): 521–547; Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 181, 497–499.

11. Mark Peterson, “Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver,” William and Mary Quarterly 58/2 (2001): 307–346; Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 45–47; Larry Gragg, “The Pious and the Profane: The Religious Life of Early Barbados Planters,” The Historian 62/2 (2000): 265–283.

12. Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547: Confiscation and Religious Purpose in the Holy Roman Empire (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), 92; see also Karin Maag, “Financing Education: The Zurich Approach, 1550–1620,” and Richard Cahill, “The Sequestration of the Hessian Monasteries,” in Beat Kümin (ed.), Reformations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-Economic Impact of Religious Change, c.1470–1630 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996); Charles Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 90.

13. Lucy M. Kaufman, “Ecclesiastical Improvements, Lay Impropriations, and the Building of a Post-Reformation Church in England, 1560–1600,” The Historical Journal 58/1 (2015): 1–23.

14. Benedict, Christ’s Church Purely Reformed; Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95.

15. Quoted in Joachim Mehlhausen, “Der Streit um die Adiaphora,” in Martin Brecht and Renihard Schwartz (eds.), Bekenntnis und Einheit der Kirche: Studien zum Konkordienbuch (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1980), 119.

16. Marcia Pointon, “Quakerism and Visual Culture 1650–1800,” Art History 20/3 (1997): 397–431; Tanya Kevorkian, Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig, 1650–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 191.

17. Bridget Heal, “ ‘Better Papist than Calvinist’: Art and Identity in Later Lutheran Germany,” German History 29/4 (2011): 584–609.

18. Quoted in John Martin Vincent, Costume and Conduct in the Laws of Basel, Bern, and Zurich, 1370–1800 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1935), 150.

19. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 487–489.

20. Kevorkian, Baroque Piety, 72.

21. Vincent, Costume and Conduct; Rublack, Dressing Up, 120.

22. R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Spiritualism: Schwenckfeld and Franck and their Early Modern Resonances,” in John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (eds.), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 120–161.

23. Calvin, Institutes, vol. 1, 408.

24. Joyce Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971).

25. Peter Klassen, “The Economics of Anabaptism, 1525–1560” (Ph.D. thesis, Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California, 1962), 43, 63.

26. For examples outside of Anabaptism, see the writings (and short-lived settlement) of Pieter Plockhoy and the radical and apocalyptic groups that emerged during England’s Civil War and Interregnum. Henk Looijesteijn, “Between Sin and Salvation: The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artisan Pieter Plockhoy and His Ethics of Work,” International Review of Social History 56/19 (2011): 69–88; Ariel Hessayon, “Early Modern Communism: The Diggers and Community of Goods,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3/2 (2009): 1–50.

27. Klassen, “Economics of Anabaptism,” chap. 3; Martin Rothkegel, “Anabaptism in Moravia and Silesia,” in Roth and Stayer, Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 178–182.

28. James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal and Kingston, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 131–138.

29. Newe zeytung von den Widertauffern zu Münster (Nürnberg: F. Peypus, 1535), Ciiv.

30. Wenceslaus Linck, Von Arbeyt vn[d] Betteln wie man sole der faulheyt vorkommen/vnd yederman zu Arbeyt ziehen (Zwickau, n.p., 1523), Bv––Biir; Juan Luis Vives, A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instructio[n] of a Christen woma[n], 1529, Hiiiv.

31. Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers, 188.

32. Paul Seaver, “The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited,” Journal of British Studies 19/2 (1980), 42–43; Margaret C. Jacob and Matthew Kadane, “Missing, Now Found in the Eighteenth Century: Weber’s Protestant Capitalist,” The American Historical Review 108/1 (2003), 32–33.

33. John Boys, An exposition of the dominical epistles and gospels used in our English liturgie … the winter part from the first Aduentuall Sunday to Lent (London: Felix Kyngston for William Aspley, 1610), 109.

34. Martin Luther, Von Kauffszhandtlungen vnd Wucher (Augsburg, n.p., 1524), Aiiv.

35. Allarme to England, foreshewing what perilles are procured, where the people liue without regarde of Martiall lawe (London: Henry Middleton, 1578), Ciiiir.

36. Valeri, “Religion, Discipline, and the Economy of Calvin’s Geneva,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 28/1 (1997): 123–142.

37. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 156–172.

38. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 306.

39. Luther, Von Kauffszhandtlungen; Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London: Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673), vol. 4, 113ff.

40. Quoted in Renate Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-Century North America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 67.

41. Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

42. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 103.

43. Carter Lindberg, “ ‘There Should Be No Beggars among Christians’: Karlstadt, Luther, and the Origins of Protestant Poor Relief,” Church History 46/3 (1977): 313–334; Lee Palmer Wandel, Always among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Timothy Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Parker, Reformation of Community.

44. Quoted in Sherrin Marshall, The Dutch Gentry, 1500–1650: Family, Faith, and Fortune (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 91.

45. B. Ann Tlusty (ed. and trans.), Augsburg during the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2012), 69–77.

46. I am indebted to my research assistant Samantha Rogers for the initial survey of The Statutes of the Realm, Printed by Command of His Majesty George the Third, vol. 3 (1817) and vol. 4, Part I (1819) (Burlington, ON: Tanner Ritchie Publishing, 2007).

47. Quoted in Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 220.

48. Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100–118.

49. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2012); Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 82.

50. Rowan Strong, “A Vision of an Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 1701–1714,” Journal of Religious History 30/2 (2006), 192.

51. “Barbados Act 1661,” in Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette (eds.), Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105.

52. The Dutch East India Company’s practices toward its own “Lodge” slaves accepted the logic of the Reformed Church’s position. Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 330–356.

53. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Philippa Koch, “Slavery, Mission, and the Perils of Providence in Eighteenth-Century Christianity: The Writings of Whitefield and the Halle Pietists,” Church History 84/2 (2015): 369–393; Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 180.

54. Christoph Pelargus, Mercator Vere Christianus (Frankfurt a.d.O.: Friedrich Hartman, 1618).

55. Adam Hill, The crie of England. A sermon preached at Paules Crosse in September 1593 (London: Ed. Allde for B. Norton, 1595), 70; quoted in Meinrad Böhl, Das Christentum und der Geist des Kapitalismus: die Auslegungsgeschichte des biblischen Talentegleichnesses (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2007), 207; Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 160.

56. Bartimaeus Andrewes, Certaine verie worthie, godly and profitable sermons (London: Robert Waldegraue for Thomas Man, 1583), 158.

FURTHER READING

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

Glasson, Travis. Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Ocker, Christopher. Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547: Confiscation and Religious Purpose in the Holy Roman Empire. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006.

Parker, Charles. The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Rublack, Ulinka. Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Seaver, Paul. “The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited,” Journal of British Studies 19/2 (1980): 35–53.

Todd, Margo. The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Valeri, Mark. Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 35

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

ALISHA RANKIN

INTRODUCTION

PROTESTANT approaches to natural philosophy represent an enormously complex and pluralistic set of ideas intertwined within the overall trajectory of the Reformation. The original Lutheran mandates of sola fide (faith alone) and sola scriptura (Scripture alone) carried over into the study of nature in varied and often conflicting ways. On one hand, an extension of the focus on Scripture prompted many Reformers to view nature as another kind of text to be studied with care, an outlook that added strength to already growing empirical trends. Some even found theological justifications for seeking knowledge of nature through observation and experience, a notion based on St. Augustine of Hippo’s (354–430) conviction that humans lost reasoning power after the Fall of Man. At the same time, the focus on biblical literalism led to an early rejection of new theories that came in direct conflict with the Bible, such as Copernicus’s theory that the sun stood at the center of the universe.

The impact of Protestantism on science has been a topic of immense scholarly debate for well over a century. Recent scholarship has done much to refute and temper nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of either religion as a hindering force on scientific progress or, conversely, Protestantism as a direct cause of scientific progress. Indeed, the very notion of a “Scientific Revolution,” on which many of these arguments are predicated, has come under increasing attack. Scholarly trends in the last fifty years have moved away both from the vision of the Scientific Revolution as the moment when rationality began to triumph over religion to produce scientific progress and from the idea that such progress was induced by a particular religious denomination. Instead, recent scholarship attempts to understand the relationship between theology and natural philosophy within the context of contemporary intellectual and socio-cultural trends.[1]

This essay does not engage with the question of why or how Protestantism influenced a Scientific Revolution. Instead, it turns the question around to ask how natural philosophers incorporated new religious ideas in their attempts to study nature. After a brief discussion of changing historical ideas about Protestantism and science, it will examine the specific ways in which Protestant theology influenced the natural philosophy practiced by its believers. The study focuses in particular on the early Reformation and the impact of Lutheran beliefs, which were crucial to the overall development of European natural philosophy but have tended to receive less attention in general overviews than have seventeenth-century British Puritanisms.[2] It uses the examples of two areas of natural philosophy that were affected most strongly by Lutheran theology—medicine and astronomy—to demonstrate both the crucial role of the foundational concept of sola scriptura and its integration through long-distance Protestant networks. Finally, it shows the ways that trends in Protestant theology in the seventeenth century continued to influence ideas about natural philosophy, albeit in more diverse ways.

PROTESTANTISM AND THE “SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION”: A BRIEF HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW

Two lasting narratives have influenced historians’ notions of Protestantism, religion, and science. In the 1870s, authors began to argue that religion hindered scientific progress, a thesis presented most forcefully in J. W. Draper’s A History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and A. D. White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). This criticism focused most strongly, although not exclusively, on Catholicism as a stagnating and intellectually backward force. Although the two books had much in common, White pointed specifically to theology, rather than religion in general, as the pertinent hindering force.[3] These two works were the most influential in what became known as the “conflict thesis,” in which the march of scientific progress was encapsulated in a corresponding shift from a religious to a secular view of science.

Draper and White both took great liberties with their evidence, and their overall argument is now seen as largely unfounded. Nonetheless, in the first half of the twentieth century the conflict thesis formed an important backdrop to a new focus on the Scientific Revolution. Historians such as E. A. Burtt, Herbert Butterfield, and Alexandré Koyré developed the idea of the Scientific Revolution as one of the most significant events in the history of science—and one that involved a separation of science from religion.[4] Following in this tradition, Richard Westfall portrayed seventeenth-century natural philosophy as inevitably tied to a more secular approach to science, although he recognized that the natural philosophers he studied all had strong religious beliefs.[5] In the second half of the twentieth century, scholarship on the history of science largely moved away from the conflict thesis; nevertheless, there has been a lasting debate over whether the emergence of a modern natural philosophy involved the disassociation of science and religion.[6]

An alternate argument about the relationship between science and religion began to take shape in the 1930s. In the wake of Max Weber’s influential The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; English translation 1930), historian Robert K. Merton applied Weber’s ideas to the history of science. In his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1934 and published in 1970 as Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, he argued that Protestantism—particularly the English Calvinist variety known as Puritanism—had contributed significantly to the Scientific Revolution. Following Weber, Merton focused on the Puritan “ethos” rather than Calvinist theology and tied Puritanism to an empirical, rational, and individualistic approach to the study of nature. At the same time, he emphasized the Puritan focus on social welfare and, more generally, the importance of social and cultural contexts in the history of science.[7]

The “Merton thesis” remains a subject of debate. Scholarship on the topic of Puritanism and the Scientific Revolution in the 1930s and 1940s moved from attempts to flesh out the Merton thesis to various critiques of it. Merton was initially criticized for imprecision in defining Puritanism and for failing to recognize the heterogeneity of Protestant thought.[8] Later authors, particularly Charles Webster, appealed to historians to look for specific social, cultural, and religious contexts in which Puritanism influenced science. Webster’s Great Instauration (1976) focused on the impact of specific theological aspects of Puritanism such as millenarianism, the belief in an upcoming battle heralding the End of Time that was particularly strong during the English Civil War. Natural philosophers, in Webster’s view, attempted to prepare for the End of Time by adhering to the Baconian script of both knowing nature and improving upon it, in the hopes of ushering in the millennium in their lifetimes. Although his study demonstrated the significance of religious concerns to seventeenth-century natural philosophy, many of Webster’s conclusions affirmed Merton’s idea that Puritanism was particularly conducive to empirical science.[9]

In 1991, John Hedley Brooke issued a comprehensive study of the complexities of the relationship of science and religion, in which he noted that no blanket pronouncements on the relationship between science and religion could be sustained. In the same year, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs published a new book on Isaac Newton, The Janus Faces of Genius, in which she argued that religion, not science, lay at the center of Newton’s thought. These works were representative of a major shift in the historiography. Rather than assuming that religion and science were mutually exclusive or that a particular religion was a force in service of science, historians began to pay more careful attention to exactly how science and religion interacted.

In the last three decades, historians have moved away from the nebulous idea of a Puritan “ethos” as a catalyst for scientific change toward an emphasis on the importance of religion to early modern natural philosophy writ large. Sachiko Kusukawa’s The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (1997) demonstrated Melanchthon’s deliberate attempt to create a specifically Lutheran natural philosophy in Wittenberg, while Robert Westman and Peter Barker examined how Lutheran theology led to a compromised acceptance of Copernican astronomy. More recently, Peter Harrison demonstrated that the Augustinian interpretation of the Fall of Man provided a motif that threaded through much of natural philosophy, especially among Protestants: because postlapsarian man no longer had the ability to know the world through reason, humans had to resort to empirical studies of nature. Indeed, Stephen Gaukroger argued that “Christianity set the agenda for natural philosophy in many respects” in early modern Europe—that is, scientific ideas were usually driven by religious considerations.[10] There is now little doubt that early modern natural philosophy was intimately intertwined with contemporary religious concerns. The rest of this essay will focus on the ways that Protestant religious beliefs influenced natural philosophy, with a particular focus on Lutheran natural philosophy.

PROTESTANT NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

What constituted a Protestant natural philosophy? The ways Protestantism influenced the study of nature varied as much as the opinions of Reformers themselves. Nevertheless, there were a few themes that became common across Protestant denominations. The first was a new antagonism toward the Thomistic scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the dominance of Aristotle. As Kusukawa has described, Luther denounced Thomism as falsely viewing human reason and free will as means of attaining theological truths. In Luther’s eyes, the Bible, not Aristotle, should present the sole authority in divine matters, in keeping with his focus on sola fide.[11] His criticisms of Aristotle became increasingly scathing during the early years of the Reformation. While his concerns initially addressed theology more than natural philosophy, he soon began to attack two foundational texts in medieval natural philosophy, Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. In 1522, Luther denounced the Aristotelian natural philosophy taught in the universities as un-Christian and “idle nonsense.”[12] With the exception of studying “the nature of things” from a medical perspective, he advocated the abandonment of natural philosophy.[13]

Despite Luther’s rejection of the classical Aristotelian canon, the Philosopher was too engrained in the university curriculum to be expunged completely. Nevertheless, Protestants began to emphasize the authority of another kind of text—nature herself. Early Protestant thinkers from the moderate Melanchthon to the radical Paracelsus viewed nature as a conduit for God’s truths. Luther himself drew many examples in support of his concept of sola fide from the world of nature, and he emphasized the active presence of God in nature such as a hatching egg or the beauty of a blossom in the form of “everyday miracles.” These examples were often drawn from empirical observation of actual natural phenomena, as Richard Strier notes. In contrast to grand medieval allegories of nature, Strier argues, Luther emphasized the “wonder of the ordinary” in nature, an idea much in keeping with his overall theological focus on ordinary life.[14] Peter Harrison sees the general Protestant focus on seeking perfection through active involvement in worldly roles as closely related to “justifications of experimental natural philosophy.”[15] Theological opposition to Aristotle’s idea of human perfection through reason thus went hand-in-hand with a focus on God’s providence in nature and, in many cases, natural phenomena themselves.

For various reasons, it would be inaccurate to credit Protestantism alone with the shift toward a more empirical interest in nature in the sixteenth century. The idea that nature could be read as a book was a widely used metaphor across all of early modern Europe. As Brian Ogilvie has shown, a project to study natural history based on botanical investigations was already well underway by 1517, led by Humanists such as the Italian physician Niccolò Leoniceno and his student, the German Euricus Cordus. Although their efforts often resulted in alterations to ancient authorities such as Pliny, sixteenth-century Humanist naturalists—both Catholic and Protestant—saw themselves as restorers of ancient tradition rather than harbingers of a new one. Similarly, many new empirical studies of nature were being carried out in regions that remained virtually untouched by Protestantism. Antonio Barrera-Osorio has argued that the study of nature in New Spain amounted to the first truly empirical project in early modern Europe, based entirely on the study of new flora and fauna rather than ancient texts.[16]

The new empiricism was also a tradition that blurred the boundaries between learned and lay forms of knowledge. Pamela Smith has described an “artisanal epistemology”—a focus on working with the hands as a means of certain knowledge—that developed in northern Europe from the late fifteenth century. My own research has shown that women had long been connected to empirical approaches to nature and had quietly been seen as experts in certain types of empirical knowledge, particularly herb gardens and medicinal remedies, since the late Middle Ages. In the mid-sixteenth century, princes and princesses became known for their hands-on approaches to nature, including both Protestants like Elector August and Electress Anna of Saxony as well as Catholics such as Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol and his patrician wife, Philippine Welser.[17] Empiricism and the experiential knowledge of nature were in vogue in diverse arenas and across confessional divides.

Similarly, Protestants were not the only anti-Aristotelians. Craig Martin has recently shown that numerous Italian scholars also attacked and modified Aristotle, as they concluded that his ideas did not match religious doctrine. Indeed, skepticism of Aristotle on religious grounds had a long history dating back to the beginnings of medieval scholasticism. Renaissance Italian Neoplatonists had engaged in prominent criticisms of Aristotle since the later fifteenth century, and some sixteenth-century adherents saw Platonism (a view of the cosmos that emphasized the whole of the universe and the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm) as a way to bring wayward Protestants back into the fold. Historian Frances Yates suggested in her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) that Neoplatonist and occult natural philosophy became a tool of many Catholic theologians in their attempts to win back adherents. While primarily focused on the role of hermeticism in early modern science (the hotly debated “Yates thesis”), Yates suggested that it is too simplistic to equate Catholicism with Aristotelianism. Martin’s findings have made the complexities of that relationship abundantly clear.[18]

There is thus little evidence to suggest a Protestant monopoly on empirical natural philosophy or an opposition to Aristotle. Nevertheless, both tenets were incorporated into the theology of some Protestants, beginning with the prominent examples of Luther and his younger colleague Melanchthon. Peter Harrison notes that Luther believed humans had no choice but to acquire knowledge through experience (rather than reason) as punishment for the Fall of Man. The great Reformer contrasted this method of gathering knowledge, which he characterized as haphazard and incomplete, to Adam’s innate knowledge of the nature of things.[19] While Protestant natural philosophers were far from alone in their shift away from Aristotle and toward experience and empiricism, the theological focus on sola scriptura helped justify that method of scientific inquiry.

WITTENBERG REFORMS

These empiricist ideas about nature and knowledge had a practical impact at the University of Wittenberg, where Luther and his followers attempted to bring about intellectual and curricular reform. Luther’s emphasis on textual study and the authority of the Bible led to the establishment of new lectureships in Greek and Hebrew in 1518. As Kusukawa has pointed out, the addition of ancient languages was a trend in universities across Germany, driven by the spreading Humanist movement, but Wittenberg was the first place to create such lectureships for clear theological reasons. Throughout the early years of the Reformation, Luther continually pushed to expunge Aristotle and add lectures on Pliny’s Natural History, which meshed better with his notion of the acquisition of knowledge through piecemeal experience. His attempts to expand and alter the natural philosophical curriculum had mixed success: although Pliny was indeed added, lectures on Aristotle continued.[20]

Unquestionably, the person most influential in defining and articulating a specifically Lutheran approach to natural philosophy—and incorporating this approach into curricular reform—was Luther’s close collaborator Philip Melanchthon. Appointed to the new Greek lectureship in 1518 after heavy recruiting, the brilliant young Melanchthon quickly became Luther’s most indispensable ally and devotee. First and foremost a scholar and teacher, he was given the task of reforming education at the University of Wittenberg. In her groundbreaking study of Melanchthon, Kusukawa argues that the young Reformer drew on ancient and medieval philosophers in a way that conformed to the new religious faith he had adopted. In doing so, he “transformed a traditional natural philosophy into a peculiarly Lutheran one.”[21] This “transformed” and reformed natural philosophy reflected in particular the Lutheran idea of the providence of God in nature. It posited the existence of laws in nature that, while separate from the Gospel, provided evidence of God’s existence.

Melanchthon’s efforts focused on two areas: publishing textbooks intended to replace Aristotelian texts, and pushing through actual curricular reforms at the University of Wittenberg. His Commentarius de anima (Commentary on the soul, 1540) provided a Christian reading of Aristotle’s De anima. The work was intended to replace an Aristotelian view of the soul that Melanchthon saw as overly rational. At the same time, it emphasized the close connection between soul and body, which Kusukawa views as a response to the rival Protestant views of Huldryich Zwingli on the separation of body and soul in the Eucharist. In emphasizing the connection between soul and body, Melanchthon drew heavily on the writings of the second-century Greek physician Galen, especially in the field of anatomy. Knowing the precise workings of the body, he contended, was crucial to understanding the workings of the soul, as will be discussed further in the section, “The Reformation of Medicine.” His later textbook on astronomy and astrology, Initiae doctrinae physicae (1549), put forth a central focus on the providence of God in nature. True to his beginnings as a Greek lecturer, Melanchthon drew heavily on classical authorities in his works, but he explicitly aimed to provide a new approach to natural philosophy that was more in line with Lutheran theology.[22]

Melanchthon put these ideas into practice in his curricular reform at the University of Wittenberg. Lutheran theology was integrated into the course of studies. Students were expected to start their day with a chapter of the New Testament, accompanied by prayers based on the text. They were required to attend chapel services on feast days where they received instruction on praying and recited the catechism. They also participated in discussions of law and gospel and the sacraments. Their studies were similarly infused with theology. While a Wittenberg student studying philosophy would hear lectures on classical topics such as Aristotle’s Ethics and Euclid’s Elements, they also spent the final years of their studies hearing lectures on God’s providence. Melanchthon also introduced a greater focus on medicine and anatomy, the areas of natural philosophy that Luther had portrayed as worthy of study.[23]

Melanchthon’s reforms did not end at Wittenberg: they served as a model for other Protestant universities, including both venerable medieval institutions such as Tübingen and Heidelberg as well as the newly-founded universities in Marburg (1527), Königsberg (1544), and Jena (1548).[24] Two areas of natural philosophy surfaced and resurfaced as especially crucial in the Lutheran agenda: medicine and astronomy. These topics are particularly worthy of further discussion, given several vibrant changes in the sixteenth century, including the development of a new focus on anatomy by Andreas Vesalius and his peers; the introduction of a challenge to Galenic medicine by the Swiss physician and iconoclast Paracelsus; and the introduction of Copernican heliocentrism.

THE REFORMATION OF MEDICINE

Medicine has been omitted from most overviews on Protestant natural philosophy. That elision is unwarranted, as medicine was not only one of the first areas of natural philosophy to receive the attention of Reformers, it was also at the forefront of the more empiricist approach to nature outlined in the previous section. The one area of natural philosophy that Luther himself deemed worthy of study was natural history for the purposes of medicine, and he remained a strong advocate of the medical arts, as did Melanchthon. Both Reformers viewed the foremost ancient medical authority, the second-century Greek physician and philosopher Galen, as a positive alternative to Aristotle. They also admired the empirical approach of the Roman encyclopedist Pliny and the Greek herbalist Dioscorides. Luther pushed through the addition of lectures on Pliny to the Wittenberg curriculum in 1518, and Melanchthon later added lectures on Dioscorides. Melanchthon also relied heavily on the advice of Protestant physicians when developing his new textbooks on natural philosophy. Conversely, medicine quickly took up the cause of the Reformation, both in efforts by physicians to incorporate Protestant ideas in their writings and in calls for a more general “reformation of medicine.”

Melanchthon viewed the study of medicine, especially anatomy, as crucial to his Reformed natural philosophy. In addition to the connection between body and soul discussed in the previous section, Melanchthon saw the human body as a symbol of the greatness of God. This view was not unique to Protestantism: as Vivian Nutton has noted, claims that studying the human body helped reveal God’s majestic creation were ubiquitous in medieval and early modern anatomical works. Melanchthon, however, put a far greater emphasis on the study of anatomy as a moral undertaking rather than a purely medical one. Indeed, the Wittenberg focus did not emphasize the potential usefulness of anatomical study for curing disease. Instead, anatomy was central in its capacity to reveal the inner workings of the soul. It was necessary both as a means to come closer to a knowledge of the divine and as a method to “know thyself.”[25]

This emphasis on anatomy put Wittenberg at the forefront of anatomical study in northern Europe. The university had previously rather neglected the subject—the professorial chairs of medicine changed hands frequently and were often vacant, and regular dissections were not introduced until 1519. From the early 1520s, however, the number of medical students began to rise, and Melanchthon’s focus on anatomy contributed significantly to this ascent. In the revised edition of his De anima, published in 1552, Melanchthon incorporated many of Vesalius’s corrections to Galen, likely aiding the spread of Vesalius’s ideas in northern Europe. Kusukawa has suggested that Melanchthon’s reading of Vesalian anatomy went hand-in-hand with a reshaping of his theological ideas. Like Vesalius, he saw knowledge of the precise internal workings of the human body as a means to know God’s greatness, and he agreed with Vesalius’s statement on the limits of humans to see and understand the rational soul. This reading of Vesalius appears to have influenced Melanchthon’s portrayal of the Holy Spirit as a physical reality in the human body in his revisions to De anima.[26] Because Melanchthon’s De anima was used as a teaching text, required of all students at Wittenberg and many other Protestant universities, this intertwining of anatomy and theology became codified in anatomical instruction. Students used anatomical fugitive sheets as guides alongside the reading of De anima. These single-page printed broadsides contained the principal organs of the body, which could be cut out and glued into their proper place on human figures. James Kismet-Bell argues that the Wittenberg versions were created specifically to correspond with topics in De anima and emphasized an intellectual order of the organs based on divine wisdom.[27]

Just as theologians used anatomy to exemplify Lutheran understandings of the body and soul, Protestant physicians incorporated theology into their medical writings. The recent work of Erik Heinrichs and Hannah Murphy has shown the crucial role of physicians in spreading reformist ideas.[28] Heinrichs has recently found that plague literature in Protestant regions evinced subtle changes by the early 1520s that were consistent with reformist ideas. Authors began to omit mention of the saints, to include prefaces pronouncing the inevitability of human sin and divine punishment, and to admonish their readers to have faith in “God, the real and true doctor of the soul and body.” As these Protestant tenets could be found in plague writings ranging from single-sheet broadsides to short booklets, the authors, mostly physicians, had the ability to reach a relatively broad audience.[29]

Physicians could also use their elite positions more directly. Murphy’s dissertation shows the influence of Lutheran town physicians in Nuremberg, both as authorities in the city and as members of a wider epistolary network of Protestant natural philosophers. Other town physicians were active in the early years of the Reformation in spreading a more radical Protestant message of healing, as Heinrichs has shown. Publications by Alexander Seitz and Johann Copp warned of an impending catastrophic flood and viciously attacked the Catholic Church. In Augsburg, physician Ambrosius Jung and preacher Urbanus Rhegius advocated a “spiritual medicine” that emphasized the divine origin of illness and recommended recognition of one’s own sins and a renewed faith in God. Most of these authors were not connected to mainstream Lutheranism, but the message they broadcast was in keeping with the central tenet of sola fide. This focus on spiritual healing proved somewhat awkward for Luther, who repeatedly emphasized the importance of natural healing and the physician’s profession. As Heinrichs has shown, Luther himself printed a plague pamphlet in 1527, which included a strong endorsement of natural healing. In Luther’s view, following the popular deuterocanonical text Ecclesiasticus, the medicines of the earth were one of God’s great wonders, and to disregard them was akin to suicide. Subsequent German-language medical works by Lutheran physicians echoed this demand that patients not reject such valuable gifts from God.[30]

How justified was this fear? Certainly, Rhegius’s work on spiritual medicine, which portrayed illness as punishment for sinful behaviour, became extremely popular, with numerous imitators. There is also some evidence that devout Lutheran patients attempted faith healing. Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz (1502–1555), for example, sought a “divine Purgation” from a preacher in 1552 and claimed that she wished to reject earthly medicines in favour of healing from the “Almighty Physician.”[31] Elector August of Saxony (1526–1586) owned a handwritten booklet titled Healing illness following the example of Jesus and the Apostles, which gave a theological explanation for biblical illness and instructed the reader how to follow the example of healing miracles in the New Testament. Notes in August’s hand show that he attempted to use this method when his wife Anna suffered from dysentery; he commanded the disease to “leave my beloved wife … in the name of Jesu Christi.”[32] In both of these cases, however, the patients also had extensive contact with physicians. There is little evidence that there was a widespread rejection of earthly medicine. Nevertheless, the analogy between healing the body and healing the soul was used both literally and metaphorically in countless religious and medical texts.

Across Protestant Europe, the metaphor of a “reformation of medicine” was used both to consolidate and to upend traditional professional hierarchies. The term was often employed in efforts to strengthen the physician’s authority, as Heinrichs and Murphy have shown for Lutheran Germany. In other cases, lower-ranked practitioners used the metaphor of reformation in an attempt to improve their position, such as the barber-surgeons in London studied by Linda Payne.[33] Most famously, the irascible Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) invoked the reformation in the 1520s and 1530s in his creation of an entirely new, alchemical medical system. In his lifetime, Paracelsus became known as the “Luther of medicine,” originally a disparaging analogy that was adopted more positively by his supporters, especially after his death in 1541. Paracelsus appears to have welcomed this comparison, even though he apparently found Luther too conservative and followed more radical strains of Protestantism.[34] Like Luther, Paracelsus’s natural philosophy rested on the idea that God had planted wonders and wisdom in nature. Nature herself, not books, should be the true physician’s guide. Paracelsus took this idea a bit further, arguing that a physician had to understand God’s scientia through a combination of experience and divine revelation. This message, especially combined with his alchemical interests, was very appealing at the Protestant princely courts, where numerous learned princes engaged with Paracelsian ideas. Tara Nummedal’s work on the female alchemist Anna Zieglerin (ca. 1550–1575), who claimed to have discovered through divine revelation a marvelous tincture known as the “Lion’s Blood,” shows that this connection between alchemical medicine and divine revelation was influential in both learned and lay spheres of knowledge.[35]

Zieglerin’s case also demonstrates the extent to which women were engaged in the link between religion and medicine. Women had long been connected to medical empiricism, in ways that originally were portrayed as derogatory. With the overall rise in status of experience in the sixteenth century, women were able to call on their experiential knowledge as certain knowledge with greater authority—much as the artisans described by Pamela Smith. Elisabeth of Rochlitz’s recourse to the “divine Physician,” mentioned earlier in this section, was hardly unique. Expected to be particularly devotional, elite women generally couched their medical practice as religious or charitable in nature. An inventory of the library belonging to the countess Elisabeth of Palatinate-Lautern (1552–1590) contained mostly Lutheran books, many of them handwritten pamphlets from the “spiritual medicine” genre, such as the “Little herb garden for the sick soul, in which can be found many sweet-smelling herbs that revive and soothe the soul in its illness.”[36] At the same time, Elisabeth had an avid interest in healing the sick body, as her many recipe collections attest.[37]

Medicine, then, was the first discipline to wrestle with the practical meaning of the Protestant message(s) for natural philosophy. There was a wide range of ways that healers and theologians understood the Protestant approach to medicine, from Luther’s conservative insistence on the preeminence of learned physicians to Rhegius’s spiritual healing to Paracelsus’s radical criticisms of the existing system and his focus on divine revelation. All of these appeals to a “reformation of medicine,” however, focused on God’s providence in nature, and most of them advocated a stronger attention to gaining knowledge from experience rather than from books.

WITTENBERG ASTRONOMY

As in the case of medicine, many of the early Reformers viewed astronomy as a crucial means to study the glory of God’s creation. Melanchthon, in particular, made astronomy, astrology, and mathematics central to his reforms at Wittenberg. As mentioned in the section on “Wittenberg Reforms,” his textbook Initiae doctrinae physicae (1549), published after Luther’s death, draws on astronomy and astrology as a central means to explore God’s providence in nature, to the extent that he termed anyone who rejected astronomy an “atheist” (by which he meant an unbeliever in Christianity, and more specifically, anyone who denied the providence of God).[38] He also acted as a mentor to promising young mathematician-astronomers, who later accepted posts in universities across Germany. This far-flung network of Philippist (i.e., following Melanchthon) astronomers was a significant factor in Germany’s status as the premier place for mathematical studies in the sixteenth century, and it provided a model for later Lutheran natural philosophers such as Tycho Brahe.[39]

Melanchthon’s views on the subject of astronomy were complex and included elements that today seem both forward-looking and backward. While he separated the study of the movement of the stars (astronomy) from the discernment of the geo-celestial effects of that movement (astrology), he defended the necessity of both. He dismissed attacks on astrology, especially the famous invective from Italian Humanist Pico della Mirandola. God governed the heavens through both celestial motions and effects, he argued, and Christians needed to study astrology in order to determine whether prodigious events came from God or the Devil and to search for signs that the Apocalypse was near. Astronomy and astrology were thus both crucial to knowledge of God’s providence. Observing the regular celestial patterns was also a means to discover God’s plan for the universe. For this reason, mathematics, especially arithmetic and geometry, was an important foundation for studying God’s governance.[40]

The introduction of Copernicus’s new heliocentric theory of the universe presented a conundrum for Melanchthon and his circle. At least until the late 1540s, Melanchthon’s astronomy curriculum rested on Ptolemy, with its complicated use of epicycles, equants, and eccentrics. The new Copernican system represented a far more simplified explanation of planetary motion that was attractive to Lutherans in search of God’s plan for the cosmos. A devoted Lutheran, Georg Rheticus, convinced Copernicus to publish his De revolutionibus (1543), and another Lutheran, Andreas Osiander, brought it to press. However, the claim that the earth moved was particularly problematic for Protestants in its apparent conflict with several passages in the Bible. Luther vociferously denounced the new theory, while Melanchthon initially dismissed it and later called it absurd. With time, however, Melanchthon came to recognize its value mathematically, and he eventually praised Copernicus’s lunar theory, his more elegant calculation of planetary angles, and his elimination of the hated equant. In a compromise that Westman calls the “Wittenberg Interpretation,” the Melanchthon circle eventually used Copernicus’s calculations without accepting his ordering of the cosmos. Although they rejected heliocentrism and the earth’s movement, Lutheran astronomers taught Copernican astronomy (but not cosmology) at universities across Germany. Kusukawa has argued that this approach should not be seen as merely “pragmatic,” but as the only solution that worked with Melanchthon’s theology. Heliocentrism was impossible because it conflicted with Scripture. On the other hand, natural philosophy and astronomy were distinct from and subordinate to theology, and the basic tenets could thus be viewed separately.[41]

While historians have pointed to the fact that most dedicated Copernicans in sixteenth-century Germany were Protestants, reconciling the Copernican cosmos with the tenets of sola scriptura did not get any easier. These difficulties are readily apparent in the work of two of the most celebrated astronomers of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and his young German assistant Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Brahe was educated at the University of Copenhagen, which had adopted Melanchthon’s curriculum in 1539. His intellectual development fell very much in line with the Philippist natural philosophy. He became celebrated for observing a supernova in 1572, evidence drawn from experience that the heavens were not perfect and immutable, as Aristotle had claimed. Two years later, he became the first scholar to hold lectures on Copernican astronomy at the University of Copenhagen. Nevertheless, Brahe rejected the notion of the earth’s movement—partially because he did not think it could be explained by physics, but also because it violated Scripture. Numerous sixteenth-century astronomers were interested in developing a geostatic system that would work as easily as that of Copernicus, but the mathematic technicalities of that endeavor were extremely complicated. Brahe had the advantage of his private observatory on the island of Uraniborg, where together with a team of devotees, he developed new instruments and made detailed observations that allowed him to solve the puzzle. Brahe’s system, which became known alternately as the Tychonic, geo-heliocentric, or double core planetary system, kept the earth at the center of the universe. The sun and moon revolved around the earth, and everything else revolved around the sun. The orbits of the sun and Mars intersected, which was possible because Brahe argued against the existence of crystalline spheres, an idea that was supported by his observation of comets in 1577 and 1585.[42] Ironically, this system ended up being the official planetary system sanctioned by the Catholic Church in 1616, even though it originated among Protestant astronomers.

Brahe’s interest in studying heavenly phenomena such as comets and supernova was indicative of the “special Lutheran attitude toward the natural world” that merged astronomy with astrology.[43] That interest was central to the astronomy of Johannes Kepler. Although Kepler is remembered today as a committed Copernican, he initially entered studies at the University of Tübingen to become a Lutheran minister. While he eventually felt unable to adopt the Formula of Concord required of all ministers (which also precluded him from a university post), he took seriously the Lutheran mission to find God’s providence in the universe. Peter Barker and Bernard Goldstein argue that his first book, the Mysterium cosmographicum (Sacred mystery of the cosmos, 1596), should be understood primarily as a theological rather than an astronomical work. The book famously defended Copernican cosmology by demonstrating that the proportional arrangement of the heliocentric cosmos corresponded to the five Platonic solids. As Barker and Goldstein show, this argument was neither mystical nor accidental. Kepler opened the work by citing the need to discover God’s plan for the universe. As a benevolent creator, he went on to show, God had devised a perfect and discoverable plan, i.e., the geometric arrangement of the solids. Kepler thus used the Lutheran theory of God’s providence to insist that the Copernican system must be correct. Barker and Goldstein argue that the attention to God’s plan was also used in defense of his first two laws of planetary motion.[44] Melanchthon’s call to find God’s laws of governance in the natural world was taken very seriously.

PROTESTANT NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Protestants outside of Lutheran regions also incorporated the idea of natural laws into their natural philosophy as a manifestation of God’s power; indeed, the most prominent natural philosophers all wrote a great deal on religious ideas. There was no parallel to Melanchthon’s university reforms in other European regions, however, and with a diversity of Protestant religious beliefs, the way each natural philosopher incorporated religious ideas tended to be highly individualistic. This plurality of Protestant ideas can be seen in the three most heralded English natural philosophers of the seventeenth century: Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton.

Both Elizabethan-Anglican and Calvinist mentors influenced Bacon, and his natural philosophy tended toward a pragmatic version of Calvinist ideas. In contrast to Melanchthon, he did not think that the study of nature could lead one to knowledge of the divine, for the gap between nature and Scripture was too great. It could, however, bring humans closer to God. Bacon frequently drew on the long-standing metaphor of a Book of Nature that paralleled the Book of Scripture, which had to be read through careful empirical study. Like the Lutherans, he excoriated Aristotle. He famously criticized the “Idols” of Aristotelian scholastic thought in his New Organon (1620), echoing many concerns expressed by Luther and Melanchthon: because the mind of postlapsarian man was fallible, it could never grasp the laws of nature by reason. Instead, one had to engage in a thorough study of Creation. Bacon outlined the methods of that study in far more detail than Melanchthon had. By casting off distractions and engaging in careful study of nature, humans could hope to recover some of the wisdom lost through the Fall. As John Gascoigne notes, throughout Bacon’s writings he incorporated the millenarian ideas of restoring man to Edenic bliss and ushering in the Kingdom of God.[45]

Religious ideas were also central to the natural philosophy of chemist Robert Boyle, who, in contrast to Bacon, strongly believed that the careful study of creation could yield insight into God’s plan for the universe. An Irish Protestant with a deep interest in Scripture, Boyle addressed the relationship between religion and natural philosophy in numerous writings. At the center of his natural philosophy was the belief that God was the final cause of all things in nature, an idea known as voluntarism. Like Melanchthon, he believed that finding the laws of nature could help man know God. In his Christian Virtuoso (1691), for example, Boyle argued that pursuing empirical knowledge of nature was conducive to religion, as it made men aware of God’s design and providential plan for the universe. More than his Lutheran predecessors, however, he stressed the idea that studying nature was not antithetical to religion—likely a pushback against the growing trends of deism, which held that God was not active in nature, and atheism, a movement that denied the existence of God.[46] Although he likely held millenarian beliefs, they did not appear in his writings as prominently as in Bacon’s; however, he shared with Bacon the idea that gaining knowledge of or closeness to God through nature took a long time, required great patience and attention to detail, and involved collaboration.[47]

Isaac Newton presents a very different case. In his preparations to be an Anglican churchman in the early 1670s, Newton became convinced that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was false. These heretical anti-Trinitarian beliefs derived from his interpretation of Scripture as containing clear evidence of an omnipotent God the Father. Recent research by James Force, Jan Wojcik, and Stephen Snobelen argues persuasively that Newton’s scientific theories were predicated on this concept of an all-powerful God. As Force shows, Newton believed in God’s ability to interfere in the normal course of nature through miracles—or completely alter the system at the End of Time. He also, it appears, considered himself to be one of the chosen few who could truly receive God’s message. Rather than Bacon and Boyle’s concept of slow, methodical fact gathering, Newton believed in revelation. Far from a deist, Newton saw matter as passive in the face of an active God who continually shaped and moved it.[48]

Bacon, Boyle, and especially Newton are often credited with moving science away from religion. That conception is clearly a misrepresentation: in fact, Boyle endowed a series of lectures on religion and natural philosophy that were intended to fight deism and atheism, while Newton infused his General Scholium, an essay appended to the second edition of his Principia (1713), with theology. Aside from a common belief in millenarianism, however, they held very different ideas on the interaction between religion and natural philosophy. Their cases caution us against assigning any unitary characteristics to Protestant natural philosophy.

CONCLUSION

Was there a “Protestant” natural philosophy? Certainly there was no unified view of God’s role in nature that pertained to all strands of Protestantism. Because many Protestant notions rested on medieval strands of thought, moreover, it is difficult to label any one concept specifically Protestant. In the sixteenth century, Protestants and Catholics alike believed that the empirical study of nature could bring one closer to God. Although in the early seventeenth century an open conflict between religion and natural philosophy reverberated through the Catholic Church, which forbade the teaching of Copernicanism in 1615 and culminated in the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, historians have noted that much of the controversy came from internal Church rivalries. Like Melanchthon, the Catholic Church came to a pragmatic solution to the Copernican problem in the sixteenth century, using Copernicus’s mathematics to calculate the new, more accurate Gregorian calendar (which was rejected by Protestants). Indeed, Copernicus was initially urged to publish by Catholic theologians as well as the Protestant Rheticus. There were strong anti-Aristotelian elements in highly Catholic Italy; conversely, William Harvey was a committed Aristotelian. Descartes believed in strict laws of nature laid down by God, Pierre Gassendi had voluntarist beliefs, and many Catholic natural philosophers used the idea of the Book of Nature. The Jesuits, in particular, engaged in an all-out empirical study of nature, and their network of information gatherers extended across the globe.[49] All natural philosophers in early modern Europe had to consider religion, and the ways they did so—and their networks—often overlapped, no matter their religious persuasion.

Two larger points can be made about a Protestant natural philosophy, however. First, Protestants represented strong voices in favor of the idea that the empirical study of nature, rather than Aristotelian reason, was the best way to discover God’s laws. While this concept was certainly not exclusively Protestant, the idea was common to nearly all Protestants, and it added to the growing interest in experiential knowledge. Second, networks of Protestant natural philosophers proved extraordinarily important to the spread and establishment of Protestant views of nature, especially in the sixteenth century. Just as Melanchthon’s university reforms spread across Lutheran regions, so too did his students and followers, leading to a widespread network of like-minded thinkers. Other natural philosophers such as Tycho Brahe emulated this model of a scholarly familia, adding new networks. Lutheran physicians, meanwhile, helped cement Protestant ideas in towns and cities. These networks allowed for compromises like the “Wittenberg Interpretation” to take root.

The influence of religion became both more focused and more complex in the seventeenth century, with the internationalism of the Republic of Letters, a multiplicity of competing Protestant beliefs, and strict regulations on what Catholic natural philosophers could write about the heavens. By the eighteenth century, moreover, deist views of God as a creator who did not interfere providentially in the natural world and instead left it to function through the laws of nature had gained popularity in scientific circles. For all of the prominent Protestant natural philosophers in the early modern period, however, ideas about Scripture and God’s providence figured crucially into the study of nature.

NOTES

1. Prominent among the many works on this topic are David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Margaret J. Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

2. See, for example, John Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” in Peter Harrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39–58; Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution,” in Thomas Dixon, G. N. Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey (eds.), Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71–86.

3. John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, International Scientific Series, vol. 12 (New York: D. Appleton, 1875); Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: D. Appelton, 1898).

4. For an excellent example of historiographical shifts, see Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution,” 79–83.

5. Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).

6. Edward Grant, “God and Natural Philosophy: The Late Middle Ages and Sir Isaac Newton,” Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000): 279–298; Andrew Cunningham, “The Identity of Natural Philosophy. A Response to Edward Grant,” Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000): 259–278.

7. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. R. H. Tawney, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930); Robert K. Merton, “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” Osiris 4 (1938): 360–632; Merton, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: H. Fertig, 1970).

8. For a comprehensive overview of the Merton Thesis and its aftermath, see I. Bernard Cohen, K. E. Duffin, and Stuart Strickland (eds.), Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

9. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976).

10. Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 3; Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011); Westman, “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory,” Isis 66 (1975): 165–193; Peter Barker, “The Role of Religion in the Lutheran Response to Copernicus,” in Osler, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, 59–87.

11. Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 32–50.

12. Quoted in ibid., 45.

13. Ibid., 43.

14. Richard Strier, “Martin Luther and the Real Presence in Nature,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37/2 (2007): 271–303, at 273–275.

15. Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, 58.

16. Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 8–17, 28–34; Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006).

17. Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 2; Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), esp. chap. 1.

18. Craig Martin, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), esp. chap. 5; Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” 43; Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

19. Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, 58.

20. Ibid., 34.

21. Ibid., 4–6.

22. Ibid., chaps. 3–4.

23. Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, chap. 5; Vivian Nutton, “Wittenberg Anatomy,” in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Medicine and the Reformation (London: Routledge, 1993), 11–32.

24. Westman, “The Melanchthon Circle,” 169.

25. Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 100–105; Nutton, “Wittenberg Anatomy,” 18–20.

26. Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 118–120; see also Nutton, “Wittenberg Anatomy,” 23–25.

27. James Kismet-Bell, “Faithful Bodies: Anatomy and Emblematic Fugitive Sheets in Late Sixteenth-Century Wittenberg,” Focus on German Studies 17 (2010): 3–22; see also Nutton, “Wittenberg Anatomy,” 25.

28. Erik Heinrichs, “The Plague Cure: Physicians, Clerics, and the Reform of Healing in Germany, 1473–1560” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2009); Hannah Murphy, “Reforming Medicine in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 2012).

29. Heinrichs, “The Plague Cure: Physicians, Clerics, and the Reform of Healing in Germany, 1473–1560,” chap. 2.

30. Murphy, “Reforming Medicine in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg”; Heinrichs, “The Plague Cure: Physicians, Clerics, and the Reform of Healing in Germany, 1473–1560,” chap. 2.

31. Letter from Caspar Aquilla to Elisabeth of Rochlitz, March 12, 1552, Hessische Staatsarchiv Marburg, Bestand 3, 77, fol. 317v.

32. Heilung der Krankheiten nach dem Beispiele Jesu vnd der Apostel, Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden, Ms. C 295; see also Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, chap. 5.

33. Lynda Payne, “‘A Speedie Reformation’: Barber-Surgeons, Anatomization, and the Reformation of Medicine in Tudor London,” in Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe (eds.), Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, & Astrology in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), 71–92.

34. Charles Webster, “Paracelsus: Medicine as Popular Protest,” in Grell and Cunnigham (eds.), Medicine and the Reformation, 57–78; Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

35. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 82–93; Tara E. Nummedal, “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations,” in Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds.), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2011), 125–142.

36. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Codex palatinum germanicum 801, fols. 1r–17v, at 1v. <http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg801/0008> (accessed May 15, 2015).

37. On noblewomen, religion, and healing, see Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters, esp. chaps. 3–5.

38. Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 127–128.

39. Westman, “Melanchthon Circle,” 172; Westman, Copernican Question, 141–171; John Christianson, On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe, Science, and Culture in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 4.

40. Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 127–155.

41. Westman, “Melanchthon Circle,” 165–193; Kusukawa, Transformation of Natural Philosophy, 171–173.

42. Christianson, On Tycho’s Island, 14–21 and 121–123.

43. Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, “Theological Foundations of Kepler’s Astronomy,” Osiris 16 (2001): 88–113, at 94.

44. Barker and Goldstein, “Theological Foundations,” 99–111.

45. John Gascoigne, “The Religious Thought of Francis Bacon,” in Carole Cusack and Christopher Hartley (eds.), Religion and Retributive Logic: Essays in Honor of Garry W. Trompf (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 209–228.

46. Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 12. On voluntarism and atheism, see Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” 39–58.

47. Jan Wojcik, “Pursuing Knowledge: Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton,” in Osler, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, 185; Hunter, Boyle, 85–86.

48. James Force, “The Nature of Newton’s ‘Holy Alliance’ between Science and Religion: From the Scientific Revolution to Newton (and Back Again),” in Osler, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, 247–270; Stephen D. Snobelen, “ ‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia,” Osiris 16 (2001): 169–208; Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Wojcik, “Pursuing Knowledge,” 183–200.

49. Steven J. Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996): 287–318; Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” 44–54.

FURTHER READING

Barker, Peter and Bernard R. Goldstein. “Theological Foundations of Kepler’s Astronomy,” Osiris 16 (2001): 88–113.

Cohen, I. Bernard, K. E. Duffin, and Stuart Strickland (eds.), Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Gaukroger, Stephen. The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.

Harrison, Peter. The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Henry, John. “Religion and the Scientific Revolution.” In The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, edited by Peter Harrison, pp. 39–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Hunter, Michael. Boyle: Between God and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

Kusukawa, Sachiko. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Nutton, Vivian. “Wittenberg Anatomy.” In Medicine and the Reformation, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, pp. 11–32. London: Routledge, 1993.

Osler, Margaret J. (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, IL: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Rankin, Alisha. Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Webster, Charles. The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976.

Webster, Charles. Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Westfall, Richard S. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958.

Westman, Robert S. “The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory,” Isis 66 (1975): 165–193.

PART VI

ASSESSING THE REFORMATIONS

CHAPTER 36

COMPARISONS AND CONSEQUENCES IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE, 1500–1750

MERRY WIESNER-HANKS

IN the first decades of the sixteenth century, a well-educated man in his early thirties determined that changes were needed in the religious beliefs and practices he saw around him. Devotions such as specific prayers, pilgrimages, or rituals were not wrong, he thought, but they might become so if people came to view such external observances themselves as spiritually worthy. Salvation came not from these, he asserted, but from God, who bestows unmerited grace on unworthy sinners. An ascetic life of separation from the world was no more spiritually meritorious than life in a family, for proper devotional discipline was best achieved when involved with the ordinary things of the world. People who were not members of the educated elite should have access to religious writings, so they should appear in the common spoken language rather than in a specialized archaic language. This religious thinker became the center of a growing group of followers that gathered around him, some within his own large household. They spread his ideas, set up a system for overseeing believers, developed ceremonies for major life changes, including marriage and death, and defended their community of believers militarily. His teachings spread widely, and today are found around the world.

This man was, of course, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), whose teachings became the basis of Sikhism, now the world’s fifth-largest text-based religion. I intentionally list facets of his ideas and life that parallel those of another sixteenth-century religious reformer, not to say that there was a link between them or the movements they inspired, as there certainly was not. Nanak lived in the Punjab region of what is now the India–Pakistan border, far from the Kerala coast of southwest India, where in 1500 there had been Christians for more than a thousand years; he is reported to have traveled widely in his quest for spiritual guidance, but whether he journeyed to Kerala or came into contact with other types of Christians who were traders or soldiers in northern India is unknown. Martin Luther knew about the Muslim empires that stretched from the Danube to the Deccan Plateau and in which Nanak lived, but nothing of Nanak’s ideas. The first recorded extended encounter between Western Christians and Sikhs was at the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), where in the 1580s Jesuits from Portuguese Goa joined Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Sikhs, and scholars of other religious traditions to discuss beliefs and practices in front of the emperor.[1] No Protestants were there.

I highlight similarities between Nanak and Luther instead because comparison is one of the most important tools of world and global history. (Although some scholars, especially those who focus on the globalization of the last several decades, draw a distinction between world and global history, I do not, and will use the two interchangeably.) Developing a global perspective involves taking a few or many steps backward, so that other things come in sight, but then also moving in closer again to examine certain developments in greater detail. In contrast to the claims of its critics, world history does not always mean a bird’s-eye view, but instead, as David Christian has noted, “multiple scales in both time and space … [that] can help historians break out of the restricted range of scales that had become the norm within historical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[2] In terms of the Reformation, using a broader spatial scale allows us to see that innovations and reforms occurred in many religious traditions in the early modern period, not simply within Western Christianity.[3] Knowing this does not diminish the importance of the Protestant Reformation, but can allow us to view it in a new way, just as does titling this volume “Reformations” in the plural.[4]

On widening the chronological scale, Reformation historians have not needed the advice of world historians, but have done this on their own, increasingly examining the “long Reformation” that stretched from Christian Humanists to the Thirty Years War rather than simply the few decades from 1517 to 1559. The dates covered in this volume, 1450 to 1750, represent an even more expansive periodization, and allow some discussion of the global spread of Protestant ideas and institutions. There were no Protestants at Akbar’s court in the 1580s, but there were at the courts of the various regional successors to the declining Mughals in the 1750s, most of them English East India Company merchants trying to snap up all the cotton textiles they could. The spread of Christianity outside of Europe before 1750 was primarily a Catholic story, but Dutch, English, Danish, French Huguenot (and briefly Swedish and Couronian) clergy and officials attempted to assert their authority on religious and moral matters over European migrants, merchants, and settlers, their mixed-race children, and the few indigenous people who did convert.

In placing the Protestant Reformation in global perspective, this chapter does two things: first, it compares the Reformation to other religious transformations that were occurring at roughly the same time; and second, it examines some of the consequences of the spread of Protestant ideology and institutions in a more interconnected world.[5]

RELIGIOUS REFORMS AND INNOVATIONS IN COMPARATIVE VIEW

Comparison is a long-established methodology in the study of religion, with university programs specifically titled “comparative religious studies” or something similar, established in the United States from Harvard to San José State and in Britain at Manchester and the University of London; faculty elsewhere are sometimes appointed in comparative religion as well, and individual courses are very common. As with any long-established methodology, comparative religious studies also has its critics, however, who point to its tendency to give primacy to text-based religious traditions, and to view religions as reified bodies of beliefs and doctrines unmoored to specific historical circumstances. Such criticism has led to more historically situated comparisons that link religion to other aspects of society and politics, examine practices as well as doctrines, and underline diversity and plurality within all religious traditions. Although global history has had a powerful materialist tradition, as most of it has focused on political and economic processes carried out by governments and commercial elites, scholars who describe themselves as world or global historians have been among those developing this new framework.

Historians of many religions have noted that calls for change and reform were a consistent feature, as individuals and groups decided that practices or institutions had grown stale or corrupt, and sought to focus on what they viewed as the core or developed new spiritual practices they believed fit better with divine will. Before 1500, these movements had generally remained local or been suppressed, but in the sixteenth century several led to the creation of new religious traditions. They were begun by individuals with a powerful sense of spiritual calling, and ultimately gained many adherents because large numbers of people found their message persuasive, or because they saw social, economic, or political benefits in converting (or both). Converts included rulers, who often demanded their subjects adhere to the same religion. Once they were established, these new religions became part of inherited traditions, as children followed the faith of their parents. Reformers set out certain duties as incumbent on a believer, often with distinctions between men and women, and viewed everyday activities as opportunities for people to display religious and moral values.

The other chapters in this volume concern the most dramatic of these reform movements, which led to the splintering of Western Christianity. The opening paragraph of this chapter mentions another, that started by Guru Nanak, which merits a slightly longer discussion.[6] Nanak was born into the relatively high Khatri caste in the Punjab, an area where there were adherents of many different religious traditions and where various Muslim rulers were competing for territory. His family practiced what the British later called “Hinduism,” the name they gave to the very old and very diverse religious rituals, beliefs, and forms of worship of South Asia. (Religious historians note that European Christian missionaries and authorities often created unified “religions” out of diverse spiritual and philosophical traditions so that these more readily paralleled Christianity; this included Confucianism and Daoism as well as Hinduism.) At this point, many Hindus were followers of bhakti, a devotional movement that emphasized personal love of God, often in one particular incarnation, such as Krishna, Vishnu, or Rama. Bhakti teachers downplayed caste divisions and Brahmanic rituals, asserting that all believers could be spiritually worthy through individual devotion. Many bhakti teachers (called sants) were mystics, and the movement had much in common with Sufism in Islam, for both emphasized close emotional relations between the individual and God more than specific doctrines or rituals. In fact, some individuals were revered as saints by both Sufi brotherhoods and bhakti groups, and their writings, usually in the form of mystical poetry, are a common heritage of northern India.

According to later Sikh sources, Nanak received a good education, became a storekeeper, married, and had several children. During this relatively uneventful period of his life, he also listened to the ideas of a number of teachers, including Sufi and bhakti mystics. Around 1500, he left his family and city, and began traveling through many parts of India and perhaps beyond. Living as a wandering ascetic, he traveled with a low-status Muslim musician named Mardana, and came to believe that everyone has equal status in the eyes of God. His writings indicate that he saw some of the fighting that occurred as part of the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the 1520s, and about this time he established a new village for his followers, Kartarpur, on the banks of the Ravi River in the Punjab. His family rejoined him, and he lived the rest of his life here as the head of a household and of a growing community of followers that gathered around him.

About the time that he first left his home, Nanak began to develop his own religious ideas, which centered on the absolute unity and majesty of God. God is—in words often repeated in Nanak’s writings—eternal, unseen, infinite, formless, and ineffable:

There is one God.

Eternal Truth is His Name;

Maker of all things,

Fearing nothing and at enmity with nothing,

Timeless in His Image

Not begotten, being of His own Being.[7]

God is unknowable in totality but also knowable to a limited degree through God’s creation. People can come to know God through meditation on manifestations of the divine presence in the world, and particularly through looking inward, for God is also present in the human heart. Salvation can come once one recognizes complete dependence on God, who bestows unmerited grace on unworthy sinners through revelation. Before they come to God, according to Nanak, people often concentrate on worldly values such as money or fame. Such things are not evil in and of themselves, but they are unreality (maya), an illusion or deception that keeps one from realizing that God alone exists; concern with worldly values keeps one separate from God. Religious devotions such as specific prayers, pilgrimages, or rituals might also entangle people in maya if they viewed these external observances themselves as worthy and did not concentrate on their inward meaning and purpose. Nanak emphasized that living in the world as a householder was spiritually superior to renouncing family ties, and that service to others was an important part of a pious life.

Turning away from maya to God is difficult for humans to do alone, and in this they often need a teacher, or guru. In Nanak’s writings, the word guru usually means the voice of God itself, akin to the Holy Spirit in Christian theology. This was experienced inwardly, and directed the believer to develop a devotional discipline often described as nam simran, or remembrance of the Divine Name. Through nam simran, believers can come to recognize the divine order of the universe and attempt to bring themselves into harmony with this. Nanak viewed this as a gradual process of ascending stages of increasing unity with God. The final stage brought one out of the endless chain of reincarnation and transmigration of souls in which one is repeatedly separated from God.

Nanak named one of his followers as his successor, beginning a line of leadership that lasted into the early eighteenth century. Gradually the word guru came to be applied to this series of men, who built on the teachings of Nanak and transformed the followers of his teachings into a community that adopted the name Sikh, a word taken from the Sanskrit word for “learner” or “disciple.” His followers spread the Sikh message, and both Hindus and Muslims converted, though converts included significantly more Hindus. The third Sikh guru, Amar Das (guruship 1552–1574), set up a system for overseeing believers and local leaders, and developed rituals and ceremonies for birth, marriage, and death. The fourth guru, Ram Das (guruship 1574–1581), founded the city of Amritsar, and established a more institutionalized system of officials who were both missionaries and administrators. This group was limited to men, and women appear to have become less important as active agents in the spread of Sikhism than they had been in its first decades.[8] The fifth guru, Arjan Dev (guruship 1581–1606) constructed a major temple, the Harimandir Sahib (“Temple of God”), which became the holiest place in the Sikh world. (In the nineteenth century, the temple was covered in gold, and marble decorations were added, so it is often referred to as the Golden Temple.) Arjan Dev also compiled a collection of Sikh sacred writings, the Adi Granth (“first book”), which consists primarily of hymns and prayers (Shabad) written by the gurus to direct believers in their devotions. The Adi Granth contains the writings of Nanak, written in Punjabi, a language spoken in northwestern India, rather than in Sanskrit, the language of the ancient Hindu texts.

During Nanak’s lifetime and those of the second and third gurus, the Sikh community was too small to be viewed with much concern by local Muslim authorities, who regarded Sikhs as simply yet another variety of Hindus or as one of the many movements that blended various traditions common in northern India. By the early seventeenth century this had changed, and intense conflict with Mughal authorities often erupted. Arjan Dev died in Mughal custody, and his son, the sixth guru, Hargobind (guruship 1606–1644) increasingly viewed himself as a political and military as well as spiritual leader, as did the later Sikh gurus.

In 1699, the tenth and final guru, Gobind Rai (guruship 1676–1708) established a new institution, the Khalsa military brotherhood, with a ritual of initiation that involved sweetened water stirred with a double-edged sword. Sikh tradition holds that the guru called all initiates to wear five articles—long hair, a wooden comb, a sword, a specific type of underwear, and a steel bracelet—and to take on the appellation “Singh” (lion). He himself became known as Gobind Singh. The order of the Khalsa created a new ideal for Sikhs, that of a saintly warrior; as the Khalsa gained influence, women and others who were not in this brotherhood were relegated to secondary status within the Sikh community. Gobind Singh also declared that his successor as guru was not a person, but an expanded version of the Adi Granth which became from that point the eternal guru for Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib Ji.

There are, of course, enormous differences between Sikhism and Protestant Christianity, but also significant parallels, especially with the Lutheran, Zwinglian, Anglican, and Calvinist traditions that have been labeled “magisterial” because they advocated working with secular authorities (i.e., magistrates): intense reverence for a text, an emphasis on God’s unmerited grace and human unworthiness, the importance of discipline, an ideal of masculinity in which being a head of household and defending one’s community were central, lack of a formalized priesthood with special legal status, close relations between church and state. These similarities were noted by British military leaders and missionaries in the nineteenth century, who saw the Khalsa Sikhs as manly men like themselves in contrast to the effeminate Hindus who worshipped many deities in strange rituals.[9] Sikh teachings, commented one Colonel Steinbach, are “a creed of pure deism, grounded in the most sublime general truths.”[10] The absence of Christ in Sikh theology might seem a fairly significant difference, but even here there were points of connection, according to the Reverend E. Gilford, for “The Shabad of the Adi Granth is in truth no other than the Eternal Logos … mark[ing] the Sikhs, as a nation, as being far in advance of any other people of India in spiritual conceptions, and in moral ideals and aspirations.”[11] Such stretched similarities can serve as a cautionary tale about comparison as a methodology, as their purpose was in part to place the Sikhs in a Social Darwinism hierarchy in which their relatively high position came from all the ways in which they resembled the British. (These ideas also served British political and military purposes, for after Sikh leaders sent troops to aid the British in suppressing the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Sikhs were systematically recruited into the British army in India, and later sent throughout the British Empire.)

Comparison can also be done in a more reciprocal way, however, viewing each side from the vantage point of the other rather than simply using comparison to measure distance from oneself.[12] Thus from a Sikh perspective, Protestant Christians differed in that their sacred text was far older and not written by the early leaders of the group, they did not accept the idea of transmigration of souls, and they viewed God as largely separate from the natural world and the human inner self, whereas Sikhs saw God as within the human heart. Protestants might also have been less willing than Sikhs (or Jesuits) to participate in the multi-faith discussions at the court of Akbar, had they had the chance, as they sometimes refused to participate in discussions with those who were simply other types of Protestants.

We can use this technique of reciprocal comparison not only with Sikhism, but also to compare the Reformation with other early modern religious developments. For example, individuals calling for reform also emerged among Chinese Confucians. The officially accepted interpretation of Confucius’s thought was that of the Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who had gathered together the writings attributed to Confucius into what came to be considered the Confucian classics, and written long commentaries on them. Zhu Xi taught that attaining wisdom came best through the “investigation of things,” that is, the study of historical events for meaningful patterns of human behavior, what became known as the School of Principle. Such study would provide moral guidance, and perhaps allow one to become a sage, an individual with perfect moral behavior.

The emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) enhanced the authority of Confucian scholars, and expanded the system of imperial civil service examinations based on Confucian classics through which men could rise in the ranks of officials. The development of woodblock-printed books dramatically lowered the cost of books and broadened access to texts at all educational levels. Printing helped the writings of Zhu Xi to become widely influential in both China and Japan, where Confucian officials translated them into very formal Japanese and then into more informal styles. In China, from the fourteenth century through the early twentieth, boys (or their families) hoping to gain the government salary, official position, and special title that success in the national examinations could bring attended academies and universities. They studied the works of Zhu Xi and other classics to provide content for their examination essays, and also practiced calligraphy, poetry, and composition so that the form of their essay would catch the eye of examiners, and allow it to rise above those of the tens of thousands of other students competing for the same opportunities. Candidates thus imbibed a state-sanctioned form of Confucianism, and most appear to have become the type of loyal, conservative bureaucrats that the emperors hoped they would be.

In the sixteenth century, however, critics began to charge that this educational system promoted a superficial and empty following of rules, a mere pretense of ethics and moral behavior rather than true virtue. Some of these dissenting Confucian scholars turned away from the connection with the outside world and advocated a more inner directed philosophy. Wang Yangming (1472–1529) had a tumultuous career as an official and military general, at one point undergoing exile. He began to doubt whether the “investigation of things” would ever lead to true sagehood, for how could one ever know enough? He decided that the best way to understand morality was not studying events, nor even studying the classics, but inward contemplation: “People fail to realize that the highest good is in their minds and seek it outside … Consequently the mind becomes fragmented, isolated, broken into pieces … The extension of knowledge is not what later scholars understand as enriching and widening knowledge. It is simply extending one’s innate knowing to the utmost.”[13] Meditative techniques could help one come to know Heaven (Xian), which Wang viewed as a divine consciousness or divine will, not a place. Every person knows the difference between right and wrong, Wang argued, and through developing their innate intuitive knowledge—what he called knowledge of the mind-and-heart—ordinary people could become as wise as scholars.[14] Wang’s ideas came to be known as the School of the Mind (mind in Chinese thought is associated with the heart, not the head, so mind and heart are one), distinguished from the School of Principle associated with Zhu Xi.

Wang Yangming’s writings circulated in printed versions, as did those of other reformers who suggested new understandings of traditional works, a diversity that fit well with Wang’s notion that each person has an innate understanding of what is right. His writings were taken to Japan, where some scholars accepted his ideas, attracted by the emphasis on intuitive moral reasoning. The scholars who were most influential at the Japanese court attacked them vigorously as too individualistic, however, and eventually succeeded in having all schools of Confucianism except that of Zhu Xi banned.

Wang’s individualistic emphasis upset many scholar-bureaucrats, but inspired others, such as Li Zhi (1527–1602), a brilliant iconoclastic thinker who challenged Confucian beliefs and values. Though he was a bright young man, Li never took the highest level of examination, and held only lower-level official positions throughout his career. Such positions gave him plenty of time to study and think. When he was an older man, he resigned his position and entered a Buddhist monastery, leaving his wife and children. He never took up normal monastic duties, however, but wrote essays, letters, poems, and other works asserting that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism were essentially the same. He argued that the emotions, as well as meditation or study, could teach moral truths, an idea that most Confucian officials regarded as dangerous. Writing to a student contemplating leaving his mother and moving to a monastery, Li advised him to stay home, for “From morning to night you have with you a teacher of the mind. She speaks with the voice of the ocean tide and teaches the ultimate truth which can never be contradicted. In comparison, the rhetoric of our peers is neither to the point nor effective.”[15] Li knew his works repudiated conventional morality and teachings—he titled one of them A Book to Burn and another A Book to be Hidden Away—but he persisted, though a mob burned down his house, and the emperor ordered him arrested and his books burned.

In some of their ideas, Confucian reformers offer interesting parallels with Christian Humanists such as Erasmus, who like Li Zhi criticized the education available at universities and rejected high official positions. They can be fruitfully compared with some of the radicals and Protestant spiritualists, who similarly stressed the importance of intuition rather than book learning. For Menno Simons and Jacob Boehme, as for Wang Yangming, “The sense of right and wrong does not require learning to function.”[16] They can be compared with the Moravians and Methodists, who also accepted the importance of the emotions in a moral and pious life. Moravians spoke (and sang) about being swept away by love for the blood and wounds of Christ, and dissolved into tears and near-ecstasy during their long Communion services. Among early Methodists, public testimony of individual conversion experiences was often marked by weeping, crying out, and other powerful emotional responses, for which both male and female Methodists were dubbed “silly women” by their detractors.

Using reciprocal comparison, we can find European thinkers who sound distinctly like Li Zhi in his criticism of state-supported hierarchies and disdain for empty formalism. In A Book to Burn (1590), Li Zhi writes:

People have always found their own natural place when left alone … but the humanitarians [by which he means Confucian scholar-bureaucrats] worry about everyone finding his place in the world, and so they have virtue and rites to correct people’s minds, and the state with its punishments to fetter their limbs.

Once this happens, “what else can there be but phony men speaking phony words, doing phony things, writing phony writings? Thereafter, if one speaks phony talk to the phonies, the phonies are pleased.”[17] A few decades later, in Spiritual Conversation between a Mother and Child about True Christianity, the Dutch poet Anna Hoyer (1584–1655) has the mother ask “What did you learn about salvation and the Bible in church today?” “Nothing,” the child answers. “About the prophets and revelation?” “Nothing.” The mother then launches into a harsh critique of the clergy’s monopoly of religious discussion despite their lack of spiritual understanding:

No one is allowed to contradict him

Even if he says that crooked is straight

And black is white. He must be right.[18]

Li Zhi and Anna Hoyer thus had much in common, and both suffered for their ideas: Li Zhi committed suicide while in prison, and Anna Hoyer was forced to flee religious persecution, eventually finding refuge far from home. Victor Lieberman has pointed to what he calls “strange parallels” on many fronts in the early modern world, and this is certainly a good example of that.[19]

The actions of rulers and other political authorities in the realm of religion also offer possibilities for comparisons. At the western end of the Muslim world in West Africa, Askia Muhammad Turé, later known as “Askia the Great,” took over the throne of the Songhay Empire in 1493. He reinvigorated Islam, viewing it as a means of strengthening Songhay and gaining greater control over the lives of his subjects as he brought them more clearly into the Muslim fold, what in Christian history of the same period has been called the process of confessionalization and social discipline. Askia used Islamic scholars as advisors on legal and political matters, modified laws, supported the building of mosques and the hiring of religious personnel, and encouraged the writing of books on Muslim history and law.[20] As you have read in other chapters, Protestant rulers in Europe used similar techniques for the same purposes that Askia did: to gain resources, strengthen their states, enforce a specific variant of their religion, and modify the behavior of their subjects.

On issues of religious tolerance, most Protestant rulers followed the pattern of the Shi’ite Safavids in Iran, the dynasty established by Ismail (?–1524) at the end of the fifteenth century, demanding that all subjects adhere to the same sect that they did and enforcing this with persecution and force.[21] A few followed the pattern of the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566), however, a Sunni Muslim who determined that limited religious diversity would not weaken his empire.[22] Like Süleyman’s Istanbul, most of these more tolerant places in Christian Europe were cities that saw a great deal of trade and migration, where residents supported toleration and peaceful coexistence as a practical matter, and benefited economically from this decision.[23]

Thus pulling back to see what was happening at roughly the same time in other religious traditions allows us to identify common or similar developments and avoid describing as unique what were in fact broader trends. (Escaping exceptionalism is a merit of all comparative history, of course.) What we find is that in many religions, reformers emphasized divine transcendence and human frailty. For Nanak, as for Calvin, “Nothing at all, outside His will, is abiding … All goodness is thine, O Lord; I have none.”[24] Religious leaders in every tradition—almost all of whom were male—set out different expectations for men and women, making gender distinctions in terms of spiritual duties and religious practices and establishing standards of ideal masculine and feminine behavior. Sikhs and Confucians, as well as Protestants, discounted the value of ascetic celibacy and praised married life. Some historians see the increased circulation of ideas that printing allowed in China as an important background factor in the individualistic challenge to authority led by thinkers such as Wang Yangming and Li Zhi, just as printing in Europe allowed wider circulation of criticism of the Catholic Church and later of Protestant ideas.

THE SPREAD OF PROTESTANT IDEOLOGY AND INSTITUTIONS

Protestant ideas were not spread simply through print, but also through trading voyages, migration, conquest, and colonization. In terms of world history, the biggest story involving religion in the early modern period is the way that, as Evelyn Rawski comments, “ideas and religions moved across regions with greater frequency than ever before, significantly influencing intellectual and cultural life.”[25] Before 1750 Catholics were far more important in these cultural encounters than Protestants; but Dutch, English, Danish, French, and other European Protestants could be found in many places. Protestant institutions followed. Their impact was greatest in North America (which is the primary focus of Chapter 17 in this volume) but they also shaped developments in parts of Asia, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean.[26]

Outside of North America, the Dutch were the most important. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Dutch, and abbreviated VOC) began to take over Portuguese trading posts and colonies and establish their own, founding a colony on Ceylon and at Batavia on the island of Java in the early seventeenth century, and in many other parts of Asia, along with South Africa, in the mid-seventeenth century.[27] (Another Dutch company founded and ran Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and northern South America.) The directors of the VOC thought it important to provide religious personnel for their own employees and to combat Catholicism in formerly Portuguese areas, but it kept these clergy strictly under VOC control. Although clergy were recruited and advised by presbyteries in the Netherlands, they were under the authority of VOC officials and were paid directly by the VOC, as were schoolmasters. The VOC had difficulty finding and retaining suitable men, and in some places augmented these positions with “Comforters of the Sick”—lower-class men from the Netherlands who acted as lay chaplains, visiting the sick and holding prayer meetings—and “Proponents”—mixed-race or native laymen who were given a bit of theological training and expected to give religious instruction in local languages. Seminaries were also established at various times on Ceylon, but these were not particularly successful, and very few native clergy from anywhere in Asia were ordained. The first translation of the New Testament into a Southeast Asian language was into high Malay by a Dutch missionary in 1688, but as literacy levels were low, conversion remained largely an oral process.

Consistories modeled on those in the Netherlands attempted to regulate conduct by imposing religious sanctions such as excommunication, and they could be very active. In Batavia, for example, during the period 1677–1693 over 800 people were censured by the consistory.[28] As in Europe, women predominated among those charged with sexual offenses, while men were more often charged with drunkenness, fighting, or not going to church.

Patterns of conversion varied in Dutch colonies. In the Cape Colony of South Africa, the VOC was completely uninterested in converting either indigenous people or the slaves it imported, and very few non-Europeans became Christians. The same was true in Dutch (and other Protestant) colonies in the Caribbean and South America, where plantation owners opposed any conversion efforts directed at slaves, prohibited preaching, and had the handful of missionaries who attempted this, mostly Quakers or Moravians, imprisoned. At the opposite end of the conversion spectrum were Amboina and Formosa, where aggressive preaching and teaching campaigns led by a few ministers resulted in significant numbers of indigenous converts. In Formosa, George Candidius (1597–1647) held baptisms and church services in native languages, and advocated marriage with local women as a way not only to win converts but give missionaries access to female religious rituals. Whole villages in Formosa sometimes converted en masse after they became convinced of the spiritual and practical benefits of Christianity.

In many Asian VOC trading posts and colonies, conversion to Reformed Christianity was almost entirely the result of intermarriage. As with other European colonizers, Dutch officials initially hoped to prevent interracial marriage, and sought to bring young unmarried women from the Netherlands to the East Indies to be wives. This was not successful, and in an attempt to increase the colony’s at least partly European population, the directors of the VOC then adopted a policy whereby soldiers, sailors, and minor officials were given bonuses if they agreed to marry local women and stay in the VOC colonies. They also ordered all Christians living together to marry and forbade the fathers of mixed-race children born in or out of wedlock from returning to Europe. The bonuses helped, but the prohibitions did not: even high-ranking VOC officials and Protestant schoolmasters maintained concubines or lived together with women without an official church ceremony, and the ban on fathers returning to Europe simply discouraged European men from recognizing or supporting their children. In some Dutch colonies, indigenous women who married Dutch men had to attend confirmation classes; though it is impossible to tell how they understood Christian doctrine, they apparently took the message that they should attend church frequently very much to heart, as they attended so often and in such great style that sumptuary laws were soon passed restricting extravagant clothing and expenditures for church ceremonies.

Some of the women who married Dutch men were Catholic, either converts or the children of marriages or non-marital sexual relationships between Portuguese men and local women who had been baptized. Church authorities worried about the women retaining their loyalty to Catholicism, raising their children as Catholics and perhaps even converting their husbands. Thus although they often tolerated Catholicism in general, they required marriages between a Protestant and a Catholic to be celebrated in a Protestant church and demanded a promise from the spouses that the children would be raised Protestant.

As in Europe, Protestant authorities in Dutch (and other) colonies regarded Catholic baptism as a fully Christian ceremony and did not require those who had been baptized as Catholics to be re-baptized. They debated about when baptism should occur for others. According to Reformed doctrine, adults should understand something about Christian teachings and give evidence of a moral lifestyle before being baptized, and only the children of Christian parents should be baptized. Baptism was linked to Communion, and baptized adults were expected to partake of the Lord’s Supper on a regular basis. Because opportunities to learn about Reformed doctrine were very limited in the Asian colonies, however, and because Jesuits in the area were willing to baptize first and then teach, many ministers decided to baptize those who desired to become Christians and showed a minimal understanding, but reserved Communion for those who had more knowledge and whose lives at least loosely followed Christian patterns.[29] They also agreed to baptize children as long as members in good standing sponsored them, even if the parents were not Christian. This “separation of the sacraments,” as its critics dubbed it, was vehemently opposed by most ministers in the Netherlands and some in the colonies as a violation of core Reformed doctrines and akin to Jesuit accommodationism. Some colonial areas, such as Batavia, renounced the practice, but others such as Amboina maintained it, and the separation of sacraments facilitated conversions on a larger scale. Pastors in Dutch colonies elsewhere in the world, such as Brazil, Curaçao, Cape Town, and Ceylon, also confronted this issue and sought guidance about what to do, or sometimes just decided on their own to baptize anyone who wanted it, especially if this would facilitate a Christian marriage.

Dutch pastors in Amboina also accommodated themselves to other local traditions. Men and women in Amboina did not eat together, and women were unwilling to attend church if it meant they would have to take Communion alongside men. The Reformed church allowed them to wear a veil, though it would not allow separate Communions. (Similar considerations of sexual propriety shaped Lutheran practice in Tranquebar, where men and women, as well as persons of different castes, were allowed to sit separately at church.) Indigenous converts continued to perform rituals that celebrated sexual maturity, such as circumcision or incision of the foreskin for boys and ritual cleaning after the first menstruation for girls. Elsewhere Dutch missionaries were stricter, forbidding Hindus to maintain a vegetarian diet or brides to wear traditional wedding garb; but despite such prohibitions in many places converts blended affiliation with the Dutch Reformed Church with customary ways. Gradually the push for orthodoxy grew stronger, as it did in Catholicism, but some syncretistic practices survived.[30]

During the early eighteenth century, a few Protestant missionaries went to other European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean besides those run by the Dutch. Most of them were Pietists. The German Lutheran pastor Bartholomew Ziegenbalg, for example, went to the tiny Danish colony of Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India, where he started a school and in 1714 translated the New Testament into Tamil. He advocated the training of indigenous catechists and the ordination of indigenous clergy, a process that proceeded slowly. Ziegenbalg also produced a sympathetic and well-researched book on south Indian Hinduism, The Genealogy of the Malabarian Gods, though this languished unknown for more than a century on a library shelf in Halle, as A. H. Franke, the director of the mission training center there, did not think Europeans needed to know anything about what he termed “heathenish nonsense.”[31] Several chaplains based at the Danish fort of Christiansborg on the Gold Coast encouraged local pupils to enroll at their school, a handful of whom later went to Europe for further education and became pastors and missionaries themselves.

In the 1730s, Moravian missionaries, male and female, came to the Danish colony of St. Thomas in the Caribbean and began the first sustained effort to convert African slaves to Christianity. Despite the official support of the Danish West Indies and Guinea Company and the fact that they did not challenge slavery, the Moravians were opposed by plantation owners and imprisoned, and their converts were beaten. Count von Zinzendorf himself visited the island in 1739, arranged for their release, and carried petitions to the Danish king and queen on behalf of converts. One of these was written by a woman originally named Marotta, born to Catholic parents in the Popo Kingdom of West Africa, and then taken as a slave in the 1690s to St. Thomas. She converted to Moravian Pietism, taking the name Magdalena from the Danish–Norwegian queen Sophia Magdalene, to whom she wrote in a combination of Dutch Creole and her mother tongue, Aja-Ayizo:

Great Queen! … I am very sad in my heart that the Black women on St. Thomas are not allowed to serve the Lord Jesus … If the Queen thinks it fitting, please pray to the Lord Jesus for us and let her intercede with the King to allow Baas Martin to preach the Lord’s word.[32]

Marotta/Magdalena was not the only woman from St. Thomas to reach across the Atlantic after becoming a Moravian. Rebecca Protten, a former slave, became a Moravian preacher alongside two husbands, first throughout the Caribbean, and then in Europe and West Africa, where she taught local girls at the school in Christiansborg.[33]

As the British East India Company established itself as a major power in parts of India in the eighteenth century, small numbers of Protestant and Catholic missionaries worked to convert indigenous people within its territories. German Protestant missionaries were active in southern India, and Italian Catholics in northeastern India. In general the East India Company was not very supportive of missionaries, however, because it thought their activities disrupted trade. It did provide chaplains for its own employees, who were, at least in theory, under the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church and its marital and sexual regulations. In practice, company employees in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries rarely brought their wives with them, but developed various informal relationships with local women; chaplains rarely commented on sexual matters and even more rarely brought them to the company’s attention. The Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was founded in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701; but throughout the British Empire ministers sent by these groups were far more interested in increasing levels of religious observance among Europeans or gaining members from rival churches than they were in preaching to non-Europeans.[34] The eighteenth century was the height of the slave trade, and despite rhetoric about the spread of Christianity justifying slavery, very few slave owners encouraged conversions, and some, as we have seen, imprisoned missionaries who attempted this.[35] Enslaved and indigenous people did become Christian, but before the mid-eighteenth century most of these (and in Africa all of these) were Catholic.[36]

CONCLUSIONS

Over the last twenty years, scholarship on the Protestant Reformation has noted more similarities between Protestants (particularly magisterials) and Catholics than earlier historians were willing to admit: both engaged in confessionalization and social discipline, both worked with secular authorities, both persecuted witches, both used printed materials to get their message across, and so on. Using a global perspective, we can find many of these same characteristics in other religions as well. We can also see Protestant Christianity before 1750 beginning a slow expansion outside Europe, but other than in North America, this would not become a major stream until the third wave of European colonization in the nineteenth century, and the migration of tens of millions of European Protestants around the world. And the real global expansion of Protestantism is an even more recent story, for only within the last several decades have Christian congregations whose roots are in the Protestant Reformation, especially fundamentalists and Pentecostals, gained significant numbers of members who are not of European background. These booming congregations, and not the shrinking ones of Europe, will determine the future of Protestant—and Catholic—Christianity around the world in the centuries to come.

NOTES

1. For a report of these discussions from the perspective of Akbar’s chief advisor, see The Akbarnama of Abu-l-Fazl, trans. Henry Beveridge (Delhi: Rare Books, 1939), 3:364–371; for a report hostile to Akbar, see ‘Abd Ul-qadir Bada’uni, Selected Histories, in Wm. Theodore de Bary et al. (eds.), Sources of Indian Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 439–441; for a report from a Jesuit, see The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S.J. On His Journey to the Court of Akbar, trans. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 180–184.

2. David Christian, “Scales,” in Marnie Hughes-Warrington (ed.), Palgrave Advances in World History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 64–89; quotation on p. 82.

3. For a similar wider and comparative view of the Renaissance, see Jack Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

4. To my knowledge, the first book to use “Reformations” in the plural was James D. Tracy, Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650: Doctrine, Politics, and Community (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), which includes a brief final chapter on the Reformations in global perspective.

5. For another recent discussion that also examines these two aspects of a global approach see Charles H. Parker, “The Reformation in Global Perspective,” History Compass 12/12 (2014): 924–934.

6. The fullest discussions in English about the development of Sikhism are the many books of J. S. Grewal, such as The Sikhs of the Punjab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and the many books of W. H. McLeod, such as Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

7. Japji Sahib, Selections from the Sacred Writings of the Sikhs, translated by Trilochan Singh et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 28. This is the beginning of the Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak’s hymn of thirty-eight stanzas and two couplets that opens the Adi Granth, about which more below. Contemporary Sikhs are to recite the Japji, or at least part of it, every morning. In Punjabi, references to God are without gender; English translations generally translate genderless pronouns as masculine.

8. Doris R. Jakobsh, Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning, and Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28–35.

9. Ibid., 50–69. See also Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

10. Colonel Steinbach, The History of the Sikhs Together with a Concise Account of the Punjaub and Cashmere (Calcutta: D’Rozario and Co., 1846), 119.

11. E. Guilford, Non-Christian Religions: Sikhism (Westminster: The Lay Reader Headquarters, 1915), 28–29.

12. For analyses and critiques of comparative theory and methodology, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (eds.), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004); Benjamin Z. Kedar (ed.), Explorations in Comparative History (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2009); Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (eds.), Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). For examples of reciprocal comparisons in the early modern period, see Victor Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Jack A. Goldstone, “Divergence in Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern,” in David Porter (ed.), Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 165–192.

13. Wang Yangming, “Questions on the Great Learning,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 845.

14. For thorough discussions of these developments, see de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) and Rodney Taylor, The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990). For translations of some of the key writings of Wang Yangming and Li Zhi, with excellent introductions, see de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 840–875.

15. Patricia Ebrey, Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook (New York: Free Press, 1993), 261.

16. Yangming, “Questions on the Great Learning,” 846.

17. In de Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 870, 873.

18. Gottfried Arnold, Unpartheiische Kirchen und Ketzerhistorie … (Frankfurt: Fritschens sel. Erber, 1729), p. 106 (my translation).

19. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

20. John O. Hunwick, “Religion and State in the Songhay Empire 1464–1591,” in I. M Lewis (ed.), Islam in Tropical Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 296–315.

21. Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

22. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

23. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Simon Dixon, Dagmar Friest, and Mark Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

24. Sahib, Selections from the Sacred Writings of the Sikhs, 30, 40.

25. Evelyn S. Rawski, “The Qing Formation and the Early-Modern Period,” in Lynn A. Struve (ed.), Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 211.

26. For a discussion of the spread of Christianity in one area of intense cross-cultural encounter, see John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. chap. 10, “Religious Stability and Change,” 397–463. On the global impact of Christianity on marriage, sexuality, social discipline, and related issues, see Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010).

27. Most of the scholarship on the VOC colonies is, not surprisingly, in Dutch. For some key studies in English, see Barbara Watson Andaya, “The Changing Religious Role of Women in Pre-Modern South East Asia,” Southeast Asian Research 2/2 (1994): 99–116; Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Leonard Blussé, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986) and Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Diane Webb (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2002); Chiu Hsin-hui, The Colonial “Civilizing Process” in Dutch Formosa, 1624–1668 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008); Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

28. Statistics in H. E. Niemeijer, “Calvinisme en koloniale Stadscultuur Batavia 1619–1725,” Dissertation, Free University of Amsterdam (1996), 222–223.

29. Charles H. Parker, “Converting Souls across Borders: Dutch Calvinism and Early Modern Missionary Enterprises,” Journal of Global History 8/1 (2013): 50–71.

30. Parker, “Converting Souls,” 64–71. On Catholicism, see D. E. Mungello (ed.), The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning (Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica and the Ricci Institute for Chinese Western Cultural History, 1994).

31. Quoted in S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India: From the Beginnings to 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 309.

32. The full text of her petition, and more about her, can be found in Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta/Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (eds.), The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.

33. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) traces her remarkable career. For another study of a Pietist missionary couple, this one European, see Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

34. Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

35. Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David M. Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).

36. Thornton, Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 409–447, 451–463.

FURTHER READING

Chiu Hsin-hui. The Colonial “Civilizing Process” in Dutch Formosa, 1624–1668. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008.

de Bary, Wm. Theodore. Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

Gillespie, Michele and Robert Beachy (eds.) Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.

Goldstone, Jack A. “Divergence in Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern.” In Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800, edited by David Porter, pp. 165–192. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Gregerson, Linda and Susan Juster (eds.) Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Grewal, J. S. The Sikhs of the Punjab. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Lieberman, Victor (ed.) Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

McLeod, W. H. Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Parker, Charles H. “Converting Souls across Borders: Dutch Calvinism and Early Modern Missionary Enterprises,” Journal of Global History 8/1 (2013): 50–71.

Parker, Charles H. “The Reformation in Global Perspective,” History Compass 12/12 (2014): 924–934.

Pestana, Carla. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Taylor, Jean Gelman. The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd ed. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

Taylor, Rodney. The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Thornton, John K. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Religious Transformations in the Early Modern World: A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2010.

CHAPTER 37

HISTORY AND MEMORY

BRUCE GORDON

WITH the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 2017 considerable effort has been devoted to assessing the historical significance of both the man and the revolution he began. Nowhere has the scale of this endeavor been greater than in Germany, cradle of the Reformation. Commemoration, however, is a precarious business, fraught with complications and complexities, and not easily controlled.[1] As the anniversary approaches, critics and supporters of the planned celebrations have given voice to challenging questions: Which Luther to remember?[2] Which part of the Reformation to commemorate?[3] Should the story of Luther be told in heroic terms or will the slaughter of peasants and the invective against the Jews receive little more than passing mention? Is the story Germany’s alone to tell? Recently, in an important book on Reformation festivals in Wittenberg, Barry Stephenson has taken up these questions.[4]

The whole event raises the question of the relationship of anniversary to commemoration. Both are acts of selective memory and the reading of history. That which we choose to honor from the past is deeply informed by our understanding of responsibility to past events and their modern manifestations.[5] Past anniversaries, as we shall see, found distinctive ways to remember the Reformers, largely by accommodating figures and events of the sixteenth century to contemporary agendas and narratives. Luther the nationalist Hercules of 1914 became the ecumenical figure of 1917 for a war-exhausted people. Calvin, the tyrant of Geneva, was by the early twentieth century a prophet of progress and forefather of American republicanism. The lability of memory and history is reflected in the spinning of accounts and visual representations crafted from the need to make the past speak to and inform the present in particular ways.

During the “Luther Decade” (2007‒2017) a vigorous round of exhibitions, concerts, and public information campaigns has accompanied the restoration of significant buildings such as the Wartburg or Schlosskirche as “sites of memory” in German lands.[6] Wittenberg remains enveloped in scaffolding and plastic, and the unlucky visitor will be disappointed by the number of buildings closed to the public on account of the robust renovation plans. The academic world is likewise in overdrive. Biographies of Luther by distinguished scholars such as Heinz Schilling, Scott Hendrix, and Lyndal Roper have begun to appear from major presses, with numerous conferences to follow. Alongside accounts of Luther’s life, leading Reformation scholars have been busy preparing works on almost every aspect of the Reformer’s thought and impact. One of the most provocative, entitled Brand Luther, by Andrew Pettegree, directly places the Wittenberg professor within a contemporary frame of reference.[7]

How will these academic studies and tradebooks change our understanding of Martin Luther and the Reformation? More interestingly, how will our contemporary concerns and prejudices inform the accounts offered? Some initial indications are emerging: first, we must acknowledge that 2017 is very much about Luther, although some efforts have been made to keep Zwingli and Calvin in the picture.[8] We may feel that we have reached the cool airs of the mount of objectivity, but future readers will detect the master narratives of contemporary historians and church organizations in which the Reformation is offered to the public as a harbinger of modernity and secularism as well as the birthplace for our contemporary concerns with toleration, religious freedom, diversity, and inclusiveness.[9]

Conjuring the past for the purposes of the present, like Saul seeking to speak with the dead prophet Samuel, remains deeply vexatious. In Germany, those organizing the various forms of commemoration, whether in public or academic spheres, find themselves confronted by formidable, and very modern, obstacles of historical and theological memory. In contemporary society the Reformation, once a visible landmark on the mental or spiritual horizon of both Protestants and Catholics, has become the object of derision, or worse, ignorance. Current public narratives of the events of the sixteenth century, such as are found in print, electronic, and cyber media, frequently focus on an age of religious intolerance, sexual and gender oppression, and an unpalatable theology that posited a tyrannical and wanton God who denied humans any free agency.

Across Europe, and to a lesser extent in North America, the Reformation tends to be regarded as a negative event, the beginning of an unwelcome sectarianism. In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli is regarded as the father of a vile “Puritanismus,” a thoroughly unmodern figure who died in battle trying to coerce others into his faith.[10] Any Scot will tell you that Calvinism has everything to do with what is wrong with the country.[11] The challenge facing those who wish to mark the history and memory of the Reformation is to persuade people why they should care.

In American academia, the attitude toward a once seminal event of European history is increasingly dismissive. Positions in Reformation history continue to disappear at an alarming rate from leading history departments. The subject has been repackaged as “Early Modern History,” leaving aspiring graduate students of the Reformation with ever fewer options. The study of the most important religious revolution in the West is increasingly the preserve of confessional institutions, where the Reformation continues to be prized, again for specific reasons and purposes.

As the homeland of the Reformation, Germany faces an especial dilemma as 2017 approaches. Significant questions need to be asked that involve history and memory. Is it possible to mark the anniversary of a seminal event in European and world history without causing offense or alienation? Germany has a large Catholic population and an even larger secular one, neither of which will have any stomach for the cult of Martin Luther redivivus.[12] Wittenberg, the focal point of the approaching celebrations, is being lovingly restored. But cleaning and renovating buildings is one part; how, it is fair to ask, will the events that began in the Saxon university town be remembered? Whose interpretation of 1517 and the subsequent Reformation will be valorized, and whose will be forgotten? Both remembrance and forgetting are essential ingredients of historical memory. Naturally, the story cannot be stated alone in terms of such stark dichotomies. The various “sites of memory” (Erfurt, Wittenberg, Wartburg) will evoke complex, competing narratives, speaking to different visitors in various voices, creating a fascinating relationship between the “official” story and the popular memories created by the peoples’ encounter with what has been chosen for representation.[13]

Yet, a story must be told, and public history demands a coherent account in order to have a particular interest in the subject presented.[14] Government bodies that oversee funding work with a metric of “impact,” which is variously defined; but without doubt scholarship is intended to enter public discourses, where academic ambiguities are not welcome. Unlike professional historians, few who read general history, visit exhibitions, or engage with media, whether films, television, or the internet, care much for subtle distinctions, conflicting interpretations, or multiple realities. The heritage business, for example, is about clarity and simplicity; it provides people with a story before lunch and items for purchase.[15] At the Melanchthonhaus in Wittenberg you can dress up as the eponymous Reformer. Our culture of heritage seeks to render a past acceptable to the present.

The embattled issue of how to portray the Reformation surfaced in a report from the EKD (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, a federation of Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches in Germany), entitled “Rechtfertigung und Freiheit. 500 Jahre Reformation 2017.” Two leading German historians have roundly attacked the document for its highly confessional presentation of Martin Luther and the German Reformation. Heinz Schilling and Thomas Kaufmann, in an article in Die Welt, charged the EKD with using the anniversary to promote the Lutheran church in German lands through a wholly ahistorical account of the Reformation.[16] Consistent with past anniversaries, preparations for marking the Reformation in Germany have focused almost entirely on Martin Luther, and, further, on his doctrine of justification.

A multivalent historical event, Schilling and Kaufmann have argued, has been slimmed down to one man and his ideas. The roles of historical events and other Reformers have been nudged into the shadow to preserve a tight narrative, one that is familiar to those aware of previous anniversaries of the Reformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther has been made the primary site of memory of the Reformation, an image onto whom a powerful narrative has been projected.[17] In the eyes of Kaufmann and Schilling the narrow focus on Protestant theology excluded vast parts of German culture and politics in whose development the Reformation played a pivotal role. One does not, they write, have to be an active Christian to appreciate how the events of 1517 transformed European culture. The problem to which the authors draw the attention of readers is the need to engage a broader audience without investment in the faith content of the anniversary. The challenge is to create a public history, a narrative of modernity in which the Reformation plays a crucial role.

THE REFORMATION RECOVERY OF THE PAST

My approach in this chapter is to place in dialogue the efforts of historians and other scholars of the Reformation to determine the roles of memory and historical identity with the belief world of the sixteenth century.[18] The Reformers of the sixteenth century sought to bring the past into the present through the creation of historical narratives that justified and made sense of the seismic changes wrought by the Reformation.[19] This was done in a number of ways. Above all the Reformers endeavored to make sense of change by portraying their doctrines and ecclesiology as a return to the purity of the Early Church. The Reformation, they declared, was a divinely appointed moment in history when the Word of God flourished as it had in ancient times. To varying degrees the Reformers presented this historical vision as revealing the end of time and the Final Judgment.[20] Within that framework, corruption and apostasy were accounted for by the dwelling of Antichrist in the church, in particular on the throne of St. Peter. The Reformers saw themselves as participating in the providential unfolding of God’s plans in human history.[21]

The role of memory lay in bringing people to see beyond the disruption to identify their continuity their the past, to experience a visceral bond with early Christians and the ancient Israelites. Through visual culture (worship), preaching, and learned and vernacular tracts the Reformers stressed a common heritage with which their churches were in continuity. They wrote and spoke of a time when true religion flourished and righteous monarchs, such as King Josiah or Deborah (Edward VI and Elizabeth I respectively), watched over the faith. The imagined biblical past of Israel and the apostolic church, joined by a Constantinian early Christianity of the six ecumenical councils, created a world that justified the writing of doctrine and the creation of forms of worship, and made sense of the fates of women and men who died as martyrs.

There were degrees of self-justification, but most Reformers acted from a belief that they lived in an eschatological moment in which they were engaged in the renewal of God’s church in the face of an implacable enemy.[22] It was not that they did not understand the difference between the past and their own time, nor did they collapse the former into the latter. They read history through the theological lens of the doctrinal solae, as well as through the natural events of their age, which they saw as revealing God’s will. Above all, they believed into the reality of the Reformation. For Zwingli and Luther, the Reformation was a divinely appointed moment in history and they as individuals were called to prophetic roles.

The momentousness of the Reformation is not to be doubted. In terms of history, it demonstrated how dangerous was the past, how uncertain and fragmentary its character.[23] For the writers of the sixteenth century it was difficult to access a distant world that only reluctantly yielded up its treasures and wisdom. The Reformation introduced the most dramatic contest of all, rival claims to Christian truth, which meant rival claims to Christian history and tradition. Further, those claims extended to the Protestant cause itself, which witnessed internecine battle over the sacraments and the nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. As Hans Merback has recently argued, early modern memory was not passive, but a “complex form of collective agency” that drew from a wide range of sources.[24] The stakes were extremely high for both Protestants and Catholics who, enabled by new editions of historical texts, sought with great intention to determine legitimate and authentic lines of tradition and continuity. One example is the work of the Council of Trent, where stories of the saints were carefully researched to separate the true from the fabricated.[25]

REFORMATION AS HISTORICAL MEMORY

Historical memory has been, and remains, about contestation, the ways in which hegemonic narratives are crafted to silence or at least subordinate other accounts. Such a judgment might sound overly negative, but it brings to the fore the manner in which the early modern creation of narrative was a process of selection, of drawing from the past those events, persons, and ideas that suited the needs of the present.[26] As with all early modern events of significance, the Reformation claims to authority were rooted in assertions of historical legitimacy. No claim could be made without evidence of a lineage to early Christianity, the fathers of the church, or the ecumenical councils, for example. No more serious charge of fraud could be made than to accuse an opponent of innovation. No development could be perceived as de novo or “original”; it was essential for Reformers to create narratives of continuity in which the past baptized the present.

For Zwingli and Calvin, as well as the English Reformers under Edward VI, historical memory was a complex negotiation between the new and the old. Even if one’s debt to existing traditions was specifically named, the creation of memory involved tacit acceptance of much that was retained. A striking reminder of this reality was the continued influence of canon law in the Protestant churches. As Paul Connerton has argued, no beginnings are absolutely new, regardless of how radical. Recollection is an essential part of all change.[27]

An illuminating example of Connerton’s reflection was the introduction of the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper in Zurich, a location of the Reformation associated more with the forgetting of iconoclasm than with continuity.[28] Yes, the traditional Mass was comprehensively removed in 1525, but the new liturgy, and the written accounts of its form by Zwingli, and later Heinrich Bullinger and Ludwig Lavater, emphasized the historical link between the sacrament and the Last Supper of Christ: it was a Passover meal. The bread and wine were sites of memory, objects that were to bring the women and men to the contemplation of the divine presence and of their own membership in the church universal. Memory, in diverse ways was at the heart of the service, even in the manner in which the table was placed before the people as an ersatz altar. Finally, the service took place within the old churches, stirring memories of what once was and how it was replaced with a new order still infused with the old.

The study of history and memory in the Reformation focuses on the negotiated relationship between the present and the past in which Reformers, scholars, and political leaders drew selectively from written, oral, and visual sources.[29] But the engagement with the past was not simply an affair of the educated and clerical elites or powerful princes and magistrates. Since the work of Robert Scribner we have been sensitive to the complex ways in which memory worked among the “simple folk,” who through ritual preserved age-old practices while entering into relations with religious change.[30] The coveted black vestments of Eamon Duffy’s priest of Morebath were sites of memory of a past for which he yearned while adapting himself to the new world of English Protestantism.[31]

What was the relationship between history and memory? The answer is not straightforward because in the Reformation the border between the two was extremely porous. A good example is martyrologies, for, as Susannah Brietz Monta has argued, the English history plays “put pressure on martyrologists’ tendency to construct a unified religious history from individual sufferers’ testimonies.”[32] Yet, these single historical narratives faced fierce rivalry from competing accounts of the Reformation’s relationship to the past. Brietz Monta adds, “writers as diverse as John Foxe and Robert Persons strove to build a continuous religious narrative reaching from the days of the early church to the early modern period to demonstrate the truthfulness of their martyrs’ confessions.”[33] Hence we find the forms of historical writing suffused with competing memories or confessions of witnesses, illuminating the reality that early modern people did not work with modern conceptions of history as a discipline, and that memory was a constructed and fragile recollection of the past.

In the early modern world memory and history were virtually inseparable, although significant distinctions can be made about the forms of memory and its practices, principally as a theological, mnemonic, and historical manifestation. Theologically, the inheritance of Augustine was memoria as a faculty of the soul upon which the image of God was impressed. For Augustine, memory was recollection, but not exclusively; it is the way in which truth is known. It is, as Paula Fredriksen has argued, the “site of illumination.” “Memory,” she writes on Augustine, “is our bridge to the world outside ourselves, and to God.”[34] Because humans live in time, recollection is the means by which we are able to make sense of the past and present, although those two moments exist in tension. Memory gives meaning to experience. In this context, language plays a crucial role. Fredriksen has written, “Language itself is tangled up in time, distended and itself intrinsically narrative, dependent on the linear passage from being (present) to nonbeing (past) before it can be understood.”[35] Language, with its contingent nature, both enables the recounting of history and proves an impediment. When we attempt to express the multidimensional relationships between present and past, language draws us into the formation of interpretative narratives.

Augustine places memory at the heart of human psychology. For the North African father it is a great repository of knowledge within which God dwells and draws the mind to God.[36] He was well aware of the rhetorical arts of memory, although he did not think much of them, as outward arts of humanity. Later, a system was developed in the Middle Ages by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.

In his work on Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne, Nicolas Russell deals with a theme crucial for both early modern and modern understandings of memory, and that is forgetting. The pairing of memory and forgetting became a way of understanding human conduct. For Humanist authors forgetting was a sign of fallenness and fallibility but also a means by which narratives could be established through the exclusion of historical or theological material not congenial to the authors’ purposes. Memory was understood to be accompanied by forgetting and therefore was a fragile basis for both the self and community, but it provided the self with useful models that can be the basis for stability.[37] Such models were those drawn from classical or biblical sources, although they too, as in the cases of Cicero, Moses, and David, could be variously employed.

The sixteenth century saw a significant shift in the use of memory and considerable unease about the tradition inherited from medieval authors that depended on systems of artificial memory.[38] As Russell has argued, the introduction of the printing press changed the role of memory in early modern culture. The availability of texts rendered the need to memorize less important. Russell argues that the French authors transformed memory from an art to a mental faculty essential to the human character, although one that was essentially unstable and distinct from the will.[39] Alexandra Walsham has argued that the tumult of religious change in the sixteenth century brought about changes in how memory was understood, initiating a different sense of generationality.[40]

Contemporaries understood the scale of change and disruption in the Reformation. Not only did change take place in religion and politics, but there was considerable social upheaval, as villages and families found themselves divided by faith.[41] Memories were shattered and formed. For Catholics, sites of remembrance in churches and through the landscape were removed, often violently.[42] The dead in purgatory, dependent on the pious memories of those who interceded for them, were cast into oblivion.[43] In England, Germany, and the Swiss Confederation, we find those of elite and modest status who saw the events of their day with regret, a sense of loss, and their memories ran to a golden age of how things were imagined to have been. Proponents of Reformation sought to create new historical narratives that offered a critique of the present order. By looking to the purer age of the Early Church, Luther, Zwingli, and, later, Calvin sought not only to demonstrate the corruption of the Old Church, but also to provide the faithful with a new identity as members of the apostolic church worshipping Jesus alone while living in a culture far removed from the Holy Land.

As Judith Pollmann has argued, rupture and change could lead to an acute awareness of what had been lost and a sense of oblivion in the face of radical change.[44] Such tumult might lead to forms of nostalgia for a lost past, but the effects were not necessarily lasting. In time, people such as the Dutchman Arnold Buchelius accepted what had taken place and even converted to the Protestant faith. When religious groups, whether Protestant or Catholic, establish control, they find ways to reconceive of the past in terms of continuity, and create rituals, such as liturgies, or civic or sacred events, such as fast days, that create memory and identity. The past was reworked to forge a contemporary culture that saw itself as rooted in the origins of Christianity, even if the temporal distance was recognized.

MEMORY AND RELIGION

The vast majority of scholarship on the Reformation, above all on theology, has focused on the transmission of thought through written texts that led to the consolidation of religious traditions.[45] However, as events proved in the 1520s, written texts were not sufficient as means of reform; they had to be accompanied by ritual transmission, such as liturgy, iconoclasm, worship, and images. Again following the work of Robert Scribner and his students, we have been educated not to divide sharply oral and written forms of communication, for both are sources of cultural memory. The interrelationship of oral, written, and visual culture must form the theoretical framework for interpreting memory in the Reformation. Here the well-known work of Maurice Halbwachs is helpful for understanding the Reformation, although his separation of memory and history is problematic for the premodern world.[46] In addition, we need to be attentive to the writing of Pierre Nora, whose “sites of memory” has proved an indispensable frame of reference for Reformation historians seeking to understand the diverse ways, from the body, to oral history, to landscape and architectural forms, “places” can serve as complex and contested sources of memory.[47]

Halbwachs argued against any idea that memory was an individual act apart from community, stating that “history is dead memory,” a way of preserving the past to which we have no longer “organic” experiential relation.[48] The construction of memory, therefore, is a communal act in which there is constant negotiation with history as “the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present.”[49] Halbwachs, with other scholars, recognized that although memory is communal, it is not uniform. Individual memories exist within the communal and can often be in conflict with one another. They take shape in forms of human discourse and representation within the community. Recent work on memory has focused on ways in which the human brain functions in order to examine the cognitive process that is memory.[50] The Social Framework of Memory (1925) argued that groups determine what is recalled and what is forgotten. Halbwachs posited a distinction between oral and written sources: the first were dynamic and constantly changing while the second moved toward codification. The central insight of Halbwachs, as Elizabeth Castelli has written, is how “individuals within social groups routinely and inevitably lay claim to a much wider and deeper past than the one constituted by their own personal or historical experience and that they discern the meanings of that past through the group’s accounting of it.”[51]

The constant debate over the nature of historical, social, or common memory continues apace because there is little agreement on both the subject and what sort of field it belongs to. One of the more persuasive arguments has been the emphasis on social memory that refuses to totalize the concept, preferring to think of memory in terms of specific moments, locations, and persons. This approach particularizes forms of memory with changing ages, so that for the study of the Reformation of central importance is the printing press, which transformed the relationship of text to media culture. The printed word became a dominant form in the shaping of communal memory. Peter Sherlock makes the point in his discussion of John Foxe’s vast English martyrology, the Acts and Monuments: “Foxe did not simply create a record of what happened, but found a way in the medium of the printed book to dictate precisely how memory should be interpreted by succeeding generations.”[52]

One of the ways in which memory research has been particularly helpful for our understanding of religious change in the Reformation has been the recognition of the extent to which pre-existent structures in the brain filter new information and mold it to how we remember a story.[53] When there is no framework into which change can be received humans have a great deal more difficulty retaining the information. This helps us to understand the work of the Reformers, who in institutional and liturgical reform drew heavily on pre-existent forms known to the people. Where more radical separation with the past took place, the less successful were the changes.[54]

Work on the subject of memory requires attention to the relationship between text and orality rather than seeing them as separate, for both were essential to how women and men remembered the past in terms of the present. The relationship between the oral and textual, however, as recent scholarship has established, reveals their distinct aspects.[55] Most written texts, whether sermons, drama, or even mandates had oral performance techniques. Theorists of social memory have made us increasingly aware of the power of commemorative services, such as liturgy, civic pageants, and rural and agrarian rituals as sites of memory that shaped the identities of communities, requiring us to think about the relationship of written, fixed texts and more fluid oral traditions. Commemorative rituals, as we shall see in the Reformation anniversaries, are able to establish master narratives. In a similar way, the central battles over the sacraments in the sixteenth century, the most significant rituals of the church, were a struggle for control of narratives that determined the face of Christianity. This was not simply between Catholics and Protestants over the Mass, but also a vicious conflict within the Protestant camp between Lutherans and Zwinglians.[56]

The relationship between ritual and written text in the shaping of memory was reciprocal. Naturally, ritual had the means of expressing the narrative in which acts of the past were remembered and commemorated. However, ritual acts both shaped the sacred stories they represented and were shaped by them. In a poignant moment from his Travesties and Transgressions, David Cressy describes a liturgical controversy in the parish of St. Thomas’s in London in the seventeenth century over forms of practice and devotion. “It shows,” he writes,
that there were orderly and disorderly ways to effect change, as well as different ways of telling a story. Each side laid claim to a particular memory of liturgical arrangements, and each blamed the other for changes that fomented disorder. Here as elsewhere the conduct of the sacrament, the placement of the table, and the presence or absence of communion rails served as indicators of religious discipline and devotional style. The episode provides another point of entry for examining the contested cultural history of early modern England.[57]

Therefore, it is not sufficient to discuss memory in terms of ritual apart from developments of theology, biblical commentaries, sermons, and catechisms, all of which were in a state of flux. We need to think harder about the encounter between multiple and changing narratives of reform and the sacred spaces in which they were told. Reformation scholarship has been too inclined to reify both ritual and theology. Drawing on the work of Alderate, Risto writes of qualities of early Christian texts illuminating for scholars of the Reformation. It’s the oral aspect of early Christian texts, he writes, “that is so often lost for us when we work with our edited texts, synopses, written commentaries and computer programs. Voice, tone, intonation, gesture, mimicry, acclamation of the audience and other similar practices were all part of what the ancients understood to be the oral performance of a written text.”[58] Such comparative work leads scholars of the Reformation to new insights into the ways in which ideas were formulated and disseminated, the manner in which they were embodied.[59]

Memory in the Reformation could serve as key to the building of defined church communities through teaching, notably through catechism, song, and preaching, reinforcing the ideas and teachings of the chief Reformers.[60] The Reformation was a culture of “ritual repetition.” Yet we know that the continuous repetition of ritual and teaching of doctrine could have the opposite effect on people, who demonstrated their resistance by staying away from church or by traveling to attend Catholic services in neighboring villages.[61] The effect of the development of ritual was variegated, often leading to singular interpretations of the Bible, mystical experiences, or acts of protest.

In the works of Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, memory is not an unchanging vessel for carrying the past to the present. Memory is a process, not a thing, and it works differently at different points. Crucial is the question of how we acquire identities, and what are the bodies’ social institutions through which Reformation cultures linked identity and memory. Halbwachs emphasized the role of the family, but we need to add churches, the state, guilds, and rural communities. Olick and Robbins cite Zerubavel: “Indeed being social presupposes the ability to experience events that happened to groups and communities to which we belong long before we joined them as if they were part of our own past,” and comment, “This ‘sociobiographical memory’ is the mechanism through which we feel pride, pain, or shame with regard to events that happened to our groups before we joined them.”[62]

Reading early modern texts is a constant quest for understanding what people chose to remember and how it was represented in light of persons, events, and ideas. For too long the Reformation has been regarded as a series of theological or political ideals without attention to variegated ways in which people responded. In numerous forms of verbal exchange people were forced to “exercise their memories” in terms of understanding their identities and circumstances.[63] Memories could be apart from official teachings of the church. They were formulated in contexts and according to particular experiences. What is being stressed is how the act of memory is essential to the creation of identity. As Kat Hill has recently argued, “We need to know who remembered; what they recalled; how; and in what context.”[64] Further, Hill argues that we need to understand the literary, linguistic, and social models that shaped remembering.

EXEMPLARITY

The role of early modern writers was to produce collective memory. This was done through a variety of ways, but of great significance was the use of exemplarity, which depended on formed memories of the past in which people and events were constructed to become symbols that valorized ideas of change, continuity, stability, and the future. Christian history was about plotting a teleological trajectory in which all events were interpreted in light of the Word of God.[65] Models for imitation are provided and through the use of rhetorical forms the people are persuaded of the verity of the narratives. The goal was to produce a usable past for church and community. Again, as Castelli argues, a unified and unifying present “are products of subtle and not-so-subtle processes of framing and sifting, emphasis and suppression.” Further, “myth necessarily involves a heightened narrativizing of the past and a careful linking of particular stories to larger, cultural master narratives.”[66]

COMMEMORATING THE REFORMATION

In the second half of the sixteenth century Lutheran communities were hard at work commemorating the Reformation. As Susan Boettcher has written, “These depictions drew upon typical themes of late medieval memoria, using old media as a means of transmitting new content in order to give Lutheranism a history that connected to a biblical past with its soteriological promises.” She continues her argument that “thus extending the connections of the new churches into the past and future in the same way that medieval memoria had united the Christian community of the viewer’s present with the lives of Jesus and the saints and their future in the Christian afterlife.”[67]

As Robert Kolb has demonstrated, by the end of the sixteenth century Luther remained the symbol of the Reformation although he was no longer the determinative theological voice. In drama, such as the work of Andreas Hartmann and Martin Rinckhart, historical material was mixed with dramatical conventions.[68] Such dramatic works intensified around the anniversary of 1617, to the extent that Luther was portrayed as the angel of Revelation 14.[69]

Most of the first anniversaries of the Reformation took place at the local level in German lands as cities marked their own conversion to the cause. The first major national event came in 1617 to mark the Ninety-Five Theses. The Luther who emerged was, as Kolb writes, “the angel of Revelation 14, the prophet of the German nation and the new Elijah, a hero who withstood powerful tyranny from ecclesiastical and political figures, and teacher of God’s Word who brought the light of the Gospel into the darkness imposed on Christendom by the papacy.”[70] Particularly striking was the manner in which the propaganda literature had a loose relationship to the historical accounts of Luther’s life; the reworking of the Reformer was intended to emphasize his divine origin through miracles and special calling. Little was made of his particular theological teaching. In lands outside Germany the anniversary of 1617 was marked in churches in Scandinavia, where a different story was told. The account of Luther and his Reformation was closely interwoven with local events. Take for example the obelisk erected in Copenhagen to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the Danish Reformation in 1943. Each of the four sides displays scenes of decisive moments from the early days of the Reform movement.[71] What remained untouched, however, was Luther’s unquestioned status as a hero.[72]

The work of Stan M. Landry has provided a clear understanding of the relationship between memory and commemoration in the Reformation anniversaries between 1817 and 1917. Landry argues for the coalescing of liberal student views with an understanding of Martin Luther as liberator of the German people from the Roman Catholic Church.[73] The anniversaries also pointed to the growing desire among many political rulers for the union of Protestant faiths, Reformed and Lutheran.

Two competing views of Luther emerged in 1817, the enlightened views of the students and a stronger nationalist sentiment among the population, which, in Landry’s words:

recalled a Luther who eschewed sectarianism and who might serve as a national hero accessible to all Germans. During this uncertain and nascent period of German nationalism, it was only natural to appeal to foundational and authoritative German icons. Indeed, memories of Luther and the Reformation provided a usable past for nineteenth-century Germans that could be deployed in order to shape the present.[74]

The anniversary events of 1817 were deeply shaped by the contemporary desire for ecclesiastical union, or, at least, ecumenical dialogue. Indeed, it was at the Reformation anniversary of 1817 that the Prussian monarch declared the union of the two Protestant churches. From the leading theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher a view of the Reformation was propagated that advocated the harmony of the different forms of Protestantism.[75]

By 1883, however, the landscape was dramatically different following the Prussian victory, the unification of German lands, and the emergence of the Wilhelmine Empire. The Luther remembered at the anniversaries was not an ecumenical figure, but a deeply political one, a national hero along the lines of 1617. German nationalists saw in Luther a great German, the man who had liberated the conscience, a man of progress.[76] He was a deeply anti-Catholic symbol used as a figure in the Kulturkampf. As Landry shows, the commemoration of St. Boniface became a site of contested memory as Lutheran Protestants sought to demonstrate that Luther had continued the work of the saint. One evangelical journal declared that Boniface had brought Christianity to Germany and Luther had reformed it.[77]

During World War I the mood changed again. Gone were the nationalist fervor and the anti-Catholicism. Services were held and speeches given in which Catholics and Protestants were called upon to come together. Luther’s image changed once more into what Landry calls a “German national hero accessible to Catholics and Protestants alike.”[78] Luther was a symbol of the fidelity and self-sacrifice required of the German people in the dark hour.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

During the nineteenth century John Calvin’s reputation as a Reformer was revived by a series of biographies and histories of the Reformation that placed him as the second man of the Reformation after Luther. Calvin’s own character was closely interwoven with the case of Michael Servetus, who was burnt at the stake in Geneva in 1553. At the heart of the debate among both accusers and advocates was the question of Calvin’s culpability for the death, which was widely regarded as a symbol of Reformation religious intolerance. Liberal Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic, seeking on the one hand to recover Calvin as a symbol of their faith, were on the other deeply embarrassed by the Servetus affair and sought to perform an act of obeisance by marking the historical guilt of their faith.

In the early twentieth century monuments were erected in Geneva (Champel), Annemasse, and Vienne by a wide range of thinkers from liberal Protestants to radical socialists, all espousing divergent beliefs, and therefore memories of the Reformation.[79] Public spaces became contested by two entirely different interpretations of the Reformation. Further, Servetus acquired the status of a resistance fighter against clericalism and the established church in late nineteenth-century France.

For the case of Calvin in France, many French Protestants believed that the execution was a product of its age. It was an unfortunate history that was never to be repeated because the faith had evolved, part of a doctrine of progress embraced by the faithful. This was the manner in which the execution could be explained, and with the anniversary in 1903 an apology was appropriate and necessary. Such a public demonstration of collective guilt, many believed, freed French Protestants to reclaim the genius of the Reformation, which was Calvin as liberator of the conscience and the great man of reform.[80]

The debate over monuments in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a struggle for the narrative of the Reformation. However, the argument went further; it was the interpretation of that history to make sense of a changing landscape in the Republic. “The debates around the Michael Servetus monuments,” Zuber has written,
are part of this fundamental historical step in the construction of French laicité (secularism). Although this is not the only example of the exploitation of history by different existing parties, this unanimity in paying homage to an obscure heretic who has the misfortune to be a double victim in his time, seemed to be one of the most significant illustrations of a society in the process of secularization and for which the truth of an idea progressively gave place to the relativization of all religious belief.[81]

A further step in this development was the Reformation wall erected in Geneva following the four-hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth in Noyon, Picardy in 1509. Without doubt the most famous monument to the Reformation, the Geneva wall, constructed for a celebration of Calvin that made him hardly recognizable to modern eyes. He was celebrated as a the prophet of progress and the origins of toleration (with the exception of the error of Servetus). Along lines similar to the thought of Max Weber and Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch prime minister and theologian, Calvin was seen as the forefather of modernity. The invitation to the celebrations spoke of him not as the author of unwelcome theological doctrines, but as the harbinger of American democracy.[82]

At the beginning of World War I Luther was commemorated in terms of a “War Theology” that recruited him to the imperial cause. In the speech given by the Kaiser in 1914 written by Adolf von Harnack, Luther was quoted. The Wittenberg Reformer was fully part of the bellicose expansionism of Wilhelmine Germany, as he had been for the unification under Prussia and Bismarck, when he was not only a symbol of the Reformation at the beginning of German history, but also the liberator of the conscience.

By 1917, however, the situation was much different. Germany stood on the brink of defeat and the triumphalism of three years earlier had vanished into the ether. In return, the people looked to a different form of Luther, one that offered certainty. The dominant figure of the age was Karl Holl (1866‒1926), Professor of Theology at Tübingen and Berlin, who portrayed Luther as a figure who lived wholly by the Word of God, a man of true religion.[83] Holl, a conservative by nature of his politics and religion, was devastated by the socialist victory in 1918, deeply resenting those who blamed Luther for the catastrophe, including Ernst Troeltsch, who retained a strong affinity for the German Reformer. James Stayer has poignantly captured Holl’s combative character as he enlisted Luther to his political cause:

Karl Holl’s research of 1914‒1918 was a contribution to the war effort, the collection of his essays into a big, 450-page Luther book that appeared with Siebeck in 1921 was a blow against the anti-Lutheran parties in the Weimar coalition. In, with, and under its scholarly substance it was a reassertion of the aristocratic, conservative Protestant forces—the displaced peoples of the state of the Wilhelminian Reich.[84]

Holl led the so-called “Luther Renaissance” of the 1920s that formed a powerful critique of both confessional and cultural Protestantism, arguing that both had failed to see the Reformer in his proper historical and theological context. At the heart of the movement was an emphasis on the theocentrism of Luther’s thought.

In 1933, just after the National Socialists came to power they did not fail to recognize the significance of the Luther celebrations, the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Reformer’s birth. They gladly assisted in the preparations, making November 10 (Luther’s birthday) an official holiday. In the preparations in Wittenberg, Wilhelm Frick, a party leader, praised Luther’s “ruthless will to truthfulness,” his “inner modesty,” and his “uncompromising belief.”[85] Frick’s words, however, pale in comparison to the historical understanding of the event declared by President Hindenburg, who stated in Berlin:

This Luther Day 1933 brings the whole world of Protestants to consciousness of its community and its bond in faith. But this day of thanks summons the German Volk in particular to be united in the stewardship of its great historical inheritance, to accomplish the tasks of the present and future in unanimity. Therefore stay firm in the faith of your fathers, be strong in your love of the Volk and Reich and full of confidence in Germany’s destiny.[86]

Other speakers placed greater emphasis on the religious revival in Germany on account of the Luther anniversary. However, it was Luther’s attack on the Jews that proved most congenial to Nazi purposes, and the opportunity was not lost. A party leader close to Adolf Hitler, Hans Schemm, gave the line:

The older and more experienced [Luther] became, the less he could understand one particular type of person: this was the Jew. His engagement against the decomposing Jewish spirit is clearly evident not only from his writing against the Jews; his life too was idealistically, philosophically anti-Semitic. Now we Germans of today have the duty to recognize and acknowledge this.[87]

In the end, as Steigmann-Gall has shown, the 1933 anniversary, with its contested interpretation of Luther, proved impossible to make Luther a “spiritual patron” for either the Nazis or confessional Christians. The birthday was a disappointment, not bringing about the renewal of Germany that many believed the revival of Luther would herald. Yet, the anniversary of Luther in that year marked a turning point for German Protestantism, leading to fragmentation and internal discord. For the Nazis there was a form of success. One area of the Reformation legacy they turned to was the bond between the church and state, and they unashamedly used the anniversary to extend control over Protestantism.

Forty years later, during the tumult in Germany of the 1960s, the next anniversary took place in 1967, though it has never been remembered with much interest. It has remained in the shadow of the momentous events of the Second Vatican Council and the later anniversary of 1983. For our purposes, worthy of note in 1967 was the growing Catholic engagement with Luther and attempts made to open dialogue on the place of the Reformer in the church.[88] It was the beginning of a new generation of Catholic Luther scholarship, with such figures as Josef Lortz, Peter Manns, and Erwin Iserloh. Also of importance was the growing acceptance of Luther in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he had been persona non grata. A new interpretation of the Reformer began to emerge, as the Communist regime began to claim the Reformation and make it part of its heritage. This was particularly important as virtually all the sites relating to Luther’s life and work were located within the GDR. The creation of Luther as a national figure, however, proved deeply problematic for Christians in the state, as they looked for a renewal of theology, not ideology.

The most dramatic anniversary was 1983, when the GDR faced the daunting task of welcoming the world to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s birth.[89] The Communist officials wanted to control the narrative and not permit either a wholly German or theological Luther to appear, but one who buttressed the ideals of the party. They wanted to show the GDR in an independent light. Within the country, however, the churches were increasingly taking a distinctive line, arguing for the importance of the ecclesiastical and theological significance of Luther. The churches distanced themselves from the state and rejected the Marxist image of Luther.

CONCLUSION

As with all anniversaries of the Reformation and of particular Reformers the events of 2017 will involve competing narratives of renewal and demise, and of very different readings of the past as it pertains to the present. Contemporary debates over the Reformation take us to the problematic nature of the sixteenth century itself, when profound religious change was grounded in divergent readings of history to create new, reformed churches and communities. Approaches were highly selective as narratives were created that formed individual and communal identities. Thinking about history and memory takes us to the heart of how religious change took place and the belief worlds of women and men who experienced the rupture of the Reformation. In considering how the Reformation itself has become an object of memory we are awoken to the ways in which its multiple interpretations throw light on how and why we have chosen and still choose to remember a momentous turning point in our history.

NOTES

1. The literature on commemoration has grown exponentially, but the following were helpful for this essay: John Bodner, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Peter J. Holliday, The Origins of Roman Historical Commemoration in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Holger Hook, History, Commemoration, and National Preoccupation: Trafalgar 1805–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Mark McCarthy, Ireland’s 1916 Uprising: Explorations of History Making, Commemoration and Heritage in Modern Times (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

2. A good example is the painful debate over the Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin-Mariendorf, where National Socialist soldiers appear beside Jesus on the pulpit. There was been considerable public debate about what to do with the church, which some claim to be “Nazi art” and should be destroyed. See “Der SA-Man neben Jesus Christ. Der schwierige Umgang mit der Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin-Mariendorf.” <http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/der-sa-mann-neben-jesus-christus.1278.de.html?dram:article_id=265504> (accessed August 16, 2016).

3. Such questions were briefly posed in 2013 in a short article by Thomas Albert Howard entitled “Protestant Reformation Approaching 500.” First Things, May 13, 2013. <http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/05/protestant-reformation-approaching> (accessed August 16, 2016).

4. Barry Stephenson, Performing the Reformation: Religious Festivals in Contemporary Wittenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). See “Martin Luther, German Hero,” 89–112.

5. See the Vatican document, “From Conflict to Communion. Lutheran–Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017”: “While the previous Reformation anniversaries took place in confessionally homogenous lands, or lands at least where a majority of the population was Christian, today Christians live worldwide in multireligious environments. This pluralism poses a new challenge for ecumenism, making ecumenism not superfluous but, on the contrary, all the more urgent, since the animosity of confessional oppositions harms Christian credibility.” <http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/lutheran-fed-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_2013_dal-conflitto-alla-comunione_en.html> (accessed August 16, 2016).

6. See the main website: <http://www.luther2017.de/> (accessed August 16, 2016).

7. Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther (New York: Penguin, 2015). See also his chapter in this volume.

8. For example, see the new biography of Huldrych Zwingli by Peter Opitz, Ulrich Zwingli. Prophet, Ketzer, Pioneer des Protestantismus (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2015). Also, the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism, edited by Bruce Gordon and Carl Trueman, is planned for 2017. The year 2016 will also see the marking of the four-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Second Helvetic Confession (1566).

9. See German government outline for 2017 celebrations.

10. The following appeared in the Zurich cultural magazine Du in 2003: “Mit dem Wort ‘zwinglianisch’ ist allerhand Unfug getrieben worden. Der Geist und die Ideen des Reformators Zwingli haben in den vergangenen 500 Jahren für vieles hinhalten müssen. Sie dienten häufig als Feigenblatt für eine gewisse Lebenshaltung.”

11. One of the more thoughtful articles on this topic is Ron Ferguson, “A Nation in the Grip of Secular Calvinism,” The Herald, May 10, 2010.

12. The delicate relations with Catholics have been addressed in the thoughtful words of Heinrich Bedford Strohm, Chair of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, who has remarked: “We like to talk of the Reformation anniversary but we also use the term commemoration. On the one hand, there is reason to celebrate: we are glad about the insights that were also important for the Catholic Church. On the other hand, however, it left open wounds. The church division cemented itself and wars of religion were waged that brought unending suffering in the name of the confessions. We have to recall these painful issues as well, and so we have agreed on holding a service for the ‘healing of memories.’ From the Roman Catholic and the Protestant side we want to confess what we did to the others and ask for forgiveness.” <https://www.ekd.de/english/4250-edi_2015_08_18_reformation_anniversary.html> (accessed August 16, 2016).

13. On the concept “sites of memory,” see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. See Etienne François, “Die Wartburg,” in Étienne François and Hagen Schultze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 154–170.

14. This problem is addressed in a stimulating article on the Guantanamo public memory project and the issues facing those charged with interpreting material for broader consumption. Rose Miron, “Sacrificing Comfort for Complexity: Presenting Difficult Narratives in Public History.” <http://publichistorycommons.org/sacrificing-comfort-for-complexity/> (accessed August 16, 2016).

15. On heritage, see Russell Steiff, Re-imaging Heritage Interpretation: Enchanting the Past-Future (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

16. Thomas Kaufmann and Heinz Schilling, “Die EKD hat ein ideologisches Luther-Bild,” Die Welt, May 24, 2014.

17. One of the most thoughtful accounts of German Reformation narratives of recent times is Bernd Hamm, “Farewell to Epochs in Reformation History: A Plea,” Renaissance and Reformation Review 16 (2014): 211–245.

18. The crucial work is Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Also, Paulina Kewes, “History and its Uses,” in Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), 1–30.

19. See the essays in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth Century Europe, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). The classic work remains A. G. Dickens and John Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Also, the essays in Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (eds.), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Irena Backus, Life Writing in the Reformation: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples, and Foes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Barbara Sher Tinsley, History and Polemic in the French Reformation (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992).

20. Bernard J. McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein (eds.), The Continuum History of Apocalypticism (New York and London: Continuum, 2003). On the Reformation, see 329–334.

21. Korey D. Maas, The Reformation and Robert Barnes: History, Theology and Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2010). See also Esther Chung-Kim, Inventing Authority: The Use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011).

22. Backus, Irena, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

23. See Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003).

24. Mitchell Merback, “Forum. Memory before Modernity: Cultural Practices in Early Modern Germany,” German History 33 (2015): 105.

25. See Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 201–224.

26. I have discussed this point in “Emulating the Past and Creating the Present: Reformation and the Use of Historical and Theological Models in Zurich in the Sixteenth Century” (with Luca Baschera and Christian Moser), in Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 1–39.

27. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13, cited in Tuula Sakarahaho, “Religion and the Study of Social Memory,” Temenos 47 (2011): 140.

28. Lee Palmer Wandel, “Envisioning God: Image and Liturgy in Reformation Zurich,” Sixteenth Century Studies 24 (1993): 21‒40; Gordon, “Transcendence and Community in Zwinglian Worship: The Liturgy of 1525 in Zurich,” in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Continuity and Change in Christian Worship (Bury St Edmunds: Boydell Press, 1999), 128–150.

29. See Thomas Fuchs, “Reformation, Tradition und Geschichte: Erinnerungsstrategien der reformatorischen Bewegung,” in Joachim Eibach and Marcus Sandl (eds.), Protestantische Identität und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 71–84.

30. Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). On images and memory, see Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

31. Eamon Duffy, Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 115.

32. Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159.

33. Patrick Collinson, “Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.), Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1985), 31–54.

34. Paula Fredriksen, “Augustine on God and Memory,” in Alan Rosen (ed.), Obliged by Memory: Literature, Religion, Ethics (Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press 2005), 133.

35. Ibid., 137.

36. See Dave Tell, “Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 233.

37. Nicolas Russell, Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-Century France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011), xx.

38. Ibid., xi.

39. Ibid., xii.

40. Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age, and Religious Change in England, ca.1500–1700,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (2011): 93–121.

41. See the essays in C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); and Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds.), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

42. See the work by Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and her inaugural lecture “History, Memory, and the English Reformation,” The Historical Journal 55 (2012): 899–938.

43. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

44. Judith Pollmann, “Introduction: On the Early Modernity of Modern Memory,” in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (eds.), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2013), 1–26.

45. Uro Risto, “Ritual Memory and Writing in Early Christianity,” Temenos 47 (2011): 160.

46. Pollmann, “Memory before Modernity,” 100–101.

47. See Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7–24.

48. Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” ARS 24 (1998): 110.

49. Quoted in Risto, “Ritual Memory,” 163–164.

50. Ibid., 164.

51. Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 20.

52. Peter Sherlock, “The Reformation of Memory in Early Modern Europe,” in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds.), Memories: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordam University Press, 2011), 33.

53. Olick and Robbins, “Social Memory Studies,” 116.

54. Risto, “Ritual Memory,” 166.

55. See Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

56. See Chapter 29 by Bridget Heal in this volume.

57. David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 189.

58. Risto, “Ritual Memory,” 168.

59. An excellent example of such a fresh approach to the relationship of body and senses to the content of Reformation ideas is found in Lyndal Roper’s “Martin Luther’s Body: ‘The Stout Doctor’ and his Biographers,” American Historical Review 115/ 2 (2010): 351–384. Also, Matthew Milner, Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

60. See Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Also crucial is Hunt, The Art of Hearing.

61. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 165–166.

62. Olick and Robbins, “Social Memory Studies,” 123.

63. Kat Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism 1525–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 78.

64. Ibid., 79

65. Castelli, Martyrdom, 28.

66. Ibid., 30.

67. Susan R. Boettcher, “Late Sixteenth-Century Lutherans: A Community of Memory?” in Michael J. Halvorson and Karin E. Spierling (eds.), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 141.

68. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999), 122–123.

69. Ibid., 125.

70. Ibid., 129.

71. <http://www.vanderkrogt.net/statues/object.php?webpage=ST&record=dk108> (accessed August 16, 2016).

72. Kolb, Martin Luther, 132.

73. Stan M. Landry, Ecumenism, Memory and German Nationalism, 1817–1917 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 3.

74. Ibid., 5.

75. Ibid., 16.

76. Ibid., 91.

77. Ibid., 98.

78. Ibid., 105.

79. Valentine Zuber, “Servetus vs. Calvin: A Battle of Monuments during the Secularization of the French Third Republic,” in Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet (eds.), Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009), 167–194.

80. Ibid., 179–180.

81. Ibid., 193.

82. R. Bryan Bademan, “The Republican Reformer: John Calvin and the American Calvinists, 1830–1910,” in Neit, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 284 n. 59.

83. James M. Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 (Montreal, ON: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2000), 28.

84. Ibid., 27.

85. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 135.

86. Ibid., 135.

87. Ibid., 136.

88. See Theodor Dieter and Wolfgang Thönnison (eds.), Was mir Luther bedeutet: Katholische Lutherforscher berichten (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016).

89. James Markham, “East Germany Finally Embraces Luther,” New York Times, May 8, 1983.

FURTHER READING

Backus, Irena. Life Writing in the Reformation: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples, and Foes. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Gordon, Bruce (ed.) Protestant History and Identity in the Sixteenth Century, 2 vols. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

Grafton, Anthony. What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Hill, Kat. Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism 1525–1585. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Kolb, Robert. Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999.

Liere, Katherine van, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (eds.) Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Merback, Mitchell. “Forum. Memory before Modernity: Cultural Practices in Early Modern Germany,” German History 33 (2015): 100‒122.

Stephenson, Barry. Performing the Reformation: Religious Festivals in Contemporary Wittenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Walsham, Alexandra. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

INDEX
à Lasco, John 228
correspondence with Bucer 444

Aachen 114

Abelard, Peter 26

Aberdeen University 490

Act for the Suppression of Innovations 615

Actes and Monuments (Foxe) 79, 280, 287, 773

Acts of the Apostles 204

Adam and Eve 23, 24f, 25, 26
as model of matrimony 669, 672

Adami, Tobias 314, 318

Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (Luther) 153, 383

Adelung, Johann Christoph 303

‘Adiaphoristic Controversy’ 157

African slave trade 720

‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’ (Luther) 393

Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (Luther) 529

Agricola, Johannes 137, 487

Agricola, Michael 160, 162

Ahmad Ibn Qäsim al-Hajari 288, 189

Akbar, Mughal Emperor 748

Albrecht III, Duke of Bavaria 257

Albrecht of Brandenburg, Cardinal 149, 607
alchemy 311–12, 315–17
and gender 11
influence on Reformation 468
medical system 735
and sexual difference 674, 675–7, 682–3

Alciati, Andrea 216
al-Fishtali, Abd al-Aziz 288

Alsted of Herborn, Johann Heinrich 78, 307, 309–10, 311, 312, 314, 316, 318, 468, 654
altars, “idolatrous” 393

Altensetter, David 405

Althamer, Andreas 697

Althusius, Johannes 308

Alva, Duke of 557

Amar Das 751

Amboina island 354, 758

Ambrose, St 623

Ames, William 656

Ammann, Jakob 208

Amsdorf, Nikolaus von 151, 157, 158, 161

Amsterdam, Portuguese Jewish settlements 284

Amyrault, Moyse 50

Amyraut, Moïse 469

Anabaptists and Anabaptism 14–15, 31, 54, 108, 110, 138, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178, 196, 198, 199, 200, 316, 409, 419, 464

Calvin and 214–15
communities 173, 208–9
community of goods 713

Dreamers 670

Eucharist 415
letters 448
and music 631–2
public penance 423–4
and secular society 201
soul sleep 70

Swiss 197
see also Münster, Anabaptist kingdom of; Melchiorite Anabaptism

Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton) 652

Andreae, Jakob 159, 314

Andreae, Johann Valentin 314–15, 316, 318

Andrewes, Lancelot 615

Andros, Edward 362

Angenendt, Arnold 410

Anglican Church see Church of England

Anglican Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 760

Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 363, 720, 760

Anglophone resistance theory 93

Anglo-Spanish War (1654–1660) 285

Anhalt 610

Anhalt, Adolf von 152

Anna, Electress of Saxony 730, 734

Anselm of Canterbury 26

Anslo, Cornelius 643–5, 644f, 653, 659

Antichrist 72–3, 74
anticlericalism 587

Antinomian Controversy 9, 158
anti-Trinitarianism 110, 319, 739
churches, Hungary 289

Transylvanian principality 109

Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre 224

Antwerp:

civic religions 557
iconoclasm 604
poetry competition 549
apocalypse and apocalypticism 72–7, 283–4, 310
and astrology 78
lore and imagery 76

Appenzell canton 181

Aquinas, Thomas 27, 28, 30, 689
archidiaconal courts 508–9

Aristotelian philosophy 463–4, 465, 466, 470, 472
centrality in teaching 493–4
psychology 26, 302
and Ramism 466–8

Aristotelo-Galenic theory 645, 647–51, 659

Aristotle 32, 486, 689, 675, 729–31

Arjan Dev 751

Armada, Spanish 288

Arminianism 228–9, 357

Arminius, Jacob 50–1, 229, 469

Armitage, David 351–2

Arndt, Johannes (Johann) 12, 206, 265, 311, 314, 332, 611

Arnold, Gottfried 190, 334, 336

Arnošt of Pardubice 128, 129–31

‘art confessional images’ 13

Aschermann, Gabriel 196

Askia Muhammad Turé (“Askia the Great”) 755

Assad, Talal 689

Asseburg, Rosamunde Juliane von der 335

Aston, Margaret 603
astrology 66–7
apocalyptic 78

‘great conjunctions’ theory 310–11
predictions 1520s 73
at Wittenberg 736–8

Augsburg 34, 286, 718
civic religious pluralism 559

Diet of (1530) 155–6
expulsion of Jews 278

Lutheran chorales 268
municipal brothels 259
as printing centre 379

Augsburg, Peace of (1555) 76, 106, 112, 158, 160, 173, 184, 227, 253, 268, 445, 446, 554, 559, 568, 711
and the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren 306
and sovereignty 509

Augsburg Confession (1530) 32, 140, 159, 309

Augsburg Interim (1548) 33, 157, 218, 711

August, Elector of Saxony 445–6, 730, 734

Augustine, St. 72–3, 87, 623, 726
anti-Pelagian doctrine of grace 38
attitude to the Donatist heretics 240

‘city of God’/’city of this world’ distinction 71, 302
memory 770–1
predestination doctrine 221
theology 151

Aureol, Pierre 27, 28

Aurifaber, Johann 438

Austerlitz 196

Austrian nobility, and the Reformation 569

Austrian Protestant migrants in America 11
authors’ relations with printers 374, 375

Backus, Irena 221

Bacon, Francis 9, 79–80, 288, 304, 309, 313, 316, 318, 738

Baden, Diet of 169

Baden disputation (1526) 175

Bader, Augustin 75

Bahia 719

Bale, John 79, 287

Bämiyān Buddhas, Afghanistan 604
baptism 54, 419–20
adult 171–2, 194, 195–6, 203
in the colonies 758
infant 192, 193, 195, 203
sacrament 26, 27
baptismal fonts 420

Baptists, Massachusetts Bay 360

Barbados 356, 362

Barbados Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes (1661) 720

Barker, Peter 728, 738

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio 730

Bartholin, Caspar 674

Basel 215–16
accepting reforms 174, 175
granting divorces 507
iconoclasm 604, 605
as printing centre 379

Basel Compacts (Compactata) 132, 133

Basel Formula of Consensus 181

Basel University 490

Batavia 354, 757

Baudouin, François 438

Bauhin, Caspar 674, 675

Baur von Eiseneck, Maria Juliana 330–1

Bavarian counter-reforming program 257

Baxter, Richard 238, 239, 244, 716

Bay Psalm Book (1640) 636

Bayly, Lewis 51, 246, 332, 359, 654

Béarn Reformed Churches 106

Beck, Johann 721

Becon, Thomas 635

Beeckman, Isaac 655

Beguines 135

Belgic Confession of Faith 419

Bell, Catherine 412

Bellarmine, Robert 88, 89, 661

Bellay, Jean de 446
bells, church 636–7

Bender, Harold 199, 200

Benedict, Philip 221, 223, 441

Bengel, Johann Albrecht 334

Bentham, Joseph 246

Bermuda 356

Bern 178

Zwinglian reforms 174, 175

Bernadino of Siena 126

Bertram, Bonaventure Cornelius 282

Besold, Christoph 314

Betbuchlein (Luther) 381

Beukelsz, Jan 207

Beverwijk, Johan van 651, 653

Beyer, Jürgen 694

Beza, Theodore 88, 89, 215, 223, 228, 229, 267, 275, 283, 632, 633
psalm singing 634

Bèze, Théodore de 438–9, 465

Baxter, Richard 332
bhakti devotional movement 750
bibles, vernacular 129–30, 162

Dresden 130

Eck (1537) 398f

English 397

Geneva 281

German language 396

Kralice 139, 141

Nuremberg (1483) 396

Strasbourg 396

Velislav 129

Wittenberg (1534) 3, 154, 163, 381, 396–7, 606

Biblia Deudsch (Luther) (1534) 396–7

Bibliander, Theodor 437–8

Biel, Gabriel 30, 146, 151, 622

Bilson, Thomas 90, 94

Bishofszell, Thurgau 180
bishop’s courts 508–9

Black, Robert 485

Black Death 129
and Jewish populations 278

Blahoslav, Jan 139

Blarer, Ambrose 439
blasphemy accusations 183

Blaufelden commune 529

Blickle, Peter 590

Bodenstein, Adam von 315

Bodin, Jean 506
body, the 643–61
affective rhetoric 636–5

Aristotelo-Galenic theory 645, 647–51
artes concionandi 654–5

Christ’s physical suffering 660
and common sense 651
continuities and resemblances 659–61
embodied hearts 651–3
embodied souls 645–51
embodied rhetoric 655–7
five outer/inner senses 650–1
foreheads 647, 647f

Galenic humors 652–3
mind’s eye (occulus imaginationis) 645–51, 646f
rhetoric and enargeia 657–9
sense of touch 660–1

‘situated cognition’ 652
theatricality and passion 655–7
vividness 658–9
writing sermons 657

Boettcher, Susan 775

Bohemia:

relationship with England 131

Bohemian Brethren 108, 110, 303, 304–6, 335, 494, 631

Bohemian Confession (1575) 110

Bohemian Diet and the nobility 568–9, 576

Bohemian Reformations 7, 124–41
confessional identity problems 136–7
confessional landscape complexity 126–7
geographical representation 107

Hussite movement emergence 130–2

Luther’s teachings 137–9
multi-confessionalism 136
power of the estates 137–40
preaching 130
radical religion in fifteenth-century 134–5
reform and revolution 127–30
relics in Prague 129
seventeenth-century 140–1
sixteenth century 136–40
social history studies 127
the century after Hus 132–5

Utraquism enters the mainstream 133–4
vernacular translation of Scripture 129–30
women’s participation 135

Bohemian Revolt (1620) 303

Böhme, Jakob 31, 205–6, 265, 311, 320, 332, 754

Boje, Nicolaus 534

Bologna 548

Bolsec, Jerome 50, 221, 222, 228

Bolton, Robert 237

Bondage of the Will, The (Luther) 29–30

Book of Common Prayer 242, 261, 636, 670

Book of Concord 159

Book of Martyrs (Foxe) 13, 359, 614, 694

Book of Nature idea 471, 472, 679, 738, 740

Book to Burn, A (Li Zhi) 755

Bora, Katharina von 489, 609

Bossy, John 218, 261

Bourbon, Antoinette de 572

Bourdieu, Pierre 412

Bourgeois, Louis 633

Bourignon, Antoinette 311, 388

Bouwsma, William 64

Boyle, Robert 739

Bracht, Thielmann van 448

Brady, Thomas A. Jr. 3, 587, 590

Brahmins 291
compared to Levites 290

Brandenburg 227
church orders 487
expulsion of Jews 278

Brandenburg, Albrecht von 152

Braudel, Fernand 546

Braunschweig church orders 487

Brazil, north-eastern 354–5

Bredekamp, Horts 604, 605

Breitinger, Johann Jacob 555

Brenz, Johannes (Johann) 33, 189, 628
educational reforms 487

Brès, Guy de 208

Bretzel, Jeorius 532

Briçonnet, Guillaume 216

Brietz Monta, Susannah 770

Brightman, Thomas 79, 284

Broke, Thomas 56

Brooke, John Hedley 728
brothels 673
municipal 259

Brötli, Johannes 195

Braunschweig 404

Bruen, John 245

Bruce, Robert 51–2, 242

Brugghen, Hendrick ter 645, 649f

Brunner, Fridolin 536

Bruno, Giordano 309, 311, 318

Brussels, civic religions 558

Bucer, Martin 35, 91, 153–4, 156, 175, 215, 216, 217, 221, 438
correspondence with à Lasco 444
correspondence with Bullinger 444
educational reforms 487
influence on Calvin 217, 218
letters 439

Mosaic laws 282
music as divine gift 630–1

Buchanan, George 93, 94

Buchelius, Arnold 772

Bugenhagen, Johannes 156, 161, 269, 415, 607, 608, 629
educational reforms 487

Bullinger, Heinrich 78, 117, 157, 178, 180, 215, 228, 282, 437–8, 440, 466, 625, 635, 669–70
condemnation of the veneration of saints 555

Consensus of Zurich 110
correspondence with Bucer 444
letters 456

Bundschuh movement (1493–1517) 206

Bunny, Edmund 243, 246

Buraeus, Johannes 311

Burghartz, Susanna 182, 513, 516

Burke, Peter 691

Burton, Robert 652

Burton, Thomas 47

Burtt, E. A. 727

Busche, Hermann von dem 434

Butterfield, Herbert 727

Cajakob, Georg ‘Blaurock’ 170, 172

Calendarium Historicum (Eber) 67–8
calendars, astrological 66–8

Calov, Abraham 465

Calvin, John (Jean) 31, 32, 35, 73, 154, 157, 178, 214–30, 383, 404, 491

Anabaptists 214–15
apocalyptic speculation 78
as author 384–5
biblical commentaries 218, 221–2

Consensus of Zurich 110
court discipline 512
dancing 634
death and burial 423
early education 488

Ecclesiastical Ordinances 217, 219
educational reforms 490

Eucharist celebrations 419

Geneva visits (1536–1538/1541) 216–21

God and material objects 710
hand-held watches 69
heretic persecution 87
in history and memory 777–80
and Humanism 462
humanist education 216–17
images of God the Father 613
and Islam 286
on Judaism 280, 283
lectio continua device 417
letters 438–9, 441–2, 455
managing scattered congregations by letter 442–3

Melanchthon correspondence 444
messenger services 435
missions in France 223–4
music and singing in services 12, 632–5, 266, 267

The Old Testament 282
policing of morals and discipline 218
possessions and property 712
preaching and sermons 219–20, 657
predestination doctrine 50, 50–4, 221–3
psalm singing 266–7
saints as Christian names 421–2
scholasticism 464
scripture and empirical experience 58

Servetus execution 222
soul sleep 71

Strasbourg (1538–1541) 217–18
the state 86
support from aristocrats and princes 444–5
see also individual works

Calvinism:

and children 55
iconoclasm 609
iconophobia 110–11
impact of Humanism 462–3
linguistic boundaries 116
millenarianism and historical progress 79–80

Montpellier 68
preaching 264
sacred spaces 695

‘theory of resistance’ 90, 91–2, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98
see also English Reformations; French Huguenots; Geneva; Reformed Protestantism;

Scottish Reformations; Strasbourg; Swiss Reformations; Zurich

Cambers, Andrew 243

Camerarius, Ludiwg 506

Cameron, Euan 598–8, 589

Cameron, John 469

Campanella, Thomas (Tommaso) 314, 318

Campeggio, Lorenzo 138

Candidius, Georgius 290, 757
cannibalism, Native American 351
canon law 506
cantata performances 267

Cape Colony, South Africa 720, 757

Capito, Wolfgang Fabritius 149, 175, 437, 456, 491

Capuchin order 255, 536

Caribbean Protestant colonists 362

Carion, Johann 77
caritas 27

Carl von Oettingen, Count 677

Carolina 362

Carranza, Bartolome 37–8

Carrera, Elena 651, 652, 653

Carroll, Stuart 224

Cartesian philosophy 469, 471, 652

Carthusians music 623

Cartwright, Thomas 243, 283

Casaubon, Isaac 290

Castelli, Elizabeth 772–3

Castellio, Sebastian 50, 87–8, 222

Catalogi Haereticorum (Schlüsselberg ) 198

Catherine of Siena 128

Catholic renewal and Protestantism 7, 253–69
church/secular state competition 254
concubinage 256
confessionalization or a complex dialogue 268–9
inquisitions 256
moral disciplining 258–60
multiple benefices prohibition 256
overview 253–4
sermons and preaching 263–4
tridentine challenge 254–8

‘Wandering out’ (Auswanderung) 257–8
war against disorder 260

Catholics and Catholicism:

baptism 758
and the Bohemian Reformation 149–1
canon law 506
celibacy 258, 669

Christianizing non-European peoples 351, 352
church and state boundaries 218
in Dutch colonies 758
exorcism 420

Formula Concordiae (FC) 160
healing water interpretations 697, 698, 699–70

Ireland 240
justification doctrine rejection 258

‘Lutheran songs’ 155
and the Lutheran theology of evil and grace 34–8
mapping minorities 107–8
marriages between Protestants and Catholics 514, 515

Maryland, English Catholics 362

Mass 414
medieval lexicon 32–3
moral disarray and corruption 585
musical tradition 268–9
in the Netherlands 226
passive justification interpretations 37–8
and the ‘Peasants War’ (1525) 206

Prohibited Books, Index of 258, 260
reforms in 224
reimposition on Bohemia and Moravia (1627–1628) 303
schools 495–6
as stagnating force 727
supernatural beliefs and practices 691–2
theologians and the doubting Thomas story 402

Catleberger, Andreas 170

Cedar of Lebanon prophecy 76
celibacy, priestly 256, 669
censorship of the book trade, Protestant 260

Centuriators of Magdeburg 336–7

Ceylon 227, 354

Chablais, Duchy of 113–14
charity 717–18

Charles I of England 97, 357, 511, 576

Charles II of England 362

Charles III, Duke of Savoy 113, 217

Charles IV of Bohemia 127, 128–30, 131

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 69, 90, 157, 218, 225, 386

Charles IX of France 572

Charles Louis, Elector Palatine 112–13

Charles the Bold 168

Charles the Elder, Žerotín 140

Chasidism 330

Chelčický, Peter 135

Chemnitz, Martin 33, 159
children’s religious experience 54–5
chiliasm 309
chorales in Lutheran services 267

Christian, David 748

Christian, William 691

Christian Humanism 170, 173
parallels with Confucian reformers 754–5

Christian Marriage (Bullinger) 669–70

Christian mortalism 70

Christian Teachings on the Last Affairs of the World (Faber) 71

Christianopolis (Andreae) 314

Christman, Robert 403

Chronica Carionis (Carion/Melanchthon) 77–8

Chur, Bishop of 537

‘church historians’ perspectives (1970s) 587

Church of England (Anglican Church):

acceptance of chattel slavery 720
clandestine de praesenti vows 507
geographical representation 106
in New England 356

‘Church of the Holy Spirit’, Silesia 316

Chytraeus, David 462

Cicero 92
circumcision 279

Cistercian music 623

Città del Sole, La (Campanella) 318
civic religions 546–59
anticlericalism 547, 552

Antwerp 557

Augsburg 559

Bologna 548

Brussels 558
burgher committees 552
cities and the Reformed tradition 554–8
cities in the vanguard of religious change 550–4
civic processions 547, 548–9
civic theatre companies 549
cult of saints development 548

Erfurt city council 553

France 556

Hanseatic league cities, and reform 551–2
late middle ages 546–50

Leipzig city authorities 551

Netherlands 556–8

Nuremberg City Council disputation (1525) 553, 554
parish churches 546
passion/mystery plays 549
priests and clergy 547
religious brotherhoods/confraternities 546–7

‘Scripture mandates’/’preaching mandates’ 552–3

Utrecht 558

Wittenberg 550–1

Zurich 555

Zwickau town council 551

Clairé, Sieur de 220

Clark, Stuart 605

Clasen, Claus-Peter 199, 200

Classen, Constance 660

Clement VIII, Pope 514
clocks and clockmaking 68–9

Clough, Richard 604

Cochlaeus, Johannes 137, 146

Codrington, Charles 720

Coligny, Gaspard de 351
college of prince electors 566

Collegium pietatis (Spener) 331

Collinson, Patrick 235, 613

Colloquy of Poissy 632

Cologne Dominicans, and the Talmud 276, 277

Columbus, Christopher 679–80

Comenius, John (Jan) Amos 9, 124, 141, 468
and Andreae 314

Heidelberg studies 306
irenicism 306
millenarianism 309–11
pansophia 306–9, 313
relations with Lutherans 305
and seventeenth-century education 494–5
and the universal reformation 301–4, 318, 319–20

Commentarius de Anima (Melanchthon) 652, 731, 733
commerce and consumption 708–22
adiaphora 711
charity 717–18
churches 710–11
commerce 714–16
community of goods 204, 207, 713
debts and credit 715

Dutch Reformed Church guidance on manumission 720
forestallers, regraters and vagabonds 718–19
goods and revenues confiscated from the Catholic Church 711
idleness 714
images and artefacts 710
material culture importance 712
material goods 709–12
mendicant orders 709–10, 714
merchants 719
ministerial education 714
overseas colonization and trade 719
printed word 710
profits 715–16
property 712–13

Protestant work ethic narrative 713–14
relics 710
state as economic regulator and enabler 718–20
sumptuary legislation 712
treasure (in Heaven) 720–1
usury 716–17
vestments and precious vessels 711

Weber thesis 708–9
work 713–14
commonplace books 265
communal capitalism, Massachusetts Puritans 359
community of goods 204, 207, 713
comparisons and consequences in global perspective (1500–1750) 747–60
baptism 758
comparative religious studies 749

Confucian reformers parallel with Christian humanists 754–5
consistories 757

Dutch colonies 756–9
intermarriage 757–8

Moravian missionaries 759–60
religious reforms and innovations 749–56
rituals celebrating sexual maturity 759
separation of sacraments 758

Sikhism and Protestantism parallels and comparisons 752–3
spread of Protestant ideology and institutions 756–60

Complaints against the Eaters of the Dead (pamphlet) 710

Concordial Lutheranism 314

Confessio Augustana (CA) (Melanchthon) 158–9

Confessio Bohemica 306

Confessio fraternitas (1615) 312, 313

Confessio Taboritarum, Czech Reformation 134
confessional paintings (Bekenntnisgemälde) 162–3

Confessions (Augustine) 265

Confucianism 753–5
congregational hymn singing 3, 13, 628–9, 631, 633

Connecticut 358

Connerton, Paul 769

Consensus of Sandomierz (1570) 139–40
and Poland 306

Consensus of Zurich (1549) 110
consortia plebis, Lombardy 528

Constance, Council of (1415) 528
consubstantial doctrine 56

Contarini, Gasparo 35, 36
conventicles, Pietism 330–1, 332, 334, 448

Coornhert, Dirck 88

Cop, Nicolas 217

Copernicus 726, 728, 736

Copernican system 736–8, 740

Copp, Johann 734

Coppe, Abiezer 97

Cordus, Euricus 730

Corpus Christi feast (1247), Liège 410

Corvinus, Johann Friedrich 190

Cosmographies (Münster) 678–80, 682

Coster, Samuel 658

Cotton, John 357–8

Courts of High Commission, Elizabethan England 510

Coverdale, Miles 447, 635

Cowper, William 53

Cracow 118–19

Cranach the Elder, Lucas 390, 417, 606, 607–9, 609–10, 616

Cranach the Younger, Lucas 2f, 380, 390, 607, 608

Cranmer, Thomas 36, 261, 421, 510, 636
liturgy 241, 242

Crashaw, William 243

Creilshelm well 699

Crespin, Jean 447, 448

Cressy, David 68, 773–4

Cromwell, Oliver 285, 362

Cromwell, Thomas 596

Crooke, Helkiah 674

Crouzer, Denis 572

Cruciger, Elizabeth 626

Cruciger, Kaspar 438

Csombor, Márton Szepsi 117–19

Cyprian, Ernst Salomon 190

Czech Confession (1575) 139–40

Damplip, Adam 595–6
dance and dancing 630, 637

Daneau, Lambert 465, 466, 468

Daniel, Book of 77

Daughter, The (Dcerka, Hus) 135

Davenport, John 358

Dávid, Ferenc 283

Davidic dynasty 281

Davis, Natalie Zemon 47, 592

Dawson, Jane 244

De Bry family volumes 681–2

De capitivitate Babylonica (Luther) 153, 154

De civilitate morum puerilium (On good manners for boys, Erasmus) 492

De Jure Regni apud Scotus (Buchanan) 93

De Marees, Peter 681–2

De pueris instituendis (On the early education of children, Erasmus) 492

De ratione studii (On methods of study, Erasmus) 492

De Regno Christi (On the Kingdom of Christ, Calvin) 218

De Ries, Hans 653–4, 657, 658
de Vio Cajetan, Tommaso 35

Delaware River, and Scandinavian Lutherans 355

Della Valle, Pietro 290

Denck, Hans 75, 194

Denmark and the Reformation 162
church architecture 263

Lutheranism 269
rural Reformation 533
sermons at healing wells 14

Dent, Arthur 359–60

Depermann, Klaus 200

Descartes, René 471, 740
deutsche Messe, Die (Luther) 414

DeVun, Leah 676
diaries and spiritual autobiographies 265

Dickens, A. G. 234, 235

Didactics (Comenius) 495

Diderot, Denis 291

Diefendorf, Barbara 556

Diet of Worms 57, 154

Dietenberger, Johann 397

Dietrich, Veit 394, 401

Diggers 97

Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans van 660

Dimmock, Matthew 285

Dioscorides 733

Dippel, Johann Konrad 335

Discourse on Western Planting (Hayluyt) 719

Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (Luther) 151
dissenters, outsiders and competing visions 301–20
alchemy and Paracelianism 315–17
irenicism 304–6
the long reformation 319–20
millenarianism 309–11
pansophia 306–9, 313
reformatio mundi 317–19
societies and utopias 313–15
universal and general reformation 312–13
universal reformation 301–4, 318, 319–20

Dithmarschen 534, 540
divine agency, scholastic background 28–9
divorce 10
and re-marriage 507

Dixon, C. Scott 586

Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter 728

Dobricius, Johannes 310–11

Dominican missionaries 351

Doneau, Hugues 506

Donne, John 283, 658

Döring, Christian 607
double justice of Gropius-Pighius doctrine 35–8

Dove, John 237

Dowsing, William 615

Drabik, Mikuláš 311

Draper, J. W. 726

Dresden Bible 130

Dresden hymnals 267

Dryden, Erasmus 245–6

Duffy, Eamon 235, 239, 240, 243, 526

Durand de Villegagnon, Nicolas 351

Dürer, Albrecht 645, 648f, 609

Durkheim, Emile 440

Dürr, Renate 695–6

Dutch Mennonites 209

Dutch Reformed Church 225–7
clandestine literature 385
differences with Calvin’s Geneva 226–7

Geneva Psalter 634
guidance on manumission 720
iconoclasm 604
missionaries and missions in the colonies 11, 353–5
predestination 228–9
views on Islam 287, 288
visual and material culture after iconoclasm 612–15

Dutch Republic:

Calvinists and the Jews 284
civic religions 556–8

Collegiant movement 355
irenicism 305

‘Israel’ thesis 51
mapping the Reformed churches 107
material consumption 12
overseas empire and Protestantism 353–5
and the print market 385–6
see also East India Company (VOC), Dutch; West India Company, Dutch

Dutch Revolt 92, 226, 573–4, 557–8

Dyke, Daniel 332

East India Company, British 719, 748, 760

East India Company (VOC), Dutch 227, 719, 756–7
and marriage 10–11

Ebeling, Gerhard 147

Eber, Paul 67–8

Eck, Johannes 175

Bible (1537) 398f
ecumenism 88, 127, 305, 335, 364, 768, 769

Edict of Nantes (1598) 114, 173, 184, 214, 225

Revocation (1685) 114, 363

Edict of Worms 154, 383–4
education 483–97

Aristotle’s centrality in teaching 493–4

Catholic schools 495–6
church orders 487–8
church schools 484

Comenius and seventeenth-century 494–5
curricula and pedagogy 491–4
funding schools 488–9

‘independent’ schools 484
and the Jesuits 495–6

Klosterschulen 489
late middle ages 484–6

Latin schools 488

Latin/German schools distinction 484, 485, 488
literacy rates 485
monasteries and convents 488–9
municipal schools 484

‘parish schools’ 484
picture books for children 495

Protestant reforms 486–91

Schulordnungen 487

Stift scholarship system 489

Swiss Confederacy reforms 489–90

Ursulines 495–6

Edward VI 226, 261, 385, 635, 637

Edwards, Jonathan 364

Edwards, Thomas 208

Eglinus, Raphael 312, 318

Ehem, Christoph 506

Ein feste Burg (Luther) 267, 626

Eisleben, teaching curriculm 487

Elert, Werner 147

Elijah 76

Eliot, John 361

Elisabeth, Countess of Palatinate-Lautern 735

Elisabeth, Duchess of Rochlitz, 734

Elisabeth of Rochlitz 735

Elizabeth I of England 235, 261, 385, 439, 575

Book of Common Prayer 421
moderate iconoclasm 613–14
pro-Turkish policy 288
and the Puritans 356

Emden Dutch reformed churches 116, 226

Emser, Hieronymus 397, 603

Emser, Jerome 379
encyclopedism 306, 307, 309, 313, 468–9

England 10

Arminians 51
bell ringing 637

Catholicism equated with Judaism 280, 281
chantries 528
church courts 510–11
colonists, and anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic sentiments 352
gender difference 10–11
geographical representation of Anglicanism 106
and the Gregorian calendar 68

Islam, views on 287, 288
liturgical reformation 420–1
music 635–7

New World colonization 351–2
nobility and the Reformation 574–5, 576

Protestant millenarianism 78–9, 284

Protestant texts 385
readmission of the Jews 285
relationship with Bohemia 131
rural Reformation 538–9
school reforms 490
visual and material culture after iconoclasm 612–15
see also English Reformations

English Bible 397

English Civil War (1642–51) 96–8, 576
and church courts 511

Israel and the covenants 281
prophets and visions 694

English Reformations 233–47
being Protestant 240–5
catechizing 243
changing interpretations 234–6
conversion narratives and the emotions 238–40
conversions 236–40
doctrines of justification and predestination 235

‘fast-slow’ Reformation controversy 234, 235
and Hobbes 89
liturgy 241–2
preaching and sermons 242–3

Puritans inclusion and national Churches 245–7

Scripture reading 243–4
special public prayers and fasting 241

Erasmus, Desiderius 29, 34, 170, 217, 221, 378, 383, 491, 754
bible’s universal appeal 395–6

English liturgical music 635

Foreword to the New Testament (1516) 593–4

Free Will 461

Humanism 73
instrumental music 623, 624
on learning and education 491–3
letter writing 432–3, 437
and Letters of Obscure Men 434
and the ‘Synergistic Controversy’ 158

Erastus, Thomas 316

Erfurt city council 553

‘Erhalt uns, Herr, bei Deinem Wort’ (1541 hymn) 286

Erpenius, Thomas 289–90

Erthal, Christoph Heinrich von 536

Esslingen 484

Estate of Marriage, The (Luther) 669, 671–2, 673, 674

Estienne, Charles 436

Eucharist 3, 50, 177, 412, 414–16
controversy 56–7, 400
and grace 27
and Luther 154–5, 156
theology 154

Euclid 732

European nobilities and the Reformation 565–77

Adlige Damenstifte 568

Austria 569

Bohemian Diet 568–9, 576

Calvinist religious rigorism 574
early Reformation 565–7
elites in north-western Europe 573–5

England 574–5, 576

France 571–3, 575

German secular principalities and Hapsburg monarchy 568–70

Holy Roman Empire 570–1
monasteries, dissolution of 574

‘Obrigkeit’ role 569–70
outlook 575–7

Scotland 574

Stiftsdamen 568
as a threat to the church as ‘the nobility’s almshouse’ 567–98
evangelical wonder books 77

Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (EKD) 767
evil and grace theology 23–39

Catholic condemnation 34–8
divine agency 28–9

Gropius-Pighius doctrine of double justice 35–8
medieval Catholic lexicon 32–3
scholastic background 25–8
explaining change 585–97

‘all-purpose models’ 589
appeal of the message 586–9
crisis and struggle over authority 596
from cultural history to a cultural narrative 591–7
decadence theory 585–6
flattery of the laity argument 588

German city states’ role 590–1

Holy Roman Empire institutional politics 589–91

Humanism role 591
idols and idolatry 594
image and text relationship 593–4
necessary conditions 589–91
political-material explanations 587
as system of inter-defined concepts 593

Exsurge Domine Bull 34, 383

Faber, Basilius 71

Fall, the 302–3

Fama fraternitas (1614) 312, 313

Farel, Guillaume 216, 217, 218

Farnese, Alexander 557

Faustus Socinus 25

Febvre, Lucien 586

Felix and Regula legend 555

Fenner, William 655, 656

Ferdinand I, Archduke, King of Bohemia and Hungary 138, 139, 140, 423

Ferdinand II, Emperor 112

Ficino, Marsilio 623

Fifth Monarchy Men 79

Figulus, Bendictus 312

Fincel, Job 77

First Great Awakening, America 364

First Helvetic Confession (1536) 418–19

Fischer, Christoph 402

Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester 34

Fitch, Ralph 290

Flacian controversy 9

Flacius, Matthias 157, 158, 162, 336, 337, 438

Florence, schools 495–6

Florida, Spanish 351

Fludd, Robert 645, 646f

Fontaine, Nicolas de la 222

Ford, Alan 233

Formosa (Taiwan) 290, 354

Formula Concordiae (FC) 159, 160, 162–3, 609, 738

Formula Missae et communionis pro Ecclesia Wittembergensi (Luther) 414

Fornerod, Nicolas 223

Forty-Two Articles of Religion (1552) 309

Four Articles of Prague 132

Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 410

Foxe, John 13, 79, 280, 281, 283, 287
martyr letters and book 447–8 see also Acts

France:

civic religions 556
clandestine literature 385
counter-reforming program 257
mapping the spread of Calvinism 107
nobilities and the Reformation 571–3, 575

Protestant ‘self-fashioning’ 11
psalter 632

Reformed Protestantism 115–16, 223–5
reforms in the Catholic Church 224
religious wars 224, 225, 556, 571
secular and religious courts 509

Francis I of France 216

Francis of Assisi, St. 1

Franciscan missionaries 351

Franck, Sebastian 75, 205, 315, 632

Francke, August Hermann 54, 209, 331, 332, 333, 339, 363, 716, 759

Frankenhausen, Battle of (1525) 193

Frankfurt book fairs 384

Frankfurt-am-Main, Pietism 330

Franklin, Benjamin, material consumption 12

Frederick II of the Palatinate 112, 136

Frederick II, Elector of Saxony 486
disturbances in Wittenberg (1521–1522) 550, 551

Frederick III ‘the Wise’, Elector of Saxony 227, 377, 380, 396, 413, 444, 594

Frederick IV, Elector Palatine 112, 305

Frederick V of the Palatinate and Bohemia 111, 112

Frederick William I of Prussia 140

Fredriksen, Paula 770
free imperial cities 550
and Jews 279

Free Will 463
conflict between Erasmus and Luther 492–3
and divine Predestination 470

Erasmus and 461

Freedberg, David 604

Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus 364

French Huguenots 92, 93, 108, 214, 224, 538, 711
colonization 351
and metrical psalm singing 634
minority rights in Paris 114

Psalter 634
public penance 423–4
settling in New York 363

Frick, Wilhelm 779

Friedlānder, Max J. 609

Friedmann, Robert 448

Friedrichs, Christopher 558

Fritsch, Thomas 190

Froben, Johannes 150, 378

Froschauer, Christoph 171

Fuggers of Augsburg 567

Fulke, William 286
funeral and burial rites 423
sermons 264

Fust, Johann 373, 374

Gaetano dei Conti di Tience (Saint Cajetan) 255

Gaisberg, Franz von 176

Galen 732, 733

Galileo 740

Gallus, Nikolaus 157

Games, Alison 287, 291

Garden of Eden 23, 24f, 25, 26, 27, 679

Gascoigne, John 738

Gaspard the Coligny 571

Gassendi, Pierre 740

Gasser, Achilles Pirmin 67

Gaukroger, Stephen 729

Geer, Louis de 718
gender relations:

Anabaptist and Spiritualist 201
and church/civil courts 514–15, 516, 517
experience of life 54–5

Germany 11
in New England colonies 358
and Pietism 337–9
and predestination 53–4

Regensburg schools 485
school provision for girls 491
see also sexual difference; women

Gendlein, Jacob 528
genealogy and Pietism 337

General Court of Freeman, Massachusetts 358, 359

Genesis 1:14 67

Geneva 113–14, 115–16, 403

Academy (founded 1559) 223, 490

Bible 281
and Calvin (1536–38) 216–18
clandestine printing 384–5
consistory 504
excommunication practices 10, 219

General Council accepts Calvin’s Ordinances (1541) 217, 219

General Council adopts Reformation (1536) 216
illegitimate births 219
music in the Reformed church 632–5
population growth 219

Psalter 633–4, 636, 638

Reformation Wall 778
schools Reformed (1559) 490
secular and religious courts 509

Small Council 219

Gengenbach, Pamphilus 594
genre painting, growth 602

Gentilcore, David 691
geographies of the Protestant Reformation 5, 105–19
changing picture 108–9
mapping Protestant divisions 109–11
mapping the Reformation 105–8
mental geography 117–19
population density ties 115
state borders and religious frontiers 111–15
towns and language 115–17

George, Duke of Saxony 381–2, 551, 596

Gerhard, Johann 160, 332, 465

Gersau rural republic 528, 537

Gersdorf, Henriette Katharina von 338

Gerson, Jean 126

Ghoostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes (Coverdale) 635

Gilford, Reverend E. 752

Gillespie, Raymond 233, 246

Gilly, Carlos 312, 316

Glareanus, Heinrich 623

Glarus 176, 181, 536
reform movements 174

Glasgow University 490
global Protestantism 14

‘Gnesio-Lutherans’ 31

Gobind Rai 752

‘Godly republicanism’, Massachusetts Bay 358–9

Goertz, Hans-Jürgen 199–200, 202–3, 592

Gold Coast of Africa 681–2

Goldener Bund (1586) 180

Goldhahn, Matthew 396

Goldstein, Bernard 738

Goldwell, Thomas 607

Gonzaga, Giulia 34

Goodman, Christopher 92

Gordon, Bruce 14, 424, 694

Goschsheim 534–6, 535f

Goudimel, Claude 633

Gouge, William 656

Gowing, Laura 516
grace and nature controversies 31

Gratius, Ortwinus 434

Great Migration, Massachusetts Bay 357

Grebel, Conrad 169, 171, 172, 195, 201

Greek Catholic Church, Transylvanian principality 109

Green, Jonathan 73

Greenham, Richard 656

Gregorian calendar reform 68, 559, 740

Gregory I (the Great) Pope 622, 410, 603

Gregory of Rimini 28, 30

Grendler, P. F. 484

Greyerz, Kaspar von 690

Gries, South Tyrol 528

Grindal, Edmund 439, 656

Grisons, Swiss Confederation 179, 180, 181, 537
riots (1613–1616) 182

Gropper, Johannes 35–6

Grosse, Christian 411, 418

Grote, Gerard 128

Grynaeus, Simon 437
educational reforms 487

Guibbory, Achsah 281

Gunpowder Plot (1605) 88

Güntzer, Augustin 404–5
gurus 751

Gustavus I, King of Sweden 533

Gutenberg, Johannes 153, 373, 374
gymnasia 307

Habernfeld, Andreas Haberweschel von 311
habitus doctrine 151

Hacke, Daniela 183

Haidt, Johann Valentin 6f

Haigh, Christopher 240

Hakluyt the Younger, Richard 352, 719

Halbwachs, Maurice 772, 774

Hall, John 15f

Hall, Joseph 332, 652, 660

Hall, Karl 147

Halle Pietism 333–4, 335, 340

Hamburg church orders 487

Hamling, Tara 236, 614

Hanseatic League cities, and reform 551–2

Hargobind 751

Hariot, Thomas 352

Harnack, Adolf von 778

Harrison, Peter 493, 728–9, 731

Harrison, William 241

Hartlib, Samuel 304, 313

Hartlib circle 468

Hartmann, Andreas 776

Hartmann, Johann 312

Harvard University 358, 363, 714

Harvey, William 740

Haugk, Jorg 59

Hausmann, Nicolaus 414

Hausväterbücher (books of fatherly advice) 265

Heal, Bridget 695, 711

‘heathen’ peoples and the gospels 351
hedge preachers 196, 226, 557, 604, 711

Heidelberg Catechism (1563) 112, 227, 305, 417, 465

Heidelberg disputation (1518) 153

Heidelberg University 227, 307, 732

Heil, Johannes 278

Heinrichs, Erik 734, 735

Helding, Michael 402
heliocentrism 737

Hellinga, Lotte 376

Hendrix, Scott 58, 765

Henlein, Peter 69

Henry, Matthew 721

Henry IV of France and Navarre 571, 573, 575

Henry VIII of England 237, 383, 420, 510

Herbert, George 53

Herborn academy 307–8, 309–10
and Ramism 467

Hergot, Hans 59, 96

Hermann of Wied 35–6

Hermeticism 468

Herrnhut community 335

Hess, Tobias 314, 316

Hesse church orders 487

Heylyn, Peter 283

Hildegard of Bingen 76

Hill, Adam 721

Hill, Kat 775

Hinde, William 240

Hindenburg, Paul von 779

Hindus 750

Hippocrates 673, 674
history and memory 765–80
commemorating the Reformation 775–7
culture of heritage 767
exemplarity 775
forgetting 771
and the Last Supper of Christ 769–70
martyrologies 770
memory and religion 772–5
the printing press and memory 771, 773

Reformation as historical memory 769–72

Reformation recovery of the past 768–9
relationship between 770
ritual repetition 774
the sights of memory 767

History of Heretics (Arnold) 190–1, 199, 207

Hobbes, Thomas 89–90

Hoby, Lady Margaret 245

Hoffman, Melchior 75, 194, 206

Hofmeister, Sebastian 170

Hohenzollern, Albrecht von 566

Hohenzollern, Johann Sigismund 111

Holl, Karl 586, 778–9

Holy Communion 416
in England 420–1

Holy Roman Empire 91
institutional politics 589–91
and the reformatio mundi 317–19
secular courts 505
status of Judaism in 276, 277, 278, 279

Holy Spirit and grace 27
homosexuality, and the Islamic world 287

Hondius, Hendrik 613

Hoogstraaten, Johannes von 277

Hoogstraten, Samuel 658

Hooker, Richard 33, 208, 242

Hooker, Thomas 358

Hoornbeeck, Johannes 656, 657

Hopkins, John 635, 636

Horace 656

Hornhausen miracle well 696, 698
horoscopes 67

Hotman, François 573

Hotson, Howard 14, 467, 494

Hottinger, Klaus 171

Hoyer, Anna 755

Huber, Konrad 559

Huberinus, Caspar 402

Hubert, Conrad 439

Hubmaier, Balthasar 169, 170, 194, 196

Huguenots see French Huguenots

Huizinga, Johan 527
humanism and Humanists 153, 461–3, 491

Christian 395–6
critiques of music 623, 635

Hebrew and Greek originals of holy Scriptures 276
impact on Calvinism 462–3
importance placed on history and historical understanding 463
and Luther 149, 151
role in the Reformation 591

Hummel, Katharina 695–6

‘Hundred Guilder Print’ (Rembrandt) 613

Hungarian kingdom 108

Calvinism 228

Protestant populations under Muslim rule 289
and the Reformation 117

Hunnius, Aegidius 465

Hunt, Arnold 240, 654, 656

Hus, Jan 124, 125, 126, 163, 528, 626
century after 132–5
cult 137
as preacher 131–2
sermons 127

Hussite movement 130–2, 528, 590

Hussite rebellion 568–9

Hut, Hans 59, 75, 194, 196

Hutchinson, Anne 360

Hutten, Ulrich von 153, 434, 566

Hutter, Jacob 196–7, 204

Hutterites of Moravia 200, 204
community of goods 200, 713
and marriage 670–1
martyr letters 448
missionaries 201
see also Anabaptists
hymn singing see congregational hymn singing

Hyperius, Andreas 467, 654

Iconius, Raphael Eglinus 311
idols and idolatry 594

Ignatius of Loyola 660

Illyricus, Matthias Flacius 50, 336, 462

Index of Prohibited Books, Catholic 256, 260

India, early Protestant accounts of 290
indulgence controversy 3, 148, 149, 151–2

Ingram, Martin 510

Inquisitions 37–8, 423

Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin) 91, 96, 217, 218, 221, 223, 281, 287, 464, 669

‘Interimistic Controversy’ 157

Ireland and the Irish Reformations 233–47
catechizing 243

Catholicism 240
changing interpretations 234–6
conversion narratives and the emotions 236–40
doctrines of justification and predestination 235
edification 244

‘fast-slow’ Reformation controversy 234, 235
geographical representations 106–7
household worship 245–6
liturgy 241–2

‘popish’ symbolism 242
preaching and sermons 242–3

Puritans inclusion and national Churches 245–7

Scripture reading 243–4
special observations 241
irenicism 110, 127, 141, 261, 304–6, 308, 405

Irenicum (Pareus) 306

Iserloh, Erwin 146, 780

Isham, Elizabeth 53–4

Islam 755–6
and scripture 289

Islam and Protestantism 285–90, 291
conversion to Islam 289
diplomatic discourse 288

Protests in Hungary under Muslim rule 289
sexual behaviour 286, 287

‘Israel’ and the covenants 281

Ittingen monastery 172

Jablonski, Daniel Ernst 141

Jacob, Johann 330–1

Jakoubek of Stříbro 132

Jamaica 362

James I of England (VI of Scotland) 88–9, 281, 352, 614, 694

Puritans 356

Jamestown settlement 356

Jamnitzer, Wenzel 609

Jansenists 266, 330

Jansz, Claes 613

Jean IV, Count of Luxembourg 224

Jeanne d’Albrecht, Queen of Navarre 572–3

Jedin, Hubert 146

Jena University 732

Jenitz, Hans 445–6
jeremiad sermons, Metacom 361 360–1

Jerome, St. 645

Jerome of Prague 134

Jerome’s Latin Bible 397

Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 255, 576
in Cologne 405

‘Letter from the Far East’ 255
missionaries 351
preaching 655
schools 495–6
study of nature 740

Jewel, John 283

Jews 284–5, 404

Ashkenazi 284
legal protection of the Holy Roman Empire 275
moneylenders 716
new kingdom in Israel 274
refugees into Saxony 278
scholarship 485
see also Judaism and Protestantism

Jihlava, Moravia 137

Jiří (George) of Poděbrady 133, 134, 135

Jiří Melantrich of Aventino 139

Joachim III, Elector of Brandenburg 607

Joachim of Fiore 73, 311

Joachimsthal 138

Johann VI, Count of Nassau-Dillenburg 308, 310

Johann VII of Nassau-Siegen 312

Johann Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg 607

Johansen, Jens 700

John Casimir of the Palatinate 112

John Frederick the Magnanimous, Duke of Saxony 139, 390

John of Bohemia 129

John of Leiden 75, 215

John Sigismund, Margrave of Brandenburg 227

John the Baptist 54

Johnson, Carina 594

Johnson, Mark 644

Jonas, Justus 156

Jones, Norman 716–17

Jonson, Ben 246

Jonvillier, Charles de 438–9

Josquin des Pres 627

Josselin, Ralph 244–5

Joyce, George 710

Judaism and Protestantism 276–85, 291
anti-Judaism in the absence of Jews 278–81
apocalypse 283–4
covenants 281–2
expulsion and conversion 276, 277, 278

Judaizing 282–3
real Jews 284–5
and Spanish Portuguese Catholicism 280
see also Jews

Julian calendar 65, 68

Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Duke 677

Jung, Ambrosius 734

Junius, Franciscus 283–4, 658–9
justification doctrine 151, 154, 237, 591
in the British Reformations 235

Catholic rejection of 256

Kagan, Jerome 47

Kaplan, Benjamin 13–14, 226

Kápolna 539

Kappel, Battle of (1531) 173, 177, 537

Kappel, First Peace of (1529) 537

Karant-Nunn, Susan 48, 491, 654, 657, 711

Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 192, 193–4, 195, 203, 315–16, 412–13, 414, 551, 593
church music 624
first public evangelical Mask 602, 603
idolatry and iconoclasm 603, 601, 605, 606
vernacular singing 625

Karsthans dialogue 530f

Kassel, second reformation 315, 316

Kaufmann, Thomas 14, 278, 279, 590, 767

Kearney, John 243

Keckermann, Bartholomäus 465, 467, 468, 470, 654, 656, 658

Keil, Heinz 694

Keith, George 363

Kepler, Johannes 9, 310, 313, 314, 737–8

Khalsa military brotherhood 752

King Philip’s War (1675–1676) 360, 361

King, John 657

Kingdon, Robert 182, 511, 512

Kircher, Athanasius 309

Kismet-Bell, James 733

Kißner, Anna Eilisabeth 331

Kißner, Johann 331

Klug, Joseph 381

Knox, John 92, 280, 403, 694

Mosaic laws 282

Koberger, Anton 396

Koerner, Joseph Leo 392–3, 608–9

Kokoschka, Oskar 124, 125f

Kolb, Robert 775–6

Königsberg University 732

Korean Christians 4

Koslofsky, Craig 69

Kotter, Christoph 311

Koyré, Alexandré 727

Kralice Bible 139, 141

Krieg, Blesy 531

Kusukawa, Sachiko 728, 729, 731–2, 733, 737

Kutná Hora, and Europe’s first bi-confessional settlement 127, 134

Kutná Hora, Peace of (1485) 137

Kuyper, Abraham 778

Lakoff, George 644

Landes, David 69

Landgrave of Hesse 511

Edict ‘On Schools’ (1537) 488

Landis, Dennis C. 350–1

Landry, Stan M. 776, 777

Landsgemeinde assembly, Switzerland 536

Languet, Hubert 93

Large Catechism (Luther) 381, 394

Las Casas, Bartolomé de 352

Last Judgement 70, 71–2, 72–3, 78

Lateran IV council 527

Latimer, Hugh 238, 656

Latin (Vulgate) Bible 276

Laud, Archbishop William 263, 289, 357, 421, 615

Laudian movement 241

Laudonnièrer, René de 351

Lausanne, Treaty of (1567) 113

Lavater, Ludwig 694

Lavinheta, Bernard de 309
law 505–8
lay officials 528

Lay, Benjamin 11

Lead, Jane 341

Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques 216, 217, 221
legal codes, and judicial systems, and the Pentateuch 282
legal courts 504–17
archidiaconal courts 508–9
bishop’s courts 508–12
canon law 506

Catholic canon law 506
clandestine de praesenti vows 507
clerical celibacy 507
contumacy 510

Diocesan courts 510
disputed marriage vows 415
divorce and remarriage 507, 514

Dutch Reformed Church 510

English church courts 510–11
excommunication 510, 512
fornication and adultery 515

France 509

Geneva 509, 511, 512, 515, 516
of High Commission, Elizabethan England 510

‘the holy household’ 513–15
illegitimacy rates 515
impact on individuals and communities 512–16
impediments and dispensations system 507
kirk session, Scotland 511
law 505–8
lay judges 511
local customary law 508

Lutheran church ordinances 508, 511
marriage law reforms 507
mixed marriages between Protestants and Catholics 514, 515
law emergence 506
parental responsibilities 515
parish presbytery 511
penance for moral offenses 509, 510

Protestant church courts 509
public morality 509, 510–11
punishments 512–13, 515
rural consistories and village courts 516

Scotland 509
secular and ecclesiastical courts relationship 505, 509–10

Sweden 515
women and marital stability 514–15, 516

Zurich 511

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 28–9, 309

Leinster 106

Leipzig:

city authorities 551
print industry 381–2
riots (1689/90) 331

Leisnig schools 486–7

Lent 65

Lentes, Thomas 593

Leo X, Pope 153

Leoniceno, Niccolò 730

Léonor d’Orléans, Duke of Longuville 224

Léry, Jean de 351

Leslie, Henry 240
letters, role and significance of 431–48
art of letter writing 432–4
between leading Protestant theologians 443–4
correspondence in the processes of Protestant Reformation 436–45
couriers, itineraries, intermediaries and diffusion 435–6
geographical and linguistic spread 441–2
information centres 435
institutionalization of preaching and teaching ministries 442–3
letters of recommendation 445
martyr letters 447–8
political complexities and public policy 444–5
and the politics of reformation 445–6
printed religious polemics as catalyst 441
secretaries 445–6

Letters of Famous Men (Reuchlin) 433–4

Letters of Obscure Men (Rubianus) 434

Levellers 97

Leviathan (Hobbes) 89–90

Leyden congregation, and New World migration 356

Li Zhi 754–5, 756

Lichtenberger, Johannes 73

Lieberman, Victor 592, 596, 755
limpieza de sangre statutes, Castile 280

Linaker, Robert 52

Linck, Wenceslaus 714

Lipany, Battle of (1434) 132, 133
literacy, rise of 261–2, 395

Lithuania:

tolerance 269

Tridentine decrees 257

Littell, Franklin H. 199

Little, Leonard 709
liturgy, reformation of 409–24
auricular confessions 416
baptism, the other sacrament 419–20

Catholic setting 410–11
early reformers 411–13
ecclesiastical rituals 412

England 420–1

Eucharist 414–16
funeral and burial rites 423

Holy Communion 416
iconoclasm 412–13
marriage rites, vows and sermons 422
pews 417
public penance 422–3
pulpits 417
purification of women (‘churching’) after childbirth 422
reformed liturgies 418–19
sermon as liturgical form 416–18
sermons 412
social liturgies 421–3

Llull, Raymond 309

Lobwasser psalter 634

Loetz, Francisca 183

Lollard movement 400, 528, 635

Lombard, Peter 27, 32, 486

London, and Dutch reformed churches 226

Lopez, Duarte 681

Lortz, Josef 146, 780

Lotter, Melchior 379–80, 381

Lotzer, Sebastian 531

Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé 224

Louis VI of France 112

Louis XI of France 436

Louis XIV of France 363

Loyola, Ignatius 255

Lübeck church orders 487

Lucerne 176

Ludwig VI, Elector 227

Lufft, Hans 381

Luis of Granada 660

Luke of Prague 137, 138–9

Lull, Raymon 468

Lüneberg hymnals 267

Lupfen 531

Luther 2f, 14, 146–64, 319, 459, 530f, 532, 748

Anabaptists 203, 214
apocalypticism 74–5, 310
appointment of preachers 442
and Aristotle 493–4, 729, 731
astrology 67

Augustinian ‘city of God’ 71

Bible, ‘Wittenberg’ (1534) 3, 154, 163, 381, 396–7, 606

Catholic and civil law 506

Christ’s perpetual passion 661

‘Christian freedom’ 95
circumcision 279
confessional controversy 156–61

Copernican system 736–7
cult of the saints 65
dancing 630
depiction as a prophet 693, 694

Diet of Worms 57
early writings 149–50
education, importance of 483–4, 486–7, 491

Eucharistic theology 154–5, 156, 414
existing ‘in Christ’ 32
faith as gift from God 30, 37, 54
habitus doctrine 151
in history and memory 765–6, 767, 768, 776–7, 778–80
and the Holy Roman Empire 317–18
household rules (Haustafeln) 155

Humanism 461, 462
iconoclasm and radicalism 603, 605–6

Immaculate Conception sermon 29
indulgence controversy 29, 30, 38, 148, 149, 151–2

Jews and Judaism 275, 276, 277–8, 279–80, 404
justification doctrine 151, 154, 193, 336
knowledge through experience 731

Last Day 74
letters 437, 438, 440–1, 454

‘Mahomedan faith’ and ‘the Turk’ 74, 275, 285–6
marriage 507

Mass translation into German (1526) 261
medicine 732–3, 734
merchants and trade 715
messenger services 436
music and hymn singing 155, 266–8, 621, 625–6, 627, 629
the natural world 729

New Testament translation (1522) 3, 151, 154, 606

‘no Magistrate should be resisted’ 90
original sin 29–31
papacy, struggles with 161

‘passive justice’ concept 30, 31
passive righteousness 33
peasant rebellions 85
policing of morals and discipline 218

Postille collection 155
preaching 657
predestination doctrine 221
prefaces to biblical books 397

‘priesthood of all believers’ 588
prostitution 259

‘psychopannychism’/’soul sleep’ 70–1
on radicals 199

Reformation foundations and 148–50, 305, 585, 586
religious freedom 207–8

Reliquiae Lutheri 161

Renaissance (1920s) 779
resistance 90–1, 92
and the ‘Sabbatarians 282–3
sacred spaces 695
scholasticism 463–4

Scriptural authority (sola scriptura) 58, 202, 221, 392–3, 460
secular authority 84–6
sexual drives 671–2

Spalatin relationship 444

St Francis story 1
subjective experience 48–50
suppression of works 383–6

‘Synergistic Controversy’ 158
the Talmud 277

Thomistic scholasticism 729

‘two kingdoms’ doctrine 70, 96, 302

Unity of Brethren 138–40, 141

Wartburg Castle 413

Wittenberg movement 30, 192

Wittenberg printing 150–6, 377–83
see also Large Catechism; Small Catechism; individual works

Lutheranism 146–64

‘Adiaphoristic Controversy’ 157

Book of Concord 159
church ordinances 508
confessional controversy and culture 156–60, 160–4
decoration in churches 262–3
divisions with Calvinists 110

Formula Concordiae (FC) 159, 160, 162–3

‘good works’ meaning 157–8

‘Interimistic Controversy’ 157
music and hymn singing 266–8, 627–30, 634–5
natural philosophy 729, 730–2
post-concord controversies 159–60
and the printing press 153, 162
as Reformation’s starting point 148–50
sacred practices, spaces and objects 693
schools 629
sermons (Predigtpostillen) 162
spread through common language 117

MacCulloch, Diarmaid 77, 233

Maccovius, Johannes 470

Mack, Phyllis 604

Magdeburg, expulsion of Jews 278

Magdeburg Agenda 410

Maissen, Thomas 179–80

Major, Georg 157–8

‘Majoristic Controversy’ 158

Mander, Karel van 658

Mannerma, Tuomo 147

Manns, Peter 780

Mansfield, England 403

Manteo (Algonquin convert) 352–3

Mantesch, Scott 512

Manuel, Frank E. 314–15

Manuel, Fritzie 314–15

Manz, Felix 170, 172, 195, 202

Marburg 311–12

Marburg Colloquy (1529) 177, 409

Marburg Settlement (1529) 174

Marburg University 714, 732

Mardana 750

Margaret of Parma 226, 538, 557

Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach 529

Marguerite d’Angoulême, Queen of Navarre 31, 216

Marie de la Tour d’Auvergne, Duchess of Thouars 573

Marot, Clément 267, 632, 633, 634, 636

Marotta/Magdalena 759

Marpeck, Pilgram 197, 208, 415
marriage 3, 219
between Protestants and Catholics 514, 515
colonists 757–8
law reforms 507, 668–73, 683
parental consent 259–60
and Pietism 338
rites, vows and sermons 422
secularization of 507

Marshall, Peter 695

Martin, Craig 730

Martínez- Patiño, Maria 667, 683

Martyrs Mirrors (Bracht) 448

Mary I of England 51, 92, 226, 281, 385

Mary, Virgin 25, 410

Maryland:

Act of Toleration (1649) 362

English Catholics 362

Protestants 361–2

Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 124–5, 125f

Massachusetts Bay Company 358

Massachusetts Bay Colony 357

Massachusetts Puritans 357–9

Matar, Nabil 284, 287, 288, 289

Matěj of Janov 131, 132
material goods 709–12

Mather, Cotton 363

Mather, Richard 357–8

Mathesius, Johann 138, 437

Matthew, Gospel of 77, 399

7:14 203

22.21 84

Matthias of Arras 128

Matthijs, Jan 75, 207

Maurice of Orange 262

Maximilian I, Emperor 435

Maximilian II, Emperor 140

Maximilian of the Palatinate 112

Mayflower 356

Mayhew Jr, Thomas 361

McDermott, Jennifer Rae 654

McGrath, Alistair 28, 588, 591

McLaughlin, R. Emmet 712

Mede, Joseph 284

Medici, Catherine de 572, 573
medicine 732–6

Meistersinger tradition 622

Melanchthon, Philip 8, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 50, 77, 139, 147, 150, 156, 159, 163, 192, 265, 318, 396, 433–4, 486, 506, 608, 650, 652, 653, 711
apocalypticism 76
astronomy and astrology 67, 736–7
community of goods concept 713

Confessio Augustana (CA) 158–9
confessional controversy 156–7
correspondence with Calvin 444
hand-held watches 69

Humanist tradition 491
humanistic textual approach 461–2
letters 440, 445, 455
liberal arts 493
medicine 732–3
messenger services 436
natural philosophy 728
natural philosophy reforms 731–2
preaching 654
proofreading 374
reform of German schools and universities 444, 487
scholasticism 464, 466
mathematics, study of 493
see also individual works

Melchiorite Anabaptism 194

Meldorf 534

Mellink, Albert Fredrik 199

Melville, James 244

Melzer, Christian 610

Memmingen 531

Menda Yehuda, ‘Nathaniel’ 280

Mennonites 415
deacons 201
in the Netherlands 424

Mental, Johann 396

Mentzer, Raymond 511

Merback, Hans 769

Merritt, Julia 653

Merton, Robert K. 728

Metacom 361

Metobius 698

Meyer, Ursula 335

Milíč of Kroměříž 130, 131, 132, 141
millenarianism 79–80, 284, 309–11, 728
and Pietism 331

Milner, Matthew 236, 654, 659

Milton, John 70

Minckwitz, Hans von 594–5
mind’s eye (occulus imaginationis) 645–51, 646f

Ming dynasty 753

Mochizuki, Mia 612

Moeller, Bernd 147, 587, 590, 592

Mohács, Battle of (1526) 285, 289

Monomotapa women 681

Monter, William 511

Montpellier, Calvinist movement 68

‘moral influence’ theory 26

Morata, Olympia Fulvia 491

Moravia 126, 137, 140, 196
mapping the Protestant Reformation 107
reimposition of Catholicism 303

Moravian church 54, 108, 140, 141, 335–6, 364
gender stereotypes 11
hymn culture 340–1
and Lutheranism 305
missionaries 759–60
and women 338–9

More, Thomas 48, 378, 485

Morgan, John 490

Moritz “the Learned”, of Hesse-Kassel 312, 610

Mornay, Philippe du Plessis 93

Morone, Giovanni 35

Morsius, Joachim 311

Moryson, Fynes 136

Mosaic law 282

Moser, Johann Jacob 339

Most, Glenn 401

Muchembled, Robert 691

Mughal Empire 750

Muhammad, Prophet 275, 285

Mühlberg, Battle of (1547) 438, 440

Muldrew, Craig 715

Müller, Heinrich 332

Müller, Siegfried 615

Münster, Anabaptist kingdom of 75, 194, 204, 206–7, 208, 215, 240, 671, 713

Münster, Sebastian 678–80, 682

Müntzer, Thomas 75, 95, 155, 192–3, 195, 200, 203, 205, 207, 404, 605, 632
liturgies 628
new order of vernacular worship 413
vernacular singing 625
words as unreliable transmitters 399

Murad III, Sultan 288

Murdock, Graeme 5

Muris, Michael 437

Murner, Thomas 404, 530f

Murphy, Hannah 734, 735

Musculus, Andreas 76–7
music 60, 266–8, 621–39

Carthusians 623

Catholic responses 638
church bells 636–7

Cistercians 623
congregational hymn singing 13, 628–9, 631, 633
contrafacta 626
dance and dancing 630, 634, 637
and domestic devotion 629

England 635–7

Geneva 632–5
late medieval period 622–3

Lutheran sung liturgy 628

‘martyr songs’ 626, 631–2
metrical psalms 626, 632, 633, 634, 635–6, 637
polyphonic 638
popular ballads 626
printing of vernacular religious music 626–7
as propaganda in the early Reformation 625–7

Psalms of David 633

Radical Reformation and 631–2

Renaissance 623, 627

Scandinavian hymnals 629–30
secular songs 630
singing as prayer in Reformed services 632
and society 637–9

Strasbourg 630–1
styles of sacred and secular music 633

Zwingli and the Reformation in Zurich 623–5

Myconius, Friedrich 153

Nanak, Guru 747–8, 749–52, 756

Napier, John 280

Nash, Thomas 205

Nassau-Orange house 574

Native Americans 290, 351, 361
natural and supernatural 688–702

‘adiaphora’ concept 693
balneology 697

Catholic interpretation of healing water 697, 698, 699–70

Catholicism, and supernatural beliefs and practices 691–2
ghosts, angels and fairies 694–5
healing waters 697, 701

Lutheran miracle wells in comparative context 696–700, 701

Lutheran sacred practices, spaces and objects 693
miracles 695–6
overview of historiography 690–6
popular and elite culture 691

‘preternatural’ 689
prophets and visions 693–4

‘religion’/’magic’/’superstition’ 689
sacred spaces 695

‘secularisation’ contradictions 692
terminology 688–90

‘wonders’ 693
natural philosophy 726–40
alchemical medical systems 735
anatomy 733
astronomy and astrology 732

Catholicism as stagnating force 727

Copernican system 736–8, 740
heliocentrism 737
hermeticism 730
human body 733

Lutheran 729, 730–2
physicians 734–6

Platonism 730

Protestant 729–31

Protestantism and the Scientific Revolution 276, 727–9

Puritanism and the ‘Merton thesis’ 728
reformation of medicine 732–6
seventeenth century 738–9
spiritual medicine 734–5
study of nature 729–30, 740

Thomistic scholasticism 729

Wittenberg astronomy 736–8

Wittenberg reforms 731–2, 733

Nazis 278
and Luther 779

Neander, Michael 462

Netherlands see Dutch Mennonites; Dutch Reformed Church; Dutch Republic

New England Congregationalists 363

New England Puritans 230, 282

Baptism 360

Israel and the covenants 281
missionary work and Christianization 36
persecution of Quakers and Baptists 360
psalm singing 636

‘rhetoric of declension’ 360
seventeenth century 356–61
see also Puritans and Puritanism

New Haven 358

New Jersey 362, 363

New Netherland colony, North America 355

New Testament:

Greek and Latin (1516) 395

Luther’s translation 154

New York 362–3
religious pluralism 355

Newton, Isaac 728, 739

Nicholas, St. 129

Nicholas of Cusa 318

Nicholas of Dresden 132

Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 31

Nicodemites 404

Nicolai, Philipp 332

Ninety-Five Theses (Luther) 148, 149, 152–3, 274, 765, 776

Ninnes, Richard 567

Nirenberg, David 291
non-Christian religions 274–92

Nora, Pierre 772

Nowell, Alexander 243

Nummedal, Tara 735

Nun freut euch lieben Christen g’mein (Luther) 626

Nuremberg 594

City Council disputation (1525) 553, 554

Jewish communities 278, 279
school order 487

Nuremberg Bible (Anton Koberger, 1483) 396

Nutton, Vivian 733

Oath of Allegiance controversy, England 88–9

Oberman, Heiko A. 146–7

Obwalden 537

Ochini, Bernadino 36

Ockham, William 28

Oecolampadius (Johannes Huszgen) 156, 169, 170, 174, 175, 215, 491

Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph 334

Ogilvie, Brian 730

Olick, Jeffrey 774

On Good Works (Luther) 153

On Secular Authority (Luther) 85–6, 87

On the Art of letter Writing (Erasmus) 432–3

On the Freedom of a Christian (Luther) 153

On the Jews and their Lies (Luther) 277, 278

On the New Transformation of the Christian Life (Hergot) 96

On the Removal of Images (Karlstadt) 593, 594, 603

On Trade and Usury (Luther) 716

Oporinus, Johannes 437, 438

Ordinances of Västerås (1527) 533
organs 267, 636
original sin doctrine 1, 25, 26, 37

Oratory of Divine Love reform movement 254

Orthodox European Church 108

Osiander, Andreas 76, 158, 736

‘Osiandrian Controversy’ 158

Ottoman Empire 286, 288
threat to Christendom 275

Packull, Werner 200

Palatinate Reformed Protestantism 106, 227

Palladius of Lunt 533

Pannonius, Stephanus 311

Panofksy, Erwin 661

Pansophia 306–9, 313, 468

Paolini, Pietro 650f
papermaking in Europe 373

Paracelsianism 311–2, 315–17, 676–7
influence on Reformation 468

Paracelsus 205, 206, 315, 611, 676–7, 732, 735, 736

Paradies-Gārtlein (Arndt) 611

Paradise see Garden of Eden

Pareus, David 306, 311

Paris 114, 118
parish presbytery, Germany and Hungary 511

Parker, Matthew 439
passive justification, Catholic interpretations of 37–8

Paster, Gail Kern 47, 652

Patrizi da Cherso, Franceso 318

Paul, St. 27, 29, 30, 151
conversion of the Jews 283–4

Letter to the Romans 34, 397

Paul III, Pope 34, 35, 255

Paul IV, Pope 34

Payne, Linda 735

‘Peasants’ War, Germany (1524–1525) 95, 172, 194, 198, 201, 206, 207, 381, 397, 531–2, 554, 605
penitential rituals 254

Penn, William 363

Treaty with the Indians 15f

Pennsylvania:

‘holy experiment’ of religious liberty 363

Pietism settlement movement 342

Pentateuch, and legal codes and judicial systems 282

Pequot Wars (1636–1637) 290, 361

Percy, William 289

Perez of Valencia, Jacobo 35

Perkins, William 52–3, 244, 246, 652, 654, 655, 656, 657, 658

Person, Robert 246

Pestis eram vivens moriens ero more tua, Papa (Luther) 161

Perth kirk session 512

Peters, Hugh 655

Petersen (née von Merlau), Johanna Eleonora 330–1, 334–5, 338

Petrejus, Johann 607

Petri, Olaus and Laurentius 160, 628–9

Petronio, St. 548

Pettegree, Andrew 401, 411, 766

Peucer, Caspar 462
pews 417

Pfefferkorn, Johannes 277

Pflug, Julius 35, 36

Philadelphian society 341

Meeting (1758) 11

Philip II of Spain 225, 226, 288, 308

Philip III of Spain 288

Philip the Handsome, of Burgundy 435, 436

‘Philippist’/’Gneso-Lutheran’ split 50

‘philosemitism’/anti-Judaism 275, 277
philosopher’s stone 676
physicians 734–6
court 316–17

Pia Desideria (Spener) 329, 331, 342

Piccolomini, Enea Silvio 135

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 736

Pictorius 697

Pietism 5, 51, 54, 209, 265, 266, 329–42, 470, 472, 630

‘choirs’ 335
communication and media 339
conventicles 330–1, 332, 334, 448
criticism of Lutheran orthodoxy 160
development within and outside the church 333–6
expansive networks 341–2
gender 11, 337–9
genealogy 337

Halle 333–4, 335, 340
hymn culture 340–1
individuation, literature, and music 339–41

Lutheran and radical traditions 332
marriage 338
millenarian eschatology 331
missionary movement 342
past and future 336–7

Pennsylvania and New England 363

‘radical’ 334–5
spiritual life 12–13

Württemberg 334, 340

Pietist Edict (1743) 334

Pighius, Albert 35–6, 36f

Pirckheimer, Willibald 711

Piscator, Johannes (Johann) 309–10, 312, 397, 467

Pius II, Pope 132, 135

Plantagenet, Arthur, Viscount Lisle 595–6

Platonism 623, 730

Platter, Felix 674, 675

Plener, Philipp 196

Plett, Heinrich 659

Pliny 731, 733

Plymouth Colony of Puritans 356–7

Pocahontas (alias Rebecca Rolfe) 352–3

Poele, Liesken van den 558

Pol, Lotte van de 673

Poland:

Calvinism 228
and the Consensus of Sandomierz (1570) 306
tolerance 269
and the Tridentine decrees 257

Pole, Reginald 37

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 108
political obedience 83–99
absolutism and the divine right of kings 88–90

Christian freedom 95–6, 97

‘lesser magistrates’ 90–1, 93
private-law argument 90, 91, 92
revolution 94–8
toleration 87–8
tyranny and resistance 91–4

Pollmann, Judith 513, 771–2

Pomerania church orders 487

Ponet, John 92

Poniatowska, Krystina 311

Portrait of a Man Holding the Frontispiece to Dürer’s “Small Passion” (Paolini) 650f

Portuguese Catholics in north-eastern Brazil 354

Postel, Guillaume 318
post-Ramist tradition 306–7, 308–9

Potter, G. R. 414–15

Pottre, Jan de 558

Practise of Pietie, The (Bayly) 246, 654

Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) 224

Prague 128–30
realist vs. nominalist debates 131
relics 129
uprising (1419) 134

Prague University 128, 132–3

‘Prayer Against the Turks’ (Foxe) 287

‘Praying Towns’, New England 361
preaching and sermons 400–5, 412
appointment of preachers 442
and the body 643–61

Bohemian Reformations 130

Calvin and Calvinism 219–20, 264, 657

Catholic and Protestant comparisons 659–61

English Reformations 242–3
hedge 196, 226, 557, 604, 711

Hus 131–2
institutionalization of 442–3

Ireland and the Irish Reformations 242–3

Jesuits 655
as liturgical form 416–18

Luther 657

Melanchthon 654
printed collections 401

Scottish Reformations 242–3

Zwingli 416
predestination doctrine (‘Counter-Remonstrants’) 228–9, 469–70
in the British Reformations 235
and the English burial service 242

Preface to the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans (Luther) 86
premarital sex 259

‘priestcraft’ 290–1

Primaudaye, Pierre de la 652

Prince-Bishop of Würzburg 536

Princeton College, New Jersey 363
print workshop and markets 66, 73, 261, 265, 373–86
and the apocalypse 73
apprentices 374–5
authors’ relations with printers 374, 375
brand Luther 379–80
compositors 374
crisis and consolidation 376–7

Dutch Republic and the print market 385–6
end of a free market 383–6

England Protestant texts 385

‘false Wittenbergs’ 380
financial underpinnings of book production 375–6
fonts of type 374

Geneva clandestine printing 384–5

German print market 382–3
incunabula 376–7
indexes of forbidden Protestant texts 384

Leipzig print industry 381–2
manuscript production 376
master printers 374, 375
and memory 771, 773
papermaking in Europe 373
printmaking 374
publishers 375–6
regulatory legislation (1540s) 384
religious pamphlets 383

Venetian publishers 384

Wittenberg 377–9, 381–2
woodcut illustrations by Cranach 380

Prognosticatio (Lichtenberger) 73
property 712–13

‘Prophecy of Elias’ 77
prostitution 258–9, 673

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber) 709

Protestantism and Catholic renewal 253–69
church/secular state competition 254
concubinage 256
confessionalization, or a complex dialogue 268–9
cultural consequences, art and architecture 262–3
devotional literature 265
diaries and spiritual autobiographies 265–6
establishing uniformity of belief and worship 260–2
hymn singing 266–8
inquisitions 256
moral disciplining 258–60
multiple benefices prohibition 256
overview 253–4
sermons and preaching 263–4
tridentine challenge 254–8

‘Wandering out‘ (Auswanderung) 257–8
war against disorder 260

Protestantism outside Europe 350–64
arguments for colonization, and images of the New World 350–3

Dutch overseas empire 353–5

Elizabethan 351–2

English Puritanism in seventeenth-century New England 356–61

French Huguenots and overseas colonization 351
pluralism and revivalism in English North America (1660–1750) 361–4

Protestants and Protestantism:

in Africa 4
commerce and trade without greed 11–12
communities under Ottoman rule 108
community orientations 13
education, and observance of moral laws 9
emergence of 1–3
gendered understandings and differences 10–11
giving shape to personal experiences 7
and Islam 275–6, 285–90, 291
and Judaism 276–85, 291
legal courts 10
and modernity 4

‘priestcraft’ in other religions 290–1
rank and wealth 11
and secularization 4
universities established 459

Protten, Rebecca 5, 6f, 759–60

Protten family 6f

Prussia (Royal), geographical representation of Lutherans 106

Prynne, William 93, 283

Psalms of David 633

‘psychopannychism’/’soul sleep’ 70–1

Ptolemy 736
public penance 422–3
publishers 375–6
pulpits 417

Calvinist 612

Purchas, Samuel 287
purgatory doctrine 3, 70

Puritans and Puritanism 208, 235, 237, 242, 245, 246, 304, 709
and affective rhetoric 654
attacking Catholic corruption 68
and the Book of Common Prayer 421

Charles I, resistance to 97
diaries and journals 72
doctrine of predestination 33, 51–3
emotions of religious life 238
emphasis on piety 470

Holy Communion 418
iconoclasm 615

Massachusetts communal capitalism 359
migration to the New World 79
role in the Church of England 230
and the Scientific Revolution 728
scripture-based piety 360
see also New England Puritans

Pyrmont, healing waters 696, 698

Quakers and Quakerism:

in Boston 360
in Maryland and Virginia 362
in Pennsylvania 363
prophets and visions 694
and slavery 11, 362

Quenstedt, Johann Andreas 465

Qur’an 287, 290

Rabus, Ludwig 438

Radical Reformation, The ( Williams) 199
radicals 190–209

Anabaptist and Spiritualist gender relations 201
clericalism 201
community of goods 204, 207, 713
current research agenda 200–1
legacies 206–9
magisterial type 198–9
names, forms and types 197–201
origins of Protestant radicalism 191–7
radical religion 201–6
types 198–9, 201–2

Raemond, Florimund de 220

Raleigh, Walter 352

Ram Das 751

Ramism 307–9, 312, 466–8
and post-Ramist tradition 306–7, 308–9

Ramus, Petrus (Peter) 307, 308, 466–8

Ranke, Leopold von 3, 147, 392, 439, 586

Ranters 59

Rawski, Evelyn 756

Reformed Protestantism 214–30
apocalypse and the destruction of the ‘Turks’ 286–7
and apocalypticism 78

Arminianism 228–9
and children 54–5

Eastern Europe 228

France 223–5

German Empire 227
and Holy Communion 416
and Islam 286–8

Jews and Judaism 275–6, 280–1
liturgies 418–19

Netherlands 225–7
predestination doctrine 221–3
women and clerical marriage 219

Regensburg:

Diet of (1541) 33, 34, 35
expulsion of Jews 278
monasteries 485

Reid, S. J. 490

Reinhard, Wolfgang 268

Reisch, George 647f

Religion and the Decline of Magic (Thomas) 691
religious knowledge construction 6–7
religious symbols and spaces 14
religious toleration 13–14

Rembrandt van Rijn 613, 634–5, 644f, 647, 653, 658, 659
removal and destruction of images 602–5

Renaissance 392
music 623

Resolutiones (Luther) 379

Restitutio christianismi (Servetus) 319

Reublin, Wilhelm 195

Reuchlin, Johannes 277, 433–4

Reuß- Ebersdorf, Erdmuthe Dorothea von 335

Revelations 20 318

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) 108

Rhau, Georg 381, 627

Rhau-Grunberg, Johann 377–8

Rhegius, Urbanus 734, 735–6

Rheticus, Georg 736

Rhode Island colony 88, 360

Ribault, Jean 351

Richard II of England 129

Richelieu, Cardinal 31

Riebeeck, Jan van 227

Riedemann, Peter 201, 204

Rinck, Melchior 194

Rinckhart, Martin 776

Rio de Janeiro 351

Risto, Uro 774

Ritschl, Albrecht 147

Roanoke Island colony 352

Robbins, Joyce 774

Robinson, John 356

Rogation Days 411

Rogers, John 239, 655, 657

Rogers, Richard 72, 238–9

Rokycana, Jan 133–4

Rolfe, John 352

Roman Catholic Church see Catholics and Catholicism

Romans:

7 and 9 229

13 86

13.1–2 84

Rome (ancient), and civil law 506

Rome, as information centre 435, 436

Römer, Hans 194
rood screens, English churches 263

Roper, Lyndal 259, 513, 592, 644, 670, 765

Rosicrucians 318
manifestos and tracts 311, 312–13, 469
and Tübingen 313–15

Rosser, Gervase 549

Rothmann, Bernhard 75, 671

Royal Society, English 304

Royko, Kaspar 137

Rubianus, Crotus 434

Rublack, Ulinka 645, 652

Rückert, Hanns 147

Rudolf II, Emperor 112, 114, 140, 316
rural society 525–40

Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmback Reformation 532
clerical professions, emergence of 532
confessional parity 536, 537–8

Denmark 533

Eastern Europe 539
endowments 538

England 538–9

Gersau rural republic 537

Glarus 536

Gospels, access to 531

Grisons valleys 537

‘imperial villages’ 534

Netherlands 538

Obwalden 537
oral dissemination 529

Reformation in the Lutheran heartlands 529–36, 540
religion in the late middle ages 527–8

Scandinavia 533–4

Scotland 539

Swiss Reformation orbit 536–9, 540

St Mary Church, Zurzach 538
vestries 538
visitation records 532

Russell, Nicolas 771

Rutherford, Samuel 93

Rutz, Andreas 495, 496

Ryrie, Alec 236, 238, 244, 651, 654, 656

Saalhof Pietists 341

Saarinnen, Risto 147

‘Sabbatarians’ 282–3

Sachs, Hans 626

Saenredam, Pieter 612

Safavids in Iran 755

Saint Andrews Cathedral, Scotland 413

Saint Bartholomew’s massacre (1572) 225, 556, 557, 573

Saint Esprit fraternity 528
saints’ days tradition 65–6, 67

Salem witch craze 360

Sandomierz Confession 110

Sarcerius, Erasmus 402, 670

Sarum (Old Salisbury) Rite 410
satisfaction (‘penal substitution’) theory 26

Saturday Sabbath Unitarian churches 282

Savonarola 623

Savoy, Duchy of 113–14

Sayn-Wittgenstein, Casimir von 335

Scandinavia:

hymnals 629–30
rural Reformation 533–4
see also individual countries
science 6, 79–80, 471–2, 495, 668 see also natural philosophy

Schappeler, Christoph 531

Schedel, Hartmann 23, 24f

Scheer, Monique 412

Schemm, Hans 779

Schertlin von Burtenbach, Sebastian 567–8

Scheurl, Christoph 553

Schickard, Wilhelm 314

Schilling, Heinz 268, 529, 551, 552, 765, 767

Schirlentz, Nickel 381

Schleinitz, Johann von 594–5

Schleirmacher, Friedrich 776

Schleitheim Articles 201

Schlick/Šlik family 138

Schlüsselberg, Conrad 189

Schmalkaldic Articles 159

Schmalkaldic League 37, 157, 438, 446, 631

Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) 31, 139, 157, 218, 390

Schmidt, Heinrich Richard 181

Schneeberg Altar 610

Schneider, Manfred 392

Schoenfeldt, Michael 644–5
scholastic heritage 463–6

Schöner, Johann 67

School of the Mind 754

Schouten, Aaltje 643–5, 644f, 647, 653, 659
schreibcalender (writing calendar) 67–8

Schücz, Hans 528

Schurmann, Anna Maria van 338, 341

Schütz (née Bartels), Catharina 331

Schütz, Joahnn Jacob 330

Schwäbisch Hall church orders 487

Schwenckfeld, Caspar von 196, 205, 311

Schwyz 177, 180–1, 183
science 471–2
early modern period 8–9

Scot, Reginald 56–7

Scotland:

communal fast days and prayers 13
educational reform 490
kirk sessions 511, 512, 540
nobility and the Reformation 574
public penance 423–4
rural Reformation 539
secular and religious courts 509

Scottish Reformations 10, 106, 233–47
being Protestant 240–5

Calvinist roots 234
catechizing 243
changing interpretations 234–6
conversion 236–40
conversion as a lived process 238
conversion narratives and the emotions 238–40
doctrines of justification and predestination 235
edification 244
eight-day fast 241

‘fast-slow’ Reformation controversy 234, 235
household worship 245–6
liturgy 241–2

‘popish’ symbolism 242
preaching and sermons 242–3

Puritan inclusion and national Churches 245–7

Scripture reading 243–4

Scotus, John Duns 26, 27, 28

Scribner, Robert (Bob) 551, 554, 592, 606, 690, 692, 693, 770, 772

Scriver, Christian 332

Scultetus, Abraham 111, 118

Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664) 355

Second Helvetic Confession (1566) 178, 228, 309

Seitz, Alexander 734

Sendivogius, Michael 311

Senfi, Ludwig 627

Sennfeld 534

Sephardic Jews in north-eastern Brazil 354
serfdom abolition 531

Seripando, Girolamo 37

Sermon (Luther) 378

Sermon on Indulgence and Grace (Luther) 378
sermons see preaching and sermons

Servetus, Michael (Miguel) 87, 222, 283, 319, 777, 778

Seven Years War 363

Severinus, Petrus 316

Sewell, Samuel 12
sex, pre-marital 10
sexual crimes 260
sexual difference 667–83

Adam and Eve as model of matrimony 669, 672
alchemy 674, 675–7, 682–3
anatomical dissection 674–5
artificial human beings 676

Book of Nature metaphor 679

Catholic hagiographies 675
celibacy 669

Cosmographies (Münster) 678–80, 682

De Bry family volumes 681–2

Dreamer community 670

Egyptian men and women 680

Estate of Marriage, The (Luther) 669, 671–2, 673, 674
female sexuality 672–3

Hutterites of Moravia 670–1
male projective capacities 680
medical and natural philosophical writing on sex and gender 673–7
medical humanism 673–4

Monomotapa women 681

Münster Anabaptists 671

‘noble savage’ concept 678

Paracelsian principles 676–7
polygamy 671
prostitution 673
reform of marriage 668–73, 683
sexual sins 672
sexuality 671–2
shame and the Fall 679
superiority of European Christian civilization 678
travellers’ tales of 677–93
unnatural and natural 678, 681
unnatural bodies 678, 679
women’s/men’s bodies 670
see also gender relations; women

Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset 420

Shepard, Thomas 357–8

Sherlock, Peter 773

Shi’a Islam 289

Shi’a/Sunni “schism” 289

Short Catechism (Luther) see Small Catechism (Luther)

Shuger, Debora 654

Sibbes, Robert 238

Sickingen, Franz von 153, 565–6

Sidney, Philip 575

Siege of Haarlem (1572) 613

Sigismund, Emperor 133

Sigismund, St. 129

Sikhism 747–8, 749–53

Silvershirts, American 278

Simler, Josias 178

Simons, Menno 194–5, 197, 203, 754

Simons, Patricia 680

Skinner, Quentin 94
slavery and slaveholding 11, 362, 757
conversion to Christianity 759

Sleidan, Johann 318

Sleidanus, Johannes (Johannes Philippson von Schleidan) 446

Small Catechism (Luther) 154, 155, 162, 381, 394, 532, 629
visual imagery 606

Smith, Pamela 730, 735

Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 363, 720, 760

Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 363, 719, 760

Socinians 469

Soergel, Philip 693

Solomon, Julie 652, 653

Spain, counter-reforming programme 257
expulsion of the Moriscos 288

Spalatin, Georg 277, 440
relationship with Luther 444

Spangenberg, Cyriacus 670

Spangenberg, Johann 401

Spener, Philipp Jakob 209, 329, 330, 331, 332, 337

Spengler, Lazarus 553, 626

Speratus, Paul 137, 626

Spicer, Andrew 424, 512

Spinks, Bryan 421

Spinoza, Baruch 284, 355
spiritual experience, nature of 47–60

Calvinist deathbed 55

‘conscience literature’ 52
consubstantial doctrine 56
doctrine and emotion 56–7

Eucharist controversy 56–7
experience of believing 57–60
gendered experience of life 54–5
gendered experiences of predestination 53–4
justification by faith alone 48–50
lay Protestant Bible readers 59–60

Lutheran deathbed 55
music 60
predestination experience 50–4

Puritanism (experimental Calvinism) and predestination 51–3

Scripture as authority 57–9
stages of life 54–5

Spiritualists 204–5

Sprenger-Ruppenthal, Annaliese 508

St. Andrews University, Scotland 490

St. Bavo Church, Haarlem 612, 616

St. Jerome (Dürer) 645, 648f

St. Mary’s Church, Wittenberg 417

St. Michael parish church, Gochsceim 535f

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London 263

St. Peter and Paul church, Weimar 390–2, 391f

St. Thomas Church School, Leipzig 268

St Thomas colony 759

St. Vitus cathedral, Prague 111
states:

and church separation 86
confessionalized Christianity 269
and sovereignty 84–6

Stathmion, Christopher 67

Stationers’ Company of London 385

Stauptiz, Johann von 150, 586

Stayer, James 200, 206, 778

Steigmann-Gall, Richard 779

Steinbach, Colonel 752

Stephenson, Barry 765

Sternhold, Thomas 635, 636

Stifel, Michael 76

Stoic view of passion 48

Stolberg, Michael 674
stool of repentance 239

Stoß, Veit 602, 609

Strasbourg 215–16
and Calvin (1538–41) 217–18
cathedral 69
music in the Reformed church 630–1
reforms 175

Strasbourg Bible 396

Strasbourg Hohe Schule (Academy) 489–90

Strauss, Gerald 490

Strier, Richard 729

Strohm, Christoph 506

Stuart monarchy restoration, England 360

Stühlinge 531

Stumpf, Simon 195, 201

Sturm, Johann 489, 631

Stuyvesant, Peter 355

Suárez, Francisco 88, 506

Sufism 750

Süleyman the Magnificent, Sultan 756
sumptuary laws 712, 718
in Dutch colonies 758

Supputatio Annorum Mundi (Luther) 77

Sweden and the Reformation 162
church architecture 263

Swiss Anabaptists 201

Swiss Brethren 196, 197, 201, 203

Swiss Confederacy:

as distinct political system 168
educational reforms 489–90

Swiss Reformations (1520–1720) 167–85, 195–7
bi-confessional regions 13, 180, 181–4

Catholic clergymen 182

Catholic ruling cantons 174, 175, 176–7, 180
civil courts 182
civil wars (1529/1531) 174, 183–4
dietary laws 171

First Kappeler Landfrieden 176

Landfrieden 173, 176, 183, 184
mapping Reformed Churches 107
as a movement 169–73
path to confessional cultures 178–84
relationship to the Lutheran movement (1520s) 177
sacred objects 182–3

Second Kappeler Landfrieden 177, 178, 180
settlements 173–8
tithes 171, 172

Swyn, Peter 534

‘Synergistic Controversy’ 158

Synod of Brazil 354

Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) (1618–1619) 229, 469–70

Synod of Philadelphia (1716) 363

Synod of Uppsala (1593) 534
syphilis 259

Talmud, and the Cologne Dominicans 276, 277

Tanzania Lutheran Church 4

Tassis, Francisco de 435–6

Tassis, Giovanni Baptista de 435

Taufbüchlein (Luther) 420

Tauler, Johann 332

Tausen, Heinrich 160

Taverner, John 635

Teellinck, Willem 657, 658

Tell, William 168

Tennent brothers 364

Teresa of Avila 660

Terry, Edward 290

‘That Our Saviour Jesus Christ was Born a Jew’ (Luther) 277

That There Should Be No Beggars among Christians (Karlstadt) 593

The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and his Wife, (Rembrandt) 643–5, 644f

Theatines 255

Theatrum Biblicum (Visscher) 613

‘Third Sermon after Invocation’ (Luther) 603, 606

Thirty Years War (1618–1648) 78, 161, 268, 357, 694, 698

Thomas of Strasbourg 28

Thomas, Keith 691

Thurgau 179
reforms 174, 176
riots (1608) 182

Thurneysser, Leonhard 652–3
time, reforming 64–80
and the advancement of human knowledge 79–80
apocalyptic 72–7
apocalyptic lore and imagery 76
astrological calendars 66–8
astrology 66–7
clocks and clockmaking 68–9

Easter, Christmas and Pentecost 66
evangelical wonder books 77
and eternity 69–72

Gregorian calendar reform 68
hand-held watches 69

Joachism 73, 76
and the Last Judgement 71–2, 72–3
as mundane duration 65–9
nocturnalization thesis 69

‘personalization of’ 72

‘psychopannychism’/’soul sleep’ 70–1
saints’ days tradition 65–6, 67
schreibcalender (writing calendar) 67–8
universal history 77–80
world-ending flood 73–4

Time of Sifting, Moravian church 336

Tinctoris, Johann 622, 623

Titelius, Joachim 699
tithes 171, 172

To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry (1525) 96

To the Christian Nobility (Luther) 551

Todd, Margo 235–6, 239, 423, 693, 694

Toleration Act (1689) 511

Toltz, Johann 381

Töpfer, Tomas 486

Torshell, Samuel 53

Tranquebar colony 342, 759

Transylvanian principality, mapping Protestantism 106, 108–9

Travers, Gian 170
tree of knowledge 23, 24f

Treitlarová z Krokvic, Anna Marie 135

Trent, Council of (1547) 7, 34, 35, 36–8, 182, 254, 255–7, 769
marriage laws 507
and the Utraquists 139

Trevor-Roper, Hugh 303, 304

Tridentine Catholicism 507, 569

Tridentine decrees 256–8

Trinitarian error 288

Troeltsch, Ernst 198–9

Troeltsch, Volker 586

Trubar, Primus 162

True Christianity (Arndt) 611, 612

Tschudi, Valentin 536

Tübingen, and the Rosicrucian manifestos 313–15

Tübingen Collegium Illustre 569

Tübingen University 334, 489, 493, 732

Tupí natives, Brazil 351, 354–5

Tupí-Guarani catechism 354

Turner, Victor 412

Turquet, Louis de Mayerne 280

‘twofold covenant’ 94

Tycho Brahe 310, 736, 737, 740

Tyndale, William 32, 48, 70, 237, 397

Uhtred of Boldon 28

Ulm 532
church orders 487

Ulster Protestant settlement 245, 247
mapping the Protestant Reformation 106–7

Undereyck, Margaretha 338

Unitarian churches, Saturday Sabbath 282

Unitarians 257

Unity Of Brethren, Bohemia 135, 136, 137, 138–41, 301–4, 319
university scholars of the Reformation 459–72

Aristotelian philosophy 463–4, 465, 466, 470, 472
encyclopedism 468–9
history from an evangelical perspective 462

Humanist heritage 461–3
humanistic textual approach 462
metaphysics and Protestant orthodoxy 469–71

‘methodical Peripateticism’ 467, 468
the new science 471–2
and post-Tridentine Catholicism 464–5
predestination doctrine (‘Counter-Remonstrants’) 469–70

Protestant orthodoxy 469–71

‘Protestant scholasticism’ 465–6

Ramism 466–8
scholastic heritage 463–6
secular ‘worlds of knowledge’ dilemma 460, 467
segregationist conception of knowledge 471

Thomist metaphysics 465, 466

Upper Hungary, geographical representation of Lutherans 106

Ursinus, Zacharias 112, 465

Ursuline schools 495–6

Ursulines 255

Usselincx, Willem 353

Ussher, James 694
usury 716–17

Utraquists and Utraquism 108, 110, 111, 112, 126–7, 137, 138

Church 132–5
and the Council of Trent 139
enters the mainstream 133–4
sixteenth century 136–7

Utrecht civic religions 558

Vaals, Dutch Republic 114

Vadianus (Joachim von Watt) 169, 170, 175

Valdés, Juan de 34

Van Engen, John 127–8

Van Helmont, Jan Baptist 318

Varotto (Barotto), Marc Antonio 196

Vassy massacre (1562) 556

Vauchez, André 547

Velislav Bible 129

Venice:

as information centre 435
publishers 384
schools 496

Vereenigde Oost- Indische Compagnie (VOC) see East India Company, Dutch (VOC)

Vermigli, Pietro Martiri 36, 465, 491

Vesalius, Andreas 732, 733

Vespucci, Amerigo 679–80

Via Lucis (Comenius) 303

Vieira, Antonio 318

Vienna:

Lutheran worship 114

Turkish siege (1529) 285, 318

Vienna University, and the counter Reformation 569

Vindiciae Contra Tyranus (Huguenot tract) 92, 93

Viret, Pierre 438
letters 455
messenger services 436

Virginia colonists 352

Visscher, Claes Jansz 613
visual and material culture 601–15
biblical scenes and stories 613

Decalogue 614

England 613–15
iconoclasm 601–5, 609, 612, 613, 615
iconoclasm, after 612–15
illustrated bibles and catechisms 606

Lutheran 605–11

Lutheran homes 610

Lutheran iconography 607–8

Netherlands 612–14

‘preserving power’ of Lutheranism 607
social history or art history approaches 604

Vives, Juan Luis 714

Vladislav, King of Bohemia 133

Voetius, Gisbertus (Gisbert) 470, 657

Vom Kriege wider die Türken (Luther) 286
von Beust, Joachim 401
von der Schulenburg family 570

Vondel, Joost van den 643, 658

Waldhauser, Conrad 130, 131

Wale, Anton van 353

Wales, geographical representation of Anglicanism 106

Walpot, Peter 204

Walsham, Alexandra 692, 693, 694–5, 700

Walther, Johann 627

Walwyn, William 88, 97

Wampanoag tribe 361

Wandel, Lee Palmer 416, 603, 655

Wang Yangming 753–4, 756

Wariston, Lady 237

Warnke, Martin 604, 605
watches, hand-held 69

Watt, Jeffrey 512

Watt, Tessa 614

Weber, Max 8, 11–12, 198, 654, 656, 708, 709, 728
linking Calvinism to modern capitalism 52, 69

Webster, Charles 304, 315, 728

Weeping Heraclitus (or St. Jerome) (Brugghen) 645, 649f

Weigel, Valentin 205, 311

Weinsberg, Hermann 405

Welser, Philippine 730

Wenceslas, King 131

Wendelstein, Franconia 525

Wenninger, Marcus 278

Wesel reformed community 225–6

West, Benjamin 15f

West India Company, Dutch 719, 353–5

Westfall, Richard 727

Westman, Robert 728, 737

Weston, William 245

Westphalia, Peace of (1648) 108, 274, 509, 559

Westphalian Pietism 334

Whitaker, William 33

White Mountain, Battle of (1620) 124, 140

White, A. D. 726

Whitefield, George 364

Whitgift, John 243, 283

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry 592

Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel 312

Wilhelm, Johann 334–5

Wilkins, John 472

Willemstad Dutch Reformed Church 262

William of Ockham 146

William of Orange 226

William ‘the Silent’, of Nassau-Orange 308

Williams, George Huntston 199, 200, 319

Williams, Roger 88, 360

Willis, John 55

Wiltens, Capar 354

Winstanley, Gerrard 97

Winthrop, John 357

Wisbech fast 245
witch craze, New England 504–5
witchcraft 10, 526, 690

Wittelsbach family, Palatinate 112–13

Wittenberg 119

Altar 608, 615
civic perspectives 660–1
cleaning and renovating buildings 765, 767

‘Complete Bible’ 154, 317–18
iconoclasm 602–3, 605
movement 116, 150, 191–3
printing 381–2
schools 486

Wittenberg Ordinance 413

Wittenberg University 67, 150, 377–9, 731–2, 733
astronomy 736–8
founded (1502) 486
and Humanism 461

Wittich, Johann 401

Witzel, Georg 402

Wolfenbüttel Dutch Reformed Church 262

Wolfenbüttel parish church 262–3

Wolgemut, Michael 607

Wolsey, Thomas 34
women:

and church/civil courts 514–15, 516, 517
and empirical approaches to natural science 730
female literacy rate 261–2
participation in religious life in Bohemia 135
and Pietism 333, 337–9
purification (‘churching’) after childbirth 422
religion and medicine 735
see also gender relations; sexual difference
word, the 390–405
age of 393–4
bringing to life 399–400
catechism school 394
in context 393–5
disciplinary processes and conformity 394–5
diversity of sermons 403
doubting Thomas story 401–2

English language 400

Eucharist debates and divisions 400

German language 399–400
of Institution 628

Luther’s Biblia Deudsch (1534) 396–7

Luther’s prefaces to biblical books 397
polemical language 404
printed sermons 401
sermons and silences 400–5
visitation committees and records 403, 404
work 713–14

Wren, Christopher 263, 615

Wren, Matthew 615

Wright, Thomas 652

Württemberg:

former monasteries and convents 489

Pietism 334, 340

Württemberg, Duke of 711

Duchy of Württemberg church orders 487

Wyclif, John 128, 131, 163, 400, 528

Wyssenburger, Wolfgang 672

Xavier, Francis 255

Yale University 363

Yates, Francis 313, 730

Zabarella 465

Zachman, Randall 418

Zanchi, Girolamo 465, 466

Zannettino, Dionysius 37

Zbyněk, Archbishop 131

Zeeden, Ernst Walter von 268, 692

Želivský, Jan 134

Zell, Katharina Schütz 631

Zerbst 423

Zerubabel 774

Z’Graggen, Bruno 183

Zhen Chenggong (Koxinga) 354

Zhu Xi 753, 754

Ziegenbalg, Bartholomew 759

Zieglerin, Anna 677, 735

Zimmermann, Hans 532

Zimmermann, Georg Christoph 699

Zimmern, Katharina von 170

Zinzendorf, Count Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von 54, 141, 332, 335, 336, 339, 364, 759

Zurich 167, 168, 177–8, 179, 183

Bible study 171
city council and dietary laws 171
civic religion 555

Disputation, first 176
iconoclasm 603

Lenten fast (1522) 711
magistrates 172
music and worship 624–5
public disputation 171–2

Reformation 195

Zurzach, St Mary Church 538

Zütphen, Heinrich von 534

Zwickau Church of St Mary 607

Zwickau prophets 192, 203, 205, 462, 464

Zwickau town council 551

Zwilling, Gabriel 191–2, 400, 414, 415, 491, 536, 551, 585, 588, 601

Zwingli, Ulrich (Huldrych) 50, 73, 78, 139, 149, 155, 168, 169–73, 175, 179, 195, 200, 215
and the civic commonwealth 555
critique of church 623–5
in history and memory 766, 768
iconoclasm 603
lectio continua device 417
letters 437, 441, 454

Luther’s influence 170
sermons and preaching 416
soul and body 732
suppression of church music 630, 631