The Church in the Early Modern Age 9781350988521, 9780857727121

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THE I . B . T AU RI S HIS T ORY O F T HE CH RIS T IA N C HUR CH

The Church in the Early Modern Age

1

THE I.B.TAURIS HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH GENERAL EDITOR: G.R. EVANS

The Early Church Morwenna Ludlow, University of Exeter ISBN: 978 1 84511 366 7 eISBN: 978 0 85773 559 1 The Church in the Early Middle Ages G.R. Evans, University of Cambridge ISBN: 978 1 84511 150 2 eISBN: 978 0 85773 556 0 The Church in the Later Middle Ages Norman Tanner, Gregorian University, Rome ISBN: 978 1 84511 438 1 eISBN: 978 0 85773 557 7 The Church in the Early Modern Age C. Scott Dixon, Queen’s University, Belfast ISBN: 978 1 84511 439 8 eISBN: 978 0 85772 917 0 The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century David Hempton, Harvard University ISBN: 978 1 84511 440 4 eISBN: 978 0 85773 560 7 The Church in the Nineteenth Century Frances Knight, University of Nottingham ISBN: 978 1 85043 899 1 eISBN: 978 0 85773 558 4 The Church in the Modern Age Jeremy Morris, University of Cambridge ISBN: 978 1 84511 317 9 eISBN: 978 0 85773 561 4

THE I.B.TAURIS HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

The Church in the Early Modern Age

C. Scott Dixon

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2016 C. Scott Dixon The right of C. Scott Dixon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. ISBN: 978 1 84511 439 8 eISBN: 978 0 85772 917 0 ePDF: 978 0 85772 712 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

THE I.B.TAURIS HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Since the first disciples were sent out by Jesus, Christianity has been of its essence a missionary religion. That religion has proved to be an ideology and a subversive one. Profoundly though it became ‘inculturated’ in the societies it converted, it was never syncretistic. It had, by the twentieth century, brought its own view of things to the ends of the earth. The Christian Church, first defined as a religion of love, has interacted with Judaism, Islam and other world religions in ways in which there has been as much warfare as charity. Some of the results are seen in the tensions of the modern world, tensions which are proving very hard to resolve – not least because of a lack of awareness of the history behind the thinking which has brought the Church to where it is now. In the light of that lack, a new history of the Christian Church is badly needed. There is much to be said for restoring to the general reader a familiarity with the network of ideas about what the Church ‘is’ and what it should be ‘doing’ as a vessel of Christian life and thought. This series aims to be both fresh and traditional. It will be organized so that the boundary-dates between volumes fall in some unexpected places. It will attempt to look at its conventional subject matter from the critical perspective of the early twenty-first century, where the Church has a confusing myriad of faces. Behind all these manifestations is a rich history of thinking, effort and struggle. And within it, at the heart of matters, is the Church. The I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church seeks to discover that innermost self through the layers of its multiple manifestations over twenty centuries.

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE Against the background of global conflict involving interfaith resentments and misunderstandings, threatening ‘religious wars’ on a scale possibly unprecedented in history, Christians and the Christian Church are locked in internal disputes. On 2 November 2003, a practising homosexual was made a bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States, America’s ‘province’ of the Anglican Communion. This was done in defiance of the strong opinion in other parts of the ‘Communion’ that if it happened Anglicanism would fall apart into schism. A few years earlier there had been similar rumblings over the ordination of women to ministry in the same Church. A century before that period, the Roman Catholic Church had pronounced all Anglican ordination to the priestly or episcopal ministry to be utterly null and void because of an alleged breach of communion and continuity in the sixteenth century. And the Orthodox Churches watched all this in the secure conviction that Roman Catholic, Anglican and all other Christian communities were not communions at all because they had departed from the truth as it had been defined in the ecumenical Councils of the first few centuries. Orthodoxy alone was orthodox. Even the baptism of other Christians was of dubious validity. Those heated by the consecration of a ‘gay’ bishop spoke on the one side of faithfulness to the teaching of the Bible and on the other of the leading of the Holy Spirit into a new world which knew no discrimination. Yet both the notion of faithfulness to Scripture and the idea that Jesus particularly wanted to draw the outcasts and disadvantaged to himself have a long and complex history which makes it impossible to make either statement in simple black-and-white terms. One of the most significant factors in the frightening failures of communication and goodwill which make daily headlines is a loss of contact with the past on the part of those taking a stand on one side or another of such disagreements. The study of ‘history’ is fashionable as this series is launched, but the colourful narrative of past lives and episodes does not necessarily make familiar the patterns of thought and assumption in the minds of those involved. A modern history of the Church must embody that awareness in every sinew. Those embattled in disputes within the Church and disputes involving Christian and other-faith communities have tended to take their stand on principles they claim to be of eternal validity, and to represent the will of God. But as they appear in front of television cameras or speak to

journalists the accounts they give – on either side – frequently reflect a lack of knowledge of the tradition they seek to protect or to challenge. The creation of a new history of the Church at the beginning of the third millennium is an ambitious project, but it is needed. The cultural, social and political dominance of Christendom in what we now call ‘the West’ during the first two millennia made the Christian Church a shaper of the modern world in respects which go far beyond its strictly religious influence. Since the first disciples were sent out to preach the Gospel by Jesus, Christianity has been of its essence a missionary religion. It took the faith across the world in a style which has rightly been criticized as ‘imperialist’. Christianity has proved to be an ideology and a subversive one. Profoundly though it became ‘inculturated’ in the societies converted, it was never syncretistic in the sense that it was willing to merge or compromise with other religions. It had, by the twentieth century, brought its own view of things to the ends of the earth. The Christian Church, first defined as a religion of love, has interacted with Judaism, Islam and the other world religions in ways in which there has been as much warfare as charity. We see some of the results in tensions in the modern world which are now proving very hard to resolve, not least because of the sheer failure of awareness of the history of the thinking which has brought the Church to where it is now. Such a history has of course purposes more fundamental, more positive, more universal, but no less timely. There may not be a danger of the loss of the full picture while the libraries of the world and its historic buildings and pictures and music preserve the evidence. But the connecting thread in living minds is easily broken. There is much to be said for restoring as familiar to the general reader, whether Christian or not, a command of the sequence and network of ideas about what the Church is and what it should be doing as a vessel of Christian thought and life. This new series aims, then, to be both new and traditional. It is organized so that the boundary-dates between volumes come in some unexpected places. It attempts to look at the conventional subject matter of histories of the Church from the vantage-point of the early twenty-first century, where the Church has confusingly many faces: from Vatican strictures on the use of birth-control and the indissolubility of marriage, and the condemnation of outspoken German academic theologians who challenge the Churches’ authority to tell them what to think and write, to the enthusiasm of Black Baptist congregations in the USA joyously affirming a faith with few defining parameters. Behind all these variations is a history of thought and effort and struggle. And within, at the heart of matters, is the Church. It is to be discovered in its innermost self through the layers of its multiple manifestations over twenty centuries. That is the subject of this series.

Contents

1.

Map 1: Confessional Divisions in Europe towards the End of the Sixteenth Century Map 2: The Global Spread of Christianity

xi xii

Introduction

xiii

Renaissance Christianity

1

Christian humanism from Valla to Erasmus † Latin Christendom Embodied beliefs 2.

†

Reformation Christianity

33

Causa Lutheri: the origins of the Reformation † The evangelical movement in Germany † Zurich and Geneva: the roots of reformed Protestantism 3.

Religious Division

67

Corpus Christi and the end of medieval unity † Catholic reform and Counter Reformation † The West and the East: Orthodox Christianity 4.

Church and State Confessionalization: Protestants and Catholics in Germany The making of Russian Orthodoxy

5.

111 †

Further Reform The rise of the Protestant radicals † Puritans, Pietists and Jansenists Eastern Christianities

143 †

6.

Christian Expansion

179

The Iberian empires and the spread of Catholicism † New England and the rise of American Christianity Conclusion

207

Notes

211

Further Reading

237

Index

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Map 1 Confessional Divisions in Europe towards the End of the Sixteenth Century

Map 2

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INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS

The Global Spread of Christianity

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INCA EMPIRE

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line between Spain and Portugal established 1494

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Ethiopian Christians

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IT Y IAN RIST OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Reaches Egypt 1517

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Muslim traders to Sumatra, Java, Malaysian peninsula and east coast of Africa

Christians of St Thomas

Hinduism

KHANATE Peking OF OZBEK Sunni CHINESE MONGOL PERSIAN MING EMPIRE Isfahan EMPIRE Confucianism SAFAVID Sunni Taoism Reaches Delhi Buddhism EMPIRE Delhi 1517 Shiite INDIAN STATES

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KHANATE OF ASTRAKHAN

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Introduction In 1609 the Lanark-born Scotsman William Lithgow (1582–1645) set out on a series of journeys through Europe, Africa and the Near East that would last over a decade and bring ruin to both his health and his ‘paynefull feet’. By his own reckoning he had walked twice the circumference of the earth. Lithgow was a Calvinist with few positive things to say about other views of Christianity, least of all for the ‘hissing of snakish Papists’, but he had a keen eye for religious details and in the course of his travels came into contact with a great variety of different faiths, both in Latin Christendom and the Orthodox lands in the east. Passing through France and Italy on his first journey, for instance, he took in the Catholic pilgrimage trails, sometimes with Jesuits, stopping off at Rome, Loreto and Venice, before boarding a ship for the Aegean in the company of Greeks, Slavonians, Italians, Armenians and Jews. No friend of the Greek Orthodox, he nevertheless had a high opinion of the monks of Mount Athos, who were the ‘very Emblemes of Piety and Devotion’. He was also very positive about the Maronite patriarch of Mount Lebanon, whom he considered a man of deep piety, ‘not puft with ambition, greed, and glorious apparell, like to our proud Prelats of Christendom’. In Jerusalem, where Lithgow was well treated by the local Franciscans, he lunched with French Catholics and German Lutherans, came into contact with Ethiopian Miaphysites ‘which came from Prester Jehans dominions’, and rubbed shoulders with Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jacobites, Nestorians and numerous eastern patriarchs while visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.1 Despite his close encounters with so many Christian worlds, Lithgow identified with just one strand: Scottish Calvinism. He was baptized a Scottish Presbyterian and he would die in the same faith. But not all Christians were as steadfast as Lithgow, nor were all Churches as homogenous as the Scottish Kirk. Lithgow was alive at a time when the Christian Church was experiencing radical new phases of self-examination, fragmentation and renewal, particularly in the West, where the divisions brought on by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter xiii

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Reformation permanently reshaped the face of Christianity and created completely new genealogies of the faith. As a Scottish Calvinist, Lithgow himself was a product of the Reformation, even though the great religious schism had originated more than half a century before he was born. The point of origin for the rise of the Reformation is generally considered to be the year 1517, when Martin Luther, a university professor in the Saxon town of Wittenberg, posted a set of critical theses against the practice of indulgences. But many different narratives went into the making of the confessional age, each with its own myth of origins and providential scheme. And the same holds true for the sense of ending. Even during his lifetime as he walked through the lands of Protestant Europe, Lithgow came face to face with the ongoing process of Christian refashioning brought on by the Reformation. He was well acquainted with the ‘peevish and self-opiniating Puritanes’ of England, for instance, and he would have met up with many of the so-called Protestant radicals in his journeys through Germany and the Dutch Republic. And yet for all the variety of religion in Europe, it was nothing compared to the profusion of Christianities that Lithgow encountered in the east, from the Hesychast monks of Mount Athos to the Georgian Christians in the hills of Cana and the Jacobite pilgrims in the Holy Sepulchre. Nothing in the West would have prepared the Scotsman for the polyglot, multi-confessional city of Cairo, for instance, where every conceivable type of Christian seems to have walked the streets. In his words, ‘In this Towne a Traveller may ever happily finde all these sorts of Christianes, Italians, French, Greekes, Chelfaines, Georgians, Æthiopians, Jacobines, Syrians, Armenians, Nicolaitans, Abassines, Cypriots, Slavonians, captivat Maltezes, Sicilians, Albaneses, and High Hungarians, Ragusans, and their owne Ægyptian Copties.’2 Of course, these were not new strains of Christianity; indeed, some had histories reaching back to the very origins of the faith. But many of them would have been new to Lithgow and, more to the point, all of them vouch for the diversity and the vitality of Eastern Christianity in the early modern age. For despite the fact that the majority of the Eastern Churches were subject to Muslim occupation, some communities not only survived the years of captivity and isolation but even experienced periods when their faith communities had been able to thrive. This book is a history of the early modern Christian Church in some of its myriad earthly forms as encountered by travellers such as Lithgow. Thus it is really about Churches rather than Church, though, as one of the authors in this series has remarked in a previous volume, there is certainly enough of a ‘family resemblance’ to group them all under the general

INTRODUCTION

xv

concept of Christianity.3 The period under consideration extends from 1500 to 1685, which Anglophone historians generally refer to as the early modern period, though at times the narrative will reach further back into the past than the year 1500, just as at times the analysis will take in historical issues that only really came to fruition at a later stage. But the epoch of interest – sometimes also called the confessional age – is properly framed by these two dates. And it was a period of fundamental importance in the history of Christianity, for both the Latin Church and the Orthodox Churches of the East. Perhaps the most dramatic story to come out of this period, and in all likelihood the best-known story to readers of this book, was the schism that emerged in the Latin Church as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation. This was, of course, a profoundly creative phase in the history of Christianity, as the new Protestant religions brought an end to centuries of Universal Christendom and developed their own ideas about the nature of the Church, ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’, rooted in radically new theologies of salvation, communion, covenant and holy power. But it was creation at the expense of a Church that had shepherded the Christian faithful for over a millennium, and it was not without its costs. Indeed, one recent interpretation has suggested that the Reformation did not just usher in the end of the late medieval synthesis. Confessional division on the scale experienced in the early modern period, with consequences – many unforeseen and unintended – that were so far reaching and so profound, completely transformed notions of the sacred and the relationship between humankind and the divine, to the point that we might speak of the ‘eclipse’ of the ancient idea of Christendom tout court and the onset of a new age with a new way of understanding the world.4 And matters were scarcely less dramatic in the realm of Orthodox Christianity, where the ongoing expansion of the Islamic empires after the fall of Constantinople ushered in a long period of captivity for the Churches of the East. In keeping with the spirit running through the other volumes in this series, which has set out to capture the history of the Church’s ‘innermost self through the layers of its multiple manifestations’, this book will tell the story of the early modern Church by way of different narrative strands and mixed viewpoints. On the whole, it tends to spend more time dwelling on the key episodes than uncovering the traces of the longue durée, but any history that concentrates on just one phase of the existence of something as ancient as the Christian Church necessarily sits within a much longer narrative, and without some reference to this longer narrative it is not really possible to make sense of the shorter bursts of change. So this book does try to effect a balance between the ‘innermost self’ and

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the ‘multiple manifestations’, even if at times it does so in a fairly idiosyncratic way. In a similar spirit, it also tries to avoid the impression that some of these narratives are more important than others. Some very powerful words are required in order to write a history of Christianity in this period, many with heavy teleological baggage, from broad historical concepts such as Renaissance and Reformation to intricate theological terms such as transubstantiation and Filioque, but the book does not set out to privilege one particular approach over the other, nor does it want to suggest that the Church was predestined to go down a particular path. None of these histories is more existentially important than others, and not one was inevitable. Necessarily, by choosing to focus on certain strands of development, this book has a unique shape of its own, but it has tried to do justice to the complexity of Christianity in the period in the space allowed, both in the Latin and the Greek Orthodox worlds, by moving between the different modalities of the religious life, from the rarefied discourse of the theologians to the sense of covenant fostered by the emerging confessional states and the nature of popular culture in the towns and villages. Even Russia’s dancing bears get a shout. In one sense, this book is a history of two Churches. Since the age of the first councils, the Latin Church of the West and the Orthodox Churches of the East had gone their separate ways. Divided by history, theology and the boundless space in between, the two ancient forms of Christianity had experienced little meaningful contact over the course of the Middle Ages. Indeed, one of the interesting developments of the early modern period was the West’s rediscovery of the Christian Churches of the East, some of which had customs and beliefs that seemed no less strange to Latin eyes than the customs of the inhabitants of China or Peru. On closer examination, however, this condition of Christian diversity and mutual incomprehension runs throughout the entire history of the Church in this period. It was not just the dividing line between the West and the East. Division and diversity marked out the entire age. As a consequence, much of this history is concerned with tracing the rise of antagonistic visions of Christianity, from the first speculative soundings in the works of the humanists to the theological syntheses of the Catholic and Protestant reformers. But more to the point, this history will explore the consequences of these antagonistic visions, which, in the context of the age, were powerful enough to reshape the entire fabric of the social, cultural and political spheres. Religion influenced more than just creeds, confessions and liturgy, though these are certainly central to the story; it also had the potential to transform the secular world. Thus the historical

INTRODUCTION

xvii

changes brought about by religious reform are a main concern of this study, from the relations between Church and state in Germany to the effects of Puritan thought on the English social order. And it is also concerned with the attempts made to overcome these divisions, whether through councils, treaties, new notions of tolerance or the plain use of force. Above all, the history of the early modern Church is characterized by the sudden intensification of religious dialogue. In the West, it was a long-running debate about the nature of the True Church; in the East, it was a discourse about how best to preserve ancient truths in the face of changing times. Only very rarely did it end in agreement. Some aspects of this story may seem familiar to readers with a knowledge of Christian history. The theological debates, for instance, might evoke a sense of déjà vu, so too the spirit at work in the Church, particularly in the West, where the heightened usage of biblical language, the quarrels over fine points of theology, the rise of communities of worship gathered around charismatic preachers of the Word and the mixed notes of sympathy and retribution in the wars fought by Christians in the name of God may stir up memories of prior days of the faith. Even the religious ideas might ring a bell, as early teachings resurfaced and were either imputed, or defended, by the warring prophets of the antagonistic Churches. Similarly, there was nothing new to the tensions and ongoing disagreements between Church and state about the proper spheres of the secular and the spiritual, and neither the Reformation nor the Counter Reformation invented the desire to recover the essential truths of Christianity and reshape both the Church and its believers in the image of the faith. These were all ancient themes. But the early modern period did present the Church with fundamentally new questions, certainly in scale if not in substance. The extension of Christianity to new regions of the world, for instance, some of which were hitherto unknown, raised a series of critical issues touching on the claims of Christianity in the ever expanding world and the rights of the clergy over the indigenous souls. The spirit of reform that gripped the West led the faith in theological directions that had no precedent in the long history of the Church, and this necessarily raised questions about the authenticity of certain teachings, the truth claims of certain authorities and the means and modes of worship that should be used in order to get in a right relationship with the divine. And the fragmentation of Christian unity that followed on from the Reformation raised all sorts of issues relating to the origins of the faith, the ‘true’ history of the Church and the preservation of its past, and the extent to which the present forms of the Church and its beliefs corresponded to an orthodox ideal. For the first time since the age of the Ecumenical Councils, whole new faith-based communities emerged with contending

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claims to be the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’, though now with the backing of the secular authorities, kings and queens included. This had profound consequences for the integrity of the faith, for as the process of confessional fragmentation took hold, defining the essence of the Church's ‘innermost self’ became that much more difficult, and that much more urgent as well. Christians, both in the West and the East, were forced to ask themselves questions about covenant, kinship and community that had not been explored so deeply, or so zealously, since the first days of the faith.

CHAPTER

1

Renaissance Christianity Among the discoveries of the age of Renaissance was that of the Church Father Jerome. Of course, Renaissance scholars did not discover Jerome in the same sense that Columbus discovered a continent or Copernicus the workings of the solar system, but they did discover Jerome in other senses embraced by the Latin word invenire, which in addition to the cognate ‘to discover’ means ‘to find’ or ‘to come upon’. In the early modern period, scholars came upon a Jerome that was different in kind to the ascetic virtuoso of the medieval age. He retained his Christian virtues, and indeed in spades: few other Church Fathers could match his piety, austerity, wisdom, modesty and knowledge of the faith. But he began to take on other virtues as well, above all those associated with the Renaissance fascination with GrecoRoman antiquity. Jerome became a model of rhetoric and eloquence, a master of classical thought, a paradigm of moral probity, and a writer – and a reader – of otherworldly intelligence, some scholars claiming that he knew all the languages of humankind. In effect, Jerome became the patron saint of the humanist movement because it was easy to mistake him, as Coluccio Salutati once remarked, for a pagan professor.1 Yet he had remained a faithful servant of the Catholic Church; indeed, more than this, precisely because of his knowledge of ancient tongues and classical texts, as the translator of the Vulgate he was in effect a mediator between God and his Church, the man who provided Latin Christendom with Scripture. This is what is meant by the Renaissance discovery of Jerome: on the basis of new perspectives, new philosophies and new methods of interpretation, scholars began to understand the saint in different ways. And this point holds true mutatis mutandis for the broader encounter between Renaissance humanism and Christian history. The very act of recovering the past induced a rethinking of the present. In doing this, Renaissance scholars were not consciously preparing the ground for a revolution in religious thought, nor could they have known how their labours of elucidation and explanation would be turned against the Roman Church. Nevertheless, even if unwittingly, this proved an explosive combination, for in this determination 1

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to recover the past in its pure and authentic form and use this knowledge as a guide for the present and an ideal for the future, the thinkers of the Renaissance unleashed what has been termed a ‘cultural compression’ with the potential to reshape the secular and spiritual order of the day.2 In order to understand the rise of the Reformation movement and the subsequent fragmentation of Latin Christianity over the course of the early modern period, it is necessary to begin with a survey of the efforts made by some of the most profound thinkers of the late medieval period to recover, and sometimes to discover, what they considered to be the first truths of the Christian faith. Christian humanism from Valla to Erasmus During the Renaissance a spirit of inquiry emerged that was devoted to the recovery of ancient Christianity. Modern scholars have referred to this spirit as the overarching impulse behind what they term ‘Christian humanism’, which itself is best conceived as an integral part of humanism in general, a phenomenon famously defined by Paul Oskar Kristeller as marked by a ‘broad concern with the study and imitation of classical antiquity’ and made up of men, primarily grammarians and rhetoricians, who were interested in recovering the pure, unfiltered ideas of both the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian tradition using the hermeneutical tools they were developing within the fields of a liberal education (studia humanitatis).3 Couching their ideas in a language that approximated the eloquence and rhetorical sophistication of classical (or Ciceronian) Latin, the aim of Renaissance humanism was to recover ancient wisdom in order to effect a reform of the present age, whether in the context of the Italian city-state, the Christian community or indeed within the individual consciousness, for despite the emphasis on imitation and mimesis the humanists’ search for purity gave rise to ‘the tendency to take seriously their own personal feelings and experiences, opinions and preferences’.4 Because religion was so deeply engrained in the early modern mind, the study and imitation of antiquity necessarily took in the history of the Church. All humanists in this age were Christian, so to a certain extent the notion of Christian humanism is redundant; and yet there was a specific impulse within the broader genus primarily devoted to the moral and the theological revival of the Church. Often equated specifically with the thought of northern Europe, and in particular with the work of the two prominent figures Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Erasmus of Rotterdam, Christian humanism was unique in the sense that it placed the new hermeneutical tools and perspectives at the service of the regeneration of the Church.5 Convinced that the Church and its medieval interpreters had buried many of the ancient

RENAISSANCE CHRISTIANITY

3

truths beneath centuries of commentaries, glossaries and useless scholastic quibbling, Christian humanists set out to recover authentic religion by returning to the original sources in the original languages, by which they meant, primarily, Scripture in Hebrew and Greek along with the works of the Church Fathers. Few of these thinkers deliberately challenged the basic presumptions of the faith, and yet the image of religion and society they projected was subtly different from the assumptions of their day, not least because the humanist obsession with antiquity opened up the early modern mind to the historical dimension behind Rome’s claim to be ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’.6 The spirit of reform articulated by the Christian humanists was the first salvo of the confessional age. For this reason, this history will begin with a discussion of some inspired examples of this spirit. Before we do this, however, it is necessary to say a few words about a conflict lurking in the background: namely, the ongoing quarrel between the humanists and the scholastics. Reform-minded humanists not only believed that their devotion to the recovery of origins would benefit the Church; they also believed that the alternative, by which they primarily meant scholastic Aristotelianism, had nothing left to offer. It is important to keep this in mind, for it reminds us that the discussions about reform were not just marked by the sense of excitement and discovery; they were also run through with a sense of urgency and gravity, based on the humanist conceit that they were recovering ancient Christian verities, sometimes nothing less than the voice of God, from centuries of neglect. The main points of disagreement between humanism and scholasticism were chiefly questions of method. While the scholastics relied on the traditional authorities, the humanists looked to fresh sources or fell back on their own analytical skills; while the scholastics relied on formal methods of interpretation, the humanists placed emphasis on stylistic and linguistic concerns.7 Even though many humanists had been trained in scholastic methods and continued to use them as helpmeets to interpretation, for the most part they thought the reliance on dialectics, disputations and the other scholastic methods, which were dismissed by the humanist Conrad Mutianus as ‘“little logicals”, sheer nonsense, exercises of all kinds, and other trifles’, concealed more than it revealed.8 Language, not logic, was the key to God’s Word, and scholars must use it to ask questions that had greater relevance for the Church of their day, and above all questions touching on moral bearing. Scholastics, in contrast, who viewed themselves as the custodians of Catholic orthodoxy, did not think that humanists, whom they dismissed as mere grammarians, had the skills to deal in theological matters. Moreover, they were also convinced that the appeal to pagan authority was

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poisoning the faith. Over time, this debate about method would have profound theological implications. The first systematic humanist critique of scholasticism came from the pen of the Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla (c.1407–57), philologist, rhetorician, educator and relentless unmasker of fakes, forgeries and errorridden texts. Valla was born in Rome over a century before the Reformation began, but he was an important early exponent of the new hermeneutical techniques and he did not hesitate to use the study of language as a tool against the Church if he thought a claim was bogus or a text was corrupt. In the sharpness of his syntactical and semantic analysis, his eye for historical discontinuity, his awareness that language is a cultural artefact and his willingness to pull any text apart in the search for errors and inconsistencies, Valla had no equal in Renaissance Europe.9 His critical approach to Christian manuscripts laid the groundwork for the biblical exegesis of the Reformation. Even before he embarked on his great works of humanist dialectic Valla had become a critic of scholasticism, claiming that the reliance on Aristotle had buried ‘true theologizing’ (vere theologare) beneath the accretions of the schools. What really offended him was not so much the ingenuity of their methods as their tendency to ossify particular conclusions. Valla thought that philosophy should do the opposite. By its very nature it was open-ended, anti-dogmatic and ambiguous. In practical terms, Valla’s most important contribution to the spirit of humanist reform was his critical study of ancient texts, particularly those that had a profound significance for late medieval Christianity. Over the course of his career Valla would accuse Augustine of error, Jerome of being disingenuous and question the authorship of the Apostles’ Creed, but his most famous critical act was his exposure of the Donation of Constantine, one of the foundation charters of the medieval papacy. By focusing on the historicity of language, Valla was able to identify the Donation as an eighth-century forgery rather than a fourth-century original. Although suspicions had been raised before, not least by Nicholas of Cusa, Valla provided the argument and the evidence required to discredit the Donation and its claims, thereby providing both Alfonso of Aragon, his patron at the time, as well as the many champions of anti-papalism who came after him – up to and including Luther – with ammunition against the Church.10 Valla’s most profound act of interpretation was his collation of the Vulgate New Testament against the Greek original. In addition to the spadework of translation, Valla wrote two manuscript recensions on the text, one of which was later edited and published by Erasmus in 1505. Although Valla’s main concern was the quality of the Latin rather than

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what he considered the Greek original, this was a radical undertaking, as many of his contemporaries were quick to point out, because it was taking on the foundational source of medieval Christianity. For this reason the humanist Poggio Bracciolini termed it the ‘book against Jerome’.11 Given that the Vulgate was viewed as a perfect text, just as Jerome, under the inspiration of the Spirit, was held to be the perfect translator, it was an inherently incendiary act to approach the New Testament as any other ancient work and to propose that its errors, mistranslations and ambiguities might be corrected by human hands. Valla defended himself by claiming that Jerome had faced a confusion of different manuscripts and that many of the errors had crept into the text since he had done the translation. And in truth, as he protested, it was not a theological analysis and it did not draw any theological conclusions.12 Nevertheless, no matter how purely ‘grammatical’ Valla claimed to be, the application of humanist methods to a hitherto sacred and inviolate text weakened both its integrity and the teachings attached to it. A case in point is his concern with the translation of the Greek word metanoia (II Corinthians 7.10), which had been rendered into the Latin word poenitentia. While the Greek word describes a mental process, something along the lines of ‘changing one’s mind’, the Latin poenitentia means ‘do penance’ and, in the biblical construction poenitentiam agere, connotes a rite or an act. Valla thought this was a mistranslation and this view was picked up by Erasmus and then eventually by Luther, who was quick to point out to his mentor Johann Staupitz in 1518 that ‘the emphasis on works of penance had come from the misleading [Vulgate] translation, which indicates an action rather than a change of heart and in no way corresponds to Greek metanoia’.13 It would be wrong to project Valla as a kind of proto-reformer, and yet there is no doubt that his work implied the need for a reassessment of the Church and the promise of a form of Christianity, buried beneath textual accretions, that was redolent of the apostolic age. Alongside the textual criticism there was another aspect of Italian humanism that subverted the Christian consensus, namely, the devotion to ancient philosophies. Like Valla, scholars working in this tradition emphasized the importance of the liberal arts for the recovery of truth. More so than Valla, however, they looked beyond the core texts of the Christian and the Greco-Roman tradition and took in a variety of influences, including the so-called Hermetic writings, the teachings of Cabbala and the Pythagorean school. For the history of early modern religious reform, the most important of all these intellectual byways was the devotion to the corpus of thought attributed to the ancient philosopher Plato. Scholars claimed to have recovered timeless Christian truths in these neoplatonic writings and

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used them as the basis for visions of renewal. At first glance, this may seem risky, but we have to remind ourselves that Renaissance Catholicism was not the closed system of the later Tridentine age. Scholars regularly ‘tested, refined, pushed, and pulled at the malleable boundaries of orthodoxies both intellectual and religious’.14 Nor should we forget that pagan philosophies had long provided the conceptual architecture for Christian thought: Aristotelianism contributed the logic and the notion of a first cause, Platonism the dualism of the spiritual and the material along with the model of a Christian soul, Stoicism the paradigm of the providential arc, and Epicureanism the opposite end of the scale. Nevertheless, the point remains that the fifteenth-century ‘rediscovery’ of Plato brought the relationship between the pagan and the Christian into a particularly sharp focus. The two most important Italian humanists working within the Platonic tradition were Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). Both men were revered and respected in their own lifetimes, and both made lasting contributions to pre-Reformation religious thought by loosening the bonds of scholastic Aristotelianism and co-opting ancient philosophies in the search for a new Christian synthesis. Marsilio Ficino, a Florentine who began his career under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, spent much of his life translating the known works of Plato with a view to bringing the Greek philosopher into harmony with Christian thought. This was pioneering on a number of levels. To begin with, it offered an ancient alternative to scholastic Aristotelianism. Ficino, like most humanists, thought little of the scholastic method and was eager to provide an equally ancient philosophy to challenge that of the schools. But more than this, Ficino believed that there were deep Christian truths buried in the thought of the pagan philosophers.15 Even in the religion of pagan peoples there were glimpses of an ancient theology ( prisca theologia) that revealed Christian truths. And according to Ficino, the most profound revelation of the divine mysteries before the coming of Christ could be found in the works of Plato (or the works attributed to him), partly because of his doctrines on the soul, salvation and the eternal life, but above all owing to his tendency to relate all thought to the divine. As he wrote: Plato, the father of all philosophers . . . considered it just and pious that, as the human mind receives everything from God, so it should restore everything to God. . . . Whatever subject he deals with, be it ethics, dialectic, mathematics or physics, he quickly brings it round, in a spirit of utmost piety, to the contemplation and worship of God.16

Ficino also believed that Platonism represented a union of the spiritual and the intellectual, a marriage of theology and philosophy, that no longer

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existed in his own day and was largely responsible for the crisis of piety and profundity that weighed down the Church. The reform of religion must thus begin with a reform of thought in a general sense and a willingness to rely less on scholastic theology and more on the ancient wisdom that still sits on library shelves, both in Scripture and in the ancient Greco-Roman texts. Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, where pagan Sybils and Old Testament prophets appear together as foretellers of the Christian mystery, echoes this conceit. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the other leading neoplatonist, was the most notorious Italian humanist of the age. Born into wealth and privilege, tutored in Ferrara, Padua, Pavia and Paris, and on good terms with figures ranging from Ficino and Poliziano to the Franciscan preacher Girolamo Savonarola and the Florentine oligarch Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico was equally well placed in the humanist and scholastic firmaments and immediately put his social advantage and his native genius to work in his quest for fame. His most brazen act in this respect was the drafting and publication of 900 theses in 1486 (at the age of 23) when he challenged all comers to a disputation on a range of themes running from religion and philosophy to science and magic. For his efforts the papacy condemned 13 of his theses and had him briefly imprisoned, but he soon regained his freedom, returned to Florence under the patronage of Lorenzo and went on to enjoy a very productive, if very short, career.17 If anything, Pico was more of an eclectic than Ficino. He was a scavenger of ancient texts with interests running from the Cabbala and Hermeticism to Socrates and Zoroaster. He was also a Platonist; in fact his ambition was to reconcile the work of Plato and Aristotle, though he was not able to complete this before his death. Like Ficino, he recognized the need to return to the wisdom of the ancients in order to help in the renewal of Christendom. In doing this, again like Ficino, he drew freely from the Platonic corpus. Plato, however, was just one of the philosophers in the mix. Pico threw together a range of ancient philosophies in the quest for a new Christian synthesis, even proposing that the three main ancient strands – Christianity, Judaism and paganism – shared a common genealogy and were built upon the same pillars of revelation. Where Pico went beyond most contemporaries was in his approach to Scripture and the authority of the Church.18 Reminiscent of the reformers that would come after him, he made repeated appeals to the need to study Scripture directly, in the original languages, free of the medieval glossaries. Religious truth would be revealed through a direct encounter with the text, even if this truth did not agree with the Catholic consensus. Even heresy, he wagered, was historically conditioned, with the result that ‘it is possible that to believe in a certain opinion in one

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period would be [considered] a mortal sin, [and] it would not be so in another period’.19 Through the movement of students, scholars, artists, diplomats, merchants, court officials and higher clergy, the ideas and ideals of Italian humanists such as Valla, Pico and Ficino settled north of the Alps. Moreover, now that the printing press had become a staple of northern culture, it was possible for scholars to plant the seed of the movement in cities and towns and let it take root in the local environments. The itinerant German humanist Peter Luder (1415–72) was a founding father in this mould, moving from university to university (first Heidelberg, then Erfurt, Leipzig, Basel and Vienna) preaching the message of the studia humanitatis he had taken to heart during his 20 years in Italy and calling on scholars of all disciplines to restore Latin to its previous eloquence. Rhetoric, Luder proposed, was God’s gift to man, a necessary foundation for all reform ‘so that truth could be propagated and men could be inspired to virtue’.20 Other ‘wandering poets’ of this type contributed to the cause, both in Germany and other northern lands, with the result that by 1500 humanism had a foothold in many cities, courts and universities in the north. At the German university of Erfurt, for instance, all five rectors of the arts colleges at that time were sympathetic to the movement. Humanist textbooks and translations had been introduced into the curriculum, and new salaried professors had been established in Latin grammar, Greek, rhetoric and moral philosophy.21 Other strongholds of humanism included the universities of Wittenberg, Heidelberg and Basel as well as the imperial cities of Nuremberg and Strasbourg. Despite the clear traces of influence, humanism in the north was more than just the slavish imitation of humanism in the south. As mentioned above, historians have identified an added element, or a marked emphasis, in transalpine scholarship that sets it apart from the south, namely the concern with how the liberal arts could be put to use in the study and the reform of the Church. There were reasons for this, ranging from the close relationship between the ethnic, linguistic and nationalistic aspects of scholarship and the climate of anti-clericalism to the deeply rooted spirituality of intellectual life in northern Germany and the Low Countries. While neoplatonism provided the framework for alternative visions of the religious life in Italy, in the Netherlands it was rather the simple, affective piety of the modern devotion (devotio moderna) that fired the pious mind. Founded by Geert Groote (1340– 84) in 1374, and inspired by the writings of the Rhineland mystics, the devotio moderna movement, with its stress on communal reform, the close reading of Scripture and the transformative power of a devout lifestyle, conditioned scholars to think that the reform of the Church began with the reform of the

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believer and that both were intimately bound up in the search for, and the reconstitution of, the Christianity of the apostolic age. All the publishing milestones of Christian humanism are imbued with this spirit. Both the Quintuplex Psalterium (1509) of Lefèvre, for instance, and his edition of Paul’s letters are careful, comparative philological studies of the Latin and the Greek texts with a view to recovering the ecclesia primitiva at the core. Erasmus’s translation of the Greek New Testament (1516) and his editions of the Church Fathers, particularly Jerome, had the same aim, namely (to cite his own words) ‘to restore or promote . . . the science of theology which has fallen into a most shameful condition through scholastic trifling’ and to use this newly recovered knowledge for a renewal of Christianity.22 Johannes Reuchlin’s defence of Jewish scholarship and the Hebrew language in his Augenspiegel (1511) had the same end in view, as did the published inaugural lecture given by Philipp Melanchthon soon after he took up the chair of Greek in Wittenberg. The study of languages, he declared, is the first step towards a reform of the Church.23 Purity of spirit and language was a shared aspiration, but the northern humanists did not follow a doctrinal or philosophical programme, nor were they joined by a particular school of thought. There may have been some sense of a fellowship among sympathetic scholars, but the problems and the concerns faced by a humanist such as Jacob Wimpfeling in the German lands were quite different to those faced by John Colet in England, and while some figures, such as Johannes Reuchlin, Thomas More and Erasmus, were household names in humanist households, most men cultivated their own intellectual plots and did not think beyond regional or national spheres. Similarly, though clearly there was a shared cluster of ideas that distinguished the men that later historians have labelled Christian humanists, in terms of their personal histories, their ideas and their approaches to the problem of reform there were wide discrepancies. Eclecticism was thus the order of the day. Nevertheless, it is true to say that some scholars had greater authority than others, and indeed to the point where they emerged as the figureheads of the movement. Two men in particular have been singled out in this regard, not least because of their importance for the subsequent rise of evangelical reform: the French scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c.1460–1536) and the Dutchman Erasmus of Rotterdam (c.1466– 1536), the so-called ‘prince of the humanists’. Born in Picardy around 1460, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples had absorbed humanist works while in Paris and had also spent time in Florence, Rome and Venice, where he had come into contact with the neoplatonism of Pico

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and Ficino. On his return to France he took up a professorship in Paris, but he ultimately abandoned a university career for a life of cloistered scholarship and devoted his time to mystical and contemplative writers, patristics and biblical studies. Mention has already been made of the Quintuplex Psalterium (1509), an edition of five different Latin versions of the Psalter, as well as his work on the Pauline Epistles (1512). His many biblical commentaries were hailed as models of how humanist techniques could unlock the secrets of Christian texts, including the patristic classics, the Gospel of John and ultimately the entire Bible, which Lefèvre translated into French, the full text appearing in a single edition in 1530. Lefèvre took on theological issues directly, challenging traditional interpretations in his work on the Psalter and suggesting that parts of the Vulgate were not the work of Jerome. His most controversial effort was probably his study of the identity of the three Maries mentioned in the Gospels, in which he proposed that they were three different women rather than different references to the Magdalen. Numerous scholars raised objections to this interpretation, but as Lefèvre wrote in his final defence of the work, although there are many great authorities and centuries of custom behind the notions that all of the Maries were one, ‘if . . . the light of the Gospel should illuminate what we have tried to achieve here, what will long usage and well-established custom – or toleration – be able to achieve against the truth, even though it might have been introduced a thousand or more years ago?’24 In all of this Lefèvre was acting and thinking like a humanist. We have seen the same sort of behaviour in Valla and Ficino. But where Lefèvre went beyond the Italians was in the explicit association he made between the studia humanitatis and the revival of Christianity. Humanism was not just a midwife to the recovery of Christian knowledge; humanism was the sure mode of faith and spirituality, the certain sensibility for communion with the Word of God. This point was made in a number of ways, usually directly, as when Lefèvre spoke about the need for eloquence when comprehending the divine, or when he concluded that ‘a renewed and unified reading of the Bible ought to be enough for the needed Reformation of the Church’, thereby implying what the later reformers would proclaim, namely, that Scripture alone was sufficient for the reform of Christianity.25 It was also made in a more roundabout manner, as when Robert Fortuné, a scholar in Lefèvre’s circle, wrote in a preface to Cyprian that ‘reading [Cyprian] awakens the sleeping mind, stimulates it, turns men to God, leads them to the theology of the blessed, ineffably, and not through riddles and enigmas or inextricable labyrinths or Gordian difficulties’.26 Although Lefèvre’s reputation was considerable, his scholarship has always been overshadowed by the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Until

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Luther emerged onto the public stage, no other scholar in northern Europe had the same level of international celebrity as that enjoyed (and carefully cultivated) by Erasmus. Through his publications, his vast correspondence and the circulation of his image in portraits and woodcuts, he became the authoritative voice of northern humanism. No other thinker at the time exercised a greater influence on how scholars approached the issue of religious reform. An education in the Netherlands, including time spent at the renowned Latin school in Deventer, meant that Erasmus had come into contact with both humanism and the devotio moderna tradition at a young age. Though earmarked for a career in the Church, he opted for a life of scholarship. After his time as a canon regular at the monastery of Steyn in Holland, he spent a year as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, continued his studies at the University of Paris and eventually moved to England as tutor to William Blount, the later Lord Mountjoy. On his return to the Continent he began to refine his Greek while publishing works that were hailed by reform-minded humanists as seminal. In addition to a list of edited collections of classical writers that included Cicero, Quintilian, Euripides, Plutarch and Lucian, Erasmus authored works that argued explicitly in favour of the value of pagan works for an appreciation of Christianity. One of his first in this vein, written while Erasmus was still a student in Steyn but published much later (and heavily revised), was his Antibarbari (1520). In this book he made a strong case for the use of pagan works in the teaching of the young, not only because they were models of eloquence and style but also because they incorporated teachings on virtue and morality that could profit a Christian education. Read cautiously, he suggested, pagan works revealed sacred verities. Similar in sentiment was his Adages (1500), an extremely popular annotated collection of quotations, similitudes and anecdotes assembled from classical authors.27 Here too Erasmus was offering the reader moral premiums, conveyed in anecdotes and adages, that enriched faith, even if they came from the minds of pagan authors. Like most humanists at the turn of the century, Erasmus was critical of scholasticism and the infighting of the schools. No scholar was spared, no matter how fixed in the pantheon, including Augustine, whom he thought was ‘lacking the equipment of languages’, and the medieval authority Duns Scotus, whose work was ‘evil-smelling to enlightened minds, but to those stupid numbskulls [scholastics] more fragrant than any spice’.28 But he did not leave it at that. Erasmus’s evolving intellectual awareness took on a religious significance, for as he peeled back the layers of gloss and looked deeper into the writings of the Church Fathers and Scripture, he came to the realization that this act of interpretation itself was

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a type of pilgrimage, a turning away from the views of the so-called Pharisees and Judaizers of his own day to the ‘evangelical liberty’ offered by the Word of God. True Christianity, or what Erasmus termed the philosophy of Christ ( philosophia Christi), was precisely this pilgrimage away from a reliance on the external dimensions of faith (rites, rituals, ceremonies, scholastic formulae and syllogisms) to the internal, and thus very personal, spiritual renewal effected by way of a direct engagement with the Word and the living example of Christ. Traces of this philosophy inform many of his publications, though the most systematic effort was probably his work Enchiridion (1504), which was essentially a guide to the Christian life. Its core message was to avoid reliance upon the externals; instead, move from the visible to the invisible, seek the essence of Christianity in the Word and the example of Christ. Faith of this kind transforms the believer, as it will transform Christendom as a whole. As Erasmus wrote in Ratio verae theologiae (1518): Let this be your first and only goal, this your longing, strive for this only, that you let yourself be changed, drawn along, inspired and transformed in that which you teach. . . . Do not believe that you are making progress if you dispute more acutely, but only when you become aware that you are gradually becoming another person.29

Erasmus was not suggesting that Christians could do without the services, ceremonies and ministrations of the Roman Church in the manner of the later reformers. He was, however, placing unprecedented stress on the importance of the spiritual and moral standing of the individual for the Christian life, and he did encourage the reading of Scripture by the learned laity. All of this was enough for some papal commentators, among them Cardinal Girolamo Aleandro, to refer to Erasmus as ‘the director of the Lutheran tragedy’.30 Aleandro was wrong about this, for Erasmus never became an evangelical reformer. But he did prepare the ground for the Reformation in one fundamental respect. In 1516 he published his New Testament translation (known as the Novum Instrumentum). This was not the first humanist study of Scripture in its original tongues. Valla, as we have seen, completed an unpublished critical translation of some parts of the text, as did the Italian humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), who completed manuscript translations of both the New and the Old Testaments, the latter with help from the Jewish community.31 Even as Erasmus was working on his own translation, scholars had gathered in the trilingual college of Alcalá in order to pool their talents and complete the first polyglot translation of the whole Bible. First conceived in 1502, the project was funded and supervised by

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Cardinal Ximénes de Cisneros, his aim being to restore Scripture to its original purity and use it to inspire unity and piety in the Spanish Church. And indeed Ximénes’s dream did became a reality, for the work, known as the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, was completed and printed in 1514. Because the licence to bind and distribute was not granted until 1520, however, Erasmus’s New Testament hit the shelves first and went on to become the premier translation of the age.32 Although Erasmus would famously claim that his intention was to put Scripture into the hands of the ploughman in the field, the 1516 Novum Instrumentum was, as he put it, ‘written for scholars . . . it has nothing to do with the people’.33 It was the most sophisticated critical collation of the Greek and Latin that had ever been done, trumping Valla in its depth and subtlety and Lefèvre and the Complutensian in its readiness to expose the inconsistencies of the Vulgate against the Greek. Erasmus subjected the text to a thoroughly humanist analysis, refining grammar, syntax and style, rooting out the scribal errors and corruptions, and correcting mistakes of translation and restoring the proper idiom, which he did by leafing through ancient texts, both Christian and pagan, to find examples of proper usage. Theologians had become lazy in their reliance on the Vulgate, he suggested, using the text without actually critically engaging it and drawing on passages to confirm things that they already knew.34 Above all things Erasmus wanted to relate the sense of how Scripture was a living language. It had been spoken by real people in real situations and it should reach the people of the sixteenth century in the same way. Hence Erasmus’s concern with capturing the idiomatic character of the orginal Greek. What was revolutionary about this approach was its ruthless integrity. Erasmus treated the New Testament as he would any other text, by which he meant that its meaning and validity were contingent on the conditions of its authorship. To understand it, he remarked, the translator must pay attention ‘not only to what is said, but also by whom it is said, to whom, with which words, at what time, on what occasion it is said, what precedes and what follows it’.35 It was a text like any other text, with scribal errors, moments of unclarity and words that did not capture the essence of what the author really meant. Equally as innovative was Erasmus’s willingness to challenge theological assumptions. Holding up the Greek manuscripts next to the Vulgate had revealed numerous errors and inconsistencies in translation, some of which were central supports for the orthodoxy of the day. In the course of his analysis Erasmus raised doubts about the phrasing of the Lord’s Prayer, the angel’s greeting to Mary and portions of the proof texts behind the idea of purgatory, papal authority and aspects of Christology. He also found

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that some Greek words were too complex or nuanced to translate with a single Latin cognate, as had been done, for instance, with the use of the Latin word fides (faith) for the different senses in the Greek. Like Valla before him, and for similar reasons, Erasmus also drew attention to the problems of substituting the Latin word poenitentia for the Greek word metanoia, though he offered a much more extensive body of linguistic proofs in support, including references to Homer, Sallust and Pliny. But his most controversial theological judgement was his decision to exclude the so-called Comma Johanneum from his translation. This was a reference to one of the proof texts of the Trinity found in the Vulgate (I John 5.7–8). Unable to find it in any of his Greek manuscripts, Erasmus simply left it out. To do so, however, was to imply that the Greek text was superior to the Latin Vulgate, which was contrary to orthodox opinion. The Complutensian scholars, for instance, simply used the Vulgate as the proof text if the Greek and Latin did not correspond.36 In the end, however, Erasmus was forced to give way. In the third edition of the translation the passage was restored. Erasmus’s 1516 Novum Instrumentum was a masterpiece of Christian humanism. It immediately inspired a generation of scholars to read the Word of God in a different way. But not all scholars welcomed it. The Louvain professor Jacob Latomus questioned Erasmus’s qualifications as a theologian and raised concerns about his views on core passages. Diego López de Zuñiga, the polyglot director of the Complutensian project in Alcalá, raised doubts about the quality of the translation. Others, such as the Parisian scholastic Noel Béda, went to the heart of the matter and accused Erasmus, the tireless redactor of texts, of weakening the authority of the Church and undermining the faith. As he wrote: ‘The man who complains of the style in which holy books are written comes very close to blasphemy; for he implies that God lacks skill.’37 All these charges had substance, and yet Erasmus was not doing anything fundamentally different to the humanists who had preceded him. He was just doing it with greater skill. By its very nature, and often against its best intentions, Christian humanism presented a threat to Catholic orthodoxy. It pitched philology against theology, proposed that Scripture, properly understood, was sufficient proof against centuries of custom, consensus and papal fiat, and argued that Christianity was just as much about internal conversion as it was about external display. The fruits of the faith were intensely personal, a matter between the individual and God. On its own, none of this was heretical, but it was a very fine line. No one realized this better than Erasmus himself. Doubtless he took the warning of his critic Edward Lee to heart: ‘you had best watch what you say’.38

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Latin Christendom There is a long historiographical tradition that depicts the late medieval Church as a ship foundering on the rocks of its own ignorance and corruption. This has been termed the decadence theory, and it is based upon the premise that the origins of the Reformation can be understood by reading backwards from the event.39 As there was a Reformation, so the argument runs, there must have been a desire for reform, and this must imply that not all was well in the Church. It thus falls to the historian to uncover the reasons for this, which is usually done by pointing up the moral failings of the clergy, the seemingly superficial nature of religious practice or the oppressive nature of medieval belief. Recent research has rejected this reading of the past, and not only because of its whiggish tendency to judge late medieval religion on the basis of modern (often Protestant) notions of faith. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that late medieval Christianity was in good health. The power of the papacy had largely been restored, the teachings of Rome, in so far as we can judge, made up the unquestioned essence of lived religion, and people continued to seek their salvation through the channels provided by the Church, from the sacraments and sacramentals to pilgrimages and endowed masses, just as their ancestors had done before them. The greater part of this book will deal with the fragmentation of Western Christianity that resulted from Luther’s revolt, but we should avoid the temptation to view the fragmentation as inevitable. It is important to remember the strengths of the Catholic Church at the time. Inscribed in black letters on a gold background on the dome of the Renaissance Basilica of St Peter’s are the words of Matthew 16.18–19: ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. . . . I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ From the earliest days of Christianity this passage had been one of the proof texts of papal claims to plenitude. Servant to Christ and heir to the Apostles in an unbroken chain, the pontiff, by Christ’s own command, was the supreme head of the Church and shepherd to all Christian souls on earth. Although there were thinkers who questioned whether the Church and the pope were absolutely coterminous, most theologians would have accepted the idea that Rome was the capital of Latin Christianity and that the pope was the principal member of the Church. The Italian Thomist Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534) interpreted the passage in this sense. According to him, these words mean exactly what they say: Christ had elevated Peter above all other members of the Church and invested him with the keys to the kingdom; no other Apostle had the equivalent preceptive power; no other institution, not even a council, could lay claim to his preeminence in the hierarchy; and no other member of the

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Church had the equivalent jurisdictional or external power. In Cajetan’s own words: Beginning from the first, therefore, we say that this proposition is certain: the pope has supreme power in God’s Church; [the papacy] is founded on Jesus Christ’s institution [Matthew 16.18–19]. Indeed, our Savior, king of kings and lord of lords, although He could have disposed the Christian commonwealth on earth in diverse ways, nevertheless, willed and established that the government would not be popular, nor that of the rich, the powerful, the nobles, many or few, but only of one, promising Peter alone I will give to thee the keys etc. [Matthew 16.19], offering him alone the promise, committing care of all the sheep, Feed My sheep [John 21.17].40

Curialist theories of papal plenitude such as Cajetan’s were derived from late medieval thought. Little fine-tuning was involved. In this issue, as in many others, the Renaissance papacy and its champions went about their business as if the humanist movement, the Great Schism, and the rise of conciliarism had never occurred, a point neatly made by Clement VII when he commissioned Raphael’s workshop to decorate his state rooms with a fresco allegory of the Donation of Constantine. It was not, however, simply due to a lack of awareness. Mindful of the powers that can accrue to other estates during periods of extended reform, the Renaissance popes, roughly speaking from Pius II (r.1458–64) to Julius II (r.1503–13), did not introduce any lasting measures to deal with the problems that beset the faith. Asserting and preserving the prerogatives of the papacy was the main concern at the time, and given the circumstances they faced, which included, among other things, the ongoing criticism of the humanists, the residues of conciliarism, the advance of Islam and the occupying armies of France and the Empire, it is not surprising that they seem to have had a tin ear when it came to picking up the deeper rumblings of discontent. We can get a sense of this mindset by looking at the papal reaction to the Luther Affair. Despite the extent of public interest in the indulgence controversy, there was no attempt on the part of the papacy to settle the matter by way of dialogue, debate or the proposed general or German council, even though there were conflicting theories about indulgences circulating at the time. Nor was there an attempt to mount a uniform response. Different theologians in different places picked up on different aspects of Luther’s thought and published works against him. Only in one respect was there general agreement: all believed that the theses (to cite Johann Tetzel) ‘encourage[d] many people to despise the might and authority of his Papal Holiness and of the Holy Roman See’ and that this challenge to papal authority was the main offence. In response, the apologists

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assembled the passages from Matthew and John to prove that Peter had received the keys ‘primarily’ from Christ and that this divine commission held into eternity for all his successors as well.41 The main concern here was not the right of the pope to reign over others in the manner of a Renaissance prince, though this too was contested. At issue was the determination of the Roman Catholic magisterium, by which was meant the teaching authority of the Church. Who had the right to determine the content of the faith? The pontiff, the councils, the community or the theologians? In 1500 there was no uniform response to that question. Not until the fourth session of the Council of Trent in 1546 did a workable consensus about the written and unwritten traditions emerge. Up to that point, even after the outbreak of the Reformation, there was just a medley of different views. All agreed that the magisterium inhered in the Universal Church, ‘one, true, holy and apostolic’, and that this Church was, as Jean Gerson put it, ‘one in multiplicity’ [multipliciter una ].42 But exactly what this meant in practical and theoretical terms was still contested. Granted, there was agreement that in all matters the final authority was Scripture. Medieval Catholics, no less than later Protestants, considered the Word of God the foremost source and arbiter of religious truth. But in the Catholic tradition there were subsidiary sources as well (all of which had to agree in their essentials with Scripture), including the revelation bound up in the apostolic succession, tradition as an active interpreter of God’s Word and the pronouncements of councils and popes. Lesser authorities included the Church Fathers and the medieval summae as well as the consensus of the faithful. Taken together this was a powerful defence of revelation, but it was difficult to define or defend precisely. Thus when the Tübingen theologian Gabriel Biel declared in his work In Defence of Apostolic Obedience (1462) that ‘the truth that holy mother Church defines or accepts as catholic is to be believed with the same veneration as if it were expressed in Holy Writ’, he was not really saying that much. By definition the truth of the holy mother Church had to agree with Scripture or it could not be defined or accepted, regardless of how many subsidiary authorities went into the mix.43 The weakness of this type of circular logic was quickly exposed by the reformers when they began to challenge the whole basis of what the papacy meant by truth. Irrespective of the complexity behind the scenes, once a pronouncement was made in the name of the Universal Church it was binding on all of Latin Christendom. To be enacted as part of the faith it then had to progress through the stages of Church rule until it reached places as distant to Rome as Cracow, Lisbon and Edinburgh. It began with the pope and his cardinals issuing pronouncements, usually in council; these were then dispatched to

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bishops and archbishops, deacons and archdeacons, until eventually they reached the parish priest. Different levels of jurisdiction and administration (provinces, dioceses, deaconries and parishes) and different methods of enforcement were in play. Bishops, for instance, could rely on provincial decrees, diocesan legislation, preaching and publishing licences (or censorship), synodal summaries of doctrine, special prayers or disciplinary measures, such as annual visitations. The object of their interest was the crucial final link: the parish priest. To prepare the priests for this mission, the Church, with growing efficiency, took steps to improve the quality of clerical education, issued synodal notifications prescribing the nature of right belief, published catechisms to ensure uniformity of doctrine, prescribed handbooks for confession and drew up mandates, Psalters, and pericopes to help the clergy prepare their sermons. Needless to say this system worked with varying degrees of success, and we should not be too surprised by this. As the most extensive administrative and jurisdictional system in Europe, the Church was bound to fall short of expectations. And it did; the archives have borne this out. Historians of the late medieval French diocese have come across abundant materials testifying to the failure of the system and the weaknesses of the clergy across the spectrum. The rate of clerical absence was high, the quality of education was low and there was limited success at translating the proclamations coming out of Avignon and Rome into religious practice – not least, some bishops claimed, because the clergy could not read the diocesan statutes.44 Even when we leave the human element out of the equation the problems are manifest. The Church in quattrocento Italy, for instance, was comprised of a total of 253 mainland bishoprics, some very ancient and lucrative, others, primarily in the south, insubstantial and poor. Although all, in theory, were filled by papal provision, in practice many of the bishoprics, particularly in the north, were subject to local interests. Great dynasties moved their kin from one see to another in a game of ever increasing stakes with little regard to Rome. Nor could the pope do much against the wishes of major powers such Venice, Florence and Milan. In Venice, where there were up to 70 parishes in total, the appointment of priests often gave rise to ongoing power stuggles between moneyed families and parishioners, senates and chapters. The quality of the candidate was a secondary concern.45 Even in the smaller benefices the interests of a local dynasty, chapter or civic commune might prevail. The bishopric of Alba, for instance, remained in the hands of the Caretto family for 80 years. And the fragmentation did not end there. Both rural and civic parishes changed in number and scale: some divided, some were amalgamated, some disappeared altogether. The determination or enforcement of the magisterium had little meaning for those parishioners in

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southern Italy who went decades without a local priest. And we might wonder as well what it meant in real terms to the people of Verona, where any diocesan or papal pronouncement had first to filter through the 52 parishes before it reached the flocks.46 No early modern system of rule could have overcome these obstacles. In some respects it was not that important whether the formal teachings of the Church reached the level of the parish. In its essentials, the religion of the people on the eve of the Reformation was no different from the religion of the people during the medieval age. This religious culture has been described in depth in the previous volume in this series and need not be further examined here.47 For the purposes of this discussion it will suffice to recall the essential points, the main one being that parish Christianity in this period was primarily an enacted or embodied form of faith, by which is meant that the emphasis was visceral rather than cognitive: it was more about doing things than thinking about them. That does not mean that the parishioners lacked a sophisticated religious sensibility or simply went through the ritual motions; but it does mean that the modes of perception and conception might have little direct relation to the magisterium as defined by the theologians of Rome. Parish religion was primarily concerned with the practical steps required to secure salvation, and these could take on a variety of forms. It was not a knowledge-based belief system, nor was it meant to be. As a historian of medieval religion has remarked, ‘what mattered for the majority was that they should willingly accept the definitions provided by the Church, and be ready to believe what the Church defined as requiring belief (overall, even if idiosyncratically), rather than become confused or be lost by seeking to penetrate what were essentially mysteries’.48 To judge by visitation returns, catechisms, confessional manuals and other related sources, the authorities expected the average parishioner to have some knowledge of the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, the law-based requirements of the Old Testament (above all the Decalogue) and the moral injunctions of the New Testament (love God, love thy neighbour), the seven sins and the seven acts of mercy, the fundamental articles of the faith – including, among other things, some grasp of the Trinity, the Real Presence, the unity of the Church and the omnipotence of God – as well as the basic purpose behind ritual acts such as baptism, confession and communion. We should also assume that some of the parishioners would have understood the meaning behind the imagery and statuary in the churches. But all this was local knowledge, just enough to invest the communal experience of the faith with Christian meaning.49 The main role of the Church and its clergy was to provide the parishioners with the means to achieve salvation. To this end there was a range of options,

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from the feasts, fasts and processions in the public sphere to the rites, symbols and observances within the churches that made up the economy of salvation. Of all the remedies against sin, however, by far the most effective was the cycle of the seven sacraments. These were the bottomless wells of divine grace, extended and effected by God, yet reliant on the ministration of the Church and some degree of human initiative. Of the seven, the three most important were baptism, which first cleansed the Christian of sin, penance, required of all men and women of discretion at least once a year, and the Eucharist or communion, also an annual requirement, and for most parishioners the most powerful enactment of sacral power they would ever witness. With the sounding of the sanctus bell and the elevation of the host, Christ was rendered (or rather rendered himself) physically present. Of the remaining sacraments, confirmation and marriage, though important markers of the Christian life, occurred only once in a lifetime, ordination was purely for the priesthood, while last rites, the final act of Christian communion in extremis, was sometimes neglected altogether.50 According to the medieval theologian Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308) a sacrament is ‘a sensible sign, which, by divine institution, efficaciously signifies the grace of God or the gratuitous action of God and is appointed for the salvation of a man who is still in this present life’.51 This is a technical description of an instinct buried deep within the emotional and mental constitution of the late medieval Christian: God held out promises of grace to true believers and the sacraments were the conduits of this grace. We can get a sense of what this meant in practical terms by looking a bit closer at penance and communion, the two most frequently encountered sacraments in the course of a Christian lifetime. The two were interrelated (confession was a prerequisite for communion) and each parishioner was expected to attend at least once a year at Easter. The purpose was to relieve sinners of their sin and restore them to a former condition. The rationale was as follows: mankind fell prey to sin, the sinner went to confession, the priest granted absolution, fixed a penance (or work of satisfaction), and with the penance the sins were forgiven and the believer momentarily returned to a state of grace. Through penance the sinner would be transformed by God’s grace, infused into the soul to facilitate redemption. This would in turn promote acts of love and good works, which would then earn the sinner merit or worthiness before God. All of this was closely regulated by the Church. Theologians drew up multi-chapter confessional manuals with precise descriptions of mortal and venial sins, along with instructions as to how the local confessors should approach the sacrament and what sorts of questions they should ask. There was no consensus on how rigorous the confessors should be, but no one

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doubted that it was a necessary part of the cycle. Theologians also argued over how much the penitent actually contributed to the process, whether the sinner could accomplish anything on his or her own merit or whether everything, even the first acts of sorrow and contrition, was due to the grace of God. But all theologians at the time, even the heretics, were in agreement that the Christian soul was by necessity a pilgrim in this process and that grace was acquired through penitential exercises, through good works.52 Such was the basic nature of the Latin Church and its pastoral functions. Different modalities and forms of expression might evolve at the level of the parish, but when it came to the theology behind the practice there were no legitimate alternatives. No other route to salvation was available; the Church alone was the custodian of souls. Yet this does not mean that the Church went unchallenged. The recent history of the papacy had done much to diminish the standing of the Church in the eyes of the faithful, and there was no lack of critics at the time who were quick to point up its failings and assumed errors. It is worth revisiting some of these late medieval developments to set the stage for the events to come. The recent memory of the Avignon papacy (1309–77) and the Great Schism (1378–1417), a period when there were two, and sometimes three, claimants to the throne of St Peter, had left the Catholic Church in a weakened state. Although the conciliarist movement had lost much of its momentum after the Council of Basel (1449), the theories continued to reverberate in the minds of the humanists, whether as a rationale for arguments in favour of a weakened papacy or as a reminder of the precarious state of the Church just a few generations before. They would resurface again in the works of the reformers. And conciliarists in the pure sense existed as well. In response to the pro-papal arguments of Cajetan mentioned above, Jacques Almain (d.1515), a professor of theology at the Sorbonne, argued that supreme power in the Church, as in all forms of monarchy, was derived from the community, even if it had been formally invested in a single head. On the basis of this logic he proposed that the keys had not been given to Peter alone but rather the whole body of the Church, with the body represented by the Church council. Thought like this harkened back to the conciliarist thinkers of the previous centuries, men such as Francesco Zabarella, Pierre d’Ailly and Nicholas of Cusa. All believed in the divine institution of the papacy, but they denied that plenitude of power was solely invested in the pope. As d’Ailly formulated it, the plenitude of power belongs inseparably to the body of Christ (Church), representatively to the general council and separably to the pope, who exercises it as the principal minister.53 The difficulties posed by conciliarism were only amplified once the theories found common cause with the rationale behind the rise of the

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national churches. In so far as there was a philosophical programme informing this initiative, it was based on the ideas of church–state relations developed in anti-papal tracts such as the Defensor Pacis (1324) of Marsilius of Padua (c.1275–c.1342), who advocated the primacy of secular sovereignty and proposed that the papacy should be divested of all sovereign power in the temporal sphere. The Bishop of Rome, as Marsilius put it, did not have any power beyond that of a simple priest. Challenging the papacy in this manner led naturally to an examination of its role in the spiritual realm, and this too was found wanting. In the Reformatio Sigismundi (1438/9), for example, a radical tract that circulated in the late medieval period in manuscript form, the author declared that ‘the Holy Father, the pope, and all our princes have abandoned the task set them by God’.54 As the theorists argued about papal plenitude, so-called heretics, now with the printing press at their disposal, continued to denounce the papacy and the legitimacy of the Catholic faith. Heresy, of course, was not new to Christianity, and indeed many of the late medieval dissidents derived articles of faith from teachings that had been condemned centuries before. What was new on the eve of the Reformation was the fine line between humanist calls for the moral reform of Christianity and some articles of medieval heresy. Humanism as a broad field of intellectual interest was not necessarily considered a threat. Rome itself was home to a number of prominent humanists who openly criticized scholasticism and worked to replace the jargon of the theologians with Ciceronian Latin, a campaign that prompted Erasmus to take the Roman humanists to task for sacrificing Christian forms to ‘monuments of heathenism’.55 It was only when humanist theology drifted in the direction of heresy that scholars had to take care, and this became more of a problem in the early sixteenth century when humanists began to emphasize the primacy of Scripture above the formal teachings of the Church, belittle rites, rituals and rote observances, and play up the moral dimension of Christianity by speaking in terms of religious purity, sacerdotal self-determination and spiritual progress. Erasmus came up against the charge of heresy on numerous occasions, as for instance when the Sorbonne judged that his opinion on fasting and choice of food ‘agrees with the heresies of Arius, Jovinian, the Waldensians, and Luther’.56 Lines began to blur as the language of heresy mingled with the discourse of humanist reform. Cathars, Waldensians, Albigensians and Lollards preached a doctrine of interior spirituality and moral refinement that had clear affinities with aspects of the humanist programme. And since these communities remained a presence in southern France, Switzerland, southern Germany and northern Italy right up to the eve of Reformation, reformminded scholars had to take care to make sure that they did not write

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anything that put them in the wrong camp. And the doctrinal heresies of the Lollards and the Hussites just increased the dangers. Among the articles attributed to John Wycliffe (c.1329–84) and his followers the Lollards at the Council of Constance in 1415 were his rejection of the theory of transubstantiation, the claims that immoral clergy had no sacerdotal powers and could not minister to salvation, that religious orders and indulgences were worthless, and even more to the point (as stated in article 37), ‘the Roman Church is Satan’s synagogue; and the pope is not the immediate and proximate vicar of Christ and the Apostles’.57 Few humanists ventured this far, but there was also a very prominent moral dimension to the teaching of Wycliffe, as later evidenced in the Lollard tendency to favour the Book of James and its practical Christianity. This was a message that had clear affinities with Erasmus’s philosophia Christi. In part the theological debates at the time were more about the formulation of ideas than their substance. This was due to the dominance of the scholastic method in the universities. Theology had become a very technical science ordered around different schools or ‘ways’ (viae). Within most universities the two main schools were known as the modern way (via moderna) and the ancient way (via antiqua), the former tending to privilege the work of more recent nominalist theologians such as William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel, while the latter preferred the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. But these were general categories, and scholars would often take sides according to the issue under dispute rather than a particular theory. Moreover, the schools themselves were known by different names according to time and place. The via antiqua, for instance, might be termed the via Scoti or via Sancti Thomae, and the same held true for the via moderna, which might also fall under the label via nominalium or via Gregorii, the later school named after the theologian Gregory of Rimini.58 The other feature of intellectual culture that affected the response of the Church was the pervasive mood of anti-clericalism. As the works of Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio and others attest, the Church and its clergy had been the subject of criticism for centuries, and not just from the humanist moralists who took them to task for their ignorance, profligacy and dissolute lifestyles. By the fifteenth century there were theological objections as well, most explicitly from openly heretical communities such as the Lollards and the Hussites. For this the Church itself was partly to blame. Not only was it failing in some of its sacral duties, but beyond this, because it had taken on so many additional secondary tasks, often more worldly than spiritual in nature, it had started to stretch itself too thin.59 Visitation returns and diocesan records on the eve of the Reformation do seem to suggest that the quality of the parish clergymen was often quite poor. Sebastian Brant’s satirical

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description of the average priest in his Ship of Fools (1494) as ‘foolish or of his wit unstable, misshapen of his face, his hands or his feet, and for no business worldly profitable’ was not without some evidence. Nor were the higher clergy much better, at least with reference to the image they projected to the public. Erasmus was not alone in the view he expressed in Praise of Folly (1509) that bishops were corrupt, theologians were witless and members of the religious orders were ‘so universally loathed that even a chance meeting is thought to be ill-omened’. Of course, much of this was literary trope pandering to popular expectation, but the fact that there were so many critics at the time is surely important, as is the fact that there were so few defenders.60 Before we conclude this survey of Latin Christianity on the eve of the Reformation mention must be made of one final factor that played an important role in the history of the Church: namely, the rise of the early modern state. Historians have identified the early modern period as a crucial stage in the transition from the feudal to the monarchical systems of rule. This happened at different times to different degrees of intensity and complexity, and it took in much more than just the state in the sense of the modern nation-state. Princedoms, smaller territories and large independent cities underwent the same process.61 Monarchs, princes and other members of the ruling elite began to consolidate their power over their sovereign territories, which included extending the prerogatives of rule, reforming justice and administration and fostering a sense of a national or territorial community. Fundamental to this process was the attempt by the ruling elite to control the Church and the clergy in their lands. In England, a series of parliamentary acts in the fourteenth century had secured the Crown control over higher ecclesiastical appointments, a restriction on appeals to Rome and a curtailment of the liberties of the Church, its courts and its clergy. Centuries before the Henrician Reformation, English kings, considered God’s lieutenants during their reigns and buried in the most sacred ground at their deaths, pressed the English Church for more taxation, recruited the clergy for secular tasks (including war), controlled and expropriated Church property, nominated the higher clergy, including archbishops, and incrementally curtailed the liberties of the clerical estate. Little wonder a historian has termed the late medieval English Church a monarchical Church, ‘that is to say that, in practice, kings exercised a great deal of control, a largely determining control, over the activities of the church’.62 Even greater were the gains made by Ferdinand and Isabella in fifteenth-century Spain. Appointment of the higher offices, including all major appointments in Granada, was in the hands of the monarchs,

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along with the control of income and property. New Church taxes were introduced to help with the reconquista and restrictions were placed on appeals to Rome. With the right of patronage to all posts in the New World secured by the papal grants of 1504 and 1508 followed by further domestic rights in 1523, which took in the military orders and all sees and monasteries in Castile and Aragon, the monarchs of Spain had ‘an autonomous control over their Church unequalled not only in Christendom . . . but in the entire history of the Catholic Church’.63 Perhaps the only monarchs to match the autonomy enjoyed by the Spanish rulers were the kings of France. By way of posturing, negotiating, threatening and then ultimately invading Italy, the French kings had managed to secure substantial liberties for the Gallican Church, beginning with the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) and continuing to the eve of the Reformation with the Concordat of Bologna (1516), all of which made the king, in effect, the ruler of the Church in his lands.64 Embodied beliefs To the casual observer of Gentile Bellini’s Procession in St Mark’s Square (1496), his famous rendering of a religious festival in Venice, the narrative subject of the painting may not be immediately apparent. It is in fact a man in a red robe kneeling just behind the centrepoint of the composition, which portrays an image of the reliquary of the confraternity of the True Cross of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, rendered in cross-section beneath a canopy held aloft by four men. The setting, however, is less ambiguous, for Bellini’s composition is a faithful rendering of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, replete with the cast of characters who once lived in this great Renaissance city. In addition to the nobility, patricians and citizens, the friars, priests and confraternity brothers, and the poor women and children – the most powerless of the so-called ‘little people’ ( popolo minuto) – begging alms, there are German merchants, turbaned Turks and Moors, and Greeks in black-brimmed hats. Like the image of the reliquary, this crowd tends to take attention away from the central narrative, which is, as mentioned, the story of the kneeling man. And yet, as much as the reliquary and the crowds capture the viewer’s attention, neither is a match for the overwhelming presence of the Piazza San Marco itself with its Basilica of San Marco looming in the background. This seems to have been the real subject of Bellini’s work. For while it purports to be an account of a particular miracle that occurred in the year 1444, the main protagonist of this picture is the city of Venice and the façade of its main church. And the story it really wants to tell is the sacral history of the city, how its origins reached back to the days of the Apostles, how it had secured the grace and protection of a major

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Christian saint, and how and why it became a site of intense sacrality and the dwelling place of a chosen people.65 The scenes in Bellini’s Procession are illustrative of what the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt meant when he spoke of the Renaissance state as a work of art. During the Renaissance political relations were conceived and perceived by way of action and form, symbolized through art and architecture and negotiated and legitimated through ritual and rite. And the same held true for religion. While theology determined the content of orthodox belief and the sacraments catered to the needs of salvation, it was the traditional modes of public life and, more to the point, the traditional settings, that invested Christianity with much of its meaning in a particular time and place.66 In Renaissance cities such as Venice, Florence and Milan, religion was intimately bound up with the history of the commune. Each city had its own story of sacred origins, its own proofs of divine favour and saintly patronage, and its own repositories of relics and devotional treasures. What this meant in historical terms is that there was a very profound local dimension to religious life, and one moreover that was embodied and enacted locally through public rituals such as the procession depicted by Bellini. It also meant that faith was necessarily bound up with power and politics, for the context for this embodied religion was the public space of the commune or the parish, which was part of the secular world. Indeed, historians of the Renaissance city have suggested that there was no clear separation between the sacral and the profane in these settings, and that in fact the state acquired much of its purpose and legitimacy through its use of Christian history and its appropriation of religious symbols and liturgical forms.67 Of course, in practice this meant that the ruling elite could exploit Church ritual, along with the clergy in their roles as ‘religio-thespians’, in order to legitimate, or perhaps to sanctify, the existing systems of rule. But at the same time it had the effect of investing religious culture with a life and a meaning beyond the reach of the sacramental theology of the Church. With this historical background, we can now better understand the different layers of local religious culture depicted in Bellini’s Procession in St Mark’s Square. The imagery is grouped around the story of the Brescian merchant Jacopo de’ Salis, the rather indistinct kneeling man, whose ailing son had been miraculously cured in 1444 after Jacopo prayed to the True Cross as it passed by during the procession on the feast of St Mark. Here then was testimony to the wonder-working powers of a Venetian relic belonging to one of the main confraternities of the city, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, whose white-robed confratelli surround the reliquary. The procession itself is winding around in the direction of the

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Basilica San Marco, where the remains of St Mark, patron saint of the city, were preserved. Like all civic processions, it was a carefully orchestrated event, and its protocol of place and precedence precisely reflected the political order. And it had an even deeper truth to tell, namely, the story of Venetian origins. For the feast day of St Mark was in celebration of the patron saint of the city, the Apostle of Christ who had first brought Christianity to the lagoon and whose earthly remains had been translated from Alexandria in 827/8CE . This association with the saint was one of the foundation myths of the city. It provided the historical legitimacy for its claims to liberty and independence, and it was the reason why its rulers could maintain that a special sanctity hung over the city. As Gabriele Fiamma, canon-regular of San Marco, put it: ‘I was born a Venetian and live in this happy homeland, protected by the prayers and guardianship of Saint Mark, from whom that Most Serene Republic acknowledges its greatness, its victories, and all its good fortune.’68 The ruling elite in Renaissance cities such as Venice, Florence and Milan were masters of public ritual, but the close association of the sacral and the profane was common to all cities in Latin Christendom in this age, as was the tendency to tailor the faith through rite and ritual to fit the dimensions of a specific social or political setting. Witnesses to a procession of relics in the German imperial city of Nuremberg, for instance, would have seen many of the same things as a bystander in Venice. In Nuremberg’s case the treasured relics were those of the Holy Roman Empire. Exhibited once a year on a feast day with a procession, a Mass and a public viewing, this too evolved into a carefully orchestrated performance overseen by the ruling magistrates that played up the spirit of religious patriotism, as if God had marked out Nuremberg in particular as a repository of his grace. Yet this was just one instance of the broader tendency of the Nuremberg elite and their subject citizens to think in terms of a localized notion of the Church. In part it was due to the simple facts of political life. Throughout the medieval period the Nuremberg council had acquired substantial powers over ecclesiastical affairs, including the gradual suspension of clerical immunities, the sequestration of Church property, the extension of guardianship over monasteries, hospitals, orphanages and leper houses, and powers of patronage and appointment in all the main city churches. This process had been so successful that it prompted the Bishop of Bamberg to remark that the central aim of the council was ‘to free itself from the subjection of us and our bishopric in ecclesiastical affairs’.69 But there was another spirit at work as well, and one that was less purely political in its motives. In Nuremberg’s church of St Sebald, for instance, the patrician church that stood directly opposite the city hall, the parishioners

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gradually pieced together an interior cosmos of worship that was unique to that setting. Originally the church had been consecrated in the name of St Peter, and it owed much of its early form and function to the bishopric of Bamberg, up to and including its choice of artists and imagery during the period of Gothic reconstruction. Over time, however, the patricians began to press back the influence of Bamberg, and they began to fill the interior of the church with statues and images that corresponded to local tastes. Some of this came from the hands of the best artists in Germany, including Albrecht Dürer, Hans von Kulmbach, Veit Stoß, Adam Kraft and Peter Vischer; but much of it was from lesser and even anonymous hands, and its purpose was to find a place for the parishioners of Nuremberg in the sacral cosmos of St Sebald. Of particular importance in this context was the rise to prominence of Sebald himself, whose relics were preserved in the church at the expense of the original patron St Peter. Against the wishes of the Bishop of Bamberg, the Nuremberg council encouraged the growth of the local Sebald cult. In 1379 he became the patron saint of the high altar, and by 1425, when he was finally canonized, the statues of Sebald stood in the most important areas of the church.70 Whether in Nuremberg or Venice, or indeed in any large commune in Europe at the time, religion was woven into the fabric of the social and political world. No citizen could avoid the spiritual dimensions of public life. At its most ambitious, the projected ideal was a type of holy community, a corpus Christianum, with little or no discrepancy between the principles of the faith and the social and political relations that bound people together. This remained a constant ideal in the mindset of Latin Christendom, even after the Reformation. It was exploited by the evangelical reformers in their sermons on love, peace, charity and the common good, and subsequently enacted in communal rituals and processions in the cities of Spain, France and Italy during the age of Catholic reform. It is thus easy to understand why religious experience was so closely tied to ideas of community, for the polity and its citizenry were bound up, in both a worldly and an other-worldly sense, in common bonds of religious observance. It is also easy to understand why the idea of the Universal Church took on so many localized forms. For the average parishioner, the Catholic Church was not imagined in terms of the Christian humanism of men such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples or Erasmus, the scholastic distinctions of theologians such as Jean Gerson or Gabriel Biel, or the doctrinal orthodoxies of the Renaissance papacy, even if these ideas provided the parameters for their experience of the faith. For the average parishioner, Christianity was something that inhered in his or her views of the world, as natural and implicit as language or place.

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This had implications for the form, or the variety of forms, of the sacramental life. Communion, for instance, ‘the pinnacle of the typical wayfarer’s worship experience’, might be registered in a variety of ways depending on time and location.71 To begin with, until the publication of the Tridentine missal, there was no fixed liturgy for all of Latin Christendom. Different forms of rites had evolved, among them the Mozarabic (Toledo), the Bragan (Portugal), the Ambrosian (Milan) and the practice of Notre Dame in Paris. But even more important than these formal rites were the subtle varieties that invested each act of communion with its own local colour. As the sediment of centuries of parish practice settled on the four main liturgical steps (preparation, oblation, consecration and communion), slight shifts in sequence and emphasis might appear, and these were often framed by settings mapped out by the parishioners. Each church, to a greater or lesser extent, was pieced together by the people who walked through its portals from one weekend to the next. Its interior was filled with the detritus of generations of local devotion. Altars and altar cloths, vestments and vessels, images and sculptures, chalice and paten, linen cloths and candles – each assembly of liturgical equipage and its surrounds was unique. And so too, of course, was the personal experience of the Eucharist, for this was the great temporary transit from sin to salvation enacted at least once a year. Although scripted and enacted by the priest, the parishioners, first through the acts of preparation and then by way of the sights, smells and sounds of the sacrament, entered into personal communion with God. The desire to commune with incarnate Christ and to participate, by way of what has been termed ‘the sacramental gaze’, in the overspill of sacrality effected by the consecration of the elements was a primal impulse of the medieval religious mind.72 Over time it found expression in cults devoted to the body of Christ, fraternities specializing in the worship of the Eucharist, art inspired by the passion and the wounds, Christ as the man of sorrows, and numerous local feasts, commemorations and para-liturgical activities. Of all these initiatives the most influential was the feast of Corpus Christi, which was elevated to a regular papal feast in the fourteenth century with its own office and liturgy, reputedly written by Aquinas himself. Its origins have been traced back to the diocese of Liège, a region rich in monasteries, convents and communities of the devout, whose members, especially the female Beguines, longed for more frequent communion. First celebrated in 1264 and declared a universal feast 20 years later, Corpus Christi soon spread to the neighbouring dioceses of northern Europe (Cologne, Münster, Osnabrück) and eventually crept into the missals, liturgy books and breviaries of Italy, France and England on its way to becoming a staple of religious culture in medieval Europe.73

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What was unique about Corpus Christi was not just its popularity but the extent to which it facilitated lay participation. Because it was a summer feast that culminated in processions outside of the church, it gave rise to a degree of ‘sacred mobility’ that was difficult to contain. During the Corpus Christi processions, the laity were as prominent as the clergy, marching beside the sacrament while hallowing and blessing the route, holding the canvas aloft to protect the host, staging the biblical dramas – the so-called Corpus Christi cycles – that closed the feast, and funding the pyxes, monstrances and tabernacles.74 By the late medieval period it was as much about civic and communal identity as it was a ritual confirmation of the Real Presence, and indeed to the extent that in large cities such as Florence the feast could be the occasion for struggles between the secular and the spiritual authorities over power and honour. In 1522, for instance, the Florentine master of ceremonies remarked that ‘the rector of the university wanting to come to honor the feast [of Corpus Christi ] asked [permission] to precede the podestà of Florence. And neither the Signoria nor any of the chancellors would concede this. He did not come to honor the said festa. I record this for another time, etc.’75 Reluctant to let the sacrality slip away once the feast had passed, parishioners began to foster local cults of the Eucharist to preserve the presence of Christ. Necessarily, the clergy were complicit: no cult of the host could exist without the consecration, nor could a cult survive without the approval of the Church. But on occasion these local initiatives gathered a momentum that in effect made them self-generating, as was the case in the small north German town of Wilsnack. In 1383 three consecrated hosts, untouched, were discovered in the smouldering remains of the Wilsnack church, each with a drop of blood in its centre. The hosts were preserved, miracles followed, and soon the parish became a site of pilgrimage, so successful in fact that at one stage only Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela did better in terms of visitor numbers. To accommodate the crowds (up to 100,000 per year, according to one estimate), the town built a new church in the Gothic style with a high-vaulted nave, oversaw the construction of inns and taverns to house the influx of pilgrims and established souvenir shops peddling badges that attested to the miracle. Wilsnack’s fame was international: German, Flemish and French cities sent offenders to the church for atonement; theologians in Rome, Prague, Erfurt and Leipzig discussed the miracle of the host. Admittedly, not all were convinced by the miracle. Some German theologians, Nicholas of Cusa among them, condemned the cult, and the Bohemians thought it was pure delusion. But Wilsnack flourished, despite the fact that, as numerous reports made clear, the blood spots on the three miraculous hosts could not really be seen.76

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It is thus not surprising that historians have identified an important lay dimension to late medieval Christianity, by which they mean the emergence of forms or forums of religiosity carved out by men and women looking for additional outlets for their spirituality. Piety began to flourish outside the sacramental asylums and around the edges of the theologies and liturgies of the Church. We can see traces of this in Italy, for instance, beginning as early as the twelfth century, where the civic values of charity and austerity became the virtues of the most popular saints. Indeed, many of these holy men themselves emerged from the bourgeois milieu, proof enough that neither marriage nor a profession precluded sanctity. In the following centuries this lay spirit would find a home in the culture of the urban confraternity, which was built on the lay appropriation of the values of the monastic lifestyle. We can see traces of this in Spain, in the rural parishes of Castile and Catalonia, where there was a flourishing cult of local saints in the late medieval period who served as patrons and intercessors for parish communities. On the basis of a relic, a sacralized place or an object, or perhaps the evidence of an apparition, rural communities fostered relationships with minor saints who were thought to have an intimate knowledge of, and sympathy for, the peoples of a particular place. And we can see this lay impulse at work in the German lands, where there was an effort to reduce the complexity of religious culture as it was practised in medieval Catholicism and use the emerging modes and methods of lay religiosity to focus on the central concerns of the average Christian, which were primarily to do with faith and forgiveness.77 The Church of the late medieval period was deeply rooted in these close-knit human communities. Taken together, they made up the body of the Christian faithful. As we will now see, this fact became profoundly apparent in the early sixteenth century, when these same local communities were suddenly faced with the possibility of reforming the Universal Church.

CHAPTER

2

Reformation Christianity Early in the morning of 18 February 1546 Martin Luther suffered another bout of chest pain. A few hours later, he lay dying in a bed in Eisleben, the town where he had been born. Once attempts to revive him with a salve of rose vinegar and aqua vitae had failed, the two clergymen at his bedside, Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius, took care to record his final testimony for posterity. ‘Reverend father,’ they shouted, ‘are you ready to die trusting in your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine you have taught in his name?’ Luther reputedly answered with a yes. He then closed his eyes and, according to the witnesses, passed away peacefully without the ministrations of the deathbed rites that his Reformation had helped to eradicate: there was no sacramental element in the final hours, no extreme unction, no confession, no last communion. Luther had prepared for his death through private prayer and the repetition of passages from his own translation of the Bible, but there were no rites or rituals to shepherd him out of the world.1 In doing this, Luther died in the religious world he had helped to create. On the day following his birth in Eisleben 63 years earlier he had been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church by a priest subject to the papacy in Rome. On his death, in contrast, he was surrounded by clergymen who were subject to the secular authorities of Mansfeld and Saxony ministering a form of Christianity that was so closely associated with his own religious views that it was already widely known as Lutheranism. How had this happened? Why did Latin Christianity pull apart under the strain of a Reformation in the sixteenth century? This chapter will examine the rise, spread and evolution of Protestant Christianity as it was first conceived in Germany and Switzerland. What began in the Saxon town of Wittenberg as a localized academic exercise turned into a revolutionary religious movement that brought an end to the medieval Catholic synthesis and the authority and the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church in much of northern and central Europe. Whereas humanists such as Erasmus and Lefèvre had endeavoured to purify the faith from within sacramental Catholicism, reformers such as Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and John 33

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Calvin struck at the very heart of Rome’s claims to be ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic’ and rejected its sacerdotal rationale. The result was the rise of Protestantism in its nascent denominational forms, each with its own corpus of thought, its own narrative of providential purpose, its own platform of historical and theological authenticity, and its own founding fathers, who were perceived by their followers as little less than prophets and saints. On the basis of these newfound convictions, the Reformation effected a greater transformation of Western Christianity than any event, phase or movement since the age of the Apostles. Causa Lutheri: the origins of the Reformation There was nothing in his early history that predestined Martin Luther (1483–1546) to become the reformer of the German nation. Born in Eisleben in 1483, the son of Hans Luder, leaseholder of a mine in the duchy of Mansfeld, Luther had the same upbringing as thousands of other children raised in the many small territorial towns dotting the German countryside. Earmarked by his father for a career in law, Luther matriculated at Erfurt University in 1501 and began the course of study in the liberal arts faculty. As Erfurt was one of the principal ancient universities in the Empire, it was subject to the same currents of thought as the rest of Germany, including humanism and the rival schools of scholastic theology. Later in life Luther would claim that he belonged to the via moderna tradition in Erfurt, which included his professors Jodocus Trutfetter and Bartholomaeus Arnoldi von Usingen, both of whom were prominent northern exponents of late medieval nominalism. Luther would come into contact with these masters again, for he did not follow the path set out by his father. In 1505, impelled by a traumatic experience, Luther turned away from the study of the law and entered the Order of the Augustinian Hermits in Erfurt. He took his vows the following year. While in the Order, Luther observed the strict cycle of canonical hours, prayers, Masses and confessions that comprised the monastic lifestyle, and he would later remark that it was during this period that he started to suffer the attacks of anxiety (Anfechtungen) that would be so instrumental in his eventual break with Catholicism. As Luther wrote years later, ‘although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I could also not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who punished sinners, I actually hated him.’2 With hindsight, Luther’s life in the monastery and his early struggle with questions of judgement and atonement seem pregnant with significance; but many other young German monks, in Erfurt and elsewhere, would have suffered the same type of Anfechtungen as Luther, and

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there would have been many recent university graduates who tried to comprehend their suffering by using the mix of tools imparted by the scholastic viae and Christian humanism. The best place to look for the first signs of Martin Luther the reformer is in Wittenberg after he took up his post as a professor of theology. In 1512 Luther became an expositor of Scripture, beginning with the exegesis of Psalms (1513) followed by Galatians and Romans (1516). Like other professors, Luther used exegetical aids, including Erasmus’s Greek New Testament (1516) and biblical commentaries, but he quickly developed an intimate relationship with the biblical text, often having local publishers print leaves of the Psalter with narrow columns so that he could fill up the spaces with marginalia. None of this led to a clear theological ‘breakthrough’, at least insofar as we can judge by the historical record, but already at this stage there are traces of three aspects of his thought that subsequently became central supports of his mature theology.3 First, contrary to the theory and praxis of late medieval Catholicism, Luther’s close engagement with Scripture had convinced him that humankind could not be washed clean of sin. Nothing within the facility of man could remove this stain: it was everlasting. Christ alone is our only righteousness, and thus salvation comes from outside of ourselves (extra nos). As he wrote in the Dictata super Psalterium (1515), to be righteous means to accept God’s verdict, to acknowledge and confess the state of sin and accept divine judgement with humility. Second, by using the emotive language of medieval mysticism as a diagnostic tool, Luther began to probe the limits of scholastic theology and its failure to acquire the type of ‘wisdom that came with experience’. His later tendency to round out his theological insights with the use of paradox or to confound scholastic arguments with appeals to the mysteries of the faith stems from this period. Third, following from this, and nurtured by his coterminus roles as preacher, professor and town pastor, Luther became openly critical of the Church, not only in the humanist fashion of pointing up its deficiencies and evident lack of spirituality. Luther also began to question its theological underpinnings. In his early work Against Scholastic Theology (1517), for instance, he called for an end to the use of Aristotle’s ethics in the teaching of theology, and he reiterated his conviction that Christ alone is the only means of our salvation.4 Publishing against scholastic theology did not bring notoriety. The act that brought Luther fame was the drafting of a set of theses against indulgence peddling. The issue had been brought to his attention by his Wittenberg parishioners, some of whom were making the trip to nearby Jüterbog to avail themselves of the 1515 plenary indulgence being preached by Johann Tetzel in the diocese of Magdeburg. Concerned that the indulgence

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and its promised remission of sin was masking the meaning of true repentance, Luther drafted the theses for disputation and posted them to the bishops of Mainz and Brandenburg. (He may have posted them on the door of the castle church on 31 October 1517 as well, though there is no irrefutable evidence for this.5) Although radical enough in some respects, similar objections had been raised before, and indeed Luther had been lecturing against indulgences for over a year. Ultimately what made the Ninety-Five Theses so important was their role as a catalyst for public debate. Translated from Latin into German and published in cities as distant as Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel, they soon caught the attention of both the humanists and the papal controversialists. By early 1518 scholars throughout Europe, from Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg to Thomas More in London, had copies on their desks.6 From this point Luther’s own history and the origins of the Reformation would be closely intertwined. It is thus necessary to devote a few pages to a narrative of people and events in order to give a sense of the incremental stages of development and how a series of localized, very personal encounters turned into a historical movement. In April 1518 Luther attended a meeting of his Augustinian Order in Heidelberg. It was the first time he spoke about his evolving theology outside of Wittenberg and it was very important for the initial spread and reception of the message. A number of younger theologians were in the audience, including the latterday reformers Martin Bucer and Johannes Brenz, and they were converted to the cause. Later that year Luther travelled to another meeting that would prove even more fateful. Having received a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses, the papal theologians eventually resolved to cite Luther to appear in Rome. Wary of the rising tide of German anti-papalism, however, and heedful of the importance of the Saxon Elector Friedrich the Wise for the forthcoming imperial election, Pope Leo X agreed to the Elector’s suggestion that Luther’s proposed hearing be translated to the German city of Augsburg. The legate chosen to meet with Luther was the Dominican Tommaso Gaetano de Vio, better known as Cajetan, whom we have already met in an earlier discussion as one of the most unyielding defenders of papal primacy. Cajetan’s brief was straightforward: Luther had to return to the Church, recant what he had written and leave off such teaching in the future. Luther, however, had come to Augsburg in the expectation that there would be a debate and was thus shocked when Cajetan refused all dialogue and simply reiterated the grounds for papal supremacy.7 Even before his meeting in Heidelberg, however, Luther had known that a hostile reaction was mounting. He had already received a set of critical theses prepared by the Ingolstadt professor Johannes Eck (1486–1543), who

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became Luther’s main opponent in the German lands and his most relentless pursuer. On the basis of the efforts made by Luther’s colleague Andreas Karlstadt, Luther and Eck agreed to meet in June 1519 for a staged debate overseen by the University of Leipzig.8 Once at Leipzig, Eck pressed Luther on the key issue of authority. In Eck’s mind, the crux was manifest: either Luther recognized the divine foundation of the papacy and its primacy or he did not. If he did not, then he was a heretic in the mould of the Bohemian Jan Hus and his sole aim was to undermine the Church. In response to this accusation, Luther protested that Christ alone was the head of the Church. He was willing to concede that the papacy had been founded according to the will of God, but he disputed the claim that it enjoyed primacy over the entire Church, the Greek Church included, and he expressed doubts that belief in the supremacy of the Roman Church was necessary for salvation. Before the debate was over Luther, goaded by Eck, would also confirm his belief that Church councils could err and that many of the articles of Hussite theology were ‘Christian and evangelical’.9 After Leipzig, scholars began to take sides. The Luther Affair (causa Lutheri), up to this point a rarified dispute between theologians, became a public issue. Philipp Melanchthon, Wittenberg’s new professor of Greek, was the first to publish a short description of the debate, portraying Luther as the humble champion of the Word of God whose only concern was religious truth. The humanists were quick to follow Melanchthon and offer their support in print, and not just works of theology but lampoons against Eck, including Eck Cut down to Size, a satire written by the Nuremberg patrician Willibald Pirckheimer, and a broadsheet parody entitled The Triumphal Arch of Johannes Eck, which was a ribald inversion of the arch Eck was alleged to have erected in an Ingolstadt church in celebration of his assumed victory. Equally as rapid and widespread was the formation of opinion among the supporters of Eck and his vindication of the papacy. Eck was quickly joined by others who made similar accusations of antipapalism and heresy against Luther, among them the Leipzig scholars Jerome Dungersheim, Hieronymous Emser and August Alfeld, who actually witnessed the debate, and the professors of theology at the universities of Cologne and Louvain, who did not.10 In March 1520, Eck journeyed to Rome, where he joined the papal commissions and began working on a denunciation of the Wittenberg theologian. The result of the commission’s efforts was the papal bull of excommunication against Luther and a few alleged followers, promulgated in June 1520. Entitled Exsurge Domine, it opened with metaphors of boars and foxes destroying the vineyard of Christ (rather fitting, given that it was first put before Pope Leo X while at a hunting lodge in Magliana) and

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expressed deep sadness that errors so ‘heretical, false, scandalous, or offensive to pious ears’ should have arisen in the German Nation, for the pope had always ‘held this nation in the bosom of our affection’ and the Germans had ‘always been the bitterest opponents of heresies’. It then went on to list the errors that had been found in Luther’s works, 41 in all, and gave him 60 days to recant. If he did not, the bull concluded, we shall, following the teaching of the holy Apostle Paul, who teaches us to avoid a heretic after having admonished him for a first and a second time, condemn this Martin, his supporters, adherents and accomplices as barren vines which are not in Christ, preaching an offensive doctrine contrary to the Christian faith and offend the divine majesty, to the damage and shame of the entire Christian Church, and diminish the keys of the Church, as stubborn and public heretics.11

In 1521 the final act of the opening drama was played out in the German city of Worms. Luther was summoned to appear before the Habsburg monarch Charles V (1500–58), King of Spain, Duke of Burgundy, Archduke of Austria and recently elected King of the Romans. Already aware that the papacy had judged Luther a heretic, there was little doubt how Emperor Charles would react. Nevertheless, in conformance with the laws of the Empire, Charles granted Luther a hearing. And it was there that the ‘little monk’ made his stand. Luther’s speech at Worms has become one of the most celebrated episodes in European history. In the long tradition of narratives that project the rise of the Reformation as a personal struggle between Luther and Rome, it often serves as the dramatic turning point. It has also been an act played out in the minds of theorists, varying between a monologue on individualism to the last chorus of medievalism. What it was in fact was improvisation. Luther had travelled to Worms in the expectation that there would be a public hearing, an opportunity for debate with the papal authorities. As soon as he arrived, however, he realized that he had not been called to a disputation but a recantation. Once in the hall, with his publications stacked before him, he was asked whether the books were his own and whether he was willing to disavow what he had written. Luther requested time to consider his answer. The following day (17 April 1521), in a larger hall where the hearing had been moved owing to the press of the crowds, Luther gave a defence of his writings. In reply to the demand of the imperial official that he stop dissimulating and give a clear answer, he offered a closing statement of his convictions. In his words: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason – for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they

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have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves – I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.12

Emperor Charles V read out his answer to Luther’s declaration the following day. As anticipated, it was a summary rejection of Luther’s reformist programme and an unequivocal confirmation of the emperor’s Catholic faith and the orthodoxy of his dynastic heritage. Too much has been made of this, and it would be a mistake to think of it as a conflict between the antagonistic principles of Protestant and Catholic belief, especially as neither of these magisterial confessions granted the individual believer the freedom to follow religious conscience if it contradicted the public faith, but there is some truth in the notion that the meeting between the Saxon professor and the Habsburg emperor was a prefiguring of the two modes of religious discourse that would collide during the confessional age: the personal and the historical. At Worms, Luther took refuge behind a species of conscience he described as ‘wholly captive to the Word of God’. His latitude of conviction and ‘right belief’ was constrained by Scripture, but within the frame of his own fears and persuasions he projected his religious conscience as an active influence, an inbuilt spiritual compass pointing him in the direction of what he perceived to be the True Faith. No other guide was necessary, just conscience bound to Christ through the Word, a formula for salvation with all the simplicity of a mathematical equation.13 When Emperor Charles V spoke of his religion, he was taking refuge in a personal faith that had been invested with authority by the Catholic Church, confirmed in its authenticity by the trials of history and dynasty, and sanctioned by the majestas of his rule. When Charles referred to the weight of his conscience, he did so with no less certainty or honesty than Luther, but he was conjuring a latitude of conviction and ‘right belief’ held in place by a different range of referents, from the principles of his early Christian humanist education and the ethos of the Knights of the Golden Fleece to the sermonizing of priests, theologians and confessors at court and the powerful symbolism that inhered in the cycle of rites and ceremonies that bound the emperor to his faith.14 In such a framework, the only possible reaction to Luther’s declaration was condemnation. Accordingly, on 26 May 1521, the emperor issued the Edict of Worms, a decree which endorsed the papal bull of excommunication and placed Luther under the ban of the Empire. Luther’s life was impugned, his theology was condemned and his books were to be eradicated from the memory of man. Later in life Luther would recall his excommunication and the publication of the ban with a sense of isolation, evoking the celebrated image of one man

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and his conscience against the might of Rome, and he would contrast his early struggle against the papacy with the ‘school of Wittenberg’ (schola Witebergensis) of his later years, when hundreds of students journeyed to hear him lecture and theologians gathered to record his words. No doubt his memory had preserved a vivid sentiment of that time, but Luther was never alone in his struggle against the papal theologians, not at the beginning and not at the end, and his later recollection of events was not quite true to the historical origins of the movement, to the days when Luther himself referred to the rise of ‘our theology’ (theologia nostra) as the Reformation began. By the time Luther took up his professorship, Wittenberg had become an established setting for reform. Elevated to the principal city of electoral Saxony by Friedrich the Wise (1463–1525), it was transformed in function and form by a rebuilding programme initiated around 1490. Both the castle and the castle church were reconstructed, the latter in order to provide the appropriate setting for the elector’s relic collection, which by 1518 counted over 17,000 objects. Numerous civic buildings were remodeled as well, from the Rathaus to apothecaries, bathhouses and stately private homes. But the jewel of Wittenberg was its university. Founded in 1502 on the basis of imperial rather than papal dispensation, Wittenberg University quickly emerged as a favoured seat of learning in the German lands. Comprised of the college of liberal arts and the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine, it began as a small institution (just 37 faculty members in 1508) and remained a small institution despite its later fame. As it was a recent foundation, created by Friedrich to rival Leipzig University in the Albertine lands of Saxony with the aim (to paraphrase the foundation charter) of profiting the commonweal and providing the land with educated servants, it did not suffer the same weight of tradition or the glacial conservatism of the ancient institutions. Moreover, as it was more or less a pet project of the elector, it had a tractable constitution from the very outset. It even had a special committee of ‘reformers’ with the mandate to make sure that the university kept pace with the times. Its very malleability, bound up with its lack of history and tradition, made it an ideal incubator for the hatching of new ideas.15 Thus when Luther arrived in Wittenberg, there was already a short-lived tradition of local scholarship that was consciously embracing humanist ideas and pushing against the boundaries of academic orthodoxy. In matters of theology as well, members of the faculty were arguing some of the points that later became the main pillars of Reformation theology. The biblical humanist Johannes Lang (1487–1548) was appealing to his readers in his editions of Jerome to return to Scripture and the Church Fathers rather than rely on scholastic commentaries; Nicolaus von Amsdorf (1483–1565),

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a lecturer in the university before Luther arrived, turned away from traditional theology, immersed himself in Augustine and Paul, and renounced his reliance on the ‘false superstitions’ taught by the traditional schools; and Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541), one-time hard-necked Thomist, who became even more actively anti-scholastic than Luther and just as convinced that Scripture was the only sure foundation of religious truth. Reformation theology, which in its infancy was built upon a mix of humanist hermeneutics, Pauline Christianity and anti-scholasticism, was nurtured by this community of scholars. And it was its proclaimed goal to unseat scholastic Aristotelianism and elevate Augustine and Scripture in its place.16 We should not be in any doubt, however, about the prime mover. Through his ideas, his actions and his tireless activity writing, preaching, lecturing, debating, publishing and engaging sympathetic scholars, Luther emerged as the leader of the German Reformation. First within Wittenberg, and then incrementally within the German lands at large, he began to reach out to sympathetic minds and convert them to his cause. Luther became a master of self-promotion, one of the first public figures in northern Europe to recognize the power of fame. As a consequence, by the time he stepped onto the imperial stage as the ‘new Porphyry’ mentioned in the papal bull, he had already emerged as the leader of the schola Witebergensis. By May 1519 Luther could claim in a letter to the Franciscans of Jüterbog that his teachings had been the subject of debates, lectures, readings, sermons and disputations for over three years.17 And indeed, as we have seen, by this time Luther had already worked up some of the central tenets of Reformation theology in his mind. Throughout the early stages of the Luther Affair, Luther’s progress had been closely followed and closely chronicled by the German humanists. These were the opinion-makers of the day, often men of high standing and social repute, whose only common cause was the cluster of opinions and hermeneutical techniques that made up the new learning. Conditioned by the war of words between the so-called sophists (scholastics) and the socalled grammarians (humanists), many of the earliest supporters of Luther, including prominent spokesmen of the new learning such as Wolfgang Capito, Ulrich Zasius, Otto Brunfels and indeed Erasmus himself, rallied in defence of Luther because he seemed to be the latest in a series of victims who had fallen foul of outmoded philosophies and a backsliding Church. Like themselves, Luther wrote against scholasticism and the corruption of the biblical text; he rejected the reliance on the medieval glossaries and commentaries and placed emphasis on the Church Fathers and the original sources; and he criticized the moribund papacy and championed the

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philosophy of Christ. Moreover, he appealed to the people of ‘our Germany’, an aspect of the Luther Affair that was quickly exploited by nationalists such as Ulrich von Hutten, who contrasted the virtues of the German Nation with the failings of the ‘Romanists’.18 At this stage support for Luther and the Wittenberg movement did not have to be boiled down to a theological essence. Some scholars jumped into the fray by publishing florilegia of patristic quotes to refute the scholastics; others reissued medieval calls to reform such as the Reformatio Sigismundi or the Grievances of the German Nation; others wrote against Luther’s critics, the most notable work of this kind being Pirckheimer’s caustic lampoon Eck Cut down to Size. To count oneself a member of the reforming party it was enough just to evoke the decades of grievances against the Roman Church. By 1521, however, it was becoming difficult to be an apologist for Wittenberg while remaining true to Rome. As Erasmus began to remark in letters, there was much more to Luther’s theology than humanists such as Reuchlin and Pirckheimer first appreciated. Luther went much further, he dove much deeper and he had developed ideas that challenged the core teachings of Catholicism and threatened to ruin the cause of measured pedagogical reform. Luther had moved the conversation beyond the spectrum of conventional religious discourse, with the consequence that sympathetic scholars now had to be prepared to take sides. Erasmus made the point: There had long been a deep strain of bitterness in everything written both by the supporters of the ancient tongues and of the humanities and by those blockheads who are convinced that any progress in liberal studies must weaken their own position. Then this sorry business of Luther blazed up into such a controversy that it is safe neither to speak nor to keep silence. Everything is wrested into the opposite sense, even what one writes with unimpeachable intentions; no notice is taken of the time when a man was writing, but that which was entirely correct when it was written is transferred to a date which does not fit at all.19

This was a new take on ancient quarrels, one that, as Erasmus remarked, ‘wrested ideas into the opposite sense’, and it was a symptom of the fact that the fault-lines of the confessional divisions that would fragment the Latin Church of the sixteenth century were beginning to show. The evangelical movement in Germany By 1520, as the Nuremberg Jurist Christoph Scheurl and others remarked, Luther had become the most famous man in Germany. Unscripted events, such as the translation of his Ninety-Five Theses into German, as well as the

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deeper contingencies of history, such as imperial politics or the climate of expectation, had pushed him into the public eye. But Luther also made history once he stepped onto the imperial stage. Indeed, no other figure in northern Europe, not even Erasmus, did more to influence the way that his contemporaries thought about their place in the world and their relationship to the divine. As the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan once observed, ‘Not since Augustine had the spiritual odyssey of one man and the spiritual exigency of Western Christendom coincided as they did now.’20 That they coincided, however, was as much to do with historical circumstance as Luther’s calculated efforts to become the Augustine of his age. Luther used every means at his disposal to spread his message and popularize the Wittenberg theology, from debates and disputations, sermons and lectures, personal encounters, political leverage, preaching tours, woodcuts and portraits, and all manner of written works from Latin tractates to vernacular pamphlets. In the year 1520 alone, although Luther claimed in his work against the controversialist Jerome Emser that ‘my single intention was to stay hidden in the corner’, he wrote tracts in defence of the Leipzig debate, drafted a revised work on usury, finished sermons on the Lord’s Supper and good works, published his first substantial views on the authority of the Roman Church, wrote against his excommunication and then staged a very public burning of the papal bull in Wittenberg, and published three of the most important theological manifestos of his career, Freedom of a Christian Man, Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation and The Babylonian Captivity. Little wonder that Luther first hesitated at the suggestion that he publish his treatise on good works for fear that he was wearying the printers.21 Despite the sheer number of pages that spilled from Luther’s pen, at this stage it is too early to speak in terms of Lutheran belief or a Lutheran movement. Even after the appearance of Melanchthon’s Loci Communes (1521), the first published synthesis of the Wittenberg theology, the faith continued to evolve, sympathies continued to shift and Luther and the other reformers continued to work out what was implied when they demanded the Word of God ‘clear and pure’. The first reformers thought of themselves as evangelicals, preachers of the Gospel, not followers of a theologian or a school of thought. Nevertheless, many of the basic principles of Reformation Christianity had already been identified, principles powerful enough to justify the break with Rome, and it is worth surveying a few of these before we turn our attention to the subsequent history of the evangelical movement. The three reform manifestos mentioned above will provide the context. In Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation, a work likened to a ‘war trumpet’ by Luther’s colleague Johannes Lang, Luther appealed to the ruling

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elite of Germany to take up the mantle of reform and bring down the socalled ‘walls’ of the papacy. By walls Luther meant the sacramental foundations, and he examined each in turn. On the basis of his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers he ridiculed the notion that the clergy were a separate estate by virtue of their ordination or that they stood in a closer sacerdotal relationship to the divine. Since we are all priests by baptism, he wrote, ‘we deduce that there is, at bottom, really no other difference between laymen, priests, princes, bishops, or, in Romanist terminology, between religious and secular, than that of office or occupation, and not that of Christian status. All have spiritual status, and all are truly priests, bishops, and popes.’22 Another important ‘wall’ to come down was the notion that the papacy had a monopoly on the interpretation of Scripture. This was a ‘wickedly devised fable’, he concluded, for Peter had entrusted the keys to the community as a whole. Indeed, this appeal to the primacy of Scripture, better known as the principle of Scripture alone (sola Scriptura), emerged as one of the central pillars of evangelical thought, and it was one of the insights shared across the mainstream Protestant spectrum. Medieval Catholics also held up the primacy of Scripture, of course, but they looked to other sources of religious truth as well, primarily the unwritten traditions of belief, the appeal to the historical continuum and the vague but commanding idea of a general consensus preserved by the Church (consensus ecclesiae) under the guidance of the pope. Luther, in contrast, and the other reformers after him, rejected most of the anxillary authorities, including the summae of the medieval theologians, the centuries of unspoken tradition and even counciliar decrees when they contradicted Scripture. This did not necessarily mean that Luther and his followers appealed to Scripture alone and no other source. Other authorities might be enlisted if they paid witness to the essential meaning of Holy Writ as interpreted by the evangelicals. But it did mean that the vast field of corresponding authorities sustaining the medieval Catholic Church was made redundant, and it also meant that the new Church had a heuristic principle in place that made it possible to challenge centuries of Catholic belief on the basis of even older authorities.23 After the Appeal came The Babylonian Captivity, written in Latin for a learned rather than a lay audience, but one that was equally revolutionary in its insights and equally martial in its tone. Luther claimed that the True Church was being held prisoner by Rome. In the name of Christian freedom, he called for the liberation of the faithful from the Curia’s false understanding of the sacraments and the tyranny of legalism, rote ceremony and the onerous and unbiblical sacramental cycle that had been derived in support. In its place he offered a reading of Christianity with just three

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sacraments (baptism, penance, and the Eucharist, and he would eventually discount penance as well) and insisted that the laity should receive the Lord’s Supper in two kinds (sub utraque specie, bread and wine) rather than the bread alone as in the medieval rite. Foundational to all this was Luther’s theory of justification through faith alone (sola fide), the meaning of which he spelled out in the last work of the series, Freedom of a Christian Man. Ultimately, it was the ‘explosive power’ of this idea, as Diarmaid MacCulloch has remarked, that brought the Protestant Church into being.24 Synthesizing thoughts that can be traced back to his early lectures on the Psalms (1513–15) and the Epistles of Paul (1515–16), Luther, on the basis of a new understanding of sin, reformulated the distinction between human and divine justification and rejected the medieval notion of works’ righteousness in favour of a new theology of humility. Faith alone was the fulcrum of the Christian life. As he wrote: No good work can rely upon the Word of God or live in the soul, for faith alone and the Word of God rule in the soul. Just as the heated iron glows like fire because of the union of fire with it, so the Word imparts its qualities to the soul. It is clear, then, that a Christian has all that he needs in faith and needs no works to justify him; and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law. . . . This is that Christian liberty, our faith, which does not induce us to live in idleness or wickedness but makes the law and works unnecessary for any man’s righteousness and salvation.25

On the basis of this idea of justification, which holds that salvation is an unconditional gift of God, that righteousness is a state beyond ourselves that places the sinner in a new relationship with the divine, and that faith ‘is the means whereby man is led from his moral subjective existence into the final validity of the righteousness of Christ, in which he is preserved for salvation’, the medieval theology of justification and its associated cycle of salvation (with many of the sacraments in tow) was undone.26 The basic reasoning is as follows: in medieval Catholic theology, as we have seen, justification was conditional; it occurred in stages, with the sinner moving along a gradual path towards salvation and back again to a state of sin. With the Reformation principle of justification, in contrast, the medieval cycle was replaced by the unconditional and instantaneous state of righteousness. God becomes the active element in the quest for salvation, the sinner passive; Scripture becomes the sole standard of religious truth and the Word of God the only route to salvation; faith, not works, is necessary for justification; and religion becomes a concern of the worshipping community, no longer the preserve of a sacerdotal elite. It was this idea of faith alone that

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sat at the heart of evangelical theology. It represented a fundamentally new relationship between the Christian believer and the divine.27 In recent years historians have grown increasingly interested in how Luther’s ideas were spread. Different forms of media played a crucial role in this history, but just as important were the many sympathetic men who worked as quasi-missionaries for the faith. That the Reformation owed its early success to a fraternity of reformers is not a recent insight. In his Historia Reformationis, one of the first histories of the Reformation, the Gotha clergyman Friedrich Myconius (1490–1546) reflected on the friends and colleagues who had taken the faith to the parishes: Nicolaus von Amsdorf was in Magdeburg, Johannes Aepinus in Hamburg, Nicolaus Hausmann in Zwickau, Johannes Grau in Weimar, Urbanus Rhegius in Augsburg – the list goes on. Myconius recounted how, in addition to his own efforts in Gotha, he had preached the new theology to congregations in Cologne, Braunschweig, Celle, Essen and Düsseldorf. Men such as these set the evangelical movement in motion. And they were much more than just couriers of Luther’s words; some had a grasp of the faith that made them important theologians in their own right. Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558), for instance, the so-called second apostle of the north, was critical for the shaping of Lutheran ecclesiology in northern Europe, drafting church orders for the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg and Lübeck, the territories of Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, and even the kingdom of Denmark-Norway, where he worked closely with King Christian III (1503–59). A similar type of figure was Johannes Brenz (1499– 1570), reformer of the south German imperial city of Schwäbisch Hall. While serving as chief pastor to his congregation, Brenz also contributed to the introduction of Lutheran reform in Nuremberg, Heilbronn, the margravate of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach and the duchy of Württemberg. By virtue of his opposition to the Eucharistic theology of the Zwinglians, he emerged as Luther’s ‘most trusted disciple’ in the south-west of the Empire and one of the most nuanced Christologists of the age.28 Bugenhagen and Brenz were exceptional cases, both with respect to their learning and their roles in the making of the new Church. In most instances the spread of the faith was reliant on the local parish pastor who pieced together an understanding of the new teaching by way of ‘zungen und federn’ (word of mouth and words on a page) and then turned to Wittenberg for guidance when it came to questions of practical reform. Occasionally, if the local pastor was not sympathetic, the parishioners would take the initiative. The Saxon town of Altenburg secured an evangelical preacher by seeking Luther’s intervention; so too did the parishioners of Leisnig, whose difficultites with the local clergy not only prompted the authorities to contact

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the reformer but inspired Luther to publish a general tract in defence of local initiatives.29 We should also remember that many of the first evangelical preachers were recent Wittenberg graduates, perhaps as many as 16,000 between the years 1520 and 1560. The missionary activity of the first generation of alumni also did much to plant the faith in the years before the authorities intervened. Gottschalk Kruse, for example, a Benedictine monk from the city of Braunschweig, made his way to Wittenberg to get a grounding in the new faith and then became, through Luther’s intervention, an evangelical preacher in Celle. Johannes Briesmann, a Franciscan from Cottbus, spent time studying with Luther and the other reformers in Wittenberg and then set out, doctorate in hand, to spread the faith in Prussia. The Dominican Jacob Strauss travelled all the way to Wittenberg from the Swiss city of Basel to sit at the feet of the reformers. His education complete, Strauss then embarked on a career as a pastor and itinerant preacher in Wertheim, Eisenach and Baden-Baden. Of course, not all of Wittenberg’s students became proselytizers for the faith. Some came as Catholics and left as Catholics, and others, such as the itinerant Swiss student Ulrig Hugwald, eventually broke ties with the Wittenberg reformers and began to drift towards the radicals.30 But the majority of Wittenberg’s students were the foot-soldiers of the Reformation, and this would hold true as well for the students of later Lutheran universities such as Marburg, Jena and Helmstedt. Because the evangelical movement was by its very nature seditious, Luther’s first supporters often tended to be rather impetuous, eclectic thinkers whose opinions about reform changed over time. The Swabian clergyman Johann Eberlin von Günzburg (1470–1533) fits this description. A member of the Franciscan Order, Eberlin first comes to the attention of historians in 1519 while in Tübingen, where he became conspicuous for his fiery sermons and his quarrels with the scholastics. He was also an adept of humanism with, to judge by his later works, a healthy sense of German identity (he would go on to translate the Germania of Tacitus). Transferred in 1521 to an observant priory in Ulm, he began to preach in an evangelical manner and eventually raised the ire of the authorities, among them Luther’s papal opponent Girolamo Aleandro. Dismissed from his post, Eberlin laid down his habit, took up his pen and began to write in defence of the movement. With his first main work, a cycle of pamphlets termed the Fifteen Confederates, we can trace the evolution of his thought. In the manner of an evangelical humanist, he called for a return to Scripture, a reform of the clergy and a more heartfelt, affective type of piety along the lines of Erasmus’s philosophia Christi. In his later pamphlets, however, as he read deeper into the reformers’ works,

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Eberlin began to change his tune. He became less tolerant of the Roman Church, to the point where he termed it the ‘synagogue of Satan’ and repeated Luther’s assertion that the pope was the Antichrist. Convinced now that the monastic life was a perversion of true Christianity, he advised his readers that ‘nowhere are there more of God’s curses than there . . . because one openly teaches and acts against God, and blasphemes all of God’s truth and that of his confessors’.31 He rejected clerical celibacy, dismissed the sacramentals as little more than magic and claimed that the laity were on equal spiritual terms with the clergy. In his work Wolfaria, which was an exercise in utopianism, most of the main principles of evangelical theology were on display: namely, the centrality of Scripture, the rejection of Rome, the idea of the priesthood of all believers, the Pauline insistence on faith, the emphasis on sin, the attack on indulgences and good works, and the appeal to brotherly love. Eberlin did not make sharp distinctions about the theologians he read or the ideas he embraced, as long as they promoted reform. In his eyes Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, Karlstadt and Ulrich von Hutten were all ‘pious and learned’ men in equal measure.32 Reformation ideas were a mix of the new and the old, so we should not be surprised that the first formulations drew from many wells. The early message took in more than just the new teachings on justification through faith alone, the priesthood of all believers and Scripture as the sole source of the faith. There were plenty of age-old concerns preached from the pulpits as well, including late medieval ideas of reformatio, well-worn renditions of anti-clericalism, and thoroughly Catholic teachings on the approaching Judgement Day. Quite often evangelicals would preach or publish a message that, logically enough, reflected their own religious concerns. Thus while a university-educated clergyman might foreground Luther’s message of justification, others might underscore the social or the moral lessons. For Lazarus Spengler, for instance, a prominent member of Nuremberg’s ruling elite, the main message was the appeal to Scripture and the centrality of God’s Word to the integrity of the Christian commune; for the patriotic German nobleman Ulrich von Hutten, Luther’s idea of freedom meant German freedom, the liberation of the German Church and its parishioners from the tyranny of Rome and clerical servitude; for the Swiss bell founder Hans Füssli, reform had more to do with the awakening of the individual religious conscience than the constitution of communes or nations.33 For the defenders of the status quo, it was precisely the disordered, fluid nature of the movement that presented the greatest threat. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479–1552), one of Luther’s first theological opponents, was quick to play up the dangers of what can happen when Scripture falls into the

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wrong hands. Human nature being what it is, wrote Cochlaeus, corrupt, curious and prone to rebellion, and with the parishes full of ‘simple people, who easily believe and freely open their wide-spread, itching ears to every novelty’, it was not surprising that evangelicals, who ‘freely insinuated themselves everywhere by a voluntary pilgrimage through the cities’, were preaching whatever message pleased them at the time. Nor was it surprising that the parishioners, having been told that this was the Word of God finally released from its papal captivity, should start to think that they might be theologians in their own right and ‘attributed so much learning to themselves that they did not blush to dispute about the faith and the Gospel, not only with laypeople of the Catholic party, but also with priests and monks, and furthermore, even with Masters and Doctors of Sacred Theology’. For Cochlaeus, the evangelical movement was the first frenzied rush of open rebellion, and the man to blame for this was Luther himself, who aspired to be ‘all things to all people’.34 ***** The first Protestant churches emerged in the towns and cities scattered throughout the German landscape, particularly the imperial cities.35 Though not as large or as wealthy as the civic republics of Italy, the imperial cities of Germany had a similar sense of local patriotism and self-perception, and they too could lay claim to rich veins of cultural development, even if the fame of their own artists and writers did not resonate quite as far beyond their own walls. The other similarity was in the ideology of public life: like the Italian oligarchs, the patrician rulers of the imperial cities styled themselves in terms of republican Rome, drawing on the same pantheon of values (honesty, integrity, patriotism, charity) and the same elevated rhetoric. When Conrad Celtis wrote a eulogy in praise of Nuremberg, he described the patricians as senatores and praetores, and he made a sharp distinction between the patres and the plebs.36 Of course, the urban landscape was much more complex than the example of the patrician oligarchy of Nuremberg would suggest. In addition to the imperial cities, whose sole overlord was the emperor, there were free cities and territorial towns, the latter subject to comital and episcopal lords. Each was situated within a unique matrix of overlapping, intersecting and countervailing authority. And the picture of intramural relations could be just as complex. In many imperial cities there was a type of mixed constitution where power was divided between merchant elites and local guilds. But whatever its final form, in its origins, the German city is best understood as a political association, bound by oath, joined by common will, created in order to preserve the peace and characterized by a strong sense of

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communal identity, which in some of the larger municipalities borrowed much of its language and imagery from humanist texts.37 The urban commune was the natural environment for the evangelical movement. It had the churches and the preachers, the printers and booksellers, the close energy of political wills and the complex matrix of human relations that infused the Word with such social energy. And there was a deeper affinity as well. From the very outset the preachers had stressed the moral dimensions of the faith. Luther and the Wittenberg theologians may have focused on the soteriological union between the individual and the divine, but for the preachers in the parishes it was more about the covenant between the worshipping community and God. This message had particular resonance for the ruling elite of the towns and cities. Not only was it the heyday of the urban age, a period when powerful imperial cities such as Nuremberg, Augsburg and Strasbourg were breaking free of the last medieval constraints; it was also a time when the theorists and practitioners of rule began to develop new ways of thinking and speaking about the relations of power. The evangelical message, with its emphasis on the godly community bound up in brotherly love, was an ideal support for the humanist philosophy of the common good and its associated virtues of peace, charity, probity and collective salvation.38 Because it was a localized phenomenon, however, urban reform did little to advance the rise of a universal Protestant Church. Most urban reformers in Germany, both secular and spiritual, took their cue from Wittenberg, but ideas were often lost in translation or tailored to suit local needs. Nevertheless, the urban interlude was critical for the history of the Reformation, and for two basic reasons. First, with the formal introduction of the Reformation by the ruling elite of a city or a town, the codification of the Lutheran belief-system began. This was an important step, for it was one thing to make the theological discoveries, as Luther did, or to provide the theological syntheses, as Melanchthon did, but it was still necessary to convert the theology into a meaningful religious system at the level of the parish. By working as a crucible for Reformation ideas, the urban initiative provided the framework for this. With the adoption of the Reformation in Nuremberg, for instance, the precise content of the Lutheran faith was spelled out in a flood of council decrees, public debates, preaching mandates, catechisms, visitation articles and church orders. All the parishioners and clergy within the jurisdiction of the city council were obliged to observe its teachings. Catholicism was discredited; other types of evangelicals, such as Anabaptists or Zwinglians, were expelled. Nuremberg became a Lutheran city, its citizens defined by its faith.39 Second, with the adoption of the Reformation and the rejection of the existing diocesan order, the communes had to provide an alternative

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ecclesiological structure for the faith. On this issue as well, the reformers offered guidance, though much of the spadework was simply done by the city councils as they came to terms with the practical consequences of reform. In Strasbourg, this meant that control over the Church fell to the council, exercised through committees, boards of examiners and above all the church wardens, who, subject to the council, watched over Church affairs. Local and general synods, staffed by both spiritual and secular officials, assumed the functions that had once been carried out by bishops and chapters.40 Ultimately the reform initiative in cities such as Nuremberg and Strasbourg would be eclipsed by the rise of the Protestant state. The German rulers became the custodians of the faith and the Church evolved in territories such as Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg and Württemberg under the watchful eye of the prince. But the initial phase of development, the point at which the evangelical movement moved from a war of words to an experiment in religious reform, occurred in the towns and cities. The other setting for the early Reformation was the rural parish. From the very outset the evangelical pamphleteers had promoted the image of the pious peasant who, like the famous caricature Karsthans, was able to trump the monks in theological debates by deriving his proofs from Scripture. There was no more resonant symbol of the power of the Word than the theologically literate peasant. Karsthans was just a literary trope, however; no authority figure in this period, Catholic or evangelical, really wanted to see a peasant with a Bible in his hand. It was thus of some concern to the reformers in the early 1520s when the Swiss and German peasants began to agitate in defence of the new faith. It began peaceably enough with isolated instances of what has been termed the Communal Reformation. The leaders of rural communes, ostensibly writing in the name of the whole parish, submitted grievances and supplications to their lords and patrons demanding the introduction of communal reform, by which they meant the unrestricted preaching of the Word as well as the right to appoint and dismiss the pastor, supervise his income and judge his teaching. They also proclaimed that Scripture should serve as a guidebook for social and political relations, a notion with profound implications for traditional relations of power.41 The revolutionary potential of this vision was revealed in 1524 and 1525 when rebel bands throughout the Empire took up arms in a series of extended sieges and regional conflicts that historians have termed the Peasants’ War, a wave of unrest that swept through most of the German lands, including Alsace, Franconia, Thuringia, Upper Swabia, Switzerland and Tyrol.42 There was more social complexity than the name would suggest, as historians have long recognized, for it was not just the peasantry who took up arms but a varied range of social actors, from tenant farmers,

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itinerant wage-earners, town artisans, civic patriarchs, defrocked monks and even minor nobles. But the word ‘peasant’ (Bauer in German) best captures the socio-political profile of the rebels, who were primarily legal and political subjects of the realm, and this is what the label was meant to convey. Similarly, there was more to the war than just religion, as there were numerous appeals for economic and legal reforms, but in articulating their demands we see the same appeal to the evangelical faith as in the early communal initiatives. The voice of the early Reformation is unmistakable. The rebels demanded the preaching of the Word of God, the right to appoint the pastor and judge the quality of his teaching, and the elevation of Scripture above the laws of the Church. The first article of the famous Twelve Articles, which circulated in the rebel camps in 1525, will give something of the sense: First, it is our humble desire and request, and the intention and conviction of us all, that henceforth we want to have the full power for a whole congregation to select and elect its own pastor; and also the power to remove him, if he acts improperly. . . . This elected pastor should preach the gospel to us purely and clearly, without any additional human doctrine or commandments. Rather, he should always proclaim the true faith to us, prompting us to petition God for his grace, so that he implants and confirms this same true faith in us. For if his grace is not implanted in us, we will always remain flesh and blood, which are ineffective, as is clearly stated in Scripture: only through true faith can we come to God, and only through his mercy will we be saved. Thus, such an elected leader and pastor is necessary for us and is grounded in Scripture.43

Ultimately this appeal to ‘godly law’ went even further as rebel bands demanded the lifting of fees and dues, access to the waters and the forests of the demesne lands, the elimination of tithes and, at the most extreme, the end of servitude and feudalism. Manifestos circulated, allegedly representing the views of the bands of rebel peasants, demanding the root-and-branch reform of Church and state in accordance with the principles of godly justice while foretelling the rise of Christ’s Kingdom on earth. But it did not lead to lasting change. Neither this vision of a world turned upside-down nor the gathered forces of the common man against the cannons, halberds and harquebuses of the princely armies had any chance of success. The rebel armies were crushed, thousands were slaughtered and huge fines were imposed on the rural and the urban communes. In the end, the crucial importance of the Peasants’ War would not be measured in its gains but rather in its losses. One year after the end of the Peasants’ War the German princes gathered at the Diet of Speyer (1526) and introduced measures to ensure that an uprising on that scale could never happen again. With reference to the

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evangelical movement, which now had the sympathy if not the support of some estates at the Diet, the recess ruled that it was the responsibility of the rulers to conduct their affairs ‘as [they] hope and trust to answer to God and his Imperial Majesty’. Interpreting this as a positive command (or concession) from the emperor to start with the upbuilding of the Reformation Church, a minority of German princes began to dismantle the existing diocesan systems and work out the practical implications of Lutheran reform.44 In all of this, first in Saxony and then in the other principalities such as Hesse and Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, the newly baptized Protestant princes were simply pouring the new faith into the existing ecclesio-political moulds. Wittenberg’s theology replaced Roman Catholicism. It became the only public religion, inviolate and absolute, overseen by a trained ministry and superintended by one public Church. There was a new chain of ecclesiological command, with a fixed hierarchy no less rigid than the diocesan system it replaced, though it was now ministered by a different range of officers and institutions, with a prince as summus episcopus instead of a bishop.45 We will explore this history in greater detail in a later chapter on the process of confessionalization. With these first steps in the German lands, the state began to absorb the energy of the evangelical movement. From this point forward the Lutheran Reformation in central and northern Germany would take on the form of the territorial Church. Towns and cities still nurtured the faith, but the power to shape and shepherd the new Church passed over to the princes. Moreover, with the spread of the faith to the Scandinavian kingdoms, we see the foundation of the first Protestant Churches coterminous with the evolving nation-state. Lutheranism continued to make inroads in central and northern Germany and spread to the surrounding lands, including northeastern France, parts of eastern Europe such as Hungary and Bohemia and the island kingdom of England, where even King Henry VIII, crowned the ‘defender of the faith’ by Leo X for his diatribe against Luther, could not stop the passage of evangelical books across the Channel. Ultimately, however, neither England, eastern Europe nor France would embrace the Lutheran religion wholeheartedly. Instead, the Reformation movement in these lands would owe much more to the strain of evangelical theology that was evolving in Switzerland further to the south. Zurich and Geneva: the roots of reformed Protestantism For centuries now historians have debated the relationship between the rise of the German Reformation under the influence of Luther and the origins of the reform movement in the Swiss lands and southern Germany inspired by the preaching of the Swiss clergyman Huldrych Zwingli. Indeed, the issue

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first surfaced when both men were still alive, and in Zwingli’s opinion the matter was clear-cut. ‘I will not bear Luther’s name,’ he wrote, ‘for I have read little of his teaching and have often intentionally refrained from reading his books. . . . I will have no name but that of my Captain, Christ, whose soldier I am . . . yet I value Luther as highly as anyone alive.’46 There is no need to revisit the arguments here, but for the purposes of the following analysis some degree of contextualization is required. The first point to make is that both movements had many things in common. In Switzerland, as in Saxony, we can see the centrality of the direct witness of Scripture against the assumed errors and inventions of Catholic tradition, the shaping of religious awareness by way of dialogue and debate, and the strength of purpose that resulted when the early evangelical movement joined forces with the ideals of an imagined community. But there were significant differences as well, not only in the ideas of reform that emerged in the Swiss setting, as we will see, but also with reference to the historical context that conditioned the rise of the movement.47 To begin with, unlike Luther’s Wittenberg, Zwingli’s Zurich was not part of a princely territory subject to the rule of a hereditary dynastic elite. Zurich was a city-state in the Swiss Republic, which was a confederation of rural cantons and city-states that owed its existence to an ongoing quest for freedom and autonomy. Its origins were located in the thirteenth century, when the first alliance between the rural territories of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden came into being. Over the course of the next century these founding members were joined by urban powers such as Bern, Zurich and Lucerne as well the rural cantons of Glarus and Zug. On the eve of the Reformation, there were 13 core states, in addition to associated territories such as Graubünden, Valais and St Gall. In social and political terms, it was an incongruous mix, for it was not a single polity with a single head but a loose alliance of rural cantons and city-states ruled by urban patricians, old nobility, craft guilds and wealthy peasants. It had the rudiments of a constitution that provided the framework for a common defence, a federal diet (Tagsatzung) and the rule of law, which preserved the autonomy of the individual member states, but there was very little common purpose or mutual political interest. The only ‘national’ agenda in any meaningful sense was the preservation of freedom from the tyranny of the monarchical states, a goal that had been successfully realized in the late fifteenth century in the wars against Burgundy and Austria.48 The founding father of the Swiss Reformation was Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), stipendiary preacher of the Great Minster in Zurich. In contrast to Luther, Zwingli was not a theologian or a university scholar by profession and he did not belong to a sodality of like-minded reformers along the lines

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of the schola Witebergensis. Although educated at the universities of Vienna and Basel, and thoroughly familiar with both the scholastic and the humanist traditions in the transalpine world, Zwingli was not on the front-lines of a theological battle against Rome in the manner of the Wittenberg reformers. He was a clergyman, ordained in 1506, who first served in Glarus and Einsiedlen before taking up a preaching post in Zurich in 1519. Zwingli’s path to reform was thus different to that of Luther in two significant respects. First, although he corresponded widely with ‘learned and excellent men’ in Zurich and beyond, he was not a contributing member of a theological school; and second, related to this, he did not work up a systematic corpus of evangelical thought on a scale comparable to either early Lutheranism, as synthesized by Melanchthon, or the Calvinist strain that followed. Indeed, Zwingli’s success in Zurich was not so much due to his ability to see through an abstract theory of religious truth as his ability to provide biblical solutions to the religious problems created by evangelical reform. And it was his preaching that created the problems in the first place. Soon after taking up his post as stipendiary preacher of the Great Minster, Zwingli began by adopting the so-called lectio continua method, which entailed working through the books of the Bible without relying on preaching aids for style or substance. He believed that the Word alone was powerful enough to effect a godly transformation of the commune and that Zurich, as a consequence, would emerge as the setting for a Christian rebirth.49 From the very beginning, the Reformation in Zurich was closely stagemanaged by Zwingli and his followers in collusion with the secular authorities. If there was one opening act analogous to Luther’s posting of the theses, it was the breaking of the Lenten fast on Ash Wednesday in April 1522 at the house of the printer Christoph Froschauer, who had been joined by a group of evangelical sympathizers. Zwingli himself did not partake, but he did use the occasion to publish a sermon in defence of their actions and to speak on the need for religious freedom and the primacy of Scripture. In doing this, Zwingli was repeating what he had been preaching since 1520, which was in essence the evangelical Jeremiad against the ‘invented, external worship’ of Catholicism, which included the devotion of saints, religious festivals, some forms of tithes, monastic orders and clerical celibacy. In the Apologeticus Archeteles (1522), his first major statement of belief, Zwingli opened with an appeal to his countrymen to defend the freedom of the Gospel against human doctrines and false prophets, whether they be bishops, popes or general councils. The only certain guide was Scripture. By this time Zwingli had been joined by other reform-minded clergy in Zurich, the most important being Leo Jud (1482–1542), Zwingli’s erstwhile colleague in

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Einsiedeln, who had translated some of Luther’s Latin works into German and was also preaching against false laws and superfluous images while offering baptisms in Swiss-German in the Great Minster. What was particularly unique about the Zurich Reformation was its coming into being as a public process. While the theologians of Wittenberg had to graft their faith onto the Saxon state after the break with Catholicism, the Zurich Reformation was in sync with the interests and the energies of the commune from the very beginning. For his part, Zwingli promised to preach ‘the holy gospel and pure holy Scriptures’ in line with the council’s mandate and avoid issues that gave rise to unrest. As early as his fast sermon of 1522, Zwingli counselled restraint, advising his readers that since the practice was not bad or dishonourable, ‘one should peacefully follow it, as long and as much as the greater portion of men might be offended at its violation’.50 For its part, the council protected Zwingli from the declarations of the Swiss Diet, which demanded the suppression of Luther’s books and associated teaching, and the commissions of the Bishop of Constance, who as the ruling prelate of Zurich was responsible for religious affairs in the city. By way of this incremental and closely managed process of reform, the Reformation took shape in the city. By April 1525, at which stage the Mass according to the Roman rite was abolished, the Zurich council, working together with Zwingli, had overseen the removal of religious images and statues from the city churches, secularized the monasteries and rechannelled the income, reduced the number of religious holidays and put an end to a number of traditional processions, suspended the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Constance, established an independent marriage court and instituted yearly synods for the regulation of the Zurich Church and its dependent clergy. By way of this synergy of interests, Zurich became the first fully reformed, Protestant commune.51 One of the reasons why Zwingli found such a ready following, both within Zurich and in the Swiss lands in general, was that his message hit the right notes with a people conditioned to think in terms of communalism and freedom. This is not to deny the pure theological aspects an equal appeal. Perhaps no other reformer placed so much stress on the principle of Scripture alone (sola Scriptura), for instance. From the very outset of the movement Zwingli proclaimed his belief that ‘every diligent reader, in so far as he approaches with a humble heart, will decide by means of the Scriptures, taught by the Spirit if God, until he attains the truth’.52 No doubt in Switzerland, as in Germany, the evangelical promise of the Word ‘clear and pure’ exercised a powerful appeal. But he also stressed two other themes in his theology that, on the face of it, seemed tailor-made for a Swiss audience.

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First, as touched on above, Zwingli consistently let his theology speak to the themes that were most important and familiar to the city magistracy and its citizens. When he referred to Catholicism as a form of idolatry, a false religion that placed the selfish, fleshly desires of the individual above the universal, spiritual truths of the evangelical faith, there was a strong awareness of the urban ideals of the common good and order beneath the surface; when he spoke of the correlation between faith and regeneration and the need for good works to bear out belief, he was evoking the medieval idea of the sacral city and the moral dimensions of salvation; when he counselled patience, distinguished between anathema and adiaphora, and judged it beyond the gifts of mankind to separate the wheat from the tares, he was in part tailoring his theology to match the realities of power in the Swiss commune.53 Christianity, as he projected it, had become bound up with a specific horizon of perception and expectation, which was the citystate of Zurich. The other issue that hit a chord was the idea of freedom, or what Zwingli spoke of as evangelical freedom (evangelica libertas), which he conceived of in theological terms. Freedom meant liberation from the laws and beliefs that enslaved the soul and the acceptance of the Word. Simply put: the worship of God, as proclaimed by the evangelicals, liberates; the worship of the world, as practised by the Catholic Church, enslaves. This was a formula that could be comprehended in different ways. Freedom could be understood in a political sense as the freedom from tyranny and oppression, which was readily applied to Rome and its laws. Freedom could be understood in a spiritual sense as the emancipation of the individual soul by the preaching of the Gospel. Or freedom could be understood in an anthropological sense, as in the ability to break free of the human tendency to worship false gods or observe false laws. Whatever the reading, the main message was the same: that the essential source of all freedom was Christ as the Spirit reveals him through the Gospel.54 Zwingli’s gospel of faith, Scripture, communal Christianity and evangelical freedom soon spread to the rest of the Swiss lands. Beyond Zurich, the first areas to rally round the movement were Appenzell, St Gall and the lower valley of Graubünden. Next came the two large cities of Bern and Basel, and from there it moved into southern Germany and most significantly into Strasbourg, Constance and Augsburg, three of the most powerful cities in the southern Empire, where reformers openly preached Zwingli’s theology from the pulpit and printers published his tracts.55 Despite this early success, however, Zwingli’s vision of a Switzerland united under the banner of evangelical freedom never became a reality. On the contrary, the emergence of a powerful evangelical movement in a

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confederation of cantons and city-states that still had a substantial Catholic core gave rise to a confessional war, the first of its kind in Europe. Once all the sides were lined up, and with the evangelical faith condemned at an important religious disputation in Baden (1526), the tensions and denunciations eventually gave rise to the Kappel Wars, which occurred in two stages. The First Kappel War broke out in 1529, provoked by evangelical sermonizing in those areas or common lordships that were ruled jointly by Protestant and Catholic states. Widespread conflict was averted but the problems remained, and two years later Zurich went to war once again with the Catholic states, although this time it did come to a pitched battle ending in defeat and the death of Zwingli on the field of battle. The result was the Second Peace of Kappel (November 1531), which was a major setback for the Zwinglian movement. Not only was Zwingli dead, and with him the vision of a united Confederacy fighting for the cause of the Gospel, but the evangelical party within Zurich was pressed back as well.56 This was a turning point in the Protestant Reformation. To begin with, it was a clear defeat for Zurich and its visions of evangelical imperialism. The Second Peace of Kappel forced Zurich to renounce its alliances with foreign powers and pay substantial indemnities, and it was no longer able to influence the religious status of the mandated territories. As a consequence, the Swiss Reformation lost much of its early momentum. Moreover, with the Lutherans now united in spirit under the shared rubric of the Augsburg Confession (1530) and joined together in the Schmalkaldic League (1531), a politico-military alliance led by the powerful Lutheran princes of Saxony and Hesse, the heartland of Protestant Europe clearly shifted to the north. Mindful of the change in circumstances, powerful cities such as Bern, Augsburg and Strasbourg started to move towards Lutheranism. Meanwhile, the Swiss Confederation embarked on its long experiment with religious plurality. Divisions between the Protestants and the Catholics remained. Indeed, some areas, such as Glarus, Graubünden, Thurgau and Rheintal, became biconfessional, sharing time and space in the same churches. Although Protestantism still made gains after Zwingli’s death, particularly when Bern began to extend its influence into the Pays de Vaud and other French-speaking lands, the initial vision of a uniformly Protestant Confederation reached an impasse. Things only started to improve for the Swiss evangelicals in the 1540s, when a second surge of Helvetic Protestantism changed the fortunes of the movement. But by this stage the heartland of the movement was no longer Zurich but rather the city-state of Geneva, far to the south-west near the borders of France. *****

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The Reformation in Geneva was brought to completion by John Calvin (1509–64), the most important of the second generation of Protestant thinkers and, theologically speaking, the main architect of the Reformed tradition. As one recent authority has remarked, even when we take into account the significance of other Reformed figures such as Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger or the Polish theologian John à Lasco, Calvin ‘unquestioningly merits the leading role traditionally assigned him in the history of the Reformed tradition’.57 Calvin was not a disciple of Zwingli, but his theology took up many of the themes first developed in Zurich and in his career as a reformer he did much to preserve the legacy of its Reformation. Born in Noyon in the French province of Picardy, John Calvin first studied in Paris, where he read for an arts degree at the Collège de Montaigu, and then went on to take law in Bourges and Orléans. Similar to Luther’s own story, in the end Calvin went against the wishes of his father and did not pursue a career in law. Instead, influenced by his reading of French humanism, Calvin devoted his time to the study of classical languages and ancient texts, particularly after his return to Paris. The first fruits of this intellectual labour was an edited commentary of Seneca’s On Clemency (1532). Some scholars took note of the book, but Calvin did not become renowned for his work on ancient philosophy. When he did come to the attention of the learned world, it was through his association with the early evangelical circles in Paris. When his friend Nicolas Cop, who had recently been appointed rector of the University of Paris, used the occasion of his inaugural address to give an openly Lutheran sermon and thereby bring down the wrath of the Catholic authorities, Calvin was forced to join the other evangelicals and leave France. Stopping in Basel, where he drafted the first edition of the Institutes, he then moved on to Strasbourg with plans to pursue a quiet life of scholarship. While passing through Geneva, however, Calvin was recognized by the local reformer Guillaume Farel, who convinced him to stay in the city and help him see through the Reformation. As Calvin later recalled it, ‘he [Farel] proceeded to utter a threat that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquillity of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the necessity was so urgent’.58 With some justice, early modern Reformed Protestants looked to this union of the refugee French evangelical and the recently liberated episcopal city on the borders of the Swiss Confederacy as the historical point of origin of their religion. It was certainly a fortuitous coming together of person and place, and one that was readily cast by later writers in providential terms. Politically speaking, Geneva, like most of the cities and territories where the Reformation first took hold, was predisposed to find certain aspects of the evangelical message appealing. Long under under the domination of the

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dukes of Savoy and the Genevan bishops, Geneva was in the midst of a struggle for independence when the first reformers arrived. Consequently, the sharp tone of anti-Catholicism and the evangelical message of Christian freedom, both of which were quickly appropriated by the preachers of political freedom, provided welcome support for the party of independence. Moreover, in order to defend itself against Savoyard aggression, Geneva had entered into an alliance with the Swiss cities of Fribourg and Bern. This enabled the Protestant magistracy of Bern to foster the rise of the Reformation in Geneva, especially after the alliance with Catholic Fribourg came to an end. Farel, for instance, had first come to the city under Bernese safe conduct. Thus when Calvin arrived in 1536, with the rudiments of a Protestant Reformation already in place thanks to the work of Farel, there was no resident bishop to contend with, no powerful Catholic clerical presence, but an extant group of local patriots who readily associated the early Reformation with the struggle for local autonomy.59 Despite Geneva’s later image as the Reformation’s New Jerusalem, in the beginning a substantial portion of the citizenry did not want any part of Calvin’s new Church. During his initial stay in the city, for instance, as the clergy and the magistracy quarreled over the right of excommunication, the tensions reached the point where Calvin was forced to flee the commune and seek refuge in Strasbourg. Even after his return to Geneva in 1541, propitiated by the council with the promise of a free hand to develop his model of Church governance, antagonistic factions still worked against him, often led by men of high standing. Numbered among Calvin’s enemies were Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, former Carmelite theologian and physician, who challenged Calvin’s teaching on predestination; Ami Perrin, the Genevan nobleman and city magistrate, who led the struggle against the power of Calvin and his pastors over issues of discipline and excommunication; and, most famously, Michael Servetus, the Spanish theologian, whose views on the Trinity eventually led to his imprisonment by the Genevan magistrates. Ultimately Calvin was able to overcome his opponents (both Bolsec and Perrin were banished, and Servetus was burned at the stake), but it was a long-fought battle and one that few of the other main urban reformers had to face.60 But Calvin’s importance to Protestantism transcends his history in Geneva. Even before he arrived in the city, the first draft of the Institutes of Christian Religion (1536), his masterpiece of Reformed thought, was complete. Just six chapters long in its first edition, and more of a catechism or a teaching tool than an extended dogmatic text, by 1559 the Latin version numbered 82 chapters in four books, making it the most comprehensive statement of Protestant belief to appear before the age of orthodoxy.61 At a

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time when many reformers were still caught up in polemical exchanges over specific aspects of Catholicism, Calvin offered a meticulous breakdown, article by article, of the contents of the evangelical religion. In the 1559 edition of the Institutes, for instance, the discussion is ordered around the following themes: the doctrine of divine creation and providence; the doctrine of redemption and sin; the application of this redemption to the faithful (faith, regeneration, justification, predestination); and the nature of the godly community – by which is meant the Church, the ministry and the sacraments. Although no single theological principle unites the work, it is teleologically structured around the figure of Jesus Christ, in both his divine and human aspects. And it is unremittingly concerned with what mankind must do in order to stand in a right relationship with the divine. Indeed, it reveals this concern in the opening line: ‘Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.’62 Calvin was greatly influenced by Luther, and he held the reformer in high esteem, but his theology was closer in kind to the Swiss mode of evangelical thought than the teaching of Wittenberg. There was the same stress on the moral dimensions of Christianity, for instance, the idea that salvation was as much about the whole as the parts. But in truth he does not fit neatly into either camp. Like all mainstream reformers, he taught justification through faith alone and rejected any suggestion that grace might be earned or mediated by a priest. Yet he was more inclined to speak of a ‘path’ to justification than Luther, thus stressing sanctification as well as justification, and he emphasized how the believer might participate in the grace of Christ and share in his benefits. Similarly, he adopted something of a middle way in the debate over the Eucharist. Calvin rejected Catholic teaching yet did not embrace Luther’s notion of ubiquity, nor did he side with Zwingli and his symbolic interpretation of the sacrament. Instead, he taught that the bread and wine, though having no power in and of themselves as signs, raised up the heart and spirit of the faithful and thus, through the Word, brought them closer to the presence of God. Finally, again like all mainstream reformers, Calvin emphasized the importance of Scripture for knowledge of the faith and the pursuit of a Christian life. According to him, the entire world was a ‘mirror of divinity’ that could be perceived through the ‘spectacles’ of Scripture. But he was quick to place restrictions on the liberties that might be taken with the sacred text, and that made him more of an exegetical hardliner than Zwingli.63 In terms of his ‘uniqueness’ in relation to the thought of Luther and Zwingli, however, Calvin is perhaps best remembered for his views on two themes that came to mark out the Reformed tradition: discipline and providence.

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All the Churches in the Reformed tradition emphasized the importance of godly conduct for the creation of a Christian society, and indeed to the point that discipline became one of the main ‘marks’ of the Church alongside the preaching of the Word and the ministering of the sacraments. But the Genevan Church was particularly concerned with godly order, as numerous contemporaries pointed out, and it was particularly effective in imposing it. The reasons for this were rooted in Calvin’s ecclesiology, his notions of Church rule. On his return to the city in 1541 he drew up a practical guide for the ordering of the Genevan Church, all of which he spelled out in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541). In place of the remnants of the Catholic system, Calvin established the foundations of the presbyterial-synodal form of church rule that would henceforth characterize most forms of Reformed Protestantism. Henceforth, four core offices comprised the body of ecclesiastical officials in Geneva: pastors, teachers, elders and deacons. Paramount was the office of pastor, for these were the men charged with the preaching of the Word and the administering of the sacraments. With a view to the history of Protestant order, however, the most significant office was that of elder, for these were the agents of the disciplinary process, the men charged to uphold what Calvin termed ‘the honour of Christ’ by ensuring that the commune of Geneva became and remained Christian.64 It was Calvin’s organizational genius in the approach to Christian order, facilitated by his ability to bear out present circumstance with appeals to Scripture, that made him the most effective disciplinarian of the Reformation. With the introduction of the Ordinances of 1541, not only was the liturgy reworked, the number of holy days reduced, the sacraments pared down to baptism and communion, the walls of the churches whitewashed and the pulpits repositioned, but a new form of Church rule emerged to hold the new Christian order in place. Superseding the former episcopal hierarchy was the Company of Pastors, a body made up of the urban and rural clergy responsible for doctrine and clerical discipline. But even more important was the consistory. Comprised of 24 secular and spiritual officials, the consistory watched over Christian discipline. Research on the consistory records would suggest that the main concern was with crimes that threatened familial or sexual norms, such as adultery, prostitution, premarital intercourse and rape. But it swept a wide range of sins up in its net, from drinking, dancing and public violence, to superstition (which included Catholicism) and blasphemy.65 And it seems to have worked. Johann Valentin Andreae, a Lutheran visitor to Geneva, claimed that the discipline of morals in the city was without parallel in Europe: ‘all cursing, gambling, luxury, quarreling, hatred, conceit, deceit, extravagance,

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and the like, to say nothing of the greater sins, are prevented. What a glorious adornment – such a purity of morals – for the Christian religion!’66 The other theme that distinguished Calvin’s ministry in Geneva, at least in the eyes of later generations, was the intertwined concepts of providence and predestination, both of which were corollaries of his all-consuming preoccupation with the sovereignty of God. Although neither concept was treated in much detail in the Institutes, partly because Calvin was reluctant to probe too deeply into mysteries he considered beyond human understanding, they were nevertheless at the very heart of his mature theology, which was increasingly absorbed in questions relating to the election and damnation of Fallen Man. In Calvin’s thought, both concepts were explicit reminders that God is the all-powerful primary cause, that he superintends the universe according to a ‘secret plan’ beyond the comprehension of humankind, and that it is the duty of the faithful, in so far as it was possible, to devote their lives to living in accordance with this plan. For even though much remains hidden behind mysteries and secondary causes, all believers must do their best to ‘inquire and learn from Scripture what is pleasing to God so that they may strive toward this under the Spirit’s guidance’.67 Not unlike his ideas on discipline, Calvin’s teaching on providence proved a very effective way of ordering the Christian world, for it could encompass all other aspects of the faith within the folds of its logic. The question of sanctification could be illustrated with reference to God’s secret plan, for just as God was assuredly ‘constructing, redeeming, and restoring’ his kingdom on earth, so too was he sanctifying the souls of the elect. Similarly, Calvin’s theology of the social and political order, which was essentially a conservative scheme, could be justified with reference to providentialism, for God worked his will through history, which meant that the rulers and the institutions of the day were part of the divine order and, unless they were explicitly violating God’s Word, must be honoured and obeyed. And, of course, the idea of predestination itself, which Calvin defined as ‘God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man’, not only helped to explain the place of the believer within the economy of salvation but made it possible for the clergy to relate the essentials of evangelical theology to the spiritual and psychological dimensions of human experience. Election, it was claimed, was something that might be revealed in daily life, through an increase in charity, for instance, or as a steady stream of brotherly love. God’s hand was everywhere.68 Speaking in very general terms, there were two types of reaction that might follow from the ‘terrible decree’ of predestination. At one extreme, it could easily cripple the faithful and push them to the edge of despair. Later Protestants were inclined to dwell on the negative aspects of predestination,

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and indeed one of the underlying motives of the later revivalist movements was to break free of the decree. But there was another response as well, and it tended to have the opposite effect. For some parishioners, the doctrine of predestination could work to liberate. Assuming that one was among the elect could serve to empower the pious individual and provide a profound sense of purpose and direction to the unfolding of daily life. ‘I honour and glorifie my God,’ wrote one Puritan believer of this cast of mind, ‘who hath passed by so many thousands as he hath done, and left them in their sins, and yet hath chosen me freely before the foundation of the world was laid.’69 Hundreds of spiritual diaries from the seventeenth century were written in the same spirit. And there are broader traces as well. Whole nations of Protestants might start to think they were in a special bond of fraternity with God and thus act out God’s greater purposes. In such a mindset, which was foundational to the early modern sense of national identity, it was easy to reach the conclusion that all laws and constraints that opposed or undermined this purpose were ungodly and had to be overcome.70 One of the reasons why Reformed Protestantism became such a revolutionary force in northern Europe may well be due to the impact of this terrible decree of destiny. Ensconced in his godly redoubt in Geneva until his death in 1564, Calvin paid witness to, and partly orchestrated, the spread of his brand of Protestantism throughout central and northern Europe. Within his lifetime it had surpassed Lutheranism as the most dynamic variant of evangelical reform. To be fair, much work had already been done by Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75), Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, a tireless author and correspondent, who had been able to preserve and eventually expand the Zwinglian legacy. In 1549 his efforts resulted in the Consensus Tigurinus, a joint theological statement with Geneva. But Calvin built on Bullinger’s work, establishing a huge network of correspondence while flooding the bookshelves with a steady stream of publications for an international readership, often directing his texts at the ruling elite in the hope that they might emerge as patrons of the faith. By mid-century Reformed communities had taken root in important urban sanctuaries such as Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Aachen and Wesel. And even more importantly for the course of Protestant history, it had started to emerge as the favoured religion in some nation-states, including the Palatinate, England, Scotland, the Dutch Republic and parts of Poland-Lithuania and Hungary. Historians have come up with a long list of reasons why this occurred, ranging from the deep motives of religious psychology to the pragmatics of rule. Opinions vary, but what seems common to all of them is the emphasis placed on the transient nature of the faith. It travelled well. The majority of

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first-generation Reformed Protestants did not belong to a public Church but rather acquired their sense of community by way of the traffic of ideas, personal contacts and shared experience. As a consequence, the Reformed Protestants, more so than the Lutherans, were able to look beyond the distinctions of traditional Christian society and imagine themselves as members of a Church united by the higher ties of faith. The final goal was a sacral community fashioned and regulated by Scripture alone, and this necessarily meant that many of the Reformed Protestants were rootless and mobile, ready to displace themselves in the search for their own perfect school of Christ.71

CHAPTER

3

Religious Division Orthodoxy was an indispensable condition of early modern Christianity. Almost without exception, scholars argued that there could be no lasting order in Church or state without a uniform corpus of beliefs. Without it, religion would descend into chaos, ordered rule would give way to anarchy and mankind would lapse (even further) into sin. This ideal of orthodoxy, of course, was as old as the faith, set down in Paul’s injunction to avoid division within the community (I Corinthians 1.10) and prescribed in the earliest confessions. But it became particularly important during the age of Reformation, as the rise of religious division did away with the old order and each Church claimed to be the sole custodian of religious truth. That is why there was such a profusion of confessional statements and credal syntheses, each spelling out in detail the content of the faith and the dangers of heterodoxy. In Europe the tone was set by the Augsburg Confession (1530), Lutheranism’s first attempt at a universal creed, which ended in the hope that the Confession, with God’s help, would be enough to prevent ‘any new and godless teaching from creeping into our churches and gaining the upper hand in them’.1 The other Churches of Reformation Europe published syntheses of a similar spirit, each one itemizing the content of proper belief while emphasizing the dangers of nonconformity. Despite the deep-seated impulse to preserve an ancient, unmoving, uncontested core of Christian orthodoxy, and indeed largely because of it, no other period of history has ever experienced so much Christian discord as the early modern age. With the fragmentation effected by the Reformation, Europe became a patchwork of antagonistic faiths, each claiming to be true in all essentials to the religion preached through Christ in Scripture. The result was unremitting quarrels, conflicts and the further fragmentation of Christianity. This chapter will explore three examples of religious division from this period, each of which was fundamentally important for the course of Christian history. It will begin with a study of the debates and divisions that emerged with the Reformation concerning the meaning of the Eucharist, 67

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which was the central sacrament of the late medieval Church. If the body of Christ (corpus Christi) had been the great symbolic and sacramental lodestone of medieval Christianity, with the Reformation it became the source of dispute and dissension, first as the point of division between the Protestants and the Catholics, and then amongst the Protestants themselves. This will be followed by an extended survey of the course of Catholic reform, which can be conceived as both a continuation of late medieval developments and a specific response to the challenge of Protestantism. The great rupture of Latin Christendom was not just caused by the Protestant Churches pulling away. Catholicism renewed and refashioned itself in the early modern period and created a dynamic of reform that was at least the equal of the Protestant phenomenon. The final discussion will take up the greatest division of them all, namely the schism between Latin Christendom and those Churches of Orthodox Christianity in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Of course, the schism between East and West precedes the age of Reformation by centuries, and Eastern Christianity had experienced other moments of division in the course of its history. But the early modern period was a particularly testing time for Eastern Christianity in the face of the Ottoman advance, and many of the Churches soon found themselves caught up in the religious divisions of the West as well. Corpus Christi and the end of medieval unity In the bull Unam Sanctam (1302), perhaps the most categorical assertion of spiritual supremacy ever issued by the papacy, Pope Boniface VIII conceived of the Church in the following terms: That there is one holy, Catholic and apostolic church we are bound to believe and to hold, our faith urging us, and this we do firmly believe and simply confess; and that outside this church there is no salvation or remission of sins, as her spouse proclaims in the Canticles, ‘One is my dove, my perfect one. She is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her’ (Canticles 6:8); which represents one mystical body whose head is Christ, while the head of Christ is God. In this church there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. . . . This is that seamless garment of the Lord which was not cut but fell by lot.2

The analogy to the Church as the body of Christ, as a corpus Christi, begins with Paul, but to speak of the Church as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum Christi) as Unam Sanctam does was a fairly recent development. Whereas previously the mystical body of Christ was taken to mean the sacrament of the Eucharist, by the fourteenth century it was beginning to signify the Church as a whole.3 Aquinas, for instance, used it in this sense:

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namely, as a term embracing the body of the faithful, past, present and future, as well as the miracle of the Mass. This conflation of meaning is significant in a number of respects, not least because of what it reveals about the importance of the Eucharist to late medieval Christianity. The Church was not just likened to the body of Christ; it was the body of Christ. And it was by way of the sacrament of the Mass, the central sacrament of the middle ages, that the body of the faithful partook in the benefits of universal salvation within the confines of their local church. No sacramental act was more terribly potent, and no metaphor of faith more resonant, than the mystical body of Christ, and all believers were necessarily bound by its terms in a seamless garment, as Unam Sanctam proclaimed. With the rise of Protestant Christianity, it was no longer possible to comprehend Latin Christianity in these terms. In place of one body of the faithful there was now a number of different bodies all claiming to be the one true corpus mysticum devolved from the age of the Apostles. In support of their claims to authenticity, each of these communities had to develop or, in the case of Catholicism, confirm a theology of the Eucharist that defined in precise terms the economy of the sacred in relation to this central sacrament and how the Church as a whole could be understood as the earthly manifestation of the body of Christ. It is worth examining these debates, however briefly, in order to give a sense of how fine theological distinctions could give rise to Christian divisions. As in many aspects of late medieval Catholic belief, there was no uniform theology of the Eucharist but a range of different theories embraced by different schools. On the central principles, however, there was agreement. It was considered the main sacrament, ‘the sacrament of each of the other sacraments’ as Nicholas of Cusa put it, because Christ was not just present in power but substance as well.4 Without this substantial presence, the other sacraments had no meaning. Equally, most mainstream thinkers spoke of it as a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice, instituted by God, which contributed to the salvation of the believer irrespective of the quality of the priest. Its efficacy was intrinsic, a notion captured in the Latin tag ex opere operato, meaning ‘from the work done’. Beyond these basic assumptions, however, there was still much that was up for debate. The main issue concerned the Real Presence, that is, how the body of Christ could be substantially present at the moment of consecration and take the place of the elements of bread and wine. By the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) it had become common to invoke the theory of transubstantiation in order to make sense of this mystery. Based on the terminology and conceptual machinery of Aristotelianism, transubstantiation made distinctions between form and matter, substance and accidence. The bread and wine retained their

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accidental forms (the secondary characteristic) while acquiring the substance of the body of Christ (which was, as it were, beneath the accidental forms). Although it did not become an article of the faith, transubstantiation remained the dominant theory up to the eve of Reformation, not least because it had the endorsement of Aquinas.5 A modern scholar has referred to medieval Eucharistic theory as ‘the quantum mechanics of the age’.6 This is a helpful analogy, for it not only alludes to the significance of the topic and the complexity behind it but also the knowledge it claimed to relate. The theory of transubstantiation elucidated the nature of higher reality for the medieval mind, that is, how the supernatural related to the natural world and how it might be captured or observed in terms of place, quantity and time. Gallons of ink were spilled explaining the physics of transubstantiation effected by the phrase ‘this is my body’ (hoc est corpus meum), the words of consecration. Some thinkers argued it should be understood as the coexistence of matter in one place, the bread and wine being consubstantive with the flesh and blood of Christ. Some spoke of annihilation, the complete substitution of one element by another. Others preferred the idea of transmutation, focusing on the words of consecration as the mysterious catalyst of change rather than the elements behind it. Related to all this was the question of the Real Presence. Much was at stake in this discussion, for defining the metaphysics of Christ’s presence had direct implications for the rituals, liturgies and spaces designed to accommodate it, as well as the purpose and the power of the clergy and the Church that facilitated that presence.7 The most substantial debate in this regard related to the language used to comprehend the Eucharist. Should Christ’s presence at the sacrament be understood in a symbolic or figurative sense or was his presence substantive and actual? Another debate with a long life was that concerning the validity of the terms used to describe that reality, a dilemma of particular interest to the followers of William of Ockham and the schools of nominalism. Could the meaning of the Eucharist be captured in the terms and the theories used to describe it? And was God necessarily bound by those terms? All these questions, fundamental to the faith, were still being debated on the eve of the Reformation, and they played a central role in the religious divisions that emerged. As Montaigne later remarked, ‘how many quarrels, and what momentous ones, have been caused in the world by the uncertainty as to the meaning of the syllable Hoc!’8 It is thus little wonder that the theology of the Eucharist became one of the most contentious fields of the early Reformation, for its language and concepts bore the weight of so much faith. On the basis of the principles of early evangelical thought, Luther and other reformers developed a theology

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of the Eucharist that completely redefined Christian thinking on the sacrament and how the body of Christ should be understood in relation to the community of the faithful. Everything, from the symbolic meaning of the host to the physics of consecration, was reconsidered and reconceived. When Luther first wrote on the Eucharist he spoke of its figurative and symbolic sense. Within a few years, however, particularly after spiritualist readings of the sacrament began to drift up into northern Europe, Luther became more conservative in his stance and turned from the tropes of symbolism and memorialism to a categorical emphasis on the words ‘this is my body’ as testimony of the Real Presence. Until the end of his life, Luther maintained that the bread and wine were the sacramental forms ‘under which are [Christ’s] true body and blood’ and upheld belief in the Real Presence, even if the terms used to define it, such as ubiquity and consubstantiation, were different and the corporeality they described was, he claimed, beyond human understanding.9 But if Luther’s realist reading of the words ‘this is my body’ betrayed his ‘medieval’ side, in other respects his ideas on the Eucharist represented a radical rejection of Catholic theory and practice. He dismissed the scholastic theory of transubstantiation as the overly complex Aristotelian jargon of the schools, insisted that the parishioners receive both the bread and the wine in the sacrament rather than just the bread as in the medieval rite (which came to be known as communion sub utraque specie, meaning ‘both kinds’), and taught that the clergyman should face the congregation and preach in the vernacular. More importantly, Luther denied that the act of consecration ministered by the priest effected salvation ex opere operato – that is, as an act efficacious in and of itself that leaked grace into the aisles. It was not a miracle conjured for the benefit of the congregation, nor was it merely a momentary re-enactment of Christ’s saving sacrifice framed and orchestrated by an ordained priest. On the contrary: rather than a sacrifice it was a testament, and rather than an instance of salvation it was the eternal sum total of Christ’s incarnation and his promises of grace. Moreover, it was not the act of consecration that was important or the rituals surrounding it. The power of the sacrament resided in the words of consecration, words that could only be captured and comprehended by a Christian with proper faith. As Luther wrote in The Babylonian Captivity, the only aid to communion was faith, for faith alone prepared the believer for ‘laying hold of the Word of Christ’ and fulfilled the promises of the sacrament, though ‘only by the person who believes for himself, and only to the extent that he believes’.10 Once the sacrament was defined in these terms there was no longer any justification for the thaumaturgical drama of the medieval rite or the belief that the priest, by way of the rite, was parcelling out salvation to the congregation.

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As radical as Luther’s re-reading of the sacrament was, for some reformers he had not gone far enough. This challenge came from two directions: first, from within Wittenberg itself; and second, from Switzerland and the southern Empire. Even in Wittenberg, however, the ideas seem to have been imported from elsewhere. According to a sixteenth-century biography of the medieval theologian Wessel Gansford (the Vita Wesseli Groningensis), in 1521 Hinne Rode, rector of the Brethren of the Common Life in Utrecht, arrived in Wittenberg with a manuscript treatise on the Lord’s Supper. The purported author was Cornelius Henricxz Hoen (d.1524), an affluent court lawyer at The Hague. Whether Hoen wrote the tract is not clear, but what does seem clear is that his manuscript passed through the hands of some of the Wittenberg reformers and eventually left its mark. This was significant, for Hoen’s so-called Epistle on the Eucharist was the first systematic defence of the symbolic interpretation of the sacrament to surface during the Reformation. For this reason, it has a claim to be one of the foundation texts of both the radical and the Swiss Protestant traditions, both of which interpret the phrase ‘this is my body’ in a symbolic or figurative manner. In the Epistle, Hoen not only rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation along Lutheran lines; he also claimed that the sacrament had been instituted as a pledge of forgiveness, in the same way that a token or a ring represents a pledge or a promise. The word ‘this’ should not be taken literally, Hoen proposed, but symbolically in the sense that it signifies (significat) the body of Christ, just as the words rock, vine, door and way symbolized other aspects of his being.11 According to the Vita, Hoen’s manuscript was in Luther’s hands sometime in 1521. He read it, rejected it and even wrote against it in 1523. Andreas Karlstadt, however, reacted differently. Karlstadt had followed Luther in rejecting the Catholic notions of sacrifice and transubstantiation, but over time he began to move away from Luther’s reading of the sacrament and head in the direction of the language used in Hoen’s Epistle. Although Zwingli is remembered as Luther’s great adversary in this field, it was Karlstadt who first published against Luther on the Eucharist. Karlstadt seems to have taken some things from Hoen, though traces of Hussite belief were also in the mix and, later, Zwinglian and Sacramentarian ideas. Yet there were clearly unique emphases in his thought, in particular Karlstadt’s typological interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, which spoke of it as an ‘ardent remembrance’. Rather than proposing that the words ‘this is my body’ signified the bread offered to the faithful in a sacramental re-creation of the meal, Karlstadt placed stress on the subsequent words ‘given for you’ and argued that it was Christ’s body, rather than the bread, that was meant in the passage (i.e. that Christ was actually pointing to his body). In short, it was not

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the re-creation of the New Testament supper but the Old Testament prophecy that was the essence of the sacrament, and this could only be experienced in a symbolic or typological sense.12 On reading Karlstadt’s views, Luther quickly declared that his former colleague ‘has deserted us . . . and become our worst enemy’, though he was soon to face a more important antagonist in Zurich.13 Within mainstream Protestantism, the most influential symbolic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper was that of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, whose thought on this theme is widely considered to be foundational for the Reformed tradition. Zwingli was aware of developments in Saxony. Hoen’s Epistle, published anonymously in Worms and Strasbourg in 1525, had reached him years before and he had referred to the work and its author by name. More difficult to disentangle is the influence of Karlstadt. In this case the current may have been flowing in the opposite direction: Zwingli’s symbolic interpretation antecedes that of Karlstadt, and the two parted company in a number of ways. And yet there is no doubt that Karlstadt’s Eucharistic theology affected the Swiss tradition.14 In terms of intellectual influence, though, the most plausible candidate is Erasmus. Consistent with the stress he placed on inner spirituality at the expense of outer form, Erasmus regularly referred to the Mass as a memorial or a commemoration while casting doubts on the theory of transubstantiation. The essence of the sacrament was its ability to effect, by way of contemplation, a type of spiritual union powerful enough to transform both the individual and the commune.15 Whatever the formula that went into the making of Zwingli’s Eucharistic thought, there is no doubt that it represented a radical break with both the Catholic and the evolving Wittenberg tradition. In his view, sacraments did not transfer grace or nourish faith, nor were they soteriologically bound up with the preaching of the Word. Properly understood, a sacrament was akin to an oath; indeed, as the humanist Zwingli knew well, before it was appropriated by the Church, the Latin word sacramentum had been a military term for an oath. Thus a sacrament, including the sacrament of the Eucharist, was meant in the sense of a pledge of obedience to God and to the worshipping community. Far removed from any sense of the infusion of grace common to the medieval conception, in Zwingli’s view the Lord’s Supper was a type of public memorial, a commemoration of the historical act of sacrifice, which, when received in faith, led to a sense of inward thanksgiving that in turn nurtured a love of God and fellow Christians. In Zwingli’s own words, ‘the Lord’s Supper, if it is not a sacrifice for the soul, is a remembrance and a renewal of that which once happened, which is valid for all eternity, and which is dear enough to render satisfaction to God’s justice for our sins’.16

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In emphasizing the memorial aspect of the Lord’s Supper, Zwingli was using the same mode of symbolic interpretation as Karlstadt and Hoen. Consequently, there was no concession to Luther’s insistence on the Real Presence: according to Zwingli, the Latin word est does not mean ‘is’ but rather ‘signifies’, and Christ’s reference to his body is a figure of speech. Nor is it possible for Christ to be corporeally present as Luther and the Catholics presuppose, for as Scripture relates, he sits at the right side of God. The most Zwingli would concede with reference to the Real Presence was Christ’s ‘assurance to the weak’, but in essence he held that there was nothing present at the sacrament but the faith of the recipients and the reality of their communal pledge. Two analogies used by the reformers might help to illustrate the difference. In trying to explain his understanding of the Real Presence, Luther compared the elements to a red-hot iron in which fire and iron coexist unchanged. Both natures obtain. Zwingli spoke instead of the sparks that shoot out from struck flint. The fire is not coterminous; it only appears, momentarily, when the flint is struck, just as Christ is only present under the form of the bread when he is sought in faith.17 There were other varieties of thought in the symbolic mode. Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531), reformer of Basel, conceived of the Lord’s Supper in similar terms to Zwingli. While rejecting the theory that Christ was corporeally present, he too spoke of the sacrament as an act of commemoration, a ritual inscribing of the memory of the sacrifice on the heart of the believer. And yet Oecolampadius did not follow Zwingli in all respects. In his early formulations, even after he had clearly broken with Catholicism, he was still willing to speak of the Mass as a sacrifice (though with the stress on commemoration), and there are still traces in his later writings of a concern with the Real Presence, though presence in this context is understood in the sense of faith: Christ grants the gift of faith, faith lifts believers beyond themselves and to a greater awareness of Christ, and the end result is a form of union that brings us closer to God.18 Similar in its language, but more important in terms of influence, was the Eucharistic theology of John Calvin, which in some ways steered a middle course between Wittenberg and Zurich. Calvin held that the sacrament of the Eucharist was an external symbol vouchsafed to humanity by Christ (one of the ‘marks of his glory’) that made use of the finite and the physical in order to reveal invisible truths. It was thus an act of commemoration rather than a conjuration of sacramental energy. Calvin taught that proper communion was a lifelong project that led, incrementally, to a greater understanding of Christ. At the same time, however, while confessing that it remained a mystery (arcanum) that escaped human reason, he did teach that

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Christ was substantially present for those with proper faith, joining his body with the bodies of true believers and imputing its attributes of redemption, righteousness and eternal life. In Calvin’s words, the Lord’s Supper comprehended two realities at once, ‘physical signs, which, when placed in front of our eyes, represent to us (according to our feeble capacity) invisible things; and spiritual truth, which is at the same time represented and displayed through the symbols themselves’.19 Thus by the mid-sixteenth century Protestant Christianity understood the Eucharist, and with it Christ and his relationship to the Church, in radically different terms to Catholicism. If we return to the analogy used earlier, they had replaced the theories of the scholastics with a quantum mechanics of their own, with the effect that all the elements in this universe of thought took on a different purpose and meaning. Granted, it did little to bring Protestants together, as we have seen. Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists and the radical tradition went their separate ways on this issue, and indeed few conflicts of the age had more of a bitter edge than the disagreement between the followers of Luther and Zwingli over how to understand the words hoc est corpus meum.20 Nevertheless, viewed against the backdrop of late medieval Catholicism, there was enough held in common to allow us to speak of an evangelical theology of the Eucharist. All mainstream reformers rejected the theory of transubstantiation, the conviction that the Mass was a sacrifice and the belief that participation in the sacrament and the adoration of the elements was a good work that, by virtue of the work itself, contributed to salvation. There was also common ground in the reformers’ rejection of the claim that the priest stood apart from the congregation and could effect a sacramental transformation of the blood and the body. Sacerdotally speaking, in Protestant theory, all members of the congregation were equal participants, and therefore all had the right to receive both the body and the blood of Christ. There was no biblical warrant, they concluded, for withholding the cup from the laity, as was done in the Catholic rite. And even though there was disagreement about whether Christ in this context was meant as a corporeal presence or merely as a figure of speech, evangelicals in general tended to place greater emphasis on the words surrounding the sacrament and the deeper reality behind the signs rather than the thaumaturgical dimensions of the late medieval rite. Whether in Wittenberg, Zurich or Geneva, the Lord’s Supper of the Reformation invoked a different understanding of the relationship between Christ and the believer, of Christ and the community, and of Christians among themselves, than that of Catholicism.21 Faced by the evangelical deconstruction of the medieval corpus Christi, the Catholic Church responded by confirming the doctrines in place. All of the

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aspects of the Eucharist discussed in the opening chapters of this book, from its purpose and meaning in the sacramental cycle to its functions and symbolism in the ritual sphere, remained just as relevant to the postReformation Catholic Church. Pierre Doré (1500–59), for instance, a Dominican theologian in Paris, and second only to Calvin in terms of the sheer flood of vernacular works to come from his pen (he appears in Rabelais as Master d’Oribus, sermonizing at length about a stream of dog urine), wrote a series of tracts in defence of the traditional understanding of the Eucharist. Not only did Doré publish in French, thus matching the Protestants, as it were, word for word, but he also used the same hermeneutical techniques and the same references to Scripture to overturn the symbolic arguments and confirm the principles of Catholic doctrine, from the Real Presence and transubstantiation to the sacerdotal uniqueness (and necessity) of the priesthood.22 The formal post-Reformation Catholic position on the Eucharist first came with the decrees and canons of the Council of Trent, and here too there was no concession to Protestant thought. Worked out over the course of a number of separate sessions (1547, 1551–52, 1562–63), the Tridentine statement on the Eucharist confirmed that, enacted through the ministrations of the priest, it had an efficacy that automatically and infallibly conferred grace on the believer. Christ was corporeally present in a manner comprehended by the doctrine of transubstantiation, and it was the same propitiatory sacrifice as that made on Calvary. In the words of chapter 2 of session 22: In this divine sacrifice which is performed in the mass, the very same Christ is contained and offered in bloodless manner who made a bloody sacrifice of himself once for all on the cross. Hence the holy council teaches that this is a truly propitiatory sacrifice. . . . For the Lord is appeased by this offering, he gives the gracious gift of repentance, he absolves even enormous offences and sins. For it is one and the same victim here offering himself by the ministry of his priests, who then offered himself on the cross: it is only the manner of offering that is different. For the benefits of that sacrifice (namely the sacrifice of blood) are received in the fullest measure through the bloodless offering, so far is this latter in any way from impairing the value of the former.23

Here then was an unequivocal confirmation of Catholic doctrine as it had been conceived and ritually enacted for centuries previous to the rise of the Reformation. The qualities of the late medieval Eucharist were intact: namely, that transubstantiation properly defined the miracle; that the sacrament should be bound up in rite and ritual and directed at the adoration of the host; that it had to be enacted by a priest, who in effect took on the role of Christ; and that it was a propitiatory sacrifice, whose efficacy was not in the

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eye of the beholder but rather in the act and the thing itself. And Protestant conceptions of the Eucharist were rejected at the root. To cite the canon relating to the Mass: If anyone says that the sacrifice of the mass is only one of praise and thanksgiving, or that it is a mere commemoration of the sacrifice enacted on the cross and not itself appeasing; or that it avails only the one who receives and should not be offered for the living and the dead, for their sins, penalities, satisfactions and other needs: let him be anathema.24

This was the voice of the renewed and reinvigorated Catholicism captured by the decrees of the Council of Trent, which was itself the consequence of the spirit of Catholic reform, many years in the making, that rose up to meet the Protestant threat. Catholic reform and Counter Reformation Decades before Luther and Zwingli were born, Christians in Latin Europe were speaking of the need for a reform or a renewal of the Church. Reform in this context took its meaning from the medieval Latin cognate reformatio, a word that invoked, indiscriminantly, a desire to remedy the perceived failings in a present state of affairs, whether with reference to an institution, an estate or a set of ideals or practices, by returning to an ancient model of order that, through the years, had lost its original form. Scholars called for the reform of academia, natural philosophers called for the reform of the sciences, jurists called for the reform of the law, and a growing mass of public agitators, some dangerously low down the social scale, called for the reform of political relations. Reformatio was applied to religious affairs as well, and often in one of two ways: either as an appeal to a former state of religious purity or as a vision of brief improvement before the Last Days. Clerics preached the need for a restoration of the apostolic faith, religious orders appealed for a return to the original ideals of poverty, purity and a stricter rule, while humanists railed against the involutions of scholasticism and underscored the need to return to the alleged clarity and purity of early Christianity.25 This was more than just an academic exercise. Inspired by the ideals of reformatio, prominent figures began to muster forces for the needed reform of the Church. The main spokesmen of this movement were the Christian humanists, scholars such as Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, whose close readings of Scripture recovered a model of apostolic Christianity that made the contemporary Church look deeply flawed by comparison. But running alongside this hermeneutical recovery of a (perceived) lost Christianity was a series of historical attempts to reform the Church. Of these, the broadest and most sustained took hold in the monasteries and

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nunneries, particularly among the orders of friars (Franciscans, Dominicans, Capuchins), where efforts were made to impose stricter rule, reform chapter regulations, foster greater piety and establish educational initiatives that would revive the cloisters as havens of preaching and scholarship. There were also numerous higher clergy in Catholic lands who took on the task of reform. Among the best known were Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet (1472– 1534) of France, who oversaw a revival of preaching, piety and morality in the diocese of Meaux, and Gian Matteo Giberti (1495–1543), Bishop of Verona, whose efforts to reform his diocese were the inspiration for Borromeo’s later campaign in Milan. Several Spanish bishops in this period made similar efforts to reform the Church and the clergy in their sees.26 Of all the reform-minded prelates previous to the Council of Trent, perhaps the most important was the Spaniard Francisco Jiménez (Ximénes) de Cisneros (1436–1517), Cardinal, Grand Inquisitor and eventually Archbishop of Toldeo. Cisneros was alive at a particularly fateful time for the Spanish Church. With the union of the crowns, the culmination of the reconquista and the discovery of the New World and its heathen paradise of unbaptized souls, the higher clergy became particularly important agents in the making of the Spanish state. Cisneros, having been plucked from his Franciscan cloister to become the confessor to Queen Isabella and then primate of all Spain, used this relationship to his advantage. Once in power, he put his various offices to work in pursuit of the reform of the Spanish Church. As provincial of the Franciscans in Castile, he staged a synod in Aguilera to encourage the houses to introduce the stricter regulations of the observant orders; as Archbishop of Toledo, he pushed through episcopal reforms directed at both the regular and the secular clergy, including visitations and a series of measures designed to return the ministry to its original ‘moral rectitude’; as Inquisitor General, and thus guardian of the faith, he took a personal interest in missionary activity and the Christianization of Muslims and Jews; and as a biblical scholar influenced by both the scholastic and the humanist traditions, he founded a college at Alcalá as a laboratory for the study of the ancient languages of Scripture. Alcalá was where Cisnero’s Complutensian Bible first saw the light of day, dedicated to Pope Leo X in the hope that ‘every student of Holy Scripture might have at hand the original texts themselves and be able to quench his thirst at the very fountainhead of the water that flows unto life everlasting and not have to content himself with rivulets alone’.27 No matter how sincere the efforts of prelates such as Cisneros, a universal reformatio could only come into being under the auspices of the papacy. Contemporaries realized this and made repeated appeals for a Church council or a general reform of the clergy, but none of the popes in office

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during the early years of the Reformation took the final step. Until the opening of Trent, the most promising of all papal reactions were the words drafted by Pope Adrian VI (r.1522–23) for the legate Francesco Chieregati to read at the Diet of Nuremberg (1522/3). Although Adrian condemned Luther as a heretic and made no concessions to the evangelical movement, he did admit ‘that for many years many abominable things have occurred in this holy see, abuses in spiritual matters, transgressions of the commandments, and finally in everything a change for the worse’. Due to Adrian’s short pontificate, however, nothing came of his concern. Similar words had been spoken ten years before during the early sessions of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), invoked by Pope Julius II. Cardinal Bishop Giles of Viterbo, prior general of the Observant Augustinians, had opened the meeting by drawing attention to the need for reform and admonished Julius to see it through ‘so that the church, together with a reviving pope, might restore morals to life . . . [God] commands you to tear down, root up, and destroy errors, luxury, and vice, and to build, establish, and plant moderation, virtue and holiness’.28 This lecture was followed a year later by a libellus submitted by two saintly hermits who claimed that the Church was mired in ignorance and superstition and in desperate need of a reform in head and members. But these public censures, like Adrian’s confession to the German estates at Nuremberg, accomplished little substantial reform. The problem facing the Catholic Church was not so much the will as the way. There was no shortage of first-class theological minds in Rome who recognized the need for reform, but their efforts always ran aground whenever it reached the stage to take the final step and summon a general council. There were reasons for this. Calling a council was a risk at the best of times, but it represented a particular danger to a late Renaissance papacy still suffering from the 1527 Sacco di Roma, defenceless in the face of Valois and Habsburg troops carving up the peninsula, and no less a target in the eyes of humanists and conciliarists than it had been a century before. Moreover, by the 1520s there was the added problem of the Protestants. Not only did the Reformation raise practical questions relating to jurisdiction and leadership, it touched on the deeper theological issues of truth and authority as well. For even if the Lutherans could agree on the need for a Church council, they were not willing to subject their teachings to the arbitration of a papacy whose sole purpose, they believed, was to watch them burn as heretics. In the words of Melanchthon, the pope desired a council ‘for this reason and for this reason alone: to determine how best to root out our professed faith, condemned by him in advance as heresy’.29 With all these things working against the calling of a council, it was little less than a miracle (and according to the later Catholic historian Hubert

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Jedin, nothing less) that a general council of the Church did in fact gather in 1545 in the episcopal city of Trent. In so far as the past turns on crucial moments, this was a critical juncture in the history of early modern Catholicism: Trent was the stage when the passive abstractions of reformatio gave way to the dynamic credo of the Counter Reformation Church. The Council of Trent opened during the pontificate of Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III (r.1534–49). Although guilty of his fair share of philandering and nepotism, Paul III was also acutely aware of the need for reform. As Bishop of Parma he had enforced the Fifth Lateran decrees and encouraged clerical improvement, and immediately after his election he drew up plans for a proposed Church council, first in Mantua and then in Vicenza. His pontificate was notable for other decisions as well, not the least being the approval of the Jesuit Order and the appointment of Michaelangelo as chief architect. But the greatest accomplishment of his reign was the convocation of Trent. This occurred for a number of reasons, two in particular. First, Paul III actively supported change from within the Curia. He raised known proponents of reform to the cardinalate, among them Gasparo Contarini, Jacopo Sadoleto, Reginald Pole, Gianpietro Carafa (later Pope Paul IV) and Gian Matteo Giberti, the reforming Bishop of Verona. Tasked with the responsibility of drawing up a report to assist the pope ‘with their advice, piety and learning’, these men became members of a commission that eventually issued its plans for the amelioration of the Church (the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia of 1537). In the end the Consilium did not result in any practical reform measures, but its categorical unveiling of the problems at the heart of the Church, from clerical corruption to the abuse of papal power, was an important step. Moreover, the commission gave voice to a generation of men with a new sense of religious awareness, not only mindful of the failings within the Church but also more attentive to developments in Germany. Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), for instance, scion of a powerful Venetian family raised to the cardinalate in 1535, had experienced bouts of spiritual doubt and unease reminscent of Luther’s, and indeed his conclusion that the cure for this disquiet was ‘hope and absolute faith’ makes the semblance even more marked. Contarini was not a Lutheran; he never doubted good works or papal plenitude. But unlike the previous generation, he was much more aware of the spiritual issues at stake, and he knew that meeting the challenge of the Reformation would take more than fiat and force. In his words, ‘No councils, battles of words, syllogisms, or biblical citations are needed to quiet the unrest of the Lutherans, but good will, love of God and one’s neighbor, humility of soul in order to do away with avarice, luxury, large households, and courts, and to limit oneself to that which the Gospels prescribe.’30

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Second, Paul III was able to overcome the political obstacles that had scuppered earlier attempts. In part this was due to his own efforts. Immediately on his election he had dispatched nuncios to Germany, France and Spain with the aim of securing support for a general council and he pursued this course throughout his pontificate. But even more important was the favourable alignment of historical circumstances in the mid-1540s. The colloquies between Catholic and Protestants had reached an impasse, the Turks were in retreat, the Peace of Crépy (1544) brought a momentary suspension to the Italian Wars, and the proposal of Trent as the setting for the council neatly circumvented the problems of jurisdiction. For although Trent was south of the Alps and Italian speaking, it was under Habsburg hegemony. The stage was set. The Council of Trent did its work in three main sessions (1545–47, 1551– 52, 1562–63) under the auspices of three different popes (Paul III, Julius III and Pius IV) and in the shadow of ongoing wars. The central conflicts were the dynastic struggle between the Habsburg and the Valois and the campaign against the German Protestants, and these left their mark. Due to his negotiations with the Lutherans, for instance, Charles V was more interested in the reform of the institutional Church than the reform of dogma (which occupied the papacy), and this meant that the Council agenda had to give equal time to both concerns. Meanwhile, because the French kings feared the pope was little more than an imperial stooge, there was no French delegation at the first two sessions, and France often worked against the interests of Rome. There were tensions inside the Council as well. Not only were there the usual problems relating to power and precedence, quickly revealed in the opening discussions over protocol; there were also different theological interest groups at work, some of which, particularly the conciliarists and the episcopally minded Spaniards, often resisted the agenda being pushed by the papal legates. On occasion matters reached such an impasse that there seemed to be little constructive dialogue, a state of affairs that prompted the imperial theologian Francisco de Córdoba to remark that ‘there are two councils going on in the Church. One is the council at Trent, and the other the council in Rome with the pope [and the cardinals]. They are somehow at war with each other.’31 And yet despite the difficulties, the third session of the Council, in the presence of prelates from Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Bohemia, Croatia and (finally) France, brought the deliberations to a close in December 1563. The decrees and canons were subsequently published in June 1564. All of the Catholic teachings reviewed at Trent were confirmed without ceding ground to the Protestants. Even in those instances where the

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Church granted that some reform, renewal or revision might be a necessity, the authority and validity of doctrine were never in doubt. The articles on Scripture are an example of this. The Council verified the Vulgate as the authentic source of God’s Word, even if the translation might be in need of revision at some future date. Scripture was considered ‘sufficient’ for salvation, but in keeping with centuries of Catholic teaching, and contrary to Protestant claims, the Council stipulated that ‘this truth and rule are contained in written books and in unwritten traditions that were received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself or else have come down to us, handed on as it were from the apostles themselves at the inspiration of the holy Spirit’.32 A similar approach marked the discussion on sacraments. The Council theologians allowed that the sacraments might be efficacious in different ways, but otherwise the medieval theories were confirmed. All seven sacraments, properly administered by an ordained priest, conferred grace automatically on the recipient. And this was particularly true for the chief of the sacraments, the Eucharist, which was defined in terms that left no doubt that the Church had not changed its mind about this central mystery. Nothing better illustrates Trent’s resolve to confirm Catholic teachings in the face of the Protestant challenge than the decree on justification. Both the papal legates and the Council theologians recognized that this was the crux of the religious division. Indeed, in setting the agenda for the discussions, the Council raised the same sorts of questions that had set Luther adrift. What was the degree of cooperation in justification? Does it result in a remission of sin or sanctification? Is faith sufficient or are works required? Is the human passive or active in the quest for grace? In what sense are good works meritorious? It is thus little wonder that the sessions dealing with justification were particularly heated. Many hard-liners held that any formula too sympathetic to the Lutheran position smacked of heresy and had no place in the Council decrees. Thus when Tommaso Sanfelice, Bishop of La Cava, used phrases such as ‘slave will’ and ‘by faith alone’ while discussing justification, he was promptly reproofed by the Franciscan Dionisio de Zanettini, who termed him ‘either a knave or a fool’. In response, Sanfelice grabbed a handful of Zanettini’s beard.33 The decree on justification was drawn up in January 1547, the product of numerous acts of revision dating back to the first version of July 1545, which was judged by Agostino Bonuccio, Superior General of the Servite Order, to be ‘unacceptable in all its parts’.34 Scholastic in its form but biblical in its language, the final decree, passed unanimously, was an unequivocal defence of traditional Catholic teaching on justification, including the role of human agency.

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In more precise terms, the decree confirmed the following scheme: owing to the corrupting effects of the Fall, it was not possible for humans to rise above sin through law and nature alone. For this reason God had sent Christ as saviour, accessible to man through the gift of faith. Christ was the catalyst and faith was the means, regardless of existing merit, for ‘those who had been turned away from God by sins are disposed by God’s grace inciting and helping them, to turn towards their own justification by giving free assent to and cooperating with this same grace’. Faith is thus the first step on the path to salvation, but faith alone, especially when hardened by a ‘proud assurance’, was not enough. Nor should believers search for certainty in the ‘hidden mystery of divine predestination’. Rather, Christians must constantly renew themselves through the commandments of God and the ‘instruments of his righteousness’ such as the sacraments. By doing this, Christians ‘grow and increase in that very justness they have received through the grace of Christ, by faith united to good works’. Thus to be justified means that Christians need to actively seek grace, to be constantly vigilant ‘and work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, in labours, watchings, alms deeds, prayers and offerings, in fastings and chastity’. With this, the medieval theology of good works, in all of its parts, was confirmed. Faith and works were the necessary components of the Christian life. Luther’s theory of justification was condemned in unmistakeable terms: ‘If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, meaning thereby that no other co-operation is required for him to obtain the grace of justification, and that in no sense is it necessary for him to make preparation and be disposed by a movement of his own will: let him be anathema.’35 Running parallel with the reform of doctrine was the reform of the institutional church. This too touched on sensitive issues relating to papal power and biblical exegesis, the most disruptive of all being the question of episcopal residency. Was the bishop bound by God to reside in his see, as a powerful lobby of Spanish prelates maintained, or was it a stipulation of canon law and thus merely a human proviso, as the curialist party believed? A lot was riding on the answer, for in essence it was a question of whether the popes had the right to hand out dispensations. In the end the Council decreed that there were some legitimate reasons for episcopal absence, but in the majority of instances ‘all to whom care of souls has been entrusted are subject to the divine command (praeceptum) to know their sheep, to offer sacrifice for them, to nourish them by preaching God’s word, by administering the sacraments, and by the example of good works of every kind, to have fatherly care for the poor and of all others who are wretched, and to be devoted to other pastoral duties.’36 In practice, because these duties could only be fulfilled in person, this made the command equivalent to a divine law (ius divinum). But this

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problem was not resolved by Trent. Years later Cardinal Robert Bellarmine was still lamenting how dispensations were occurring ‘with great detriment to the souls’ of the people of Spain, only to be reminded by Pope Clement VIII, ‘how many difficulties we would incur if now that faculty was taken away from the king’.37 This emphasis on the cure of souls ran through all the canons and decrees. As part of the reform measures issued by the Council, the decrees stipulated that bishops were obliged to reside in their dioceses unless exempt through special circumstances. They were expected to preach regularly, hold regular synods and visitations that took in the whole of the diocese – regardless of any special claims made by chapters, colleges or local patrons – and promote works of charity, learning and discipline. Bishops were also instructed to establish seminaries and to take personal responsibility for the quality of the clergy in their dioceses. As a Venetian bishop declared at the final session of Trent, the hope was that ‘great ecclesiastical offices will in future be filled by those in whom virtue prevails over ambition . . . and bishops will remain in the midst of their flocks’.38 But these hopes were not just directed at the higher clergy. Whatever their standing, whether deacons, subdeacons, parish priests or clerics in lower orders, all clergymen were expected to have sufficient quality of learning and conduct to ensure that (to quote the decree) ‘in their outward bearing, their deportment, their gait and their speech, they show nothing but what is grave, moderate, and full of piety’.39 Although the nature of the reform process varied from place to place, in general terms Trent reduced the number of abuses that had plagued the late medieval Church and improved the quality of clerical learning along with the status of the priesthood as an estate.40 But taking the measure of Trent is difficult to do. Because the secular authorities reserved the right to implement the decrees, there was a wide variety of reactions, ranging from outright enthusiasm, cautious and conditional acceptance, to dogged resistance. Moreover, in many instances the impulse behind the phase of Catholic reform that historians have termed the Counter Reformation took very little (or indeed sometimes nothing) from the programme developed at Trent. Any measure of the impact of the Council has to take this into account, for there were just as many contingencies of place, time and scale in the Counter Reformation as there were in the Protestant Reformation to the north.41 If forced to generalize, most historians would agree that Trent, if by degrees, worked as a beacon and a blueprint for a new spirit of Catholic reform. For those bishops with the will or the latitude to act, the foundations were in place. The same held true for the papacy. While there was no longer any doubt about the limitations of papal power, the Council had still done

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much to consolidate the authority of the popes. By building on the refined and reinvigorated sense of religious mission, the Tridentine popes approached their former medieval status as quasi-monarchs ruling over parts of central Italy and the Catholic conscience as a whole. While reducing the power of the College of Cardinals and effectively turning them into ‘handmaids of papal power’, the papacy set its seal on a range of reform measures that enabled Catholicism to match the Protestant advance quid pro quo, including the Index of Prohibited Books (1564), the Profession of Faith (1564), the Roman Catechism (1566), the Breviary (1568) and the Missal (1570). But Trent was not the moment of origin in a coordinated campaign of Catholic reform, nor did it give rise to the monolithic systematization or standardization of Church doctrine. Many of the core texts of Catholic confessionalism, the Roman Breviary included, had no association with the Council.42 Before we turn to a survey of the impact of the decrees it is necessary to say a few words about another Catholic development of the period that had no direct association with the Council but represented, nevertheless, the same spirit of renewal that guided the final sessions in Trent, namely, the rise of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits were the creation of Íñigo López de Loyola (1491–1556), better known to posterity as Ignatius of Loyola. A one-time courtier and military man, Ignatius experienced a spiritual awakening while recovering from an injury suffered at Pamplona (1521) and resolved to dedicate his life to the higher purpose (as he now saw it) of ‘saving souls’ in the service of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the original intention had been to undertake this mission in the Holy Land, ultimately, after years of study in Barcelona, Alcalá, Salamanca and Paris, Ignatius, with an increasing number of like-minded young men in tow, ended up in Italy, where he spent the rest of his life overseeing the new order of regular clergy that evolved from his efforts. The Jesuits came into being in 1540 through a papal bull of confirmation, and it quickly became the most dynamic Catholic order in Europe. Within 25 years there were over 3,000 members spread throughout the known world, all of whom were subject to the Superior General and united, broadly speaking, by a similar pedagogical background, a similar devotion to the teachings of Tridentine Catholicism and a similar desire to devote their lives to saving souls in the service of Rome. In doing this, as Jerónimo Nadal (1507–80), one of the founding members, explained, the Jesuits were simply following an ancient Christian impulse. As he wrote: Our vocation is similar to the vocation and training of the Apostles: first, we come to know the Society, and then we follow; we are instructed; we receive our

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commission to be sent [on ministry]; we are sent; we exercise our ministry; we are prepared to die for Christ in fulfilling those ministries.43

But the Jesuits had an added edge that set them apart, due in no small part to the fact that they were founded by a former military man in an age of Christian infighting. Their methods may have been the same as those used for centuries by the medieval orders, namely preaching, teaching, catechizing, works of mercy, ministering the sacraments and embarking on missions, but in most cases the Jesuits introduced a degree of application and organization that brought with it a new intensity to religious reform. A case in point would be the Jesuit reform of education. Although the religious orders had been teaching for centuries, within a generation or two the Society had established an approach to public education that made the Jesuit schools the most respected in Europe, even in Protestant eyes. Although the Society was often out of sync with Tridentine reform, no other order or institution, the papacy included, contributed more to the preservation or the spread of Catholicism in the early modern world. In their roles as teachers, preachers, priests, missionaries, scholars and confessors, the Jesuits worked at the very heart of Catholic renewal and became the first line of defence against Protestantism. It is thus little wonder that Ignatius insisted that candidates be men of proven health and stamina, sound of mind and body, lacking any ‘notable ugliness’, who were willing to devote their lives to Roman Catholicism both in Europe and overseas. Masters of all trades, the Jesuits proved versatile and tractable enough to deal with any challenge, whether squaring up to Calvinists or fending off crocodiles in Brazil. That may have been what Étienne Pasquier was getting at when he referred to them as hermaphroditic: there did not seem to be a fixed type or form, just an unnerving ability to change and adapt. And they seemed to be everywhere. By the seventeenth century, most major Catholic cities had Jesuit colleges, Jesuit confessors had the ears of powerful princes, Jesuits dominated the fields of the humanities and the emerging natural sciences, and Jesuit missionaries were active on all known continents of the world. Indeed, it was their very success at reaching the ends of the earth that prompted Athanasius Kircher to develop a world clock that could keep standard global time.44 There is no greater testimony to the success of the Jesuit enterprise than the fear invoked by the order in Protestant lands. Whenever Lutherans or Calvinists needed to find a reason for a sudden crisis or a run of bad luck, they pointed their fingers at the Society. Jesuits were the ready villains for every early modern conspiracy theory, whether in their perceived roles as soldiers of the Antichrist or heretics, disturbers of the peace and regicides. For many Protestants,

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though, their blind devotion to Rome was damning enough. They were viewed as the lapdogs of the pope, his personal troop, his new creature.45 ***** The complex relationship between medieval reform and the Tridentine impulse makes it difficult to generalize about the history of Counter Reformation Catholicism. Different time scales, different strategies and levels of reform and different archetypes and agencies were at work. Perhaps the best solution is to think in terms of models or patterns, something the historian R. Po-Chia Hsia has done in his study of Catholic renewal. Two of his models provide the framework for the following analysis: the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant.46 By Church Triumphant Hsia means those parts of Catholic Europe that not only kept Protestantism at bay but actively contributed to the consolidation and subsequent expansion of Catholicism. The heartland of this movement was Italy and the Iberian peninsula, which accounted for more than half of the Catholic bishoprics in post-Reformation Europe. Portugal accepted the Tridentine decrees without reservation. Top-heavy in terms of noble influence, the Church’s close association with the ruling elite meant that when the interests of the state and the interests of the Church were in sync, reform could make inroads, and there is evidence of this in the bishoprics and the orders. When other issues intervened, however, domestic reform was often overshadowed, as was the case after the death of King Sebastian in 1578, which resulted in Portugal being absorbed by Spain, or the ongoing encounters with the native peoples of Brazil, the Atlantic islands and the Portuguese holdings in the East, which naturally inclined the nation to be more concerned with missionary activity than reform at home. But the flagship of Catholic renewal was Spain during the rule of Philip II (1527–98). Spain was the first major power to give its full endorsement to the Council of Trent. As the largest national Church in Latin Christendom, this was a major boost for the Tridentine programme; and yet, because the Church was so closely controlled by the Spanish monarch, it was not really a victory for the papacy in any meaningful sense. The process and pace of reform was completely determined by the king and his ministers. Moreover, in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of the Church at the time, Spain was no different from the rest of Europe. There were pockets of piety and religious reform, but there were also some dark corners in the land, a point made by the cathedral canon who famously referred to Oviedo as the ‘very Indies’. Nevertheless, Spain’s approval of Trent provided critical support for Catholic reform at a universal level, while within the land the Tridentine

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decrees provided the foundations for religious renewal. After Trent, the Spanish Church ‘left one age and entered another’.47 Overseeing it all was Philip II, who summoned his prelates to Barcelona to discuss the course of reform. In line with the Tridentine programme, bishops were instructed to hold regular synods and keep a check on the clergy. Attempts were made to improve the standard of the ministry, from the prelates to the parish priests, including the introduction of new entrance requirements, the foundation of schools and seminaries and more rigid moral standards. To cite a royal decree of 1578, henceforth all bishops ‘should be graduates of theology or canon law from approved universities, of sound judgement, exemplary lifestyle, modest disposition, charitable conduct, worthy reputation, pure-blooded and legitimate birth . . . for upon them rests the correction . . . of the Christian world’.48 There were also efforts made to reform the institutional nature of the Church. Dioceses were reconfigured to match religious needs: Burgos became an archbishopric, for instance, Valladolid a bishopric, and six new sees were created in Aragon. Even the monastic orders were subject to the king’s efforts to sweep the ecclesiastical stables clean, with some of the smaller orders simply absorbed into larger ones. Needless to say, these initiatives met with mixed results. The success of the Tridentine vision, even one that conformed so closely to the will of a king, was reliant on the efforts made by the bishops. In the majority of dioceses, however, as one incumbent succeeded another, the reforming impulse dissipated over time. Regular synods never became a reality in most places, and often reform was held at a distance by local interests, chapter politics or the basic geographical realities of the realm: it was difficult, for instance, to make inroads in the precipitous terrain of Galicia or the Basque lands. Similarly, limited lasting change took hold in the monasteries, and here too there was ongoing resistance to the Crown’s efforts – though few of the regular clergy went so far as a monk in Elna, who took up arms and a life of banditry.49 The results of religious reform were not really apparent until the seventeenth century, many years after the first generation of Tridentine reformers had passed. But this should not detract from the course that was set under Phillip II or the influence of his reforming impulse for the shaping of Spanish Christianity. Italy was a complex setting for reform. Not only was it a honeycomb of bishoprics, princedoms and city-states, it was a miscellany of political types as well. Constitutionally speaking there was quite a difference between (say) the duchy of Milan and the republic of Venice, and this had implications for Church reform, as we shall see. The humanistically trained, pragmatically inclined, civically minded patricians of merchant communes such as Venice

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and Florence were not overly receptive to the clericalist agenda of Trent. Even in the princely states there was no guarantee that the decrees could be reconciled with the philosophy of rule. While in the duchy of Savoy, for instance, the decrees were embraced because they could be put in the service of the state, the opposite was true of Naples, where reform from the top down was unable to overcome corporate interests. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, Italy belongs to the category of the Church Triumphant, and largely because so much of the peninsula remained in the orbit of an invigorated Rome. This was the period which experienced the rediscovery of the catacombs and the subsequent cult of early Christianity, the continued rebuilding of the city, including the completion of the dome of St Peter’s, and the reinvigoration of the papacy as an institution. Three particularly serious and austere popes contributed the most to this process: Pius V (r.1566–72), Gregory XIII (r.1572–85) and Sixtus V (r.1585–90). Each man in succession saw through the introduction of measures that embodied the Tridentine spirit by reducing abuses, curbing luxuries and improving the moral and educational quality of the clergy.50 The lands that made up the Church Militant were either areas where Catholicism had lost ground to Protestants or where the Church was forced to coexist in close proximity to other faiths. Both conditions might obtain simultaneously, of course, but there was a difference between a state of coexistence regulated by law and a state of open conflict, where relations between the Churches were determined by the fortunes of war. The PolishLithuanian Commonwealth was an example of the former, where with the Warsaw Confederation of 1573 there was a legally recognized state of coexistence between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Bohemian Brethren, Jews, Unitarians and Anabaptists. In this setting Catholic reform had to make its gains by way of conversion rather than conquest, a state of affairs that, according to the Jesuit Peter Canisius, had caused the Church to decline into a state of ‘barbarism’. With the bishops ‘old and decrepit’ and most of the nobles either Protestant or anti-clerical, Canisius concluded that Poland was ‘the most opulent and uncultivated harvest for the workers of Christ’, by which he meant the Jesuits.51 This was not entirely true, for there was evidence of a reforming impulse at work. Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius (1504– 79), for instance, successively Bishop of Chelmno, Warmia and papal legate to Poland, oversaw the publication of the Council decrees in 1564. But over the long term it was the introduction of the Jesuit Order, and in particular the Jesuit schools, that did the most to win back the land to Catholicism. In the southern Netherlands, in contrast, Catholicism was the only tolerated religion; thus when the Spanish overlord Philip II gathered up the reins of reform, he necessarily took on the role of a conquering hero as well as a pious

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ruler, and to great effect. The Habsburg provinces became one of the success stories of the Counter Reformation, an ‘export land of Catholic renewal’.52 Of all the Counter Reformation initiatives, perhaps the most militant were those overseen by the Habsburg archdukes of Austria. After the death of Emperor Ferdinand I in 1564, rule devolved to his three sons: Karl II (1540–90), who became ruler of Inner Austria (Styria, Carniola and Carinthia), Ferdinand II (1529–95), who became ruler of Further Austria and the Tyrol, and Maximilian II (1527–76), who became the Holy Roman Emperor. All three men were devout Catholics, but Karl and Ferdinand were particularly zealous. Both were early archetypes of the conscience-driven Tridentine rulers of the age of Catholic renewal, similar in kind to the Duke of Bavaria (with whom they worked up a common strategy document for the restoration of the faith), and both were intent on rooting out the Protestants in their lands and restoring the authority of the Catholic Church. Ferdinand began the process of re-Catholicization in Further Austria and the Tyrol immediately after he inherited rule, forcing officials to take an oath to observe Catholicism, introducing clerical reforms and supporting the work of the Jesuits. Karl II was even more active in Inner Austria and Styria. With the help of the Jesuits, who were rewarded with schools and churches, and a newly created ‘reform commission’, which oversaw the reform of the clergy and the reorganization of the Church, Karl managed to re-establish the dominance of Catholicism in his lands and root out most of the Protestant communities. By the last years of his reign his reform efforts had taken on the quality of a military conquest, with schools and churches burned to the ground, Lutheran congregations forced from the land, and town councils forcibly placed in the hands of Catholics.53 But the re-Catholicization of the Habsburg lands required more than just strong-arm tactics. Statecraft and subterfuge were needed as well. The favoured method of the Habsburgs was the policy of confessional preferment, which was the strategy of using patronage and promotion as a lure for Catholic conversion. It proved a successful scheme. By the start of the seventeenth century, all the members of the imperial privy council were Catholic, even though nearly one-quarter of them had been Lutherans at some stage. Although often disparaged as ‘aulic conversions’, by which was implied that they were more about political advantage than personal faith, the public embrace of Catholicism became a very useful (and very necessary) tool for imperial service. A few examples will make the point. Not long after the ‘ardent Lutheran’ Karl von Liechtenstein joined the Catholic Church in 1599, Emperor Rudolf II recommended his appointment to the privy council. With that, the long-running quarrels between Liechtenstein and the imperial courts over his right to worship as a Lutheran were set aside and his career

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took wing. Taking note of the success of this gesture, his brother Maximilian followed suit. The pope sent his congratulations. In 1598 the Lower Austrian Michael Adolf von Althann was converted by the Bishop of Vienna, Melchoir Klesl, who was himself raised a Lutheran, and subsequently became governor of Gran and an imperial count. Franz Christoph Khevenhüller, also raised as a Lutheran, entered the service of Matthias after his conversion and became ambassador to Spain, chancellor, a member of the privy council and ultimately the author of Annales Ferdinandei, a biographical paean to Emperor Ferdinand.54 As this balancing act of personal beliefs and worldly ambition would suggest, the line between politics and religion was very fine, and it was often difficult to distinguish between Habsburg re-entrenchment and Counter Reformation reform, particularly as the Habsburgs were reluctant to observe any Tridentine decrees that compromised their powers of rule. The end result, nevertheless, was impressive, namely, the uncompromising restoration of Catholicism as the public faith of the land. Exemplary in this regard was the campaign of re-Catholicization overseen by Emperor Ferdinand II (r.1619–37) in Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain (1620). With the Protestant estates in disarray, Ferdinand, ‘the first emperor whose public persona was so purposefully molded according to the confessional standards of the Counter Reformation’, saw through his vision of ‘confessional absolutism’.55 It began with the conversion of the noble estate. While the leading Protestant grandees were exiled or imprisoned, the remaining nobles were forced to participate in the project of Catholic restoration. Not only were they expected to play a prominent role in the public life of the Church, but their very trustworthiness as members of the Habsburg state was often measured in terms of church donations and chapel foundations. Meanwhile, all educational establishments were placed in the hands of the Jesuits, including the ancient Charles University, which suffered after White Mountain due to its decades of defiance. And while the schools in the towns and cities were reformed and restaffed with Jesuit-educated clergy, preachers, teachers and missionaries moved into the Bohemian countryside, utilizing both the reinvigorated sermonizing of the Counter Reformation along with the arsenal of saints, sacramentals and Baroque imagery cultivated by Tridentine Catholicism. For the clergy who still resisted, the result was often exile or imprisonment; for the parishioners who were slow to convert, whippings, beatings and the forced quartering of imperial troops often brought them back into the fold. All this was consistent with Ferdinand’s overall approach, which relied on ‘a complicated interplay of force and persuasion’.56 As this short survey suggests, there were many variables in the history of Catholic reform. Each nation, territory and city-state might react in different

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ways, some supportive of, some resistant to the Council’s aims. To give a sense of the contrasting fortunes of Tridentine renewal, this section will conclude with a contrasting study of reform in two cities that were separated by a three-day postal service: Milan and Venice. No figure better encapsulates the ideals of the Counter Reformation than Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), Cardinal Archbishop of Milan. In his lifetime, Borromeo was considered so pious that churchmen began assembling the proofs of his holiness in situ. On his death they mounted a publicity campaign to speed up the canonization process, compiling accounts of his purported miracles, publishing open letters with descriptions of his charity and austerity and circulating the report of his peaceful deathbed scene. Even the results of his autopsy became public, his body so thin and disfigured through self-flagellation that Pavia’s anatomy professor broke down in tears when he held the heart of this man in his hands.57 Borromeo’s story is one of the triumphal tales of Tridentine Catholicism, though in its origins it was common enough. Born into a wealthy noble family in Milan, Borromeo had been called to Rome in 1560 at the age of 22 by his uncle Pope Pius IV. In Rome, as the cardinal-nephew, he became in effect the personal secretary to the pope, keeper of the papal seal and served as an important functionary in the final session of Trent. Borromeo was thus thoroughly familiar with the concerns of the Tridentine reformers, and it was after the close of Trent, now as Archbishop of Milan (1564), that he embarked on his career as the reforming saint and turned the Milanese church into Europe’s laboratory of Counter Reformation reform, his hope being, as he mentioned in a letter to Giovanni Francesco Bonomi in 1566, that ‘in his own particular church he will come to serve also the universal church with the example of his actions’.58 In a sermon from the year 1569 Borromeo projected a model of the Church straight from the pages of the Pseudo-Dionysius: the entire ecclesiastical order was likened to the divine hierarchy, with bishops on the same plane as the angels and the priests some two levels down. All, however, were placed above the level of the secular order, and this is why Borromeo’s attempts to impose the Tridentine reforms had such a profound impact on Milan. No prelate of the sixteenth century did more to realize the reform of the Church and society envisioned by the decrees of Trent. Borromeo placed himself in his archbishop’s palace at the centre of the ecclesiological web; from there he orchestrated a reform of the Milanese church that turned it into a ‘second Rome’. He introduced regular visitations, convoked diocesan synods and provincial councils, set up seminaries for the clergy and schools for the civic elite, repaired and renewed the fabric of the churches and oversaw the reform of the monastic orders. The parishes were assigned to new administrative districts, and the priests, who had to meet with superiors

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in weekly sessions, were admonished to keep a close watch over the nature of local religion to make sure that the sacraments were properly observed, the religious festivals were honoured and superstition or heresy did not intrude upon the faith.59 In order to see through this project Borromeo used some of the darker arts as well, resurrecting the ancient tradition of the archbishops’ private army, the famiglia armata, and reviving the old archepiscopal tribunals. In doing this the archbishop came into conflict with Milan’s overlord, Philip II, King of Spain, who ruled over the territory through a governor and a senate. Philip was sympathetic to reform but he did not agree with Borromeo’s belief in the supremacy of the Church in the process. As a consequence, the two branches of Milanese authority, bishop and governor, were often at odds. At one point the governor Luis de Requeséns informed the king that Borromeo was ‘the most dangerous rebel that Your Majesty has ever had’.60 In addition to his creation of Milan as the archetype of Tridentine reform, Borromeo introduced two important innovations that helped to shape global Catholicism. First, in line with the decrees of Trent, he placed great stress on the efficacy of the sacraments. And he placed most emphasis on one sacrament in particular: confession. He is perhaps best known in this context as the man who introduced (or rather standardized) the use of the confessional, including the very shape and dimensions of the box. Borromeo’s crucial contribution was in recognizing how the confessional could be used as a type of ‘internal forum’ for getting at the religious mindset of the parishioners. By reforming the stages leading up to confession (sermons, catechism, confessional manuals), improving the quality of the parish priests as confessors and threatening the consequences of sin and the denial of absolution, Borromeo in effect ‘enlisted his confessors in a comprehensive ritual and pastoral offensive aimed at conquering souls, changing public conduct and, ultimately, transforming the entire social order’.61 Second, Borromeo left a lasting legacy in the form of the synodal legislation issued during the course of his reign, drawn together in his Acta ecclesiae Mediolanensis (1582). Inspired by the pronouncements of Trent, this collection of synodal decrees touched on the full range of reform measures introduced in Milan and thereby ‘put pastoral flesh on the legalistic bones of the Tridentine reform agenda’.62 The Acta became the most influential body of decrees of the Tridentine period, published and adopted throughout the Catholic world as far as the dioceses of Mexico and Peru. The course of Catholic reform in the Republic of Venice was markedly different, largely due to the history and the traditions of the city. Rooted in an ideal of ‘original and perpetual liberty’, governed by a patrician elite

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whose main concerns were order and profit, and accustomed to close control over the Venetian church and a general disdain for Rome’s claims to primacy, it was inevitable that the Tridentine reform programme would run into resistance once it reached the islands of the lagoon. Venice thought of itself as a ‘second Rome’, with its own myth of sacral origins, its own direct link to the Apostles in the figure of St Mark, the patron of the city, and its own de facto head of the church, namely the doge. It was not that Venice was without religion; on the contrary, Catholicism was central to the Venetian sense of self, a point made by the Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commynes, who remarked that ‘I believe God blesses them for the reverence they show in the service of the church’. But it was reverence in the service of the Venetian church, and often the inverse as well: the reverence of the church in the service of the Venetian state.63 Thus when the Tridentine papacy pressed the Republic to loosen its hold over the church and its clergy, empower the bishops and the Jesuits to implement the decrees and in general pay less heed to what Bellarmine termed ‘the laws of false prophets, such as those who are now called politici’ and more to the directives of the reinvigorated church, the commune proved much less accommodating than Borromeo’s Milan. It agreed to publish the decrees, but any aspect of the reform programme that threatened to challenge the ecclesiastical status quo or strengthen the standing of the church at the expense of the Republic was simply ignored. Needless to say, in the face of resistance of this kind the Tridentine reformers could accomplish very little. It reached the stage, in fact, where the papacy placed Venice under an interdict and eventually excommunicated the city (1606) for its repeated infringements of the rights and liberties of the Church.64 Even then Venice refused to yield. Banning the circulation of the papal decree on pain of death, the Senate ordered its clergy to ignore the interdict and perform the sacral services as if nothing had happened, and by appointing the anti-papal patriot Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) as its chief consul in theology and canon law it found a man who invested an age-old habitus of religious independence with a theological defence. For Sarpi did not just point out some holes in the papal case; he advised the Senate that the laws behind its resistance were a ‘good and holy work . . . commanded by God’, and he raised doubts about the legitimacy of a papacy that could use the threat of censure and force to achieve its ends. In Sarpi’s words: ‘Do we wish to determine whether the excommunication of a pope is valid? Let us see whether Saint Peter would have delivered it; and if we find it remote from apostolic love and modesty, we should not believe it has the force of apostolic authority.’65 In response, the papal theologians likened the Venetians to the Protestants and declared Sarpi an enemy of the Church in the mould of Hus,

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Wycliffe, Luther and Calvin. Cardinal Borghese thought that Sarpi’s impiety went so far that he had entered the ranks of the heresiarchs, while Bellarmine considered his crime to be the worst that could be inflicted on the Church, namely, ‘using the Word of God against God’.66 The West and the East: Orthodox Christianity In 1461 the Italian humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–64), recently elevated to the papal throne as Pope Pius II (r.1458–64), wrote a letter to Sultan Mehmed II (1432–81), ruler of the Ottoman Empire and conqueror of the city of Constantinople. With the Ottoman forces still on the march and the papal appeals for crusade falling on deaf ears, the pope was no doubt anxious about the Ottoman threat. But that was not the impression he gave in the letter. Instead, Pius’s famous Epistola ad Mahometem II opens with a warning to the sultan to be wary of ‘the greatness of the Christian people’, the likes of which he had never faced. Victory over the Greeks of Constantinople was one thing, but war against the Italians, the French or the Germans was quite another; and in any event, were the sultan to venture such a war, there is no doubt that Christendom would put aside ‘all private hatreds’ and mount resistance on all fronts. In order to avoid this fate, Pius advised the sultan to renounce Islam and accept the faith of Christ. If he did this, the pope would accept him as emperor of the East and peace would reign. If he refused, he would face the wrath of Christendom. And this is something else that the pope stressed in his letter. The sultan might think that he already ruled over Christians, but as Pius made clear: This is not correct. Very few are the Christians under your rule who walk in the truth of the New Testament. All are imbued with error to some degree, although they cherish Christ: the Armenians, the Jacobites, the Maronites, and certain other groups. The Greeks had abandoned the unity of the Roman Church when you invaded Constantinople, and they had not yet accepted the Florentine decree and were in error. Their beliefs about the Holy Spirit and the fires of Purgatory were not consonant with correct faith.67

For Pius, the ‘greatness of the Christian people’ referred exclusively to the Latin Church of the West. All other forms of Eastern Christianity, including the Orthodox Churches in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, were in error. Not even their present circumstances could shift papal opinion in this regard: Eastern Orthodoxy was a wayward faith. If Mehmed II ever read the Epistola, in all likelihood the least of his concerns was the potential of Christendom to overcome its ‘private hatreds’. Relations between Constantinople and Rome had not improved during the late medieval period. The steady advance of the Ottomans forced

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Byzantine emperors to look to the West for support with increasing urgency, and this meant entering into discussions with Rome about the possibility of reconciliation. But these brief interludes of hope sat within a much longer history of hatred and mistrust. All the emperors who set out to formalize a union with Rome over the period leading up to the fall of Constantinople, from Michael VIII at Lyons in 1263 to John V, Manuel II and finally John VIII Palaiologos at Florence in 1439, had not only ultimately failed in their efforts but blackened their own place in Byzantine history. Michael VIII, for instance, termed the ‘Latin-minded’, was even denied a proper burial. From the Orthodox perspective, the reasons for this distrust are not hard to grasp. A long history, still very much a living memory in the late medieval period, had set the two Churches on different trajectories. Historians often stress the importance of the schism of 1054, but the roots of the separation can be traced all the way back to the earliest ecumenical councils, the different experiences of the barbarian invasions, the increasing isolation of the East in the face of the Islamic advance and the simple fact of linguistic separation. Most important of all, however, was the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the crusading armies of Latin Christendom using the siege weaponry originally intended for Muslimheld Jerusalem. Years later the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates would recall ‘the dashing to earth of the venerable icons and the flinging of the relics of the saints . . . seizing as plunder the precious chalices and patens . . . the outcries of men, screams of women, the taking of captives . . . and raping of bodies’.68 Constantinople never recovered from this Christian invasion, nor did the Orthodox faithful ever forget. Despite the ancient distrust and deep antagonism, the fifteenth century was a period of relatively fertile relations between Greek Orthodox scholars and Renaissance Europe. Granted, there had always been men who moved between the two worlds. Barlaam of Seminara had used Latin loan words and scholastic techniques in his contributions to the Hesychast debates of the fourteenth century, for instance, and Demetrios Kydones had translated Augustine and Aquinas a few years later. Aquinas himself had drawn on John of Damascus, while Scotus had made use of works by Maximos the Confessor and Dionysius the Areopagite. But the sustained exchange of men and ideas only really began in the late medieval period, and largely for two reasons: first, because the Byzantine Commonwealth started to succumb to the Ottoman advance, the result being a steady flow of refugees out of the Aegean; and, second, because the humanist scholars of Italy started to develop an interest in Greek scholarship, and there were few natives in Europe with a command of the language. Byzantine scholars, particularly those with a working knowledge of Latin, became a precious resource in Renaissance Italy.

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As a consequence of both of these factors, communities of displaced Greeks became a common sight in Italy. Venice, as ‘a virtual satellite of Byzantium’, had the largest group of any commune, so large in fact that they were granted the right to build their own church. Within this broad community was a smaller cluster of scholars who worked at the Aldine Press. A similar group of intellectuals gathered in Florence to help Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in their efforts with Plato. By the fifteenth century, a substantial number of Greek scholars were lecturing at the universities, while others were translating Latin texts and working as copyists and editors in the printing houses. Among the great teachers of Greek were Manuel Chrysoloras, John Argyropoulos, Demetrios Chalkokondyles and Theodorus Gaza, who between them taught the rudiments of Greek to generations of humanists in Ferrara, Padua, Naples, Bologna, Florence, Venice and Rome. By 1463 the respect for Greek letters was plentiful enough for Chalkokondyles to declare in his inaugural lecture in Padua that ‘it is well known that the originators of all these arts were Greek and that the very name of the arts was inspired by the Greek’.69 But the relationship between the West and the East had its limits, even in this age of increased dialogue. It is worth noting that Chalkokondyles was in fact talking up Greek culture in order to elicit sympathy for a crusade against the Ottomans, the conquerors of his homeland ten years before. It was not forthcoming. And it was the same desperate appeal for Latin aid against the Turks that led to the last great attempt to unify the two Churches before the fall of Constantinople, namely the Council of Florence in 1439. It too came to nothing, though the encounter would shape relations between the two Churches in other ways for the next two centuries. In 1430 Byzantine delegates met with papal officials to discuss the possibility of a reconciliation. For those Orthodox Christians in favour of union, such as the Emperor John VIII Palaiologos (r.1392–1448) and the aging Patriarch Joseph II (1360–1439), it was a propitious moment. The Latin Church had not yet recovered from the Great Schism and was currently divided between the claims to primacy of a council in Basel and Pope Eugenius IV. Negotiations dragged on throughout the 1430s due to the rift, but eventually the Byzantine delegates decided for Pope Eugenius and agreed to gather at an ecumenical council in 1438 in Ferrara to discuss the possibility of reunion. In November 1437 the Byzantine delegation set sail from Constantinople in the promised papal fleet and arrived in Ferrara in April, where the council commenced until it was relocated to Florence in 1439 due to the threat of the plague. The driving force behind the calling of the council was the Emperor John VIII, and the main reason was the need for Western aid against the

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advancing Ottoman Empire. By 1439, the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to the area around Constantinople, the appanage of the Morea in the Peloponnese, the empire of Trebizond, towns along Marmara and the Black Sea coasts of Thrace, the islands of Tenedos and Imbros, and some scattered property and ports on the Aegean. The city of Constantinople was a shell of its former self. In 1438 a Spanish traveller remarked that the imperial palace ‘must have been very magnificent, but now it is in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure’.70 Aware that Constantinople would surely fall without Western aid, the Byzantines thus agreed to meet with the Latins at a council in Ferrara/ Florence in the hope that the ancient antagonisms and theological differences could be overcome. Understanding the controversies in Ferrara and Florence requires an awareness of the divergent histories of the Greek and Latin Churches, for the roots of the quarrels ran very deep. As the previous volumes in this series make clear, the various schisms and associated theological disagreements predate the fifteenth century by many centuries. Indeed, in light of the ancient antipathies, it is something of a small miracle that the delegates were able to reduce the bulk of the discussions to just five main themes, which amounted to the following: the doctrine of purgatory, the issue of leavened and unleavened bread, the liturgy of the Eucharist, the primacy of the papacy, and the procession of the Holy Spirit and the addition of the Latin word Filioque to the Creed. Due in part to the ambiguous wording of the final decree, it was possible to reach agreement on these themes. But there is no doubt that little real progress had been made towards a common creed. Nor is there any doubt that the final settlement favoured Rome. On the question of the Eucharist, for instance, the papal theologians did not budge from their conviction that it was exclusively the dominical words of consecration (‘this is my body’) that effected the miracle of the Mass. It thus followed that there was no place for the later invocation of the Holy Spirit (the epiclesis) practised by the Orthodox. Nor did they give any ground on the matter of papal primacy. The agreement invested the pope with ‘primacy over the whole world’ (understood by the Orthodox in a canonical sense) and made Constantinople subordinate to Rome, followed by the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.71 But it was the discussion about the Filioque clause that revealed the distance between the two Churches on the eve of the early modern age. Catholicism’s addition of the clause Filioque (‘from the son’) to the Nicene Creed had long been denounced by the Orthodox ecclesiastics (Photius had termed it ‘the crown of evils’), and the Church’s opinion had not changed when the Byzantine delegation arrived in Ferrara. Manuel

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Eugenikos (1392–1444), Metropolitan of Ephesus, opened discussions by declaring that ‘it was not rightfully made and ought never to have been made’ and most of his fellow ecclesiastics initially agreed with him. The Latins responded by claiming that the inclusion of the phrase was simply a matter of ‘words and syllables’ that clarified and completed the meaning. Ultimately the two sides were able to come up with a formula that overcame Greek objections, even if the Latins refused to compromise on the inclusion of the clause. The statement ended by confirming that the Filioque had been ‘licitly and reasonably added to the creed for the sake of declaring the truth and from imminent need’, but it was otherwise worded in such a way as to meet (or circumvent) the main Orthodox objections.72 For the Orthodox, the paramount concern was their understanding of the Godhead and whether the formula ‘from the son’ or ‘through the son’ compromised the Church’s teaching on the Trinity. This was a complex and highly technical issue, one that was argued back and forth using specialist terms such as substance, essence, hypostasis and spiration. But it also revealed some very important general differences between the two forms of Christianity, and these differences would continue to mark out the two Churches throughout the early modern period. To begin with, Orthodox Christianity, to a much greater extent than late medieval Catholicism, defined itself exclusively against an ancient and immutable heritage of belief. The rejection of the Filioque, for instance, was derived from John 15.26, the Nicene Creed and canon 7 of the Council of Ephesus. No modern authorities were referenced. Mutatis mutandis, this held true for all the main articles of Orthodox religion. The Church claimed to represent the ‘living continuity’ of the foundational sources of early Christianity, by which was meant Scripture, the ‘thousand-tongued assemblage’ of the first seven councils, patristic testimony, canon law, a selection of later doctrinal statements in accord with the councils, and the truths embodied in icons. Eastern Orthodoxy had not been affected by the scholastic revolution described in the earlier chapter on Latin Christianity, nor had the Byzantine religious world experienced an intellectual or cultural Renaissance like the West, neither in the twelfth nor in the fifteenth century.73 A similar disparity distinguished the spiritual habitus of the two Churches. By this stage, after so many centuries of separation, Catholics and Byzantines simply ‘felt differently about religion’.74 Some Greeks claimed that the lack of affinity was due to the failings of Latin, which they termed ‘barbaric and Scythian’, but the problem ran much deeper than this. It took in the whole perception of the divine. In mounting their arguments in Ferrara and Florence, for instance, the Catholic theologians held that their scholastic

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theories reflected an underlying reality about the nature of God. Orthodox theologians, in contrast, did not trust the human mind to make this leap. Instead, fully in keeping with the Hesychast tradition, they were much more likely to suggest that the only sure way to God was the negation of knowledge. To cite a distinguished modern scholar, to the Orthodox mind ‘theology was not a science of divine ontology but of divine revelation’.75 Real knowledge, so-called apophatic knowledge, was formed in ignorance. This was a mindset that drove the Latins to distraction and even prompted the emperor to apologize for the Greeks’ seeming lack of learning. But it was just as frustrating for the Orthodox to understand what the tortuous reasoning of the scholastics had to do with the faith of the Fathers. Sylvester Syropoulos, a member of the Greek delegation, registered the response of a Georgian official that captured something of the mood: ‘He said: “What about Aristotle, Aristotle? A fig for your fine Aristotle.” And when I by word and gesture asked: “What is fine?” the Georgian replied: “St Peter, St Paul, St Basil, Gregory the Theologian; a fig for your Aristotle, Aristotle”’.76 Despite the differences between the two Churches, in July 1439 the council did manage to come up with a decree of union (Laetentur Caeli), referred to in Pius II’s Epistola ad Mahometem II as the ‘Florentine decree’. On 6 July 1439 it was read out in Latin and Greek in the nave of the Florence cathedral, which had recently been crowned by Brunelleschi’s magnificent dome. In February of the following year the Byzantine delegation returned to Constantinople, where they soon faced widespread resistance to the decree. The patriarchs of Alexander, Antioch and Jerusalem issued condemnations, while the Orthodox faithful en masse threatened unrest. An anti-unionist, anti-Latinist movement started to gather around the figure of Georgios Scholarios (1400–73), who had emerged as the heir apparent to Eugenikos. Realizing this, the emperor refused to have it declared. Only years later, during the reign of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI (r.1449–53), would the decree be proclaimed in Hagia Sophia; but by that stage (December 1452) it was too late to have any real meaning. Although the conflict between the Ottomans and the Mongols had offered the Byzantines a brief respite, it had been clear for a number of decades that the sultans had set their sights on the conquest of Constantinople. The inhabitants of the ‘ill-starred’ city knew it was just a matter of time. It is interesting to note, for instance, that the majority of the Orthodox delegates at the Council of Florence left huge deposits of personal wealth with the Italian banks during their stopover in Venice.77 With the accession of Sultan Mehmed II in 1444, the final piece was in place for the capture of the city. Mehmed, latterly termed ‘The Conqueror’, was said to be obsessed with the idea, to the point that he stayed up whole nights weighing

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up the best ways to breach the walls. By 1451 he had gathered an army for the purpose, reckoned by some modern historians to have been up to 160,000 strong. Meanwhile, the depleted Byzantine forces had essentially been abandoned by the West. The pope had dispatched some archers, Venice had shipped some breastplates and gunpowder, but otherwise no substantial aid arrived from Christian Europe. The outcome was inevitable: on 29 May 1453 the Ottoman army of Mehmed II breached the walls of Constantinople and ‘the core of the Byzantine state was extinguished forever’.78 The history of the early modern Eastern Orthodox Church is thus a history of a Church under foreign occupation. For the entire period taken in by this book, all the Orthodox lands in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate (inter alia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Albania) were vassals of the Ottoman Empire. Only Russian Orthodoxy escaped this fate, but it was an exception in many ways and will be dealt with in a separate chapter. For the majority, this was the ‘age of captivity,’ a period when the Orthodox Church suddenly found itself stripped of its ancient partnership with the empire of Constantine and faced with the new reality that ‘it no longer sanctified through its spiritual guidance the earthly order of things’.79 As a consequence, much of early modern Orthodox history is a story of selfpreservation intermixed with periods of contraction and decline. But not all of it. There were phases of resourcefulness and creativity as well, and not least when the Church came into contact with the newly confessionalized Christian religions of the West. After the conquest, and in the absence of a regnant patriarchate in the city (the incumbent had fled in 1451), Mehmed the Conqueror oversaw the appointment of the anti-unionist Georgios Scholarios – or Gennadios, to use his monastic name – as the Ecumenical Patriarch. Gennadios was elected by the Holy Synod in 1454 and invested with the staff of office by the sultan himself. With this act, Constantinople retained its special standing in Orthodox Christianity, even though it was now an Islamic city. Tolerating a minority religion in this way was a common practice in the Ottoman Empire and consistent with the principles of the Koran, which recognizes all the Abrahamic religions. Mehmed had also established a chief haham for the Jewish community and the catholicos for the Armenians, for instance. But the sultan had practical reasons as well. By preserving the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Mehmed not only had a useful counterpoint to Catholic Rome at his disposal; he also inherited a ready-made institutional and ideological system through which to govern the Orthodox Christians of his realm. During the age of captivity, Orthodox Christians constituted a millet (a ‘nation’) in the empire. It was incorporated on the basis of religion, the

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traditional way the Ottomans ordered subject minorities. Christians were granted the right to form a self-governing community with their own laws and faith, but they remained second-class citizens (dhimmis) subject to numerous restrictions and they lived entirely at the pleasure of the sultans. Moreover, although the Christians might use Roman and canon law to regulate their own affairs, Islamic law had clear precedence, which meant that individual Christians who fell foul of Muslim interests had no real hope of due process, even though the sultans generally tried to honour the rights that had been granted to the Orthodox community by Mehmed II. Roughly speaking, the institutional church worked on the basis of its preconquest ecclesiological forms and systems. Elected by the Holy Synod and confirmed in office by the sultans, the Ecumenical Patriarch remained the titular head of Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, in the post-conquest Church his standing increased, for the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate was extended to all Orthodox Churches regardless of nationality or regime. Though not canonical, de facto this development brought an end to the ancient ideal of the pentarchy and made the Ecumenical Patriarchate the effective superior of all of the patriarchates, not the least because of his function as the interlocutor between all the other Churches and the Sublime Port. Moreover, now that there was no longer an emperor, the patriarchs of Constantinople took on a new range of secular functions as well. Not only were they responsible for the spiritual welfare of the community but they were also invested with the supervision of the legal and moral constitution of the millet along with the responsibility of overseeing the collection of taxes, dues and contributions to the Ottoman state.80 The Muslim conquest did not spell the end for the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine commonwealth, but it was an extremely testing time for the faith. A simple head count of churches in Constantinople will make the point. Most of the churches that fell to the plunder were subsequently converted into mosques, among them St John in Petra, the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, St Theodosia, and the True Church of the Pantokrator. Others, however, specifically those in the districts of the city that had surrendered to the Ottoman forces (Phanar, Petrion and Psamathia), initially remained in Christian hands, including the Cathedral of the Holy Apostles and the Church of the Pammakaristos, both of which served as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch until Pammakaristos too was converted into a mosque.81 Thus the Christians did manage to retain some important places of worship, even if they were forbidden to ring the bells for service (some congregations were reduced to striking pieces of wood), display candles, sing at more than half-voice and hang icons from the walls. Over time, however, most of the original churches were turned into mosques,

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armaments and menageries. By the eighteenth century, only three preconquest churches remained. Not even Hagia Sophia, the most famous church in Christendom, was spared. Recognizing its importance as a symbol of the triumph of Islam over Christendom, Mehmed the Conqueror immediately turned it into a mosque by having one of the ulama recite the Shahada from the pulpit. He then had the interior stripped of many of its crosses, relics and icons, replaced mosaics with Koranic inscriptions, added a marble minbar and a mihrab at an angle facing Mecca, completed the first two minarets and removed the cross from the dome.82 Arguably even more significant than the decline of the outer fabric was the decline of the inner workings of the Church. The Ecumenical Patriarchate had not been reduced in its functions after the conquest, as we have seen. But its survival came at a price. Now that the seat was entirely subject to the sultans, it was no longer hedged in by the aura of sanctity that marked out the Byzantine institution. To the sultans, it was primarily a political tool for the ordering of the Christian millet. Their most important concern was not the piety or probity of the incumbent but his ability to keep his Orthodox subjects in line. This had two main consequences, both of which worked to the detriment of the Church. First, the patriarch became a pawn in the hands of the powerful, making it impossible to effect any type of lasting reform contrary to the interests of the Ottomans or their clients. As a result, the office tended to change hands in step with the interests of the ruling elite. And it was not just a matter of replacing one man with another. Many patriarchs served multiple times, some with reigns lasting less than a month, while others were unseated through bribes, threats, infighting and even sentences of death. The second consequence was the inevitable corruption such a system fostered. Convincing the sultans to confirm a candidate in post required a substantial amount in bribes, tributes and fees. As the choice of appointment increasingly went to the highest bidder, over time these fees and tributes started to involve huge financial resources. Eventually only a self-perpetuating elite could afford it. From time to time foreign interests might play a role. There are examples of elections influenced by the Orthodox princes of Wallachia and Moldavia, the king of Georgia, the monks of Athos and even a sultan’s wife. But by the late sixteenth century the most important powerbrokers were the families resident in Phanar, the quarter of Constantinople where the Ecumenical Patriarchate was located. These were the so-called Phanariotes, merchant magnates and Hellenized aristocrats who used bribes and tributes in order to place their candidates in office in the hope that it would result in greater political leverage or, by means of the tax-farming system, greater family wealth.83

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Inevitably this left its mark on the Church. Not only did it tend to keep the best men out of the highest office; it implicated the entire hierarchy to some degree. The ancient ideal of the pentarchy, which had projected a model of Church governance through cooperation between the five patriarchal sees of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome, had been superseded with the post-conquest elevation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the head of the Orthodox community. The Holy Synod was staffed by the clients of the wealthy, most of whom lived in Constantinople or its environs. At some stage, non-resident bishops stopped signing the synodal acts altogether. In light of this state of affairs, it is not surprising that the quality of the Orthodox clergy declined over time. Clerical education fell into abeyance. Important centres of learning in Constantinople, Mistra and Trebizond closed their doors after the conquest, forcing scholars to leave for Italy. Henceforth the best provincial Greek boys could hope for was some sort of private tutoring. Most future clerics had to make do with an apprenticeship or rely on a father or a family friend. Taken together, these conditions left the Church in a much weakened state, a point made by the English traveller Paul Ricaut when he drew up an account of the state of the Greek and Armenian communities in the late seventeenth century: Tragical the subversion of the Sanctuaries of Religion, the Royal Priesthood expelled from their Churches, and these converted into Mosques; the Mysteries of the altar concealed in secret and dark places; for such I have seen in Cities and Villages where I have travelled, rather like Vaults and Sepulchres than Churches . . . the Oppression and the Contempt that good Christians are exposed to, and the Ignorance in their Churches occasioned through Poverty in the Clergy.84

It is thus little wonder that the Catholic missionaries had such a poor opinion of the Orthodox parishioners, for they had nowhere near the same level of exposure to doctrine as their counterparts in the confessionalized churches of the West. Not only were the schools and the clergy disappearing but the entire religious experience was being denuded over time. One seventeenthcentury visitor even claimed that he could not find a pulpit in the Greek churches, ‘for the custom of preaching has been abolished’.85 According to the English traveller Henry Blount, it was this lack of understanding, combined with the positive advantages of religious conformity, that explained why so many of the Greek Orthodox parishioners converted to Islam. Blount commented on how in Galata ‘many who professe themselves Christians scarce know what they mean by being so; finally, perceiving themselves poore, wretched, taxed, disgraced, deprived of their children and

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subject to the intolerance of every Raschall, they begin to consider, and prefer the present World, before that other which they so little understand’.86 The Church was in crisis. And yet it not only survived the Ottoman conquest; in some respects it experienced phases of consolidation and creativity. Ricaut remarked on this as well, considering it no less than a miracle ‘that there is conserved still amongst so much Opposition, and in despite of all Tyranny and Arts contrived against it, an open and public Profession of the Christian Faith’.87 Of course, when speaking of ‘Opposition’ and the ‘Tyranny and Arts contrived against it’, Ricaut was referring quite specifically to the threat posed by the Ottoman occupation. But the Church faced other threats as well, other interested parties who wished to build on the ruins of Constantinople, namely, fellow Christians, Catholics and Protestants. In its dealings with these two forms of Latin Christianity, both of which were supercharged with missionary zeal due to the religious conflicts in Europe, the Orthodox Church demonstrated that the core beliefs had not been diminished by the fall. ***** After the conquest, relations between the Greek Orthodox Church and Catholic Europe went cold. Popes continued to appeal for crusades and humanists continued to compose their polished exhortatoria in order to stir up interest in the East, but the first substantial attempts to beat back the Turks would only come in the later sixteenth century, and these were led by the kings of Spain rather than the bishops of Rome. Cut off from the rest of the Christian world, Greek-speaking Orthodoxy turned in on itself for a century or so after 1453, experiencing none of the changes brought about by the Renaissance or the Protestant and Catholic confessionalization in the West. Of course, complete isolation was not possible. Contact with the Italian states continued, and by the sixteenth century the Byzantine cities had become regular stops on Europe’s developing global network of trade. But there was no attempt by the Patriarch of Constantinople to renew ties with Rome and no desire to revisit the dialogues of Florence. After mid-century, however, relations between the two Churches started to improve. By the 1580s the Jesuits were sending missionaries into the empire. Settling first in the Greek colonies of Venice and Genoa, they were in Constantinople by 1583, where they took possession of a church and set up a school. The Capuchins soon followed. Meanwhile the papacy, having founded the College of St Athanasius in Rome in 1577 with a view to turning young Greek scholars into Catholic missionaries, started to send new graduates into the field. Over time these efforts did pay modest dividends.

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Some Patriarchs cultivated close ties with the papacy, among them Raphael II (r.1603–07), Neophytus II (r.1602–03, 1607–12) and Timothy II (r.1612–20), all of whom were very deferential to Rome. But in the end, no matter how pro-union a particular patriarch may have been, it proved impossible to overcome the deep spirit of distrust and antipathy shared by the synods, the clergy and the population at large. Nor were the sultans likely to favour closer relations with Rome, as Raphael II learned to his cost. As a consequence, the understanding between the two Churches did not markedly improve.88 When the idea of a union with Latin Christianity did take a new turn in the early modern period, it was the Protestants rather than the Catholics who piqued the interests of Constantinople. On the surface, the two forms of Christianity seemed to have some things in common: both had a healthy disregard for Catholicism and both emphasized the centrality of Scripture and ancient, unchanging sources of authority. Luther had spoken favourably of the Greek Church during the Leipzig debate, and the graecist Melanchthon had been cultivating contacts for years. On the basis of some initial soundings, Patriarch Joasaph II (r.1556–65) sent a deacon named Demetrios to Wittenberg in 1558 in order to get a better grasp of Lutheran theology. Demetrios returned to Constantinople with Melanchthon’s translation of the Augsburg Confession (which included loan words from the Greek liturgy), but otherwise nothing came from this initial encounter. Contact did not resume again until ten years later, when David von Ungnad, a Lutheran ambassador from Austria residing in Constantinople, instigated a series of contacts and exchanges that eventually established a correspondence between Jeremias II (r.1572–79, 1580–84, 1587–95) and a group of Lutheran scholars at the University of Tübingen, which included the prominent graecist Martin Crusius (1526–1607) and the two professors of theology Jakob Andreae (1528–90) and Lukas Osiander (1534– 1604). Over the course of seven years (1574–81) the Lutherans sent a series of long and detailed letters spelling out the essentials of their faith, along with at least six Greek translations of the Augsburg Confession. At no stage in the course of the negotiations did the Orthodox Church give the impression that it was willing to compromise on its beliefs. On the contrary, if anything Jeremias II effected a rather patronizing tone in his correspondence with Tübingen, referring to the Lutheran theologians as ‘learned Germans and dear children’. And he made it perfectly clear in a long letter of 1576 that the only hope of union would depend on the extent to which ‘you [the Lutherans] are willing to follow with us the apostolic and synodical traditions [of the Orthodox Church] and to subject yourselves to them’.89 This declaration came at the end of a long list of Orthodox objections to a synthesis of Lutheranism drafted by the Tübingen theologians. As soon as they had received it, Jeremias II and the ecclesiastics

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in the Holy Synod would have recognized that the spirit of this religion was different from their own. Although the Lutherans emphasized the primacy of Scripture and the witness of the early Church, their religion was couched in the same sort of language as that of the Catholic scholastics in Florence. Indeed, there is no more telling testimony to the distance between the two Churches than the methods used in the exchange. Whereas the Lutherans pitched their religion by arguing a case, the Orthodox simply responded with citations from Greek Fathers, ecumenical councils and synods.90 Nevertheless, Jeremias II did go through the list of Lutheran articles and responded to each in turn. In many instances he simply described or confirmed the Orthodox practice and how it differed from that of the Lutherans. This was the case with reference to baptism, the use of leavened bread, ordination, confession and the worship of icons. In some instances his response was a more direct criticism of Lutheranism, as was the case with the Filioque, the sacraments and the Eucharist. And still in other instances it entailed an outright rejection of Lutheran thought, as was the case with the teaching of justification through faith (sola fide). For the Orthodox, no less than for the Catholics, justification was achieved through both faith and works, and works might range from feasts to fasts to monastic exercises and prayers before icons. Despite the ongoing efforts of the Tübingen theologians, the Greeks could not be convinced of the truth of Lutheranism or the need to reconsider any of the content of their own faith. After a second long letter the Ecumenical Patriarch refused to be drawn into further discussion, and in his final communiqué of 1581 he advised the Lutherans to ‘go your own way, and do not send us further letters on doctrine but only letters written for the sake of friendship’.91 A more serious threat to the integrity of Greek Orthodoxy surfaced in the seventeenth century, when the Ecumenical Patriarch himself began to flirt with Protestant ideas. Constantine Lucaris (1572–1638), later Cyril I Lucaris, was born in Crete and educated in mainland Europe, primarily in Venice and Padua, though he had spent time in Wittenberg and Geneva as well. In 1596 he was raised by the Patriarch of Alexandria to the status of special envoy and sent to Brest to lead the Orthodox opposition against the union negotiations between the Metropolitan of Kiev and Rome. Afterwards, Lucaris remained in Poland and Lithuania for a number of years teaching and working against Catholic interests, and it was also around this time that he started to cultivate relations with the Protestants. In 1601 he was elected Patriarch of Alexandria, and in 1620, after he agreed to pay the fee to the sultans, he took on the name Cyril I and became the Ecumenical Patriarch, a post he would occupy until his death in 1638 (although his reign was punctuated with periods of exile).

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Already as Patriarch of Alexandria, Lucaris had been in contact with high-ranking Protestants in the Dutch Republic and England looking for ways to mount a common defence against Catholicism. He had seen the Jesuits at work in Brest and feared they might persuade Constantinople to follow in the footsteps of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church: that is, union with Rome. Once the Jesuits got their hands on the young they were, as Lucaris put it in 1613, ‘as foxes among poultry’, and he was convinced that unless something was done to counter their efforts in Constantinople, ‘at length the Roman doctrine will overspread the world, if the satellites of the Court of Rome employ equal diligence in the business, unless God is merciful to us’.92 It was in order to stave off the feared Catholic advance that Lucaris cultivated close ties with the Church of England, an initiative that resulted in the creation of studentships in Oxford for Greek scholars. It was also partly for this reason that Lucaris tried to see through a series of reform measures in the Greek Church, including efforts to reorganize the monasteries and a campaign to improve piety and understanding. A shortlived experiment with Constantinople’s first printing press (smuggled in from England in 1627) was part of this reform project. For his efforts, Lucaris earned the enmity of the popes, who termed him ‘that son of darkness, that athlete of hell, the pseudo-patriarch Cyril’, as well as the close-quartered intrigue of Catholic agents in Constantinople, which included a rather heady brew of Jesuits, French Capuchins in the service of Cardinal Richelieu and missionaries from Rome.93 Although the English and Dutch ambassadors managed to save him on a number of occasions, in the end his enemies proved too resourceful and had him deposed on a trumped-up charge of treason. In 1638, while on a ship on the Bosphorus, he was strangled to death by Janissaries and tossed over the side. Of all the charges brought against Lucaris, the most damaging, and the only one of any real substance, was that he was a Protestant. Rumours to this effect were already circulating while he was Patriarch of Alexandria, when he first started to cultivate close ties with the Dutch ambassador Cornelius van Haag. By the 1620s, after his election as Ecumenical Patriarch, he maintained a regular correspondence with Reformed divines in the Dutch Republic as well as George Abbott, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he actively sought out talks with clergy in Bern, Basel, Strasbourg and Geneva. After more than a decade of speculation, in 1629 Lucaris had his Confession of Faith published in Geneva, which seemed to confirm what his detractors had claimed for years: he was a crypto-Calvinist. But the matter was not quite so clear-cut. Only eight pages in length, the Confession was in fact a mix of conventional Orthodox belief and Calvinist theology. Doggedly traditional in some respects, as in its ideas on the Trinity, the Incarnation and original sin, in

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other respects it was an open embrace of Protestantism, including Calvinist notions on predestination, a rejection of the Catholic theory of transubstantiation (which he termed a ‘chimera’), the denial of purgatory and the efficacy of images (including icons) and a wholehearted support of the principle of justification through faith alone. In Lucaris’s own words: ‘We believe that man is justified by faith, not by works.’94 These were clearly Calvinist sentiments, and there was certainly enough in this booklet to suggest that Lucaris had moved beyond Greek Orthodoxy, and yet historians are still unclear as to what extent we should think of him as a Protestant Patriarch or rather just a seventeenth-century neo-reformer with a desire to return the Church to a state of ‘evangelical simplicity’. In all likelihood, his semi-conversion was due to a mix of motives. Closer ties to Protestants offered support against an encroaching Catholicism as well as a ready range of experience and expertise for the practical reform of the Orthodox Church. And as a personal approach to Christianity, as a religion that openly embraced the ideals of rebirth and renewal, Calvinism may have seemed an ideal remedy for a Church caught up in a period of crisis and decline.95 Whatever private reasons Lucaris may have had for his drift towards Protestantism, in the very public opinion of the Eastern Orthodox Church it was a mistake and the confession was quickly condemned as heretical (though not Lucaris himself). In order to stave off future flirtation with Protestantism, the Church staged a series of councils reconfirming the traditional teachings of Greek Orthodoxy and pointed up the errors of Protestant belief. In this sense, the effect of Lucaris’s reign was the opposite of the one intended: instead of rethinking the Church in pursuit of an ideal of ‘evangelical simplicity’ (as he saw it), the brief dalliance with Protestantism convinced the higher clergy that there was a need to reconfirm the ancient beliefs of the Church in order to protect it against the thought of the West. This was not just a knee-jerk reaction to the reign of the ‘Protestant Patriarch’. Despite the Church’s circumstances, there were still very competent theologians in the Byzantine lands, and these men had freely engaged with Western thought before the arrival of Lucaris. Gabriel Severos, for instance, Metropolitan of Philadelphia, managed to digest many of the ideas of Tridentine Catholicism without compromising Orthodoxy, while Maximos Margounios, Metropolitan of Kythera, although forced to renounce some of his writings later in life, mastered scholasticism without being forced out of the Church.96 But the reign of Lucaris marked a turning point. After this death, the Church became much more precise in its attempts to define the faith, and in fact to the point that it started to borrow the language and techniques

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of Latin scholasticism in order to do so. It also became even more wary in its dealings with Latin Christianity, tending to turn in on itself. And it changed in one other important respect as well, an important shift in perspective brought about by its most recent scramble for allies. By this stage the higher ecclesiastics realized that Constantinople was no longer the foremost city of Orthodox Christianity. That distinction now belonged to Moscow.

CHAPTER

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Church and State Given the close fit between the Church and the emerging nation-states of the early modern period, it is not surprising that so much religious discourse was devoted to determining how the authorities should divide up rule over the body and the soul. All Churches faced these questions at some stage, though it was particularly critical for the Protestants, for they had raised up their own Churches on the ruins of the medieval synthesis, and this meant that a new foundation was urgently required. Luther tried to solve the problem by thinking in theological terms. Fearful of the harm that might be brought about by too much secular involvement, he developed the paradigm of the ‘Two Kingdoms’, a theory based on the premise that mankind has a dual nature and stood in a double relationship with God: the Christian was subject to both the Spirit and the sword, each in its proper place. This became a widespread Protestant thematic, for it allowed the Church and state to negotiate the boundaries between the two spheres while treating them on equal terms. But it was not the only Protestant approach to the issue, and historically speaking there was not always parity between the two kingdoms. In most of the newly confessionalized nations, the state simply absorbed many of the functions that had traditionally belonged to the Church. And there were further difficulties, of course, if the state religion itself was being contested between antagonistic confessions. This was the case in some of the post-Reformation lands of northern Europe, for instance, such as France, the Dutch Republic and England, where the issues of sovereignty and faith became fatally bound up in the struggles for rule. But finding the right balance between Church and state was not just a dilemma facing the Protestants. In Catholic lands caught up in the process of reform, it was no less difficult for the rulers of the Catholic powers to accommodate the reinvigorated Church within the framework of a state that was steadily reaching further and further into the spiritual realm. And the same holds true for the Orthodox Church of Russia, which was one of the few Orthodox Churches of the age bound up in a state on the rise. Throughout the early modern period, and in the midst of dramatic political 111

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changes, tsars and patriarchs had to work out how the ancient Byzantine ideal of symphonia (concord) should be understood in the context of the emerging Russian Empire. Since the days of Constantine, Eastern Orthodoxy had projected a model of church–state relations based in mutual respect and autonomy within the appropriate spheres. But these ideals were difficult to reconcile with the realities of early modern Muscovy. Confessionalization: Protestants and Catholics in Germany Scholars have often used the study of the Reformation as a laboratory for the investigation of the modern condition, reducing, distilling and combining the constituent elements in an effort to develop an explanatory paradigm that not only grasps its effects on its age but also projects a theorem of causal forces and core ideas that can account for the making of modernity. The most profound thinkers in this tradition were Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, both of whom wrote their most influential works over a century ago, and their most ambitious theories were those relating to the rise of individualism, capitalism, religious tolerance and the foundation of the nation-state. But this fascination with the Reformation and modernity has since branched off in myriad ways and occupied the thoughts of generations of scholars. In recent years, the most sophisticated and influential attempt in this vein has been the theory of confessionalization, an approach developed in the 1980s, roughly simultaneously, by the German historians Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, which posits that religious reform worked as a ‘heuristic indicator’ for broader patterns of social, cultural, intellectual and political change. Given the centrality of faith to this age, the theory holds, both in the public and the private spheres, any reform of religion necessarily had a profound and far-reaching effect on the entire matrix of social, cultural and political relations. By incorporating the secular and the spiritual, forging new notions of identity rooted in the symbols, ritual and language of religion, and creating philosophies of order that found their logic and justification in works of theology, the Reformation effected a transformation in the way people perceived and experienced the world. And it was not just a Protestant phenomenon. The process of confessionalization occurred in the Catholic world as well, with similar methods and similar results.1 As with all historiographical paradigms, the idea of confessionalization has a limited shelf-life, and some recent scholarship has argued that its time has passed. New insights, new evidence and new sympathies have led historians in different directions. But the idea can still serve as a powerful historiographical paradigm, by which is meant that it is still a very useful way for historians to gather their thoughts. In this spirit, the following chapter will draw on some of the themes of confessionalization in order to shed light

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on the broader implications of early modern religious reform, and in particular on how it affected political relations, how it impacted the believer in the parish and how it contributed to the making of confessional identity. To get a sense of the comparative nature of the process, the chapter will take in both the Protestant and the Catholic experience. And to keep the analysis within reasonable bounds it will limit the setting to the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire (excluding the Habsburg Austrian lands to the south), where the dynamic was especially complex. ***** Having first been embraced by the rural and urban communes of central and southern Germany, Luther’s theology of reform eventually assumed its final historical form as a state Church in the princely territories. But it was not a uniform process, nor was it inevitable. Despite the shared grievances against Rome and the galvanizing discourse of German nationalism, the majority of princes proved reluctant to support Luther or to commit to the movement, which is not surprising in light of the fact that the reformer had been excommunicated and placed under imperial ban. The most decisive response came from open opponents such as Georg of Albertine Saxony, Joachim I of Brandenburg, Heinrich of Wolfenbüttel and Wilhelm of Bavaria, all of whom introduced very public measures to root out the movement, from the banning of Luther’s publications to the exile or arrest of evangelical sympathizers. Most other princes remained non-committal, biding their time until they had greater understanding of the faith or a better sense of how the reform movement would play out. Some rulers, however, despite the risks, did come to the defence of Luther and his theology and began to oversee an evangelical reform of the Church within their territories. Pride of place in this respect must go to Johann of Saxony and Philipp of Hesse, who became the leaders of German Lutheranism and, with the foundation of the Schmalkaldic League in 1531, the defenders of the faith, but lesser powers followed their lead, including the princes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Anhalt and Mansfeld. By mid-century, either due to the death of a regnant prince (as in Albertine Saxony in 1539 and Brandenburg in 1540) or the broader shifts in imperial politics (such as the restoration of Ulrich to the duchy of Württemberg in 1534), Lutheranism made further important gains, both in the north and the south. On the eve of the Schmalkaldic War (1547) Lutheran territories were scattered throughout the Empire, from the isolated enclaves of Prussia east of the Elbe, the territories of Holstein, Pomerania and Brandenburg near the northern coasts, the central German princedoms

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of Hesse and Saxony, to the Palatinate Electorate and the duchy of Württemberg in the south-west, which sat in close proximity to both the Habsburg lands and the Catholic stronghold of Bavaria.2 Around mid-century another wave of Protestant reform swept through the German lands, though Swiss rather than Saxon in its provenance, guided and inspired by the thought of Zwingli, Calvin and Melanchthon. Most of the Reformed territories were modest in scale and significance, fairly minor enclaves such as Nassau-Dillenburg, Hanau-Münzenberg, Sayn-Wittgenstein and Hesse-Cassel, but there were some notable conversions as well, paramount being that of Elector Friedrich of the Palatinate, whose change of heart became official in 1563. With the faith established in the Rhine Palatinate and (reluctantly) tolerated by the imperial estates in 1566, other German princes followed Friedrich’s lead and introduced the Reformed confession, including a temporary conversion by the rulers of Electoral Saxony and the top-down imposition of the faith in Anhalt and Brandenburg. Indeed, the conversion of Brandenburg to Reformed Protestantism in the early seventeenth century (while a Lutheran land) is instructive of the character of this ‘Second Reformation’ and its differences to Lutheranism. Generally speaking, and using Brandenburg as the model, it was imposed from above, largely in the face of an indifferent or, just as frequently, an antagonistic subject population. Because of the hostile nature of confessional relations at the time, it was highly politicized, necessarily so given the fact that neither Zwinglian nor Calvinist teaching was recognized by the Peace of Augsburg (1555). And true to the strong tropological (moral) dimension of Reformed thought, it tended to emphasize the need for a ‘reform of life’ to complete the initial reform of theology orchestrated by Luther, an idea with obvious affinities to the enduring Zwinglian vision of a Christian commonwealth standing in a covenant with the divine.3 The rationale for the rise of the Protestant territorial church (Staatskirche) was devised by the reformers, using both the language and the methods of evangelical theology. For this reason, from the very outset, there was a close symmetry between the words used to describe the relationship between the believer and God and the relationship between the believer and the state. Although initially reluctant to grant the prince authority over the workings of the Church, Luther eventually conceded that the elector might assume the role of an emergency bishop and oversee the upbuilding of the Saxon Church. Given Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and his theory of the Two Kingdoms of rule, this concession did not compromise his thought; but it was not on its own enough to provide a blueprint or a logic for the princely usurpation of power. Instead, it was the more systematic mind of Philipp Melanchthon who invested the Protestant authorities with the right

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to rule over the Church. True to his humanist education, Melanchthon spoke of the prince in the language of the mirrors of godly rule and emphasized his elevated role as the ‘chief member of the church’ ( praecipuum membrum ecclesiae). Yet he also projected the princes in more active and permanent terms as the ‘gods’ and ‘guardians’ of the Church with the divinely ordained duty to safeguard religion and watch over both tables of the Decalogue – that is, not just the final seven commandments dealing with worldly relations, but the first three as well, those which concerned the externals of the faith and the proper public worship of God. The Protestant prince was thus imagined as a Christian authority in the Old Testament mould, obliged, as Melanchthon put it, ‘to accept the holy gospel, to believe, confess, and direct others to true divine service’.4 Other reformers, Johannes Brenz and Johannes Bugenhagen among them, adopted Melanchthon’s scheme and made it the basic framework for church/state relations in Lutheran Germany. Later in the century, once Zwinglianism and Calvinism started to take root, this scheme was recreated in its essentials in the Reformed polities as well. Despite its emphasis on synods, consistories and clerical autonomy, Calvinism was readily transplanted into the soil of the territorial Church. In this respect, perhaps the Reformed equivalent of Melanchthon was Thomas Erastus (1524–83), professor of medicine in Heidelberg and physician to Elector Friedrich, who, as we have seen, was the first of the German princes to embrace the faith. Without compromising the notion of the two spheres of rule, the secular and the spiritual honoured by all the mainstream reformers, Erastus developed an argument in favour of extensive powers of secular rule over the visible Church, up to and including the right to impose forms of penance and excommunication. In the end, the Protestant polity was essentially a moral covenant whose central purpose was to tame the sins of Fallen Man. In the words of Mark Greengrass, ‘God had established a world of nature in which the sins of humankind were a fact of life, to be regulated, controlled and limited. Those limits were policed by state power, itself constructed around a theo-political imagination in which God’s power was the model of that of the state itself – both almighty and irresistible.’5 Out of this conflation of the secular and the spiritual a new type of ruler emerged: the Protestant prince, inheritor of the medieval Catholic synthesis, who in effect took on the role of an archbishop (summus episcopus) in his lands.6 Of course, the conceit that the prince was God’s agent on earth did not surface with the Reformation. German princes had long shared in the odour of sanctity marking out the medieval monarchs. But the Protestant prince was different in kind. To begin with, although divested of any hint of a unique or elevated sacerdotal status by Reformation theology (the prince, as

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Luther wrote, ‘is a man as any other’), it became his ordained duty as a Christian ruler to protect the Church placed in his care. In theory, the ruler could not meddle in matters that touched on salvation. Doctrine, dogma and saving faith remained the preserves of the theologians. In practice, however, the rulers of both Lutheran and Reformed territories regularly influenced the content of the faith in their lands, not only by exercising their powers of supervision and appointment over the clergy but by emphasizing their newfound status as the godly and learned custodians of the faith entrusted with the oversight of the visible Church. Little wonder that Friedrich IV of the Palatinate considered his role as the summus episcopus, ‘the foremost part of our rule as elector and the basis of all temporal and heavenly welfare’.7 With the Protestant prince covenanted to watch over the ‘temporal and heavenly welfare’ of his subjects, the highest office of rule became the preservation of religious orthodoxy. To cite the words of a Lutheran church order, the prince’s chief duty was ‘to safeguard God’s name and his Word’ and to ensure that the faithful ‘were protected from error in pure, healthy teaching and proper belief’.8 In the absence of the Catholic magisterium, Protestant rulers had to look elsewhere for theological guidelines. As a consequence, the early modern age experienced what has been labelled the rise of confessionalism, a term that describes the propensity of the Protestant Churches, with a frequency and a precision unprecedented in Christian history, to draw up public confessions of belief that spelled out, article by article, the content of approved religion. And it was much more than just an exercise in systematic theology. Faith had to coincide with conduct and form, the end result being ‘the articulation of belief systems (in “confessional texts”), the recruitment and character of various professional clerical bodies, the constitution and operations of church institutions, and systems of rituals’.9 Whole territories and their subject peoples had to adhere to a corpus of belief derived from the canonical works of the reformers. Lutherans first looked to the works of Luther (his two catechisms in particular) and the Loci Communes of Melanchthon, but then relied on the formal confessions and synthetic statements, including the Confession of Augsburg (1530), the Schmalkaldic Articles (1537) and eventually the Book of Concord (1580). Similarly, early Reformed Protestants tended to base their public confessions on Calvin’s Institutes (1536) and The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), but later in the century they drew on the thought of other leading theologians or the public confessions of other Reformed lands. Moreover, to bring the faith closer to home, the Protestant princes issued church orders and religious mandates that, though based on the broader teachings of Lutheran or Reformed belief, were specifically tailored to the Church within their lands.

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Hundreds of these local church orders rolled off the printing presses in the sixteenth century. The most influential examples were the Church Order and the Instructions for the Visitors of Saxony (1528), both of which were widely copied due to the involvement of Luther and Melanchthon, but each Protestant territory had its own published church order and its own quorum of theological advisors called in to draft the text. At no previous stage in German history had Christian beliefs been so precisely defined.10 With Protestant rulers assuming the role of bishops and territorial synods acting as an ersatz magisterium, these Lutheran and Reformed polities became the seedbeds for the rise of new forms of Latin Christianity. The secular authorities dismantled the Catholic Church and built a Protestant Church in its place. Protestant rulers abolished or simply superseded episcopal jurisdiction; recalcitrant Catholic clergy were replaced with evangelical preachers, who swore an oath to the prince before taking up office; and the religious landscape was reconfigured, with the result that chapters were either absorbed or brought into line with secular boundaries, parishes were reduced in size or combined with others and ecclesiastical property and income changed hands as patronage and jurisdiction were revamped. Throughout Protestant Germany large amounts of Church property were secularized, beginning with the wealthy convents and monasteries, which were sequestered by the princes and put into secular service. With reformers such as Luther and Brenz proposing that these institutions be left to die out from their own fatal entropy, the initial seizures of property eventually gave way to a more measured absorption of the buildings, their contents and their allodial incomes. In place of the medieval Catholic superstructure, new hybrid forms of Church rule evolved, often in very close association with the evolution of the state.11 All of this had one overarching purpose: the creation of a community of believers joined together in a single Church – one, holy, Protestant and apostolic – grounded in an approved public confession. To do this the Protestant authorities had to wean the parishioners off late medieval Catholicism and turn them into Lutherans and Calvinists. Different means and methods were used to achieve this goal, from the heavy-handed use of force and coercion to the lighter touches of broadsheet propaganda and evangelical sermonizing, but the impulse itself was all embracing and it was one of the core dynamics of the period. And in all instances the subject of reform was the parishioners, both their minds and their bodies. Transforming the mind entailed transforming the modalities of public worship. In place of the theatres of ceremony and sacramentality that facilitated medieval religiosity, the Protestant place of worship tended to emphasize the ministry of the Word. And indeed, if there was one leading

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idea that captures the logic behind the Protestant campaign to transform the sensibilities of the Christian believer it was the conviction, rooted in the evangelical idea of sola Scriptura, that Christian truth is best grasped through words rather than objects or images. Words in this context might mean both texts and sounds, but the underlying conceit was that the Christian best comes to faith through a direct encounter with the Word. A range of consequences followed from this. To begin with, in an age when literacy was rare, the Reformation worked as a catalyst for the reform of education. This was certainly the case in the German lands, where Protestants put a premium on schooling and founded schools, seminaries and universities in numbers that have prompted some historians to speak of a pedagogical revolution. Beyond the classroom, for those parishioners with no experience of regular schooling (who remained the majority), the reformers revitalized the ancient practice of catechizing. The catechism emerged as one of the main tools of Protestant indoctrination. Luther provided the archetypes with his Great and Small catechisms of 1529, while the Reformed Church could draw on Calvin’s Institutes (which began life as a catechism) and the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563. By mid-century most of the leading reformers, and hundreds of lesser ones as well, had published catechisms specifically aimed at the Christians of a particular territorial Church. These were the ideal vehicles for the evangelical message: short, sharp, vernacular syntheses of the main teachings of the faith, often in a rhyming format for easy memorization, the Protestant catechism spelled out in precise terms what the reformers meant when they spoke of the Word of God.12 But the most effective method of spreading the Word, and the most potent reminder of the logocentric shift that epitomized the Protestant modality of worship, was the sermon. Every church order in the German lands insisted on regular preaching and regular attendance at the weekly sermons. In this regard, despite its successful marriage with print, the movement never lost communion with Luther’s sense of urgency about the need to preach rather than just print the Word. The sound of the Word became a quasi-sacrament, a sure means of salvation. As Luther once remarked: ‘Satan does not care a hoot for the written Word of God, but he flees at the speaking of the Word.’13 In order to facilitate preaching, Protestant Churches effectively became paired-down auditoria. Many of the medieval objects of devotion (what the Calvinists termed ‘vain papal relics’) and much of the equipage of worship was removed. Pictures, statues, side altars, candles, choir screens and reliquaries made way for altar freezes, epitaph memorials, historical panel paintings and carved pulpits with large sounding boards. True to the original

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Zwinglian impulse to remove all objects that deflected attention away from contemplation of the Word, the Reformed faith tended to be more unyielding in this respect, but even in the more lenient Lutheran lands, such as in Mecklenburg, for instance, visitation orders specified that ‘where it is discovered that there is an idol or an image on hand that is an object of devotion, it should be removed immediately, destroyed and reduced to ashes’.14 At the same time the broader space of the church began to shift. Although attention still had to be paid to altars, communion tables and baptismal fonts, the primary focus of the service became the pastor in the pulpit. Unlike the medieval church, where the sacral energy of the service was diffused through altars, chantries, chapels, icons and liturgical equipage, in the Protestant church, there was (in theory) nothing happening above, behind or beside the congregation that might pull the parishioners in different directions. All of the senses were focused on the Word. Just as the reformers sought to change the way the believer comprehended Christianity, so too did they aspire to bring about a change in how he or she behaved. The basic reasoning was simple enough: fruits should follow faith. But taking up the ancient Christian concern with conduct and behaviour meant that Protestants had to become much more hands-on in their approach to reform, for this was primarily an issue of discipline, of imposing order on the parishes and meting out punishment. Once again, faced with the seeming universality of the phenomenon, historians have come up with paradigms in order to make sense of this process, speaking in terms of social disciplining, the reform of popular culture, Christianization and the disciplinary revolution, while placing this concern with morality within the context of the rise of the state or the civilizing process as a whole.15 At root, however, the concern with discipline was a theological issue and thus a natural consequence of evangelical reform. For Lutherans, good works and a godly lifestyle would follow from faith, and it was the responsibility of both Church and state to create and preserve the conditions for these virtues to exist. For the Churches within the Swiss tradition, whose notions of Christian society were derived from the claustrophobic urban ecclesiologies of Bucer and Calvin, the oversight of discipline was such an important aspect of the faith that it had been elevated to one of the ‘marks’ of the True Church alongside baptism and the preaching of the Word. In historical terms, the consequence of this Protestant concern with Christian conduct was the rise of new techniques, technologies and organs of social disciplining. With reference to the latter, the terminology varied. Some Churches had synods, presbyteries and classes, others had consistories, church councils and marriage courts. And the means varied as well. In Lutheran territories, the

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authorities had a sliding scale of punishments that ran from simple admonishment to fines, imprisonment, excommunication and even (very rarely) death. But all were put into the service of upholding the godly order and rooting out those aspects of popular culture, whether symptomatic of conduct or beliefs, that had no place in the new Christian order. The 1528 visitation order of Saxony gives something of the sense: Wherever a visitation takes place in our towns and villages, respondents shall be required under threat of severe punishment to report and enumerate to the visitors whether there are to be found among them any blasphemers, adulterers, fornicators, gamblers, drunkards, idlers or loafers, disobedient sons and daughters, and others of the same sort, leading a wicked life and exhibiting the outward signs of an evil nature. Also any people suspected of Anabaptism or of abusing the holy sacrament by practicing Zwinglianism. Also any who mutter against the government and oppose it as though it were not a power ordained by God. All such are to be reported by name, as the Electoral Instruction prescribes.16

Conduct and belief are just two component parts of the broader scheme of reform taken in by the paradigm of confessionalization, but even this short survey should give some sense about the bigger questions it evokes. Behind the rise of the Protestant princedoms it is possible to see the first faint outlines of the modern nation-state, with its ideology of order and rule, its compact (or covenant) of higher moral purpose and its diffused sense of providentialism. The same holds true for the study of the individual believer. The Reformation’s turn away from the visceral world of late medieval Catholicism to the logocentric (or Word-centred) religion of Lutheranism and Calvinism created the conditions for the rise of modern individualism. No longer reliant on the sacramental intervention of the medieval priest, the Protestant believer stood alone before God (so the theory holds) with only Scripture as a guide to salvation. The consequence, as the historian Richard van Dülmen put it, was that ‘a man’s subjective faith, his “internal” religious attitude, came to occupy the centre of religious and ecclesiastical life for the first time’, with the result that a new type of Christian emerged, more independent, critical and self-aware.17 All of these developments are thoroughly modern in the sense that we can trace their histories by moving backward from the present day; and all of them, traditionally speaking, have been associated with the rise of the Protestant Reformation. And yet as the study of confessionalization in Germany has revealed, many of the same developments occurred in the Catholic lands as well. *****

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Once the reformers had discovered the potential of the printing press and piqued the interest of the communes, nothing within the power of the early modern German prince could have prevented the spread of the evangelical movement. Although historians use words like autocratic and absolutist to describe the nature of the state in this period, in practice the methods of rule were still very rudimentary. There was no such thing as a public police force, the chain of command was largely dependent on local initiatives and personal ties, and there was no effective way to stop the flow of people or goods from one territory to the next. As a consequence, the evangelical movement was able to spread throughout Germany regardless of the religious sympathies of the ruler, including those territories, such as the great prince-bishoprics of the Rhineland, where the full weight of church discipline could be brought to bear. Because there were so many different interests at play, it is difficult to form a blanket judgement about the Catholic response to the Reformation in Germany. Historically speaking, the guardian of the faith was the emperor, and this meant that when the Reformation first surfaced the defence of German Catholicism was in the hands of Charles V, the French-speaking Duke of Burgundy residing in his kingdom of Spain. Charles was not lacking in Catholic conviction, of course, but by the time he was able to mount a response to the Protestant threat in the 1540s over two-thirds of the imperial cities had already been lost to Lutheranism as well as the powerful princedoms of Saxony, Brandenburg, Württemberg and Hesse. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) restored some order, and this allowed German Catholicism to muster its forces, but as a confessional bloc it was always at cross-purposes and there never really was a single ‘Catholic response’. The Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria, for instance, the most powerful Catholic family in Germany, was repeatedly at odds with the Habsburgs, and sometimes allied against them; the prince-bishops of Franconia and the Rhineland, often members of powerful dynasties with overt political agendas, were frequently locked in ancient quarrels with their chapters, and many great monastic houses, concerned with preserving liberties and prerogatives granted by former emperors, chose to avoid the potential dangers of clerical reform. All of this obstructed the Catholic response, including the implementation of the Tridentine decrees. Generally speaking, there was no rush to publish them in the German lands. Still hoping for some sort of reconciliation with the Lutherans, Emperor Maximilian II refused to confirm the decrees at the Diet of Augsburg (1566). It was thus left to each Catholic estate to respond individually to Tridentine reform.18 Around mid-century, as in the rest of Catholic Europe, we can start to see the first signs of the reforming impulse that historians associate with

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the Counter Reformation. With the end of the Schmalkaldic War (1547), the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the decrees of the Council of Trent, Germany now had a legal, political and religious framework for a consolidated Catholic response. Having said this, we should not overestimate the impact of the Counter Reformation in the bishoprics, anymore than we should assume that the Protestant Reformation accomplished all that it set out to do. Even after Trent, Catholic prelates kept mistresses, collected benefices, lived like worldly princes and abused their sinecures for dynastic ends. Indeed, the Bishop of Trent at the time of the Council was Cristoforo Madruzzo, brother of Emperor Charles V’s mercenary captain Eriprando Madruzzo, whose family monopolized the bishopric without interruption from 1539 to 1658. Ultimately, because of the ‘fragmented and haphazard’ nature of the Catholic Church in Germany, reform was always going to be piecemeal.19 Nevertheless, where there was a sincere desire to renew the Church or implement the Tridentine decrees, the results could be impressive. In Augsburg, for example, once the Erasmian bishop Christoph von Stadion had been replaced by the Catholic hard-liner Otto Truchsess von Walburg (r.1543–73), papal chamberlain, nuncio at Trent and future cardinal, the elements of reform started to fall into place, including the publication of the Tridentine decrees, the discipline and improvement of the clergy, the establishment of a Jesuit university in Dillingen and a diocesan synod followed by published statutes. Another powerful example of a Counter Reformation prelate was Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn (r.1573–1617), the Jesuit-schooled prince-bishop of Würzburg. As he was from Mainz and thus had no local or familial ties in Franconia, he was able to dismantle the noble networks that had monopolized the chapter for so many years and staff the offices of the bishopric with Jesuits and reform-minded men. With a view to the best models of reform in Italy and the Habsburg lands, he effected a complete transformation of the diocese, beginning with the upgrading of the methods of secular rule and reaching to a complete renewal and upbuilding of the Church, a campaign that resulted in a reform of the clergy and the founding of new institutions, including monasteries, the famous Juliusspital, which served as a quasi-hospital, a university, numerous churches and a Jesuit college. Using all the methods of conversion at his disposal, from sermons and services, processions and plays, to punishment and imprisonment, he launched a campaign of conversion in 1585 with the aim of bringing all his subjects into the fold. Protestants who refused to convert were fined, arrested and ultimately exiled from the land.20 Among the secular territories, the epicentre of Catholic confessionalization in Germany is usually considered to have been the duchy of Bavaria, a land situated at the south-west corner of the Empire bordering on the

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Habsburg lands of Austria. From the rise of the Reformation in the 1520s to the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Bavaria was ruled without interruption by four princes of exceptional piety and resolve: Wilhelm IV (r.1508–50), Albrecht V (r.1550–79), Wilhelm V (r.1579–97) and Maximilian I (r.1597–1651). Measures were imposed against the evangelical movement as soon as it first surfaced, including the prohibition of Lutheran books (the New Testament translation included), the exile and imprisonment of evangelical preachers, mandates against any change of service and the full endorsement of the Edict of Worms. These measures proved effective enough to stave off a Protestant Reformation, but Lutheranism still found its supporters, particularly among the nobles, who were a powerful voice in the mid-century demand for communion in two kinds (which was granted). Starting in the 1560s, however, the Bavarian dukes mustered their forces and embarked on a campaign of Catholic reform. Albrecht V, for instance, working together with the bishops, oversaw a visitation of the duchy in 1558– 60. He issued church orders, school ordinances and religious mandates in the manner of the Protestant rulers, established a Spiritual Council in 1570 as the central organ of Church governance (subject to his rule) and required all ducal officials, from the theologians of Ingolstadt to the district magistrates, to swear an oath on taking office to honour the Tridentine decrees. Duke Wilhelm V, who succeeded Albrecht in 1579, was just as devoted to the defence of Bavarian Catholicism and more willing to look beyond the duchy’s borders in order to revitalize the faith. He worked closely with the Archbishop of Salzburg and the bishops of Chiemsee, Passau, Freisung and Regensburg to preserve Catholicism in the southern Empire (while wresting even more concessions from the bishops in matters of Church rule), and he did much to bolster the already significant Jesuit teaching presence in the duchy, adding to the number of schools and endorsing the catechism of Canisius. He encouraged the cultivation of Marian devotion and regular pilgrimages to Altötting, Breitbrunn, Einsiedeln and even Maria Loreto in Bohemia.21 Due in large part to the efforts of these princes, Bavaria emerged as the superpower of the German Catholic states, a match for any Protestant territory to the north. And it was a land saturated in the spirit of Counter Reformation Catholicism, a point made by the Jesuit scholar Matthäus Rader in his work Bavaria Sancta (1615), an illustrated compendium of the sacral landscape of the principality: For if you look over all parts of Bavaria, you will scarcely find a place that is not marked by monuments of cult and religion. Cities, fortresses, marketplaces, districts, villages, fields, forests, mountains, and valleys breathe and show the

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Catholic and Old Religion in Bavaria. They are all full of sacred buildings, wide cloisters, new theological colleges, magnificent churches, innumerable chapels, relics, columns with depictions of saints, pilgrimage hostels, hospitals, and homes for the elderly and orphans. . . . Relics occupy a large section of the Bavarian land so that it would be difficult to count them up individually because the entire region is nothing other than religion and appears as a single communal folk church.22

When Rader published Bavaria Sancta, the process of Catholic confessionalization was reaching its peak during the reign of Maximilian I, one of the great Counter Reformation princes of Europe. Schooled by Spanish Jesuits, widely read in Tridentine theology, and with chests full of costly relics and instruments of piety, Maximilian never wavered in his devotion to Catholicism. Few German princes, Catholic or Protestant, matched him in terms of the intensity of their faith or the historical impact of their religious vision, and indeed Maximilian was so successful that some scholars have described Bavarian Catholicism in terms of his own piety (Pietas Maximilianea) and his rule as a type of ‘confessional absolutism’.23 As with the process of Protestant confessionalization, the reform of the Bavarian Church was closely associated with the methods and institutions of secular rule. In his campaign to impose religious uniformity, Maximilian empowered his district officials to draw up lists of suspected Protestants. Attempts were made to bring them into the Catholic fold, but when that failed they fell subject to the threat of punishment and exile. Restrictions were placed on the book trade, booksellers and colporteurs were threatened with fines and imprisonment and eventually only those books could be sold that were published by an approved Catholic press, which included Maximilian’s own publishing houses in Ingolstadt, Dillingen and Munich. Meanwhile, while his agents of Church and state worked to impose religious uniformity on the parishes (including his spies and undercover agents), Maximilian also made use of the tools and techniques of Tridentine Catholicism to cultivate a sense of Catholic identity. He was an avid patron of the Virgin Mary, founding new chapels, confraternies and sites of pilgrimage while crowding the streets of Munich with statues, frescoes, paintings, chapels and columns devoted to the cult. Taking a leaf from the pages of Borromean reform, he placed great stress on the need for regular confession and communion, to the point of requiring parishioners to brandish a shrove ticket at the risk of fines or imprisonment. And he was a great patron of the Jesuits, establishing new colleges in Burghausen, Mindelheim and Amberg to join those in Ingolstadt, Munich and Landshut. All his confessors were foreign Jesuits, often doubling as diplomats entrusted with the highest secrets of the realm.24

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In all of this Maximilian was no less prominent in Church affairs, and no less autocratic, than any Lutheran or Reformed prince. Granted, the dukes of Bavaria could not sit in judgement over Catholic theology. They might force some concessions from the papacy, as they did with the dispensation for the lay chalice, and they could favour certain factions within the Church, as they did with the Jesuits, but as long as Bavaria remained Catholic it was subject to the theological judgement of Rome. Beyond this, however, the same conditions obtained: in both cases, Catholic and Protestant, the Church was shaped by the active intervention of the state, all with a view to creating a community of Christians, orthodox and uniform in its conduct and beliefs, that was uniquely bound to a particular polity and a particular place. At one level it was simply a pragmatic increase of power. Despite the objections of the neighbouring bishops, the dukes regularly fined and disciplined the clergy in their domains, issued religious mandates and Polizeiordnungen that took in religious affairs and exercised direct influence on the Church using the secular arm, as with the visitation, for instance, or the church council, which was wholly in the power of the duke. But there was a deeper rationale as well. Before his abdication in 1597, Wilhelm V drew up a set of instructions for his son Maximilian wherein he repeatedly stressed the importance of piety, simplicity and humility for a long and successful rule. The prince had to be a good Christian, for the Church had been placed in his care. This message was readily embraced by Maximilian, who had no doubts about the importance of piety or his Godgiven role as the defender of the Bavarian Church. Nor was it lost on the men who had his ear at court. Maximilian’s Jesuit confessor Adam Contzen (1571– 1635), for instance, moonlighted as a political theorist of international renown. Like many of the theorists before him, Contzen supported the notion of a strong, centralized monarchy with uncontested sovereign powers invested a single head of state – an ideology we tend to associate with absolutism. The foundation for this type of rule was felicitas, by which was meant a state of affairs that could only be effected through the proper balance of virtue, piety and the Catholic religion. And it was the right and the duty of the prince to maintain this balance, which necessarily required the intervention of the state into the affairs of the Church.25 In most of its main parts, then, the Catholic state of the confessional age was a mirror image of the Protestant version. In both instances, the main duty of the pious prince was the defence of the Church and the preservation of the True Faith, and he did this by ordering and controlling conduct and belief. In this respect, however, there were some important differences, not only in relation to what was meant by the idea of the True Faith but also with

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respect to the methods used. Catholic confessionalization had its own modalities of the religious life. One of the chief characteristics of Tridentine reform was a renewed emphasis on the sacramental dimensions of Christianity. This took in both the seven sacraments of the Church, particularly penance and the Eucharist, as well as the myriad sacramental forms, ranging from Agnus Dei and blessed bells to reliquaries and crucifixes. Trent confirmed the sacramental theology of late medieval Catholicism and, through the decrees and the missal, standardized the services and regulated the liturgical year. The Catholic authorities also took much greater care to make sure that the parishioners were actually attending the services on a regular basis and receiving the necessary sacraments. The introduction of shrove tickets was one method used to enforce attendance, and to judge by the archival records such measures did eventually pay dividends. One historian has suggested that Lenten confession and communion ‘came to be nearly universally observed’.26 But even more important than the evidence of compliance was the ubiquity and seeming success of what has been termed the ‘sacramental paradigm’. If the main modality of early modern Protestantism was the written and spoken Word, Catholicism is best described as a faith that communicated its message by way of a theology of divine immanence, and this required the utilization of its sacramental forms. In doing this, as Trevor Johnson observed, ‘recatholicisation brought the revival of a liturgical and sacramental system which, although subject to Tridentine modification, was essentially and recognizably that of the pre-Reformation’.27 Some things, such as Ignatius water, had never been seen before, but the overarching canopy of sacramental thought was medieval. In historical terms this meant that Catholic reform was often conceived and perceived in terms of intricate sacramental display. A case in point was the approach to the Eucharist in the duchy of Bavaria. As has been discussed in a previous section, the Eucharist was the main sacramental bone of contention during the confessional age. Making no concessions to the Lutherans or the Reformed, the Council of Trent confirmed all the principles of Catholic theory, namely, that transubstantiation comprehends the mystery, that Christ is present in bodily form, that it is a sacrifice equivalent to the historical act at Calvary and that, through the ministrations of an unbroken lineage of priests reaching back to Melchizedek, it confers grace. Anxious to enforce this message, the Council theologians admonished the clergy to take every opportunity to make use of the appropriate ‘external aids’ in order to empower the sacrament, by which they meant the methods of sacramental display, from staged adoration of the host to plays and Corpus Christi processions.28

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As no other sacrament could so readily embody the Incarnation or visualize the relationship between the human and the divine, any sort of ritual or ceremony associated with the Eucharist was an ideal way of translating complex theology into stories, images and forms. The dukes of Bavaria made full use of this method. During the mid-century reign of Albrecht V, for instance, there was a marked increase in the scale and frequency of religious ceremonial. Of particular importance in this context was the feast of Corpus Christi, which had fallen away in popularity due to the Protestant attacks. Albrecht recognized that the public adoration of the body of Christ under the aegis of a specifically Bavarian mode of celebration was the perfect way to combine the universal beliefs of Catholicism with a more localized sense of sacral community. As a consequence he dramatically increased the size of the processions and made them a regular fixture of public life. By the end of the century thousands of Bavarian subjects were drafted in to make up the numbers, ranging from clergy, artisans, guildsmen, nobles and state officials to the higher nobility and their children. Over time it grew into an event that resonated in both secular and sacral symbolism. And it was closely orchestrated by the state. By 1627 the ducal officials had a manuscript book of 250 pages that carefully prescribed the staging and the costumes of the procession.29 This emphasis on sacramental display meant that the renewal of German Catholicism owed much to icons and images. And it was more than just a rehashing of the medieval commonplace that pictures were ‘books for the illiterate’. Tridentine Catholicism not only underscored the importance of visual encounters but actively encouraged the use of art in teaching, preaching and the ministering of the faith. The decrees warned against the dangers of too much sensuality (lascivia), false doctrine and superstition, but when used responsibly (to cite the text), ‘great benefits flow from all sacred images, not only because people are reminded of the gifts and blessings conferred on us by Christ, but because the miracles of God through the saints and their salutary examples is put before the eyes of the faithful’.30 The image, as it is conceived in this passage, was not just a complement to the sacral surroundings of the church. The image led the believer to greater awareness of holy things. Sight, in this context, was like sound in the Protestant scheme: it was a quasi-sacrament.31 No group of Catholics was more convinced of the efficacy of images than the Jesuits, who, consistent with the teaching of their founder Ignatius Loyola, equated the act of seeing with higher forms of meditation. The point was made by the Jesuit Francis Coster, one of the founding fathers, who likened the viewing of a religious painting to an act of devotion or prayer.32 But it was not just a Jesuit conceit. Almost without exception, proponents of

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Tridentine reform, rulers and reformers alike, made extensive use of religious art in its various forms (paintings, icons, sculptures, relics, altars) to renew the faith. In the prince-bishoprics of Bamberg, Würzburg and Eichstätt, once the reform process had taken hold it was immediately followed by costly building programmes, extensive renovation work and experiments in devotional art. In Würzburg, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn had over 100 churches built from scratch or renovated during his reign, each in the fashionable neo-gothic style with the interiors stuffed to the brim with pictures, altars and devotional images.33 By the seventeenth century, religious art in Catholic lands had acquired a complexity of form and a density of texture and colour that overwhelmed the senses. And yet that did not necessarily mean it was lacking in meaning or method. The Latin motto behind the construction of the Jesuit church of St Michael’s in Munich, for instance, was exteriora homines, interiora Deus – the exterior for man, the interior for God. All of the art used in the project was first conceived and then situated to bear out this notion, which neatly captures the duality at the heart of confessionalization. The exterior of the church was lined with statues of German rulers, ranging from Charlemagne to Bavaria’s own duke Wilhelm V, who commissioned the project. Inside the church, however, the believer encountered a coordinated programme of paintings, sculptures, altars and facades, ‘predicated on the active participation of the individual’, that led him, by way of his visual sense, to a better understanding of faith and salvation. God and his saints were everywhere, crowding the visual field so completely and convincingly that contemporaries referred to the nave of the church as ‘the gate of heaven’. One scholar has suggested that the conceptual framework was derived from Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which would make St Michael’s, in effect, a catechism in stucco and stone.34 It is easy to press too far in this regard and overlook the Counter Reformation fidelity to the Word. German Catholics, no less than German Protestants, claimed to base their faith on Scripture and worked to bring about a renewal of the Church through teaching, preaching and catechizing. Late medieval reform movements had been occupied with the same thing, but the rise of confessional conflict and the reforming impulse following on from Trent brought all these issues into renewed focus. And more to the point, with the rise of the Jesuits, ‘the single most important agent for the consolidation and restoration of Catholicism in Austria, Bavaria, and the Rhineland’, there were now plenty of well-educated clergymen in the Catholic lands who could match the reformers of Protestant Europe as teachers, preachers and authors of catechetical texts.35

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The Jesuits were at the forefront of German developments in all three respects. It began with education. Having founded the Collegium Germanicum in Rome (1552) with the explicit intention of sending out its graduates into the territories of the Empire, the Jesuits stood ready to assist the German Counter Reformation with pedagogical reform. They started at the top with the infiltration of the universities, followed by seminaries and then secondary-level establishments such as the Latin schools and gymnasia. By 1600 there were 40 Jesuit schools in the Empire with a student population at any one time between 700 and 1,000 souls.36 Next came the sermon. Recognizing the centrality of the spoken word to religious experience, the Catholic sermon, which had already experienced something of a renaissance in the late medieval period, was further refined. New methods of composition and rhetoric were developed to help exploit the potential of vernacular preaching, while the virtuosi of the pulpits travelled through the countryside preaching to the parishioners. In their efforts to re-Catholicize the Rhine Palatinate, for instance, the Jesuits would often stage a cycle of sermons in a rural parish lasting a week or more. To supplement the spoken word they would also organize plays, processions, expositions on Scripture, group confessions, even exorcisms.37 Finally, the Jesuits were also unflagging in their use of the catechism. Trent had imposed the obligation of regular catechizing, and most diocesan and synodal decrees of the late sixteenth century gave it high priority. The clergy now had the Roman Catechism at their disposal, and this certainly helped to consolidate the faith. But in the Empire the most popular catechism was the version written by the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius (1521–97), who, at the request of the emperor, set out to provide German Catholics with a text that could hold its own against the catechisms of Luther. Canisius proved successful in this regard, for it remained the most popular catechism in Catholic Germany until the nineteenth century. Considered in historical rather than theological terms, not much separates the process of Catholic confessionalization from the Protestant phenomenon. The patterns were similar. In both contexts there was a close symmetry between the secular and the spiritual, the desire to reform a localized church subject to unique political, jurisdictional and historical conditions, and a similar repertoire of methods and tools of reform, ranging from sermons and services, confessions and catechisms, to church courts and visitations. And the historial consequences were no less profound. Over the long term, Catholic Germany experienced the same broad patterns of development captured by historians in concepts such as secularization, modernization and the making of the nation-state. Historically speaking, as Wolfgang Reinhard has remarked, ‘regardless of theological opposition and the different

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instruments employed by different confessions, the process of confessionalization went ahead with remarkable uniformity and simultaneity’.38 At the same time, however, there were some notable differences, not least of which was the modality of worship. In Catholic reform, the accent was on the visual and the communal rather than the individual believer and the text, and as such it is more difficult to make a straightforward case for the theory of individualism associated with the logocentric mode of Protestant religiosity. But this does not necessarily mean that the Catholic mode of perception was any less critical for the making of the modern condition. Indeed, given the importance of the visual sense in this age, the opposite may be true. The making of Russian Orthodoxy In 1441 Isidore of Thessalonica (1385–1465), Metropolitan of Kiev and Moscow, returned to Russia from the Council of Florence and proclaimed the council’s decree of union (Laetentur Caeli) in a Kremlin church. In response, the Grand Prince Vasilii II (r.1425–62), with the support of the main bishops of Rus’, had Isidore deposed and imprisoned. Ultimately Isidore was able to escape and make his way to Rome, where he subsequently served as the papal legate to Constantinople on the eve of the conquest. But the grounds for his imprisonment lingered long after he had left. Isidore had been deposed and locked up in a Kremlin gaol because he had compromised the teaching and the authority of Orthodox Christianity by insisting on the imposition of the decree of union. But more than this, he had compromised the authority of the Russian Church, which had emerged as the most dynamic and self-aware Church in Eastern Christianity. Evidence of this growing sense of self-assurance was provided in 1448 when the Grand Prince had a new metropolitan appointed without consulting the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, which meant in effect that the Russian Church had declared itself to be autonomous. The history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early modern age was markedly different from the history experienced by the other Eastern Orthodox Churches. While the Greek and Balkan communities were in captivity and retreat, holding their own at best, the Russian Church, having made its medieval pilgrimage from Kiev, Novgorod and Vlamidir-on-theKliazma to its final destination in Moscow, was buoyed up by an extended period of ‘political, territorial, and spiritual consolidation, culminating in the creation of an autocephalous, national church’.39 The reasons for this were largely political. By the late medieval period, the fate of Russian Orthodoxy was closely bound up with the fate of Muscovy, and late medieval Muscovy was a state on the rise. Having freed themselves from Tatar domination, a series of Grand Princes, reaching from Vasilii II to

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Vasilii III (r.1505–33), embarked on a process of state building, the so-called ‘gathering of Russian lands’. Between 1462 and 1533, there was a threefold increase in land acquisition. Some of it, such as the annexed territories of Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk and Ryazan, was granted to the Muscovite service nobility, who brought much of it in line with the evolving notions of rule. Grand Prince Ivan III (r.1462–1505), for instance, introduced a unified law code in 1497. Working closely with the boyars, he also reformed the methods of governance, creating a new resource base, a more effective administrative apparatus and a hierarchical chain of command, which linked the court of the Grand Prince and his great nobles to the viceregents and provincial governors. Caught up in the currents of political reform, the Church also experienced a period of consolidation and upbuilding, despite the fact that the Byzantine calendar predicted the world would end with the completion of the seventh millennium, which worked out to be the year 1492. Undaunted by the approaching End Time, the higher clergy recalibrated the liturgical calendar, regulated the feast days, pressed on with clerical reforms and rooted out heretics such as the so-called ‘Judaizers’, who seem to have been a mixed bag of anti-trinitarians, rationalists and anti-monarchists nurtured by the late medieval climate of apocalypticism.40 Under the direction of the Grand Princes, a series of church councils gathered from 1447 to 1531 to regulate clerical affairs, while humanistically minded theologians such as Maximos the Greek refined the liturgical tradition by translating or retranslating the holy texts using the new hermeneutical methods. And new churches were constructed as well, particularly during the reign of Ivan III, whose rebuilding programme in the Kremlin made use of a range of different styles, from the Byzantine heritage and the medieval schools of Rus’ to the mannerist motifs of northern Europe and the classical revival of the Italian Renaissance.41 All this domestic reform took place within the broader transformation of the Orthodox world. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Moscow emerged as the obvious site for the new capital of Eastern Orthodoxy, and not just because of the course of historical events: unlike Constantinople, Moscow had remained resolute in its rejection of the Florentine decree of union and steadfast in its refusal to treat with the socalled ‘Roman heretics’. It alone, its clergy declared, could claim an unbroken line of fidelity linking the Church to the core teachings of the faith. As a consequence, both the higher clergy and the ruling elite now started to think of the Russian Church as the last bastion of True Christianity. And they also started to refer to their own sovereigns as the heirs of Byzantium. It was around this time, not long after the Byzantine princess Sophia Palaiologina

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became the second wife of Ivan III, that the clergy began to speak of the Grand Princes as the ‘God-chosen’ or the ‘God-crowned Tsar of Orthodoxy and of all Russia’, thus investing them with the same status of defender of the faith (defensor fidei) as the Byzantine emperors and the rulers of the confessionalized lands in Latin Europe.42 In Russia, the reference to the ‘God-crowned Tsar’ sat within a broader discourse about the rise of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, the providential successor to Rome and Constantinople. This conceit was first sounded during the medieval age, when the clergy of Novgorod pieced together an allegory of origins that identified their city as the new Rome. By the early sixteenth century, however, this honour was reserved for Moscow alone, even if reference to the city was often taken as a signifier for the Russian Church as a whole. The most influential formulation of the idea appeared in a letter to Tsar Vasilii III from a monk of Pskov named Filofei, who reminded the tsar of the fate of the two former Christian capitals and his God-granted mission to rule ‘in the new, third Rome, your mighty tsarstvo [empire], to shine like the sun throughout the whole universe, and to endure as long as the world endures: you are the only Tsar for Christians in the whole world. . . . Two Romes have fallen and the third stands. A fourth will not be.’43 In truth, this was one part prophecy and one part Jeremiad, for Filofei was not just reminding the tsar of Russia’s providential role in the final age. He was also reminding him that it was his duty to reform the Church in preparation and restore the former balance between Church and state once embodied in the ancient Byzantine ideal of symphonia (harmony or accord). In practical terms, however, the outcome of the Third Rome discourse was more political than religious, for by investing the tsars with this heightened sense of sacral standing it tended to grant them increased powers over the Church. And more than this, by turning Russia into the chosen nation, the New Israel of the north, it tended to invest the political posturing of the tsars with the odour of sanctity and conflate the will of the sovereign with the will of the divine. The result was increasing tension between Church and state, for not all the clergy thought that the tsars were doing the work of the divine, and not all tsars thought it was the clergy’s place to question the actions of the ‘God-chosen’ ruler. To paper over the cracks, some highranking clergymen worked up models of church–state relations that accommodated the growing power and ambitions of the secular arm. During the reign of Ivan IV, for instance, Makarii (1482–1563), Metropolitan of Moscow, oversaw the completion of the Imperial Book of Degrees (Stepennaia Kniga) (1563), a genealogical history of Rus’ and its ruling dynasties that emphasized the harmony between the Grand Princes, the people and the Church. According to this work, ‘not one [tsar] ever doubted or deviated nor

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was tempted to err about the true Christian religion or the life-giving gospel words of Christ, the apostolic traditions or the teachings of the father’.44 This certainly worked to invest the tsars with a sense of religious mission, thereby enabling rulers such as Ivan IV to claim that his wars against ‘godless and cursed Kazan’ were in defence of ‘our Orthodox faith and for the godly churches’. But it did little to enhance the power of the clergy. In the end it was not providence that shaped the early modern Russian Church so much as the tsars.45 No one embodied the rising tide of caesaropapism more than Ivan IV (r.1547–84), known to English-language history as Ivan the Terrible. Having experienced a youth of cruelty and ill-treatment, particularly during his regency (1533–47), he was determined to reassert the power of the tsar on his accession in 1547. In this he was given crucial guidance and aid by Makarii, who administered a coronation rite straight out of the pages of the Byzantine book of ritual, including the use of the title tsar and the metropolitan’s public declaration that ‘all power is given to you from the most High God, for he has chosen you to be in His place on earth’.46 Driven by this sense of divine purpose, Ivan’s reign started well. Throughout the 1540s and 1550s he introduced a series of domestic reforms that reached from law and governance to land ownership and the army. He also enjoyed an initial phase of military success, most famously in the conquest of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, but he also pressed into the regions of the middle and lower Volga, Poland-Lithuania and the shores of the Baltic. In the 1560s, however, his rule took a sinister turn. Ivan broke with his closest advisors, sending many into exile, and went into self-imposed seclusion, ruling instead through the oprichniki, his agents of terror, black-cloaked quasi-Nazgül who policed the state on horseback with the severed heads of hunting dogs hanging from their sides. These men reigned during the second half of his rule, the period of oprichnina, a phase marked out by episodes of tyranny, persecution and ‘pornographic violence’ that undermined many of the earlier reforms.47 The Russian Church experienced both sides of Ivan IV’s character. Despite his later reputation as a godless despot, he had had a very religious upbringing. Very probably tutored by Makarii as a youth, he was thoroughly familiar with Scripture and is said to have known the Psalter by heart. He was a frequent visitor to the monasteries and even in later life retained (to cite his recent biographer) an ‘exalted spirituality’ and was ‘personally devout’.48 In this mould he did much to improve the standing of the Church and the quality of the religious life. Soon after his accession he staged a series of councils (1547, 1549, 1551) to regulate and improve the organization of the Church. The most important was the council of 1551, which set out to answer a set of 100 questions posed by the tsar relating to spiritual and ecclesiological

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life. The result, the Book of One Hundred Chapters (Stoglav), was a collection of decisions relating to faith, ritual and liturgy that regulated Church life for the next century. It ranged widely, taking in issues from church–state relations to clerical reform, alms-giving, education, heresy and even the ringing of liturgical bells and styles of icon painting. Recognizing the difficulties of regulating the faithful in the massive eparchies of Muscovy, it established the use of elders for the close supervision of liturgical, financial and moral matters in the parishes, and it increased the power of the bishops. This was an important boost for the Russian Church, particularly as it went about its business without appeals to the Ecumenical Patriarch. But it was also entirely reliant on the goodwill of the tsar, who had after all posed the questions. There was little the clergy could do to pursue its own agenda or question the will of the sovereign. When Philip II (1507–69), the Metropolitan of Moscow, rebuked Ivan for his political crimes and once refused to bless him during a service, Ivan had him removed from office on charges of sorcery and immorality, imprisoned in a monastery, deposed by the Holy Synod and eventually, just two days before Christmas, strangled in his cell.49 The reign of Ivan the Terrible was also the period when a deep-rooted inner conflict came to the surface and exposed the looming tensions between Church and state. At the council of 1503, at a time when Ivan III was dividing up the monastic lands of Novgorod, two men spoke out about the issue of Church property. This was the beginning of the debate between the possessors and the non-possessors. The founding father of the ‘nonpossessors’ was Nils Sorskii (c.1433–1508), a monk from a hermitage in the Volga region, who criticized the accumulation of property by the monastic communities. Not only was it against the grain of the vow of poverty, he insisted, it was a corrosive influence on faith. The world seduces and corrupts. In response to the scruples of Sorskii, Joseph Volotskii (1439–1515), the hegumen of Volokolamsk and the spokesmen of the ‘possessors’, argued that monastic property was fully in keeping with biblical injunction and necessary for the clergy to fulfil their mission, which was in large part a caritative one (caring for the poor, raising alms and sheltering the poor and the homeless). Although both men had much in common, they quickly became the figureheads of two antagonistic parties, a division which became even more critical after the tsar decided in favour of the Josephites.50 Undaunted, the later followers of Nils Sorskii, such as the tonsured prince Vassian Patrikeev, used the non-possessor appeal as a foundation for a much broader and much more radical discourse about the wealth, greed and power eating away at the heart of the Church and the corrupting influence of the state.

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As an event, the 1503 debate was not an important moment in the history of Russian Orthodoxy. And indeed, recent historians have questioned whether the exchange ever took place at all.51 The significance of the debate was projected back on the past by later followers around mid-century, when the questions of land-holding and monasticism were raised once again. And yet there is no doubt that the debate, or the later recollections of the debate, contributed to the making of Russian Orthodoxy. To begin with, it gave a platform to the spokesmen of the different varieties of religious experience. Consistent with the Hesychast tradition, the followers of Nils tended to emphasize the importance of seclusion, self-stripping, deep prayer and meditation. While not antagonistic to these traditions, the Josephites tended to stress an active, affective form of piety, and one that was reliant on forms, ceremonies and institutions. Related to this, while the non-possessors generally agreed with Nils’s conviction that it was ‘not becoming to monks to own villages’, the Josephites were much more comfortable with the idea of Church property and had fewer qualms about the role of the state in religious affairs.52 Josephism, as mentioned, became the orthodox position, and this had two broad consequences. First, it invested Muscovy with the same charged religious ideology as the confessionalized lands of Latin Christendom and with it, ultimately, the same consequences, namely, ‘a narrow Orthodoxy, closely allied with the princes against any suggestion of wrong teaching’.53 And second, the triumph of the Josephite position and its cultivation of state intervention meant that the ancient, charismatic authority of great monastic figures such as Sergei of Radonezh started to give way to the authority of patriarchs, metropolitans, bishops and, particularly during the reign of Ivan IV, a ‘sacral king’.54 The half-century or so after the death of Ivan IV was an age of extremes in Russian history, the most critical of all being the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), a period of civil war fought between claimants to the throne, made even worse by the intervention of the Cossacks, the Swedes and Poland-Lithuania. Order was gradually restored in 1613 with the accession of Michael Romanov and the return of his father Filaret in 1619, but Muscovy had been seriously weakened by the period of unrest. And yet there had been phases of upbuilding and consolidation over this period, to the extent that the final decades of the sixteenth century have been termed ‘a period of stability and prosperity’, and there were marked advances in Church development as well.55 Paramount in theory if not in fact was the elevation in 1589 of Moscow to a patriarchate. The Russian Church had been behaving like an autocephalous Church since 1448, so the title really just confirmed the reality of over a century of practice. But the title itself, conferred by the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II during his extended stay

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in the city while on a fund-raising mission, was an important prize for a Church that thought of itself as the last bastion of True Christianity and the Third Rome, particularly after the perceived apostasy of the Ruthenian Orthodox with the signing of the Union of Brest (1596). It did not take long for the patriarchs of Moscow to fit themselves for the role. When Feodor Nikitich Romanov returned to Moscow as Patriarch Filaret (r.1619–33), he became in effect the co-ruler of the realm along with his son Michael Romanov, even taking on the same title of ‘Great Sovereign’ and issuing joint decrees. Using this platform of power, he did much to elevate the standing and the authority of the patriarch, creating a series of new chancelleries and consolidating the methods of rule, to the point that ‘he virtually made himself ruler of a separate principality within the realm’.56 Nor did he neglect matters of the Spirit. He did much to standardize the faith, not only commissioning new service books but actively imposing orthodoxy on the land. He kept a close tab on Catholics, Protestants and free-thinkers in Moscow (including Copernicans), and he left no doubts about his conviction that Roman Catholicism was an errant form of Christianity. As he proclaimed on his return to Moscow, ‘Latins are the most impure and ferocious of heretics, . . . like unto dogs, known to be enemies of God’.57 Throughout this formative period of Russian history, from Ivan III to Michael Romanov, there had always been a vocal minority pressing for religious reform. Initially their voices were sounded in the ‘muffled echo’ of the humanist programme of men such as Maximos the Greek, who claimed that there was nothing so pleasing to God as ‘a pure faith, an honest life and good works’, or Daniel, the Metropolitan of Moscow (r.1522–39), who wrote a number of sermons and moral tractates on the need for religious renewal. And quite often, as we have seen, there is evidence of this spirit at work among the ruling elite. Both Makarii and Tsar Ivan IV emphasized the need for reform and revival, and Ivan insisted on the conversion of the peoples brought into his realm through military conquests. In 1556, for instance, he advised Archbishop Gurii of the newly founded Kazan diocese that he ‘should teach the pagans [mladentsy, literally children] not only to read and write, but to make them understand truly what they read, and [they], then, will be able to teach others, including the Muslims’.58 This approach worked well enough when there was a strong figure on the throne sympathetic to the voice of reform, but during periods of weakness or instability, such as the Time of Troubles, the religious life of Muscovy tended to revert back to its natural state, which was characterized by a fairly weak and distant network of Church rule with little or no influence on the mix of pagan, folk and halfunderstood Christian belief practised at the local level.

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These two aspects of Russian religious culture worked against effective reform. On the one hand, the sheer size of Muscovy made it impossible for the Church and the clergy to reach all corners of the land, and this meant that many Russians went without regular church services. Tsar Aleksei’s rescript to the district official of Sviyazhsk must have captured a common state of affairs. He wrote: ‘It has come to our attention that Christians are living without pastoral fathers in towns, rural settlements (sela), and villages. Many die without repentance and do not feel in the least obliged to confess their sins or to receive the Body and Blood of the Lord.’59 The other hurdle was the depth and vitality of popular culture, much of which had descended from pre-Christian traditions. Scholars familiar with the reforming campaigns of the Protestant and Christian Churches in Latin Christendom will not be surprised to hear that parish traditions had deep and immovable roots, but the folk beliefs and ancient customs in Muscovy were particularly deeply entrenched. To judge by the authorities, the worst of all were the minstrels (skomorokhi), who were considered an especially corrosive influence on the well being of the Church. Travelling from place to place, usually with their dancing bears in tow, these men did much to preserve and to cultivate the ancient folk beliefs so detested by the reform-minded clergy. Visitors to Muscovy often commented on the popularity of the minstrels and the seeming paganism of local beliefs. Some Europeans were not certain whether Muscovy was a Christian realm at all. No doubt there were arguments for both sides when in 1621 a scholar in Uppsala defended a dissertation on the subject: ‘Are Russians Christians?’60 In the 1640s a group of reform-minded clergy started to emerge out of the monastic milieu, retrospectively termed the ‘zealots of piety’, who preached of the need for a further reform, a revitalization of the faith and a turn away from the innovations creeping in from the West. They were also active opponents of popular culture, the minstrels in particular, and often tried to reform their own parishes or monastic communities at great personal risk. The trans-volgan monk Avvakum (1620–82) was a man in this mould. A fundamentalist, and thus averse to innovations such as hops, tobacco and instrumental music, and a religious precisionist and thus averse to any theological or liturgical novelties creeping into Russian Orthodoxy, he was also a moral rigorist and waged his own private battle against the perceived evils of popular culture. Later in life he would record his encounter with the minstrels in a village east of Moscow and how he ‘being zealous in the service of Christ, drove them out and destroyed their masks and drums, one against many in the open field, and I took two great bears from them – one I killed but he later revived, the other I set free in the open field’.61 For his troubles

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Avvakum was set upon by his parishioners, beaten with cudgels, plucked of his hair and his clothes and expelled from the town. The 1640s was also a fateful period for relations between Church and state. With the accession of Tsar Aleksei (r.1645–76), there was now a man on the throne with a similar reforming vision as the zealots of piety. An ascetic in the mould of the Spanish king Philip II, Aleksei would attend vespers before dealing with state affairs and did much to improve the morals of his court, going so far as to substitute banquet music with lengthy readings from the lives of the Russian saints. Assuming power at a time of revolts and unrest, he immediately set to work re-establishing order, an initiative that included the publication of a new law code in 1649 in an effort to standardize and regulate the legal system. A similar approach was taken in relation to the Church. Soon after he assumed rule he issued a series of decrees aimed at standardizing the liturgy, reforming the quality of the clergy and uprooting the perceived paganism of popular culture, which included a ban on minstrels, a campaign against witchcraft and a clamp-down on the games of the religious holidays. In all of this Aleksei was supported, if not directed, by the zealots of piety, all of whom shared a similar distrust of novelties and ‘cleverness’ in religious affairs and a deep attachment to tradition and the ancient ways of the faith. Of these men, the most important for the subsequent course of Russian Orthodoxy was Nikon (1605–81), who became the seventh patriarch of the Russian Church. In his origins an ascetic monk from the trans-volga region, Nikon climbed up the ladder of Church rule, moving from a hegumen to the Metropolitan of Novgorod (1649) and eventually patriarch (1652), and became a close confident of Tsar Aleksei and a very powerful man at court, the ‘virtual ruler of Russia’ according to some historians.62 It was during his reign as Patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia that the tension at the heart of Russian Orthodoxy – namely, the conflict between the defence of tradition and the creeping caesaropapism of tsarist rule – gave rise to a lasting schism. Nikon transformed the nature of early modern Russian Orthodoxy by introducing a series of reforms intended to purify and revitalize the Church. He began his reign by streamlining the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the purpose being to invest the Church with greater autonomy, beginning and ending with the power of the patriarch. On assuming power Nikon revived the use of the title ‘Great Sovereign’, thus harking back to the days of Filaret’s pseudo-theocracy, and he introduced a series of changes in ceremony and regalia designed to elevate the standing of the patriarch. But the most important reforms of his reign were those touching on ritual and liturgy. Working on the premise that the Russian Church had deviated from the pure original forms of Orthodox liturgy over the years, Nikon

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commissioned a number of scholars, including clergy from the Ukraine and Constantinople, to bring Russian Orthodoxy back in line with the form of Christianity as it was described in ‘ancient parchment and Greek texts’.63 As a consequence of this initiative, which in reality relied on more modern than ancient wording, a number of ritual and liturgical changes made their way into the newly printed Psalters, missals and service books, including, among other things, the three-finger sign of the cross in place of the traditional two, the four-pointed cross on the sacred wafers in place of the eight-pointed Muscovite custom, a triple rather than a double Hallelujah at the end of the psalms, the style and number of genuflections in Ephraim the Syrian’s prayer, and even some small revisions in the Nicene Creed and the Slavic translation of the name Jesus. All of this touched on the externals of the faith rather than the teaching, but we must remember the centrality of rites and rituals to the preservation of the faith in Orthodox Christianity. Divine truth was not primarily conveyed through theological consensus or an individual’s experiences of ecstatic union as in the West but rather by way of ‘the concrete guidance and reassurance which God was believed to be continually offering his chosen people through voices and visions’, and these voices and visions were incarnate in the liturgy.64 Resistance to Nikon’s innovations surfaced immediately. In response the patriarch reacted with a heavy hand. Many of his critics were arrested, sent into exile and even executed. As early as 1654 an Orthodox visitor could observe that Nikon ‘was a great tyrant over . . . every order of the priesthood and even over the men in power and in the offices of the government’.65 There was, however, one critic that Nikon could not overcome and that was the tsar. Although a one-time favourite, Nikon’s ongoing efforts to increase the autonomy and power of the patriarch was by necessity on a collision course with a ruler many historians have considered to be the founding father of Peter the Great’s brand of absolutist rule. Aleksei harboured visions of power and status that were at least the equal of the patriarch’s. He was, after all, the tsar who had a new throne made in Persia bearing the Latin inscription Potentissimo et invictissimo Moscovitarum Imperatori Alexio (‘To the Most Powerful and Invincible Muscovy Emperor Aleksei’) as well as a crown, crafted in Constantinople, with images of the tsar and tsarina where the symbols of God’s sovereignty were traditionally displayed.66 It was not a fair fight. In 1658 Nikon went into self-imposed exile. In 1666, as a consequence of the tsar’s ongoing efforts, he was formally deposed in council, reduced to the status of a monk and sent to a monastery ‘to pray for his sins’. Despite Nikon’s fall from grace, his reforms remained in effect. In 1666 the same church council that deposed Nikon proclaimed the revised rites to be correct and abrogated a number of Russian practices, including those

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stipulated over a century earlier in the Stoglav. This act, imposed by the council under the supervision of the tsar and in the presence of patriarchs from the Near East, ‘effectively created the Schism within the Russian church’.67 Former colleagues of Nikon, like-minded ‘zealots of piety’, began to turn their criticisms against the Church and then, after 1666, once Nikon had been deposed, against the state. All these men rallied in defence of traditionalism, the preservation of the ancient ways – and with good cause. In the Russian Orthodox Church, where religious truth was conveyed by way of gestures and forms, even the slightest change to the liturgical tradition could be seen to have consequences for salvation. This was certainly the main concern of the men who first emerged in defence of the old ways, and who came to be seen as the founding fathers of the Old Believer movement. Among those who preached or wrote against the reforms was Spiridon Potemkin, the Archimandrite of the Pokrovskii monastery, who criticized the three-fingered cross and the translation of the Slavonic text; Feodor the Deacon, a Kremlin clergyman, who gathered up the works of resistance; Bishop Aleksandr of Viatka, who circulated manuscript critiques of the liturgical books; Avvakum, who referred to Nikon as a ‘wolf’ and a ‘devil’ and wrote of how the Church had been ‘complete, pure and undefiled’ before the reforms; and Avraamii, one-time holy fool, who pieced together one of the first comprehensive apologies of Old Believers’ thought by amassing sources. The underlying principle, however, remained the same: any change of ancient tradition is unwarranted and potentially damning, for, as Avraamii put it, ‘heresy comes in by a single letter of the alphabet’.68 By the final decades of the seventeenth century the Old Believer movement had started to spread beyond the clerical intelligentsia to Russian society as a whole, drawing in not just monks, priests and abbots but a broad spectrum of social actors, from boyars and merchants to blacksmiths and black-soil peasants. The perceived enemy was no longer just Nikon, but both the Church and the state, each of which was complicit in the council decrees of 1666/7. And the magnitude of the crime had increased as well: it was not just Nikon’s reforms in the strict sense but the general assault on the ancient traditions of the Church, which is why the Old Believers began to conceive of the conflict in such apocalyptical terms. And this mindset had its counterpoint: from the perspective of the authorities, who outlawed the movement in 1666/7 and made proselytization of Old Believers’ ideas a capital crime in 1684/5, it was not just a challenge to the authority of the patriarch and the tsar. It was part of the growing climate of revolt and unrest that threatened to reduce the entire land to a state of chaos.69 It was easy to overestimate the power and coherence of the Old Believers in the late seventeenth century, for that was when the most vocal proponents

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were piecing together a history of the movement and unearthing the arguments of latter-day fathers such as Feodor, Avvakum and Avraamii. Much of this was revisionism, for the first acts of resistance were often motivated by personal grievances and small-scale fears rather than an ideology of resistance in any broader sense, but there is no doubt that the council of 1666/7 worked as a catalyst for a schism in the Church that would endure into the modern age.70 After 1666, many Russian Christians chose to separate from the Church of the patriarch rather than compromise what they considered to be the ancient traditions. It was a matter of salvation and a struggle against the wiles of the Antichrist. At times the resistance could be extremely dramatic, as was the case in the Solovetskii monastery, which suffered an eight-year siege (1668–76) before it fell to the tsar’s troops and the subsequent slaughter of its residents. Other, if less violent, episodes of this kind occurred in other monasteries as well. But most of the resistance was mounted by individuals or small groups who either drew back from Church services or sought refuge in the forests, wastelands and desolate areas to the north, setting up their own cells of traditional Christianity while waiting on the day of reckoning. Ivan Dementev, a white-bread merchant of Novgorod, was an Old Believer in this mould, moving from community to community calling on the locals to resist while preaching the Old Believer message of salvation. For others, however, the only sure escape was martyrdom, which was the reasoning behind the practice of group self-immolation among some of the communities in the north. Pressed in by the tsar’s troops, the faithful would gather inside the wooden churches (not always voluntarily) and set them alight. An Old Believer poem gives something of their state of mind: Do not give up my dear ones, To that seven-headed serpent. Run to the mountains, the caves, There build large fires And burn yourselves in them, Suffer for me, my dear ones, For my Christian faith; I will then, my beloved, Open the gates of paradise Lead you into the Heavenly Kingdom And will myself live with you eternally.71

For those Old Believers who chose to wait out the End Time in Russia, however, there was little doubt about who was responsible for the policy of persecution. Although the Church itself had been enlarged after 1666, with the addition of new dioceses, the exercise of power had clearly passed over

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into the hands of the tsar. Resisting the Church thus meant resisting the tsar. As a consequence, Old Believers were not just viewed as heretics but also enemies of the state – and persecuted as such. Avvakum, for instance, was condemned by the council of 1666 as both a ‘slanderer and [a] rebel’. Exiled to Serbia a number of times, he suffered imprisonment, bouts of knouting, further exile to Pustoozero and, finally, as a result of his continued resistance, death by fire in 1682. And all of this was managed by the secular and the spiritual authorities in the service of the tsar. As one metropolitan explained while imposing the sentence on Avvakum in 1666, ‘we have to justify the tsar, and that is why we stand for these innovations – in order to please him’. The patriarch confirmed this line of reasoning by declaring that he was ‘prepared to follow and obey [the tsar] in all respects’.72 Of course, not all the tsar’s subjects were so compliant. The later seventeenth century was an age of unrest, revolt and, in the most desperate of circumstances, mass suicides. But dissenting groups such as the Old Believers were only pushing back because the state was extending its control over spiritual affairs. In light of events, it is not misguided to think of events in Russia in relation to events in the Europe of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. Russia’s own ‘confessionalization project’ showed evidence of the same sort of ecclesio-political dynamic as in the West, only that it ‘began in Russia roughly a century later than in Catholic and Protestant Europe’.73 It would gather its critical momentum during the reign of Tsar Aleksei in the later seventeenth century, but it would reach its logical extremes during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great, who simply replaced the office of the Moscow Patriarch with a new version of the Holy Synod, which was wholly in the power of the tsar.

CHAPTER

5

Further Reform By the late sixteenth century, as generations of Protestants and Catholics began to work out the implications of the refashioned forms of Christianity created by the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, a spirit of discontent and further reform started to push against the bounds of orthodoxy. It happened in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches of Protestant Europe, where English Puritans and Dutch and German Pietists started to raise questions about the faith that forced them to draw new lines between themselves and the public Church, and it happened in the Catholic lands as well, where the desire for a more personal or ‘heartfelt’ form of religiosity prompted some people to challenge the status quo. In doing this, both Protestants and Catholics had to be careful that they did not go too far in their quest for a renewed or reinvigorated Christianity, for too much enthusiasm in this regard might raise the suspicion that they had crossed over to the teachings of the Protestant radicals who had separated from the mainstream Reformations of Wittenberg and Zurich in the early phase of the movement precisely because they insisted on the need for further reform. And they too were caught up in the late-century phase of self-scrutiny and re-evaluation, the end result being both the further reform and renewal of the existing communities as well as the same type of infighting and polarization as the Lutherans and the Reformed. And there were even signs of disharmony and rebuilding in some of the Orthodox Churches of the East, where both the ongoing threat of Islam and the recent encounters with the missionaries of Catholic Europe gave rise to periods of crisis and renewal. This chapter will look at some examples of further reform, renewal and rebirth during the confessional age. It will begin with a study of the history of the Protestant radicals, men and women who emerged from within the milieu of the early Reformation but who then decided that their notions of the faith were not the same as those of the mainstream Churches and began to develop notions of Christian community that took them beyond the fold. It will then turn to a study of the impulse for further reform that emerged from within the magisterial traditions of Latin Christianity, most famously 143

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among the Puritans, Pietists and Jansenists. Unlike the radicals, most of these ‘hotter’ types of Protestants and Catholics remained in the Churches, but they too cultivated ideas of the faith that pushed against the orthodoxies of Wittenberg, Geneva and Rome. A final section will then explore two episodes in the history of Eastern Christianity that reveal the difficulties facing the Churches surrounded by the Muslim empires of the Near East – and how these difficulties, in some instances, could be overcome. The rise of the Protestant radicals The first Protestant Reformation took place in Wittenberg, and it was only possible because Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg, several days’ ride from the town. It took shape under the direction of Gabriel Zwilling (c.1487–1558), resident preacher of the Augustinian cloister, who was eventually joined in his efforts by Andreas Karlstadt, both of whom assumed leadership of what historians have termed the Wittenberg movement, a series of evangelical reform initatives that gripped the town from October 1521 to February 1522. It did not last long. In February the Elector and his officials intervened and put an end to the innovations. Luther returned from the Wartburg, denounced Karlstadt’s initiatives and his crusade against ‘ceremonies and external forms’, and confirmed his own leadership. Karlstadt was forbidden to preach, forbidden to publish and eventually exiled from the town. For his part, Zwilling renounced his radical views, made his peace with Luther and became a long-time servant of the Saxon church. Despite its fleeting impact, however, the Wittenberg movement was an important event in the history of Reformation Christianity. Viewed retrospectively, this was the first incarnation of the main 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 socalled radical forms of Reformation Christianity that remained on the margins, groups that came to be known inter alia as Anabaptists, the Swiss Brethren, Spiritualists and Mennonites. Neither one of these forms yet 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 the Protestant tradition throughout the early modern period.1 Scholars have captured the distinction between the two strands of Protestantism in terms of sociological dichotomies. On the one side they speak of mainstream or magisterial Protestantism, the Churches built in the image of the systematic theology of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, namely the Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and later Anglican traditions. Generally speaking, these types of Churches were based on fixed confessions, identified by orthodox teaching and universal ideals, gathered around an objective

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institution with a monopoly on grace and salvation, and superintended by a clerical authority marked out by training and a hierarchy of rule. Membership in the Church was obligatory, the modes of sacrament and liturgy were prescribed and there was a close affiliation with the state, whether a nation, territory or urban commune. The other strand of Protestantism, and the one that was prefigured in the efforts of Karlstadt and Zwilling, has been termed the radical tradition because of the threat it represented to the magisterial order. Unlike the mainstream Churches, the radicals avoided association with the state and did not let the considerations of the secular world influence religious affairs. They were much less concerned with liturgical forms and fixed confessions and tended to rely more on inspiration and very personal readings of Scripture. The Churches gathered voluntarily, without a well-defined hierarchy or a trained clerical estate, as communities of the religiously qualified. Salvation was sought through personal piety and ethical action rather than the ministrations of the public Church. And they disagreed with the mainstream tradition in numerous points of theology as well, although this tended to vary from group to group.2 Because the radical tradition was so spontaneous and diffuse, and so biblically based in its rationale, it is difficult to speak in terms of founders. Nevertheless, we can still identify men marked out by their teaching and charisma who emerged as figureheads of self-aware communities. The first to take on this role in Germany was Karlstadt. Although forbidden to preach or publish in Wittenberg after 1522, Karlstadt continued to explore the meaning of evangelical reform, moving beyond Luther and the other theologians in his literal reading of Scripture, his rejection of external forms of worship, his sharp contrast between letter and spirit and his conviction that reform must not be subject to the timetables or the sanctions of man. ‘Action has been commanded of all of us,’ he declared, ‘and each one should do what God commands, even if the whole world hesitates and does not want to follow.’3 In 1523 Karlstadt moved to the parish of Orlamünde, a benefice attached to his office as deacon, and pressed on with the abandoned reform experiment of 1521. During his time in Orlamünde he emptied the church of its images, ministered in the vernacular, preached against pedobaptism, stressed the symbolic meaning of the Eucharist against the more traditional Wittenberg theology of the Real Presence, preached directly from Scripture and worked up his own vernacular service replete with congregational songs and liturgy. With the help of some like-minded reformers in the neighbouring parishes of Kahla and Jena, including a printer in Jena who published his works, Karlstadt turned Orlamünde into an ‘epicentre of the Reformation’ until Luther intervened and had him expelled.4

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By taking up this experiment in Orlamünde, Karlstadt was preparing the ground for the forms of Protestant Christianity associated with the radical tradition. By eliminating so much of the external display and liturgical forms, he had essentially reduced the role of the clergy to a preaching function; and even that, he argued, did not warrant the need for a separate estate, for any informed peasant with the skill to read Scripture, if properly guided by the Spirit, was equal to any council or bishop in the land. This was a powerful assertion of Luther’s notion of the priesthood of all believers, beyond anything advocated in Wittenberg, and it remained one of the foundation principles of the radical tradition. Just as significant, and just as idiosyncratic, was his rethinking of Luther’s theory of justification, informed in part by his own turn towards medieval mysticism. Although he stressed the primacy of faith and its role in justification, Karlstadt was concerned with the transformative effect of faith on the believer and the related process of inner renewal. Justification was more than just a one-time act of redemption; it was a lifelong process of sanctification, made possible by the indwelling Spirit of Christ.5 Similar in spirit, though less systematic in his thinking and more extreme in his views, was the clergyman Thomas Müntzer (c.1489–1525). Though not part of Wittenberg’s inner circle, Müntzer was an early supporter of Luther who, like Karlstadt, oversaw local experiments in evangelical reform. Many of the ideas preached by Karlstadt in Orlamünde would have been familiar to the parishioners in Zwickau, Allstedt and Mühlhausen, the Thuringian towns ministered by Müntzer in the early 1520s. Like Karlstadt, he lectured directly from Scripture, condemned the reliance on images, externals and ‘idols’ of the Church and sought the pure form of Christianity once practised by the Apostles, and he favoured a literal reading of the Bible, one which led him to reject both infant baptism and the Real Presence. He also demonstrated a similar concern with lay religiosity, which included vernacular translations of medieval hymns, vespers and matins, and a rule for the Mass that remained in use until 1533. In other respects, though, Müntzer parted company with Karlstadt, at least in terms of emphasis if not substance. He began to privilege the efficacy of the Spirit above the efficacy of the Word, and indeed to the point that he started to speak of the ‘dead letter’ of Scripture and the mystical union between the true believers, whom he termed ‘the elect’, and the Spirit, a union that could only be formed through experiential fear and suffering. Religious understanding was thus not a question of hermeneutics but of inner experience – that is, the trials of suffering and resignation – and that was something that all men and women might have in equal measure. This was a formula for religious subjectivism, particularly as it was effectuated by the Spirit rather than the Word.6

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Müntzer also differed from Karlstadt in his views on the timetable of reform. Whereas Karlstadt evoked urgency and resolve, Müntzer preached apocalypticism and war; he held that the coming of reform and the resurrection of the apostolic Church would usher in the End Time. It thus fell to the so-called elect, ‘united in the poverty of Spirit’, to prepare the ground for the coming of Christ. And more than just passive disobedience was required. As Müntzer announced in his Sermon to the Princes (1524), a discourse on the second chapter of Daniel held in the Allstedt castle in the presence of the princes of Saxony, the signs were there for all to see: religion was in ruin, the secular world was in disarray, the Antichrist was in Rome. The time had come for the princes to take up the sword in defence of Christ and his elect.7 Once the Saxon princes failed to take up his offer, however, Müntzer followed through on his threat that ‘the sword will be taken away from them’ and he looked to his congregations. Returning to Mühlhausen, and joined by the former Cistercian Heinrich Pfeiffer (d.1525), he formed the Eternal League of God, a military association of true believers convened in order to defeat the godless. The intention was clear: once victorious, the League would bring down the mighty, give power to the poor in spirit and overthrow the false clergy and their godless followers. Müntzer’s career as a reformer ended on the battlefield of Frankenhausen in May 1525, where his League army was slaughtered by the combined troops of Saxony, Hesse and Braunschweig-Lüneburg. He was captured, tortured, executed, and his body was dismembered and put on display. Karlstadt, in contrast, distanced himself from the Peasants’ War and died of the plague in Basel in 1541, having served as a pastor in Switzerland and eventually a professor of Hebrew. Neither man founded a Church, and yet through their publications and their local experiments in apostolic Christianity, they became inspirational figures for the radical strain of Protestantism. Despite the efforts of the secular authorities, who subjected the radicals to a range of punishments running from fines and imprisonment to drownings and beheadings, followers continued to surface in the parishes of southcentral Germany, Habsburg Austria and eventually the lower Rhine and the Low Countries. Some, such as Hans Hut (1490–1527), an itinerant bookseller and close follower of Müntzer, became foot soldiers of the faith, travelling from parish to parish and preaching in the open air, ministering to the parishioners in the fields and forests and baptizing followers in private households. It was, in the most elementary sense, an attempt to recreate apostolic Christianity. Poverty and suffering, as Hut put it, were the foundations of the Christian life, ‘for 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

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justification of the cross of Christ’.8 Hut was just one of many men in this mould. Other radical preachers of note included Balthasar Hubmaier, Hans Denck, Melchior Rinck and Hans Römer, all of whom had played a prominent role in the revolution before taking up a life in the service of the faith, preaching, baptizing and gathering souls. One aspect of Saxon radicalism of particular importance for Protestant history was the emphasis placed on the direct inspiration of the Spirit, whether by way of visions, dreams or a personal relationship with the divine. The English satirist Thomas Nashe caricatured this aspect of the faith in his work The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) when explaining how so many ‘base handicrafts, as cobblers and curriers’ could speak so authoritatively on the Word of God. ‘Very devout asses they were,’ he wrote ‘for all they were so dunistically set forth, and such as thought they knew as much of God’s mind as richer men. Why, inspiration was their ordinary familiar, and buzzed in their ears like a bee in a box every hour what news from heaven, hell, and the land of whipper-ginnie [purgatory].’9 The buzzing of bees is an allusion to Luther’s label for the men and women he termed enthusiasts (Schwärmer). It was a medical term for thoughts that seemed to swarm and sting, and the person he had in mind when he coined it was Müntzer, who claimed to have direct knowledge of the divine will. Not all radicals went so far as Müntzer, but there was a widespread tendency in the Upper-German tradition to balance Scripture against revelation, and even to claim that the ‘Scripture scholars’ were mistaken in their belief that the Word of God will suffice for the Christian life. To cite the words of Hans Denck: ‘Whoever does not have the Spirit and fails to find it in Scripture, seeks light and finds darkness, seeks life and finds only death, not only in the Old Testament but also in the New.’10 Necessarily, a faith mediated by deeply subjective modalities such as dreams and visions rather than dogma or liturgy posed a threat to the magisterial order, both Protestant and Catholic, for it meant in effect that each individual had the same claims on religious truth as the magisterium of the Church. It also meant that many of the Spiritualists and visionaries of the sixteenth century tended to be free-thinkers by nature and men of marked idiosyncratic bent. A roll-call of early evangelical Spiritualists would include the nobleman Caspar von Schwenckfeld (1490–1561), 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, transcending all categories of religious thought; the German pastor Valentin Weigel

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(1533–88), 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 Spiritualism, the new birth and the mystical, theosophical union of God with the heavenly Sophia (or wisdom, reason) circulated throughout northern Europe and would exercise a powerful influence on the radical English thinkers of the seventeenth century. Particularly influential were Böhme’s notions of rebirth and the coming age of the Spirit, when all reborn Christians would be united in the Church of Christ.11 The rise of the radicals was not only a German phenomenon. In Switzerland as well men emerged who conceived of the faith in different terms to Zwingli. Indeed, having heard Zwingli defend the autonomy of the commune and the primacy of Scripture for so many years, it is not surprising that some of his followers took his words to heart, particularly his early exordium that ‘every pious Christian who can read’ should take up the Bible for himself. Over time, despite Zwingli’s best efforts to use the Prophezei sessions to rein in exegesis, other reformers started to read Scripture in a different light and press for further reform. As early as 1522 Zwingli was commenting on the emergence of a group of ‘arrogant’, ‘quarrelsome’ and ‘divisive’ men, all erstwhile supporters and acolytes, who ‘daily bring forth more silly arguments than Africa produces strange beasts’.12 In the beginning the three main figures were Conrad Grebel, Simon Stumpf and Felix Mantz, the latter being the first of the Swiss radicals to be executed, and the ‘silly arguments’ they proposed were the consequence of their close reading of Scripture and their associated belief that the reform of the Church must follow the Word of God without conceding anything to the state or the weaker conscience. In effect, as Zwingli observed, these men wanted to establish their own Church, composed of ‘upright, Christian people’, which ‘with the help of God’s rule’ would resurrect the form of Christianity practised by the Apostles.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, which in this instance was Zurich and its surrounding parishes. Grebel first sought refuge in the countryside before taking his vision of reform to the Swiss communes of Zollikon, Schaffhausen and St Gallen. Johannes Brötli and Wilhelm Reublin, following 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 60 parishioners, including the local evangelical pastor Balthasar Hubmaier, who went on to become one of the most

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important Anabaptist theologians of the age. Other Zurich radicals became hedgerow preachers of a similar kind, moving through the parishes of north 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 Although persecuted by both the Protestant and the Catholic authorities, the Swiss and German radicals survived beyond the sixteenth century. Many of the first-generation leaders, joined by the Saxons Hubmaier and Hut, found refuge in the lands of Moravia in eastern Europe, where communities in Nicolsburg, Austerlitz and Auspitz were able to put their religious ideas into practice, including the baptism of believing adults, strict congregational discipline and even community of goods. Moravia remained a hotbed of religious plurality for many years. As late as 1581 the principal of the Jesuit novitiate in Brno remarked: ‘I have travelled extensively and have seen most parts of Germany, and yet I have not found a land on earth where one can discover so many sects and heresies as here. Moravia is the melting pot for all possible heresies on earth.’15 Although many of their ideas had a medieval pedigree, and there was clearly a religious habitus reminiscent of the Cathars, Waldensians and Lollards, the radical impulse originated with the Reformation. Mainstream Protestants recognized this. From the perspective of Wittenberg and Zurich that was precisely what made the movement so dangerous: this was not the projected antithesis of the True Faith in the manner of the Reformation inversion of Rome; these sects had emerged from within the evangelical fold, empowered by the same ad fontes appeals to apostolic Christianity and reliant on the same passages of Scripture as the magisterial tradition. The radical tradition fostered plurality, a point made by the Spiritualist historian Caspar Schwenckfeld, who claimed 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.16

Dissidence and division based on religious ideals were hardly unique to Anabaptism, but Schwenckfeld had a point: the radicals did have a marked tendency to suffer schisms and fall out among themselves. Nevertheless, viewed over the period as a whole, the history of the radicals was not only one of survival but creativity, consolidation and dogged expansion, both as a theological tradition and as a historical phenomenon. The first point can be

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made with reference to the rise of a common corpus of belief, the second with reference to the rise of a community. The descendants of the Swiss Brethren tended to group around, and take their names from, charismatic figures. Thus the Philippites, who found refuge in Moravia, were followers of Philip Plener; Gabriel Aschermann’s community of believers, who settled in neighbouring Silesia, were termed the Gabrielites after their inspirational leader; the Hutterites, who practised community of goods, were led by Jacob Hutter; and so on. At mid-century, however, the lay preacher Pilgram Marpeck (d.1556), a one-time mining magistrate and latter-day hydro engineer, acquired a reputation as a theologian substantial enough to unite many of the scattered communities around some core ideas. Relatively speaking, Marpeck was a moderate: 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. Moreover, as he elucidated in his major work Elaboration of the Testaments (1547), his main emphasis was on regeneration and sanctification rather than justification, a tell-tale sign of the so-called enthusiasm condemned by the Lutherans. Marpeck did not unite all of the Swiss Brethren, but he did work as a centralizing force, both figuratively and – through his extensive correspondence – literally, and the themes he stressed in his works could be readily accommodated by most communities.17 Following on from Marpeck’s early efforts, and working with his memory still fresh in their minds, representatives of the scattered Anabaptist communities met in Strasbourg and worked up the Strasbourg Discipline (1568), an ecclesiological and ethical blueprint that would serve as a common point of reference for over three centuries. It was not a doctrinal statement, and it did not put an end to the Anabaptist tendency to separate if so inspired by the Word or the Spirit. Further subdivisions occurred, the most famous subsequent breakaway group being led by Jakob Ammann (c.1644–c.1730) and his followers (later termed the Amish), who decided to separate from the Emmentaler Brethren because of their lax approach to discipline. Nevertheless, the fact that the Swiss Brethren remained a presence in the parishes of Germany, Austria and the Swiss Confederation owed much to these efforts at dialogue and cooperation, though as ever the main strengths remained the depth of conviction and the willingness to suffer for their faith. When persecution picked up in the hinterlands of Zurich and Bern in the 1640s and 1670s, for instance, many of the faithful simply moved on to depopulated areas of Alsace and the Palatinate. Those who remained behind

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learned to adapt to circumstance, some living as Nicodemites in the manner of the French Huguenots, attending Reformed or Lutheran services, baptizing their children in the parish churches and even attending communion, but returning to their own faith once back in the private sphere.18 As these examples suggest, some measure of unity in faith and praxis sustained the Swiss radicals during the age of confessionalization. More important still, however, was their ability to retreat into self-sustaining communities and form local covenants on the basis of biblical ideals. Exemplary in this regard was the history of the Hutterites, who took their name from Jacob Hutter (1500–36), a wandering lay preacher of the first generation who, on hearing that ‘God had gathered a people . . . to live as one heart, mind and soul, each caring faithfully for the other’, made his way to Moravia in search of the ideal form of the faith.19 Building on his experience in Moravia, where he had served as chief elder, Hutter emerged as the leader of an Anabaptist conglomeration with ties to the Swiss diaspora. In time, however, the Hutterites started to pull away from the broader tradition, due in part to quarrels over disciplinary issues, but more specifically to the Hutterite devotion to community of goods. The idea itself was not new. A handful of early Anabaptist experiments, as in Zollikon, for instance, or more famously in the Westphalian city of Münster, had practised extreme communalism, but they had been short-lived episodes. What marked out the Hutterities was the importance that community of goods assumed in their morphology of salvation. Community of goods was not just a sure sign of pure Christianity; it was a principle of belief and thus, in effect, a precondition of salvation. 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.’20 After Hutter’s death it fell to others to preserve the covenant, above all the elders Peter Riedemann and Peter Walpot, and they did this by cultivating the bonds effected by the theory and practice of community of goods. In a work entitled Account (1540), drafted while he was in prison, Riedemann spelled out why the redistribution of wealth was so important for their beliefsystem. Riedemann argued that the new covenant instituted by the coming of Christ meant that the elect were guided by the Spirit.21 It was ultimate testimony to the radical ideal of separation and renunciation and the indwelling effect of the Word, and it was an idea powerful enough to hold together the Hutterite communities that sprang up in Europe, reckoned by some contemporaries to have numbered up to 70 settlements (Brüderhöfe), each having between 400 and 600 residents, living, working, producing for

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local markets and engaging in handiwork (from craft weaving and ceramics to clock making and metallurgy), raising families in common (to the horror of contemporaries), and worshipping together in a cloistered environment. Although the renewed persecution brought on by ‘the blood and iron of the Counter-reformation’ 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 during the so-called ‘golden period’ (c.1553–1591) the Hutterites (to cite the judgement of a modern historian) ‘achieved the most radical and successful social revolution in sixteenth-century Germany’.22 Along with the Swiss Brethren, the other strand of radical Protestantism to emerge out of the Reformation was the variant that surfaced in northern Europe, in the Saxony of Müntzer and Karlstadt and the northern Netherlands of Melchior Hoffman. Here too there is not only evidence of survival but signs of revitalization and rebirth. After the defeat of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster in 1535, four core groups emerged: the Münsterites, who settled in Oldenburg; the Batenburgers, who took up the sword after the defeat; the Melchiorites, who exchanged violence for visions; and the Obbenites, named after Obbe Philips, who spread throughout Holland and Friesland. Although none of these groups recognized a single confession, small-scale forms of confessionalism did take place. New leaders emerged as well, the first being Menno Simons (1496–1561), the inheritor of the Münsterite legacy, who, like Marpeck, changed the course of Anabaptist history by consolidating a tradition based on non-violence, separation from worldly affairs and the semblance of a fixed ecclesiological order. Simons taught rebirth and sanctification, but 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.23 This emphasis on order was too much for some Anabaptists, and in midcentury a group in Friesland separated from the main body of the Mennonites. This was the first stage of a process of segregation that would continue into the seventeenth century. Beginning with the Waterlanders of western Friesland, who were termed Doopsgezinden to distinguish them from the Mennonites, Anabaptist communities began to go their separate ways over questions of discipline, preaching and the use of excommunication. Periods of conflict and tension were followed by attempts at reconciliation, as when the Flemish and Frisian groups came together under the Olive Branch Confession (1626). 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

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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 magisterial religion.24 All these communities, from the strains of the Swiss Brethren to the variants in Germany and the Netherlands, shared a common genealogy and were thus related in some way; and yet it is difficult to categorize the radical tradition or draw up a taxonomy, precisely because it was so adverse to formal notions of orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Some things were sacrosanct, but as a general rule the radical tradition was much more fluid and openended when it came to doctrine, and much more willing to challenge tradition or authority if they were convinced by Scripture or revelation that they had a better understanding of God’s will for his Church. As a consequence, the radicals cultivated ideas that threatened the stability, and indeed the legitimacy, of the mainstream tradition. At the risk of oversimplification, and with respect to degrees of difference, we can thus say that by the early seventeenth century radical religiosity grouped around a cluster of common themes, each of which was sufficient in itself to propel a community away from mainstream Protestantism. Viewed as a whole, the tradition was generally marked out by its restless quest for religious purity, with consequences for both the shape and the spirit of the movement. It was much less reliant on forms and confessions. Their faith, as one historian has remarked, was not captured in church orders or formal dogma ‘but rather in words and gestures, rituals, signs, and deeds, insofar as these effect, engage with, and attempt to vanquish the social reality that gives rise to them’.25 Following from this, whether guided by the Word or the Spirit, the radicals tended to conceive of religious experience from the perspective of the individual conscience; thus there was much talk of conversion, direct and affective communion with God, the importance of Scriptural norms for the individual Christian life, freedom from theological and ecclesiastical compulsion and the conviction that faith will effect a transformation of the true believer, a rebirth or ‘new birth’ that will distinguish the elect from the mass of time-serving Christians. Sanctification rather than justification was the main formula behind the faith.26 Due to the fact that they remained persecuted minorities throughout the early modern period, the radicals did not have much lasting influence on the nature of public Protestantism, but taken together they exercised an influence tantamount to a new strand of Christianity. This was certainly the view of the historian Sebastian Franck (1499–1543), for instance, himself a

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self-proclaimed Spiritualist, who placed this deeply subjectivist movement in the same Protestant company as Lutherans, Zwinglians and Anabaptists, and predicted that its inner impulse would give rise to a form of religion which will 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.27

It would be well over a century before the Spiritualists described by Franck would be tolerated by Protestant society on the same terms as Lutherans or Zwinglians, but the radical impulse for further reform was not extinguished by the years of exclusion. And indeed over time many of the beliefs and practices of the radical communities started to awaken interest within the mainstrean traditions, particularly among those men and women who were also occupied with the issue of further reform. Puritans, Pietists and Jansenists The first extended campaign for the further reform of mainstream Protestantism surfaced in England, where Puritans started to dissect the body of the fledgling Anglican Church. Puritanism first surfaced en force during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), who assumed the throne at a time when English Protestants, anxious to dispel the dark shadows of the Marian interlude, were expectantly calling to mind the religious zeal of her Calvinist predecessor Edward VI (1537–53). Hopes were high. As John Jewel remarked in a letter to Bullinger, the clergy considered Elizabeth to be ‘a wise and religious queen, and one too who is favourably and propitiously disposed towards us’.28 The reality, however, was slightly otherwise, as the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity (1559) quickly made apparent. Elizabeth was more concerned with political order than religious ideals, and more inclined towards the letter than the spirit of Edwardian reform. As a result her Church settlement, at least in the eyes of the ‘hotter’ sorts of Protestants, was viewed as a dangerous compromise. This gave rise to a voice of unrest directed at the seeming concessions to ‘popery’ and the survival of numerous ‘unprofitable ceremonies’. The name given to these choristers of discontent was that of Puritan, used in reference to the groups of pious people who had become hypersensitive to the forms or formalities of Christianity that, in their eyes, had no obvious ancestry in Scripture.29 Unlike the dissenters in Continental Europe, such as the Anabaptists of Saxony or Switzerland, the mass of English Puritans did

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not separate from the mainstream Church. Many prominent Puritans lived happily in the Tudor world, among them beneficed clergymen, mayors of merchant-rich towns and Cambridge professors. Where they did move away from the Christian consensus, however, was in their shared belief that there was too much ambiguity in the Elizabethan settlement, too many remnants of medieval Catholicism and a degree of latitude that seemed to suggest monarchs might freely cast the shape of a religion to fit the contours of a state.30 At its point of origins Puritanism was mainly concerned with the outer forms of Christianity, the aids to worship, for instance, or the modes of genuflection. As a consequence, Puritans tended to direct their criticisms at aspects of worship that had not yet fallen to the axe of reform, which included medieval chancel ornaments, overly elaborate ritual, liturgy and music, the sign of the cross at baptism or the act of kneeling at communion. In their eyes, all these practices reeked of popery. Another Puritan eyesore was the clerical vestment. Although the issue of clerical dress had been filed away under adiaphora by most Continental reformers, it emerged as a particularly sensitive issue in the English context with the outbreak of the so-called vestiarian controversy. In Elizabethan England the clergy were expected to wear copes and surplices. Not only were they different in kind to the dark, dour gowns worn by the born-again Old Testament prophets in Zurich and Geneva, but because they were reminiscent of medieval vestments, they were the symbols of the false faith that had preceded the Reformation. Prescribed by man rather than commanded by God, the preservation of this type of clerical dress was also a reminder of the power still exercised by the state over the English Church at the peril of the Christian conscience.31 In theological terms, most Puritans could be located on a sliding scale of Calvinism somewhere between the Elizabethan settlement and the Genevan ideal. But Elizabethan Puritans were not joined by a confession in the manner of German Lutherans or Tridentine Catholics. Having said this, however, there were some core themes of Puritan belief that marked out the first communities and later provided the foundations for the rise of gathered churches. Of these, their ongoing gloss on the principle of Scripture alone and the extended discourse on the nature of the True Church contributed the most to the Puritan quest for further reform. Puritans turned to Scripture for the completion of the English Reformation, and in two ways in particular: first, by evoking a distinct vision of religious truth and, second, by furnishing the raw materials for a religious identity. The vision of truth derived from the strict reliance on the Word of God at the expense of tradition. Puritans were constantly digging deeper into Scripture, searching for the form of Christianity that best

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approximated the apostolic church. Like all Protestants, only more so, Puritans were in search of an ideal of Christian purity, a faith that was free from what Erasmus termed the ‘human inventions’ that had, over the course of centuries, and particularly so in the medieval period, corrupted and distorted the teachings of the Church. This spirit of primitivism ran through all of Puritan divinity, from the so-called precisionists’ efforts to use Scripture as a model for the Christian life to the working principles of an evangelical epistemology developed by the Cambridge divines, which, as William Perkins (1558–1602) put it, meant that when thinking of the higher truths relating to religion, a believer should not ‘conceive a thought in his mind, unless he have counsel or warrant from the Word of God so to think’.32 Though they may not have agreed about what purity implied or what might be counted among the worst of the human inventions, all Puritans were biblicists at heart, and they planted this impulse even deeper into the culture of Protestant Christianity. Second, this tendency to perceive the present in terms of the ‘living theatre’ of Scripture conditioned the Puritan mind to use the Bible as a cipher for making sense of the world. All the phenomena of daily experience, from the imperceptible passage of time to the sudden twitch of a sleeping dog, had a direct causal relationship to the Word of God, a history that reached back to the very first things. For the Puritan there was no escaping, or failing to sense, the providential embrace. As one historian has described it, ‘God was as close . . . as breathing, nearer than hands and feet’.33 Whether on the scale of the grand narrative arc of creation, redemption, resurrection and the pending Last Days or at the more mundane level of pious conduct and religious practice, the Bible reduced the seeming chaos into a meaningful whole. Consciences were constantly pricked by a sentence or an image buried somewhere in the Bible, such as the Puritan polemicists caught up in the vestiarian controversy mentioned above, who were willing to set themselves against Church and state because the English translation of Scripture was quite specific that the prophets and Apostles wore ‘simple apparell’.34 The other theme of importance in the Puritan quest for purity was the nature of the True Church, that is, the degree to which its outer form was derived from biblical precedent. On this issue the English Puritans not only had Scripture as a guide but also the actual Reformed communities in Europe, where the presbyterian model had taken root. The desired ideal, to cite the Puritan bill of rights of 1572, was a system ‘more nearly to the imitation of the ancient apostolical Church and the best reformed churches in Europe’ – which implied, of course, that there was no place for the episcopal model of the Elizabethan settlement and its medieval hierarchy of bishops and deans.35 The most articulate spokesman of this presbyterian

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movement was the Cambridge theologian Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), whose biblically based appeals for a Church based on a network of synods and local models of rule and discipline, independent of the secular arm, necessarily challenged the rule of bishops confirmed by the Elizabethan settlement along with the claims to leadership invested in the Crown. In some instances theory turned into practice. Working on the basis of their mix of biblical and historical knowledge, some Puritan communities established quasi-presbyterian forms of rule similar to the French and Swiss models, the so-called ecclesiolae in ecclesia (‘little churches within the church’), wholly voluntary associations, using church wardens or sidesmen as elders, stipendiary preachers as doctors, congregations of ministers that acted in effect like classes and a network of synods held together by correspondence. Occasionally this might even result in a revised or adapted service, with Puritan clergymen drawing on the Genevan Forme of Prayers for direction and placing emphasis on sermons, psalms and prayers rather than ceremonies. In other instances it might mean meeting in voluntary associations such as prophesyings, lecture sessions, covenanting groups or simply falling back on private devotions in the household. The essence of the movement, as Patrick Collinson put it, was the ‘adaptation and domestication of Calvinism to fit the conditions of voluntary Christians’.36 The legacy of the Puritan impulse was twofold. On the one hand, in some instances, it created the conditions for alternative (or ancillary) worshipping communities, the little churches within the Church. On the other, due to its deep strain of Biblicism, Puritanism tended to invest the individual believer with a more prominent role in the tending of his or her own soul. The rites, ceremonies and priestly ministrations of the magisterial Churches became less important than direct communion with the Word of God. Taken together, these two shifts in piety, a mix of the institutional and the experiential, would contribute to the transformation of Protestant Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the form of the heart religion and evangelical awakenings, particularly in America. It should be said, however, that, at least in the beginning, Puritan religiosity did not necessarily mean that the individual believer was less dependent on the Church. In order to help shepherd these souls in the direction of salvation, the English divines developed a special genre of pastoral theology, entitled practical divinity, which became Puritanism’s theological legacy to the Protestant world. Practical divinity was concerned with the evidence of faith experienced in daily life; it emphasized the need to prove a state of grace by living a life in line with the conditions set down by Scripture. Faith could be demonstrated by certain ‘needful dispositions’,

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which is why believers were told to search for the signs that they were among the elect and might count themselves members of the godly covenant. Practical theology thus required a regime of self-analysis and selfscanning, conceived and closely monitored by the clergy, and all with a view to determining whether the individual Christian was Christian enough. The clergyman John Downame (1571–1652) made the point in Guide to Godlynesse (1622): [We must] review and take a survey of all that wee haue done . . ., of all our parts and faculties of soule and body, examining how we haue imployed them to the glory of [God]; . . . [we must scan] all our thoughts, . . . words and actions, [and] all our course and carriage in our whole life and conversation, . . . More especially, wee may examine our selves, how wee haue . . . shaken off the seruice of sinne, . . . and deuoted our selues wholly to the seruice of God.37

Others wrote in this vein, including Robert Browne, Richard Greenham, Richard Sibbes, William Ames and William Perkins, all of whom became authors of popular spiritual works that these days would be shelved under ‘self help’ in the local bookstores. Puritan religiosity expected the believer to work for his or her salvation – or as the divine Arthur Dent worded it, ‘to fetch the warrant of our salvation from within ourselves’ – and indeed to such an extent that more than a few mainstream Protestants thought it smacked of the works-righteousness of medieval Catholicism.38 Puritan literature became very popular in Protestant Europe, circulating in both English-language originals and print and manuscript translations. Of all the seedbeds of practical theology, though, excluding perhaps the rather unique virgin territory of the New World, no land was more receptive to Puritan literature than the Dutch Republic.39 Although de jure the public Church of the country was Calvinist, de facto it had to live in close proximity to many other religions and there was never really the same climate of religious unity common to the confessionalized German territories in the north. The real problem was the state rather than the theory of religion. Many Dutch Calvinists, the most cosmopolitan people in Europe, were starting to think that their religion had grown stale and outdated when compared to the dynamism and vitality of English practical divinity. And it was not just the patricians. Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), Utrecht’s highpriest of Calvinist orthodoxy, came to the same conclusion: Dutch Reformed Protestantism was in need of a reform of life to match the reform of doctrine. Years of complacency had left the parishioners weak in faith and strong in superstition, the patricians mired in luxury and easy prey to the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza, and the clergy ineffective, slack in discipline and negligent in office.

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Voetius represented the orthodox voice of what historians have termed the further Reformation (nadere Reformatie), a movement generally moderate in its theology, conservative in its ecclesiology and precisionist in the Puritan mould. Yet this did not prevent its most vocal advocates from stressing the need for individuals to find the living faith within themselves and cultivate a piety outside of the ministrations of the Church. One of Voetius’s followers, the Utrecht pastor Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620–77), went so far as to suggest that parishioners supplement regular services with conventicles. And neither Voetius nor van Lodenstein was the first to speak of the need for reform or to look to Puritanism for inspiration. Jean Taffin and Arent Cornelisz. Croese, two practitioners of ascetic Protestantism, had been active years before, as had Willem Teellinck (1579–1629), sometimes referred to as the father of Dutch Pietism, who had spent time in the Puritan haven of Banbury in England at the feet of Puritan divines before returning to Middelburg. In 1627, in an effort to illustrate the scale of indifference, Teellinck published a catalogue of sins and proposed a programme of Christian reform that could be met within the household, starting with prayer and catechism sessions up to and including the Puritan regime of temperance, moderation, inner piety and constant selfanalysis. Godefridus Udemans, pastor of Zierikzee, taught a similar message and was one of the first in the Dutch context to emphasize rebirth and the rise of the ‘new creature’.40 Over time Puritan literature drifted into the Protestant lands of northern Germany. The clergyman Peter Streithagen (1591–1653), for instance, court preacher to the Elector Palatine in The Hague, spent time in Caroline England and brought Puritan texts and reforming ideas with him when he returned to Heidelberg. Once back in Germany, he published tracts on the rebirth and the transformation of the Christian life. But by far the most influential of all German Reformed theologians schooled in the Dutch tradition was Theodor Undereyck (1635–93), a student of both Voetius and van Lodenstein. While in the Dutch Republic, Undereyck read deeply in Puritan literature, to the point that he became a precisionist in the style of Voetius. He preached the new birth, held catechism and bible-reading sessions on the model of the English and Dutch conventicles and stressed the need for the reform of life, all of which ultimately led to his dismissal from office.41 Although his patrons may have thought that his message was undermining the Church, Undereyck’s words were warmly received by his parishioners. No doubt his talents as a preacher and a writer account for much of this, but there was another reason as well. By the time Undereyck started to preach the message of spiritual renewal and moral reform in the German lands, the Lutheran Church had been the object of a Puritan-style reform or renewal movement for over 50 years.

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The foundations for the further reform of German Lutheranism were put in place in 1605 with the publication of the first volume of True Christianity, a work written by the Lutheran clergyman Johann Arndt (1555–1621). Having finished his studies in bastions of orthodoxy such as Helmstedt, Wittenberg and Strasbourg, Arndt went on to take up a number of different clerical posts in the course of a long career, moving between Berneburg, Quedlinburg, Braunschweig, Eisleben and Celle while climbing the ladder from pastor to general superintendent. Given this background, Arndt seems an unlikely candidate for the founder of a reform movement that, eventually, would threaten the integrity of the Lutheran Church; and yet the ideas of inner faith and experiential religion that he proposed in True Christianity were powerful enough to bring about a critical rethinking of orthodox religion. For this reason some historians consider Arndt the founding father of German Pietism, or at least the spiritual arm of German Pietism, perhaps the most important movement for the further reform of Protestantism to emerge until the rise of the evangelical awakenings in the eighteenth century.42 The main message of True Christianity was the need for a renewal of the Christian life. The teaching of the Church, Arndt claimed, had become enslaved to the higher theories of Protestant scholasticism, little of which contributed to the foundations of a living faith, while the actual praxis of religion had devolved into a system of rote and ritual (not unlike the opus operatum religiosity of the medieval Church) that had given rise to a generation of Lutherans who, though versed in Scripture, were largely ignorant of the actual meaning of the Word and impervious to the message at the heart of the Gospel. As he wrote in True Christianity: ‘It is not knowledge that makes the Christian but the love of Christ. . . . We must be born again by the Word of God and become new creatures. If this new birth has not happened in us, then we do not have real faith. . . . The scholarly study of the Scriptures without love and a holy Christian life is simply worthless.’43 The purpose of True Christianity was thus to awaken the reader to the need to return to the Christian life, to demonstrate ‘wherein true Christianity consists, namely, in the proving of true, living, active faith through genuine godliness’.44 Arndt’s aim was to set the reader on a journey away from a reliance on the external rites and confessions of the mainstream Church to a private meditation on the Word of God. This would in turn lead to a heightened inner awareness of the Christian message, a sharpened sense of sin and the need for repentance, and finally a closer union with the divine, evidenced by the transformation of the message of the Gospel into a living faith. The road to a Christian life was thus a threefold scheme: renewal, rebirth and lived religion (or sanctification). Christ first comes to us through the Word; once within, the Spirit works through the individual soul and

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gives rise to a state of genuine godliness; and the result is a renewal or rebirth of the believer as evidenced by signs of an inner transformation, such as brotherly love or acts of piety. This had obvious similarities with the threefold path of the medieval mystics ( purgatio, illuminatio, unio mystica), but Arndt never abandoned his belief in the Lutheran doctrine of forensic justification or the need for the Church to mediate salvation. True Christianity did not propose that believers became one with God as the medieval mystics taught, only that they move a bit closer.45 Opinion was divided (and remains divided) about Arndt’s place in the history of Lutheranism and whether his call for the rebirth of the Christian conscience did more to help or to harm the Church. Numerous theologians took issue with Arndt’s criticisms and accused him of a series of theological errors, from perfectionism, syncretism, to spiritualism, thus putting him in the company of radicals such as Weigel and Paracelsus. Given that Arndt had drawn openly from these sources (indeed, he was a trained Paracelsian who practised alchemy in his home), it was not much of a stretch to make these claims. His works would always emit the faint odour of heresy. Arndt’s defenders, however, proved to be more numerous than his opponents, and eventually some of the most influential Lutheran minds of the seventeenth century would acknowledge Arndt as an inspiration and a founding father of the reform sentiment that was called into life after the apocalyptical interlude of the Thirty Years War.46 None of these men spoke in terms of an Arndtian movement in any meaningful sense, though they did recognize that True Christianity could point the reader down some dangerous paths. It was all a question of balance, how much inner spirituality could be accommodated by the outer church. This question would be taken up again in the final decades of the seventeenth century when Philipp Jakob Spener, the originator of Church Pietism, published Pia Desideria (1675), a call for further reform first written as a preface to the sermons of Arndt. Until Arndt’s reform of the spirit was transmuted by Spener into a reform programme for the institutional church as a whole, the influence of True Christianity and the discourse of further reform relied on local initiatives. In Lutheran Rostock, for instance, the Hanseatic city on the Baltic coast, it was the clergy who embraced the Arndtian discourse of affective piety and began to question the level of religious sincerity, pointing up the lack of living faith in the commune and the absence of Christian order. Joachim Schröder (1613–77) set the stage with his tirades against the moral decline and the general falling away from the faith, citing as evidence the wealth, luxury and overabundance in the commune, and even the popularity of pagan comedies in the Latin school. Johannes Quistorp the Younger (1584–1648), a pastor and a professor of theology, went further than Schröder in coming up with a

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series of ‘pious wishes’ intended to direct the Church back on the path to reform. Quistorp not only called attention to the poor state of the Christian faith, and above all the lack of morality and general indifference, but suggested that the ministry itself was to blame. What was needed was broader engagement with the faith, and he proposed that the parishioners bring their Bibles to church and check the text against the sermon. In discussing proposals for the reform of discipline, Theophil Großgebauer (1627–61) thought in similar terms, for he believed that proper discipline belonged to the congregation. Root and branch in the type of improvements it proposed, Großgebauer’s work Wächterstimme (1661) was one of the most searching of the post-Arndtian reform works. Finally, there was Heinrich Müller (1631–75), the most popular devotional author in Rostock, and perhaps the most openly ‘Pietist’ in the general sense, for Müller held that in order to stop the rot in the Lutheran Church it was necessary to cultivate a culture of piety. Protestantism would not be saved by a reform of its institutions but by the transformative powers of a new-found inner faith. Müller referred to the font, the pulpit, the confessional and the altar as the four dumb idols of the Church.47 ***** As the survey of the Puritans and the early Pietists suggests, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, in a manner reminiscent of the period leading up to the Reformation, the topic of reform (reformatio) – or further reform in this case – had become a subject of widepread public interest. But this was not just a Protestant concern. Catholics spoke in similar terms, and indeed the discourse of further reform tended to move between the confessions. It is interesting to note, for instance, that copies of True Christianity were regularly shelved in Catholic libraries in the early modern period, including Jesuit libraries. There was even an approved Catholic edition of the work, published in 1734. It is a reminder that an interest in spiritual renewal was not just the preserve of Protestants. Catholics also pressed for further reform, though the Catholic experience did differ from that of Protestants in a number of important ways. To begin with, and speaking in general terms, pious Christians in Catholic lands had the means to cultivate a more personal or active relationship with the divine without pushing against the boundaries of orthodoxy. Whereas Protestant precisionists raised suspicions by looking for ways to supplement their faith within a Church that, they claimed, was either only partially reformed or too rigidly formalized, Catholics had the full arsenal of post-Tridentine religiosity at their disposal. Assuming that the

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believer had no theological qualms about Catholic teaching (and the majority did not), there was plenty of scope in the invigorated religiosity of postTridentine Catholicism for the development of a more active or personal variety of the Christian life. As a consequence, as the historian H. Outram Evennett once noted, Counter Reformation spirituality, of the type and intensity that we might equate with the Puritan impulse for further reform, was less concerned with the reform of the Church as a whole and more directed at ‘the taking up, refertilizing and modernizing by men of outstanding spiritual fibre, of the disciplines of prayer, self-control, and charitable activity, whether as individuals or in community life, in the personal search for the Kingdom of God, and for the good of their neighbours’.48 What this means is that most Tridentine parishioners were able to pursue the ‘disciplines of prayer, self-control, and charitable activity’ using the traditional modes and methods of Catholic religiosity together with the avenues of God’s grace provided by the cycle of salvation. There was thus less of a tendency to look for alternative outlets for a super-charged spirituality. Instead, the spiritual leaders of Counter Reformation Catholicism, to quote Evennett again, ‘turned back zealously to the covenanted channels of God’s Grace, as an essential factor in the new bursting of spiritual energy – the sacramental system which the doctrine of Justification by Faith alone had so deeply undermined’.49 The Catholic concern with further reform was also less inclined to rely on the biblical spirituality that was so pronounced among the Protestants. This does not mean it was any less biblical in inspiration, but the rhetoric tended to steer clear of a direct dialogue with Scripture and with it (to quote Michel de Montaigne) the ‘nursery of rashness and presumption’ this might evoke.50 In part this was due to the close control exercised by the post-Tridentine Church over the use of vernacular Scripture, exemplified by the blanket ban on vernacular Bibles issued by the Roman Index in 1596; in part it was due to a fear that an easy familiarity with the Bible might push the reader in the direction of heresy; and in part it was a function of Counter Reformation Catholicism in general, which, it has been argued, set out to impose a degree of ‘parochial conformity’ and bring local religion in line with the values of a clerical elite. In some regions of southern Europe, the combination of zealous bishops, a reinvigorated papacy, Counter Reformation evangelism and institutional measures such as those provided by episcopal reform, improved clerical education, and the work of the Index and the Inquisition meant that any notions of further reform based on personal readings of the Bible were quickly reined in or simply qualified as dissent.51 In this regard the Tridentine Church drew on the momentum established by the late medieval reformist movements set in motion by the major orders.

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The monasteries and convents continued to be important settings for the cultivation of a deeper or more active spirituality in the Counter Reformation Church. Although within these settings there was still scope for theological creativity in the manner of the mid-century Spirituali, for the most part the monks and nuns of Tridentine Catholicism, no matter how active, virile or exacting in their piety, did not challenge the teachings of Catholicism. While pressing for many of the same features of further reform as the Puritans, including a more sincere, personalized and conscience-driven spirituality, a rebirth or sanctification of the Christian life and a deeper moral reform of both Church and state, the majority of monastic reformers did not question the theology of Catholicism or the role and importance of the Church in the cycle of salvation. Nevertheless, even in those instances when the quest for reform or renewal was expressly placed squarely in the service of Rome, there was always the potential for the prophets of further reform to stray from the path of orthodoxy, or at the very least to raise sensitive issues for the Counter Reformation Church. A case in point was the difficulties presented by the flowering of female spirituality. Historians have noted that this period had more than its fair share of reform-minded superiors, holy women, saints, beatas, prophetesses and visionaries, so many in fact that there is cause to speak of the feminization of Catholic piety in parts of southern Europe.52 This too had roots in the medieval period with the reform of the contemplative orders and the rise to prominence of mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden. Tridentine Catholicism built on these foundations, encouraging the continued reform of the ancient orders while witnessing the rise of more active communities that required simple vows and a devotion to caritative works, among them the English Ladies, the Daughters of Charity and the Ursulines. Meanwhile, pious women continued to explore the avenues of female religiosity, not only bringing a new sense of urgency and vitality to the traditional methods of worship in the cloistered setting (meditation, prayer, contemplation, austerity, selfdenial) but developing new modes of female sanctity that included opportunities for both private devotion and charity work in a state of conjugal chastity. Some of these women became important agents of reform on a global scale. Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), for instance, a Carmelite nun active in Spain, wrote the most influential spiritual autobiography of the age while pursuing the renewal of religious life in the cloisters of Castile. Other female saints, among them Caterina de’ Ricci, Jeanne Françoise de Chantal and Rosa of Lima, followed a similar path: while sharpening the senses of their own personal faith, they also saw it as their mission to help with the renewal of

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Catholic Christianity on a universal scale. The Ursuline nun Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) captured this sentiment with her confession that while confined to a nunnery, my spirit, united to that of Jesus, could not remain shut up there. This apostolic spirit carried me in thought to the Indies, to Japan, to America, to the East, and to the West, to parts of Canada, to the country of the Hurons – in short, to every part of the inhabited world where there were human souls who belonged by right to Jesus Christ.53

Active spirituality of this kind made the clergy uneasy, not least because the decrees of Trent prescribed more or less the opposite, namely, strict enclosure, quiet meditation and the separation of nuns from the world. Eventually, all active, non-enclosed orders, such as the tertiaries and the beguines, were suppressed. As a consequence, at the very time when female spirituality had the most to offer further reform in the Catholic lands, ‘a dialectic of male control, patronage and repression and of female subversion, cooperation and submission’ resulted in some of the most pious minds of the century practising their faith in private behind high walls, shuttered windows and parlatory grills.54 But not all female voices could be contained, as was evidenced by developments in the abbey of Port-Royal, a Cistercian foundation south-west of Paris, where the abbess Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661), better known as La Mère Angélique, served as the patroness for the rise of Jansenism. Born into a prominent noble family native to the Auvergne region of France, La Mère Angélique first took up residence as the abbess of PortRoyal in 1602 at the age of ten. Six years later, having led a life she described as ‘pagan and profane’, she had a conversion experience and resolved to give herself over completely to a life of piety, morality, austerity and seclusion. In time she began to project her private struggle onto the nunnery as a whole. As she wrote, ‘God gave me such affection for these virtues that I felt I could not breathe without finding the means of putting them into practice.’55 PortRoyal soon acquired the reputation of being extremely pious and austere, with strict rules of enclosure and moral seriousness. Having become renowned as a reformer, La Mère Angélique moved the community closer to the capital in the new Port-Royal-de-Paris, and in 1626, together with the Bishop of Langres, she founded an order devoted to the Eucharist, the Order of the Holy Sacrament. Ultimately the order would fold, and in time the community would return to the original foundation, Port-Royal-des-Champs, but by that stage La Mère Angélique had already made her historical contribution to early modern Catholicism. Eventually most of her family would join her in PortRoyal – sisters, brothers, nephews, nieces, even her mother – until it became

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little less than an Arnauld ‘family shrine’. Following her example, her recruits led a life of seclusion and deep piety, no doubt similar in mind to La Mère Angélique herself, who claimed she needed just two things to serve God: a pair of reading glasses and some lancets, ‘the one for truth and the other for charity’.56 Two recruits were of particular importance for the spread of the spirit of reform practised in Port-Royal: one was Jean du Vergier de Hauranne (1581– 1643), the abbot of Saint-Cyran, who became her confessor and the spiritual director of the monastery; the other was her youngest brother, Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), known as le Grand Arnauld, who emerged as the most powerful voice of Jansenism, French Catholicism’s mid-century movement for further reform. Jansenism reached Port-Royal by way of Saint-Cyran, having first reached Saint-Cyran by way of his friendship with his former Louvain colleague Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), latter-day Bishop of Ypres. Both men had a long-standing interest in the study of Scripture and the Church Fathers, Augustine in particular, and both were concerned with the lack of sincere faith in the French Church. Saint-Cyran, for instance, attacked what he saw as the easy grace, mechanical piety and ‘la dévotion facile’ of public Catholicism, stressing instead the need for true contrition and recognition of the depth of human corruption and the total reliance on God’s grace for the overcoming of sin. Much of this was reminiscent of previous reforming movements, including the views of dévots under Pierre de Bérulle. What made Saint-Cyran’s views so consequential was the authority he could evoke in defence, namely, the theology of grace developed in Augustinus (1640), Jansen’s massive three-volume study of Augustine seen into press by SaintCyran two years after its author’s death. The theology behind the Augustinus is too extensive and complicated to explore in depth here; and indeed, given that it was essentially an attempt to recover Augustine’s teachings on grace and salvation and with that a mode of Christianity that reached back to the sermon on the mount, it would mean returning to a study of the very origins of the Church.57 At the risk of massive oversimplication, however, we might reduce Jansen’s basic message to the following: in contrast to what he considered to be the prevalent teachings of Catholicism at the time (and the teachings of the Jesuits in particular), Jansen argued that salvation was impossible without God’s grace, which he termed efficacious grace, and that without it humankind could do nothing to overcome sin. No amount of prayers, confessions or pious acts could contribute to salvation without real contrition, and real contrition was a gift of God’s gratuitous grace, which alone liberates us from sin. In doing this Jansen was raising questions about free will and divine grace that had not

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been resolved at Trent, due in no small part to the potential ramifications of the answers. ‘Ultimately,’ as the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski remarked, ‘the whole problem boils down to the perplexing difficulty in reconciling two tenets of Christianity: God is omnipotent and it is impossible to imagine that his will might be foiled by men; men are responsible for their damnation or salvation.’58 Due to its stress on sin, grace and the omnipotence of God, Jansenism was quickly traduced as a species of crypto-Calvinism. This is incorrect, for in most respects Jansenists were orthodox Catholics, sharing the same sacramental theology, the same clericalism and the same acceptance of the apostolic succession and the primacy of the papacy. Nevertheless, their theories of contrition and grace did lead to a religious habitus that had striking similarities to the thought and behaviour of the Protestant exponents of further reform. Like the Protestants, Jansenists decried the empty formalism of mainstream religion as well as the arid rationalizing of the scholastics; they sought to recover a deeper, more active faith based on the model of apostolic Christianity. Saint-Cyran’s lament that ‘the world has become corrupt . . . we have located almost all of the piety of the Christian religion solely in external things’ is reminiscent of the opening lines of Arndt’s True Christianity, as is the sequitur that in the real Church God ‘has reduced the whole of religion to a simple interior adoration in mind and in truth’.59 In their quest for proper spiritual preparation, Jansenists turned away from a reliance on ceremony and affective devotion and focused on inner dispositions and whether there were sufficient signs of (to quote La Mère Angélique) ‘modesty, humility, and charity’ to speak of Christian faith. Puritans spoke in similar terms. And in one other important respect as well the Jansenists reminded their opponents of the Protestants to the north. Many of the men who joined the Port-Royal experiment as pious solitaires devoted their time to the translation of Scripture and other works of early Christianity. Louis-Isaac le Maistre de Sacy, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, Antoine le Maistre, Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole and even Blaise Pascal were among the men who contributed to the Port-Royal Bible translation at some stage, a text that was meant to relate the faith to the reader in fluid French prose in the hope that it would effect ‘the consolation of sinners, light for the blind, healing for the sick, and life for the dead’.60 Jansenism had a long life in France, despite the efforts made to stamp it out. Saint-Cyran, for instance, had been arrested by order of Cardinal Richelieu for preaching his views on contrition even before the appearance of Augustinus, but that did not prevent the further spread of the movement or deter Antoine Arnauld from turning Port-Royal into a stronghold of Jansenist ideas. In 1641 the Holy Office issued a decree condemning

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Augustinus and followed it up with a bull in 1642 and another in 1653. But even this failed to bring an end to Jansenism, due in part to Antoine Arnauld’s skills as a polemicist, the continued support of some high-profile figures, including Blaise Pascal, and the tendency to equate the defence of Jansenism with the Gallican cause. Over time, however, particularly once Louis XIV assumed rule, the movement was beaten back. In 1661 PortRoyal-des-Champs was forbidden to accept novices and its schools were closed. The foundation was formally dissolved in 1708 and razed to the ground the following year. A few years later, after yet another debate that pitched the defenders of Jansen against orthodox Catholicism, the papacy issued another condemnation in the bull Unigenitus (1713). This effectively marked the end of the possibility that the movement would find a place within the French Church, though the ideas continued to circulate and exercise an influence both in France and Catholic Europe in general well into the modern age. Eastern Christianities The history of the Eastern Orthodox Churches in the early modern age – that is, those Churches frequently referred to as the Oriental Orthodox that were not in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople – was marked by phases of contraction and persecution brought on by the expansion of the great Islamic empires of the Near East. Egypt was subject to the Mamelukes, India was subject to the Mughals, while the mass of southwestern Asia, northern Africa and south-eastern Europe was divided between the Shi’a Safavid dynasty, rulers of the Persian Empire, and the Sunni Ottomans, which was the most dynamic Islamic empire of the age. This meant that the vast majority of the Oriental Orthodox Churches were subject to Islamic rule. Only the Thomas Christians of India and the Ethiopians escaped this fate. The Church of the East, referred to in the West as Assyrian, Nestorian, Chaldean or East Syrian, was primarily located in the lands of modern-day Iran and Iraq. There was a titular patriarch in Baghdad, but the Church had been reduced to small communities in eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and the mountains of Kurdistan. Out of necessity, as it was not possible to meet in synods and hold episcopal elections, the highest offices in the Church had become hereditary. The West Syrian Orthodox Church (sometimes termed the Jacobite Church), which was a non-Chalcedonian or Miaphysite form of Christianity, had also suffered under the Mongols before the Ottoman invasion, with the result that it too had been reduced to small, isolated communities with no opportunity to cultivate the faith at any level beyond the local. It had little contact with the rest of the Christian world. The most

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the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner could say of the Church in his Universal Library (1549) was that it held to the one nature of Christ and ‘observe[d] ceremonies that are different from those of the Catholics’.61 After the Ottoman conquest the West Syrian Church was ordered under the Armenian millet, and this was a further blow to its independence and livelihood, though the communities lived on. A similar story can be told of the Coptic Christians of Egypt, another Eastern Orthodox Church in the non-Chalcedonian tradition. Years of Mameluke rule had reduced the Church to a persecuted vestige of its former self. That it survived at all was largely due to the value of the Christians as merchants and clerics in the service of the Muslim state. Nor did matters improve with the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Indeed, if anything, the conditions worsened: the Ottomans imposed additional taxes, limited the powers of the patriarch, destroyed many of the churches and burned whole libraries of ancient manuscripts. On occasion an inspirational figure would emerge in defence of the Church. The long-serving Coptic pope Gabriel VII (r.1525–70) was just such a man. Surveying the landscape after the Ottoman conquest, he set out to rebuild the monasteries razed by the Muslim armies, including the famous foundations of St Paul and St Anthony. Gabriel had the monasteries rebuilt, the libraries restocked and brought in monks from other houses. But these were temporary expedients. Both foundations were subsequently ransacked and destroyed, with all lives lost in the raids. And things got even worse in the seventeenth century, once the exercise of power in the empire had devolved to the Ottoman governors ( pashas). Further restrictions were placed on the community. It was now forbidden for Christians to walk on the right side of the street, and when they did venture out they had to wear bells around their necks. Individual Christians could get some of the restrictions eased through the generous use of bribes, but the Church itself remained in a constant struggle for existence. When the German Dominican Johann Michael Wansleben visited the monastery of St Anthony in 1672, he had to enter the grounds by being lifted over the eight-metre walls by way of a pulley system. As the monastery had no doors or gates, it was the only way in.62 The other threat to the continued existence of the Orthodox Churches of the Near East was the missionary aspirations of the Catholic West. Over time the process of European expansion had resulted in the discovery, or the rediscovery, of the Christians in the Orient, and these communities naturally fell prey to the same missionary impulse that inspired the Spanish and Portuguese efforts in Japan, China and South America. As soon as the Portuguese established regular contact with the Thomas Christians of India, for instance, they set to work converting the local peoples and

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Latinizing the theology and the liturgy of the Church. Once it was safe to venture into the Ottoman lands, Rome adopted a similar approach in Syria. In 1583, the same year a group of Jesuits was dispatched to Constantinople, a papal emissary was sent to meet with the higher clergy of the West Syrian Church. Nothing came of the initiative and the emissary left with the pallium in his bag, but there was some progress with the East Syrian Christians of Kurdistan, including a profession of Catholicism from the patriarch and the promise to enter into a union with Rome. But in the end it too came to nothing. This was a common enough scenario throughout the early modern period. Emissaries from the West would treat with the Churches of the East, and occasionally it would result in the promise, or even the seal, of union. Once the Catholics had returned home, however, particularly if this was followed by a change of patriarch who was not favourably inclined to Catholicism, the efforts would hit the sands. Granted, this was not the case in all instances: some unions held. But this in turn would often lead to the division of the Church between the so-called Uniates (those aligned with Rome) and the body of the ancient Church that refused to change the faith or recognize the submission to Rome.63 Even when a Church stood in a close historical relationship with Rome, as was the case with the Maronite Church of Syria, it was difficult to influence religious practice over the long term. A steady stream of Jesuits visited the Maronites throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes bringing with them syntheses of Tridentine decrees, cathechisms translated into Arabic and graduates from the recently founded Maronite college in Rome. But their efforts had modest results. Soon after the Jesuits returned to Europe the Church reverted to its ancient ways. The traditions were simply too deeply engrained for lasting changes to take hold. And the position of the Church was too insecure. When a French visitor arrived in Qannubin in 1660 with the intention of visiting the patriarch, he found him hiding in a cave in order to escape the Ottoman armies, who were presently on the march near Mount Lebanon putting down a rebellion.64 Generally speaking, then, the history of the Orthodox Churches in the Near East in the early modern age was marked by the gradual slide into further isolation, persecution and retreat. Renewed contact with the Latin Church brought with it the promise of greater security and the prospect of a resurgence of the faith, but this recovery was conditional on a union with Rome, and in the eyes of many Eastern Christians this would do far more harm to their religion than anything hitherto inflicted by the Muslims. But it would be wrong to think of these communities as nothing more than defenceless victims waiting for the blade to fall. Even under the most drastic conditions there were episodes of great creativeness and vitality, despite the

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threats presented by both the Muslim empires and Latin Christendom. The histories of the Armenians and the Ethiopians will make the point. By the age of Reformation the Armenian diaspora was already many centuries old. The world’s first Christian kingdom, once a client state of Rome, had been subject to foreign domination since the seventh century, beginning with the Arabian conquest followed by the Seljuk Turks, the Mongols and Timurids and the Latin Crusaders. But the worst of all periods, the so-called ‘dark times’, came in the early modern period, when the Armenian plateau became the battleground for the clash between the Ottoman and the Safavid empires. Towns were levelled, monasteries destroyed, churches razed. When the Augustinian missionaries first visited the cathedral in the ancient seat of Ejmiacin, they claimed that the heavy stone doors still bore the marks of the Ottoman battering rams. Meanwhile religious culture atrophied, and even the language began to disappear as Turkish emerged as the lingua franca. This state of affairs imposed great hardship on the Armenian communities, and many of the faithful chose to seek refuge in other lands (as generations had before them), spreading out into Asia Minor, the Black Sea coast, the lands of the Byzantine commonwealth, India and the Orthodox enclaves in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. Throughout the medieval period the Armenians sent appeals to Rome for support in their struggles with Islam, and there had been brief unions, but these efforts were never recognized or accepted by the better part of the Church. This was the case after the Council of Florence in 1439, for instance: a Uniate group within the Church joined with Rome and appointed a catholicos in Sis, but Greater Armenia rejected the union and established its own catholicate in Ejmiacin, which was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire (and joined, through the encouragement of the sultan, by a patriarch in Constantinople after 1453).65 Despite the historical circumstances, however, the Armenian Church, which belonged to the non-Chalcedonian or Miaphysite strain of Eastern Christianity, retained its ancient understanding of the faith and its own rituals and observances, including the Trisagion (thrice-holy) plea of mercy, the dipping of unleavened bread in the consecrated wine and the practice of triple immersion in the sacrament of baptism. Catholic missionaries made repeated attempts to bring some of the communities into the Roman Catholic fold, but their efforts usually came to nothing. Even during the dark times, some Armenian communities, particularly those associated with trade or manufacturing, were able to flourish in specific settings. The settlement in Lviv, for instance, which was essentially a trading community under the aegis of the Polish crown, was substantial

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enough to warrant turning it into an archepiscopal see. But perhaps the most remarkable example of all was the suburb of New Julfa, which was built from scratch in the city of Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Persian Empire. Paradoxically, New Julfa was created by the very same conditions that had laid waste to much of the Armenian plateau. In 1603, in the midst of the Ottoman–Safavid war, Shah Abbas I (1571–1629) arrived in Old Julfa, an affluent Armenian city on the banks of the river Aras. By that stage Old Julfa, with factors in cities as far away as Aleppo and Venice, had an international reputation as a centre of the silk trade. Recognizing the benefits that might be accrued through the exploitation of the silk merchants, the shah laid waste to the city (partly in order to prevent any thoughts of a return) and deported the population wholesale to Iran. Thousands died on the journey, but the merchant community was relatively well treated, even granted the use of camels for the transportation of their goods. But even more remarkably, once they arrived in Isfahan they were gifted a plot of land in the capital and favourable conditions in order to build New Julfa, which became the relocated home of the Armenian community. Within a generation it was flourishing, with stately merchant houses, 12 churches, up to 30,000 inhabitants and several districts ordered on the basis of profession (merchants, stone cutters, weavers, artificers, and so on). More to the point, the city more than matched the expectations of the shah. By the late seventeenth century, New Julfan merchants had trade links reaching from Europe to India, Tibet, Burma and the Phillipines, involving everything from Asian spices and dried fruits to raw silk, carpets, teas, sugar, watches, glasses and woollen cloth. Indeed, the scale of their trading network was considerable enough that it raised concerns in a number of European cities. According to the consuls of Marseilles, who directed an appeal to the king in 1623, ‘there is no nation in the world as greedy . . . although they have plenty of opportunity to sell these silks in great markets like Aleppo or Smyrna and other markets and make an honest profit, nevertheless to make even more money, they come running to the other end of the world [i.e. Marseilles]’.66 In keeping with Muslim practice, the Armenians, like the Eastern Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire discussed in an earlier chapter, became part of a dhimmi and were granted rights, including the right to practise their religion. Not all Armenian communities in the Safavid empire fared as well as New Julfa – there are many examples of persecution, forced conversions and exploitation – but the new merchant community was favourably treated and left to practise its faith in relative peace. At the instigation of the shah, the bishop of Old Julfa became the primate of New Julfa, which over the course of the seventeenth century became one of the most influental sees in

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the Church, eventually extending its jurisdiction to the rest of the Armenian Christians in Iran and sometimes resisting, and even reversing, the decrees of the catholicos. From the very beginning there was a sense that the foundation of New Julfa was an important moment in the history of Armenian Christianity, and this idea was only strengthened in 1614 when the shah ordered that the sacred stones of Ejmiacin be brought to New Julfa for the construction of the new cathedral. Ejmiacin, the shah declared, ‘is mostly in ruins’ and ‘has lost its glory and its ability for miracles’, and so both the stones and the relics of Gregory the Illuminator were (temporarily) translated to the new settlement.67 Other churches followed in swift succession, as did monasteries, institutions of higher education, a scriptorium staffed with scribes and minaturists and even a printing press responsible for half of all the Armenian texts published in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, unsurprisingly in a town of so much wealth, the artists and illuminators did a flourishing trade, often experimenting with different styles and motifs. Art historians have suggested that the paintings in the All Saints monastery are a mixture of Eastern and European traditions, with some clearly indebted to Flemish and Italian works. One measure of the vitality of the New Julfa church was its ability to resist the efforts of the Catholic missionaries. Despite the ongoing attempts to bring the New Julfa Armenians into the Catholic fold, the number of converts remained very modest. The Augustinians, for instance, who first engaged the community when it was still in Old Julfa, never missed an opportunity to preach. Even while the exiles were still encamped on the edges of Isfahan in their caravanserais, the Augustinians visited the higher clergy and tried to win them over to a union with Rome. And for a short period there seemed to be the real possibility of a reconciliation, to the point where the patriarch declared he was willing to submit to Rome. But in the end it came to nothing. The Bishop of New Julfa refused to sign the treaty and rejected any further suggestion that they were willing to compromise their rites, rituals or Christological teachings. Other efforts were made: after the Augustinians came the Capuchins, then the Jesuits, the Dominicans and the Carmelites. But few souls were won. This strength of conviction prompted one Augustinian to describe the Armenian Christians as ‘on the one hand full of blindness, error and ignorance, and on the other very proud and scornful, not to say disdainful of those who have to preach to them, and extremely attached to their ancient customs’.68 As with the Armenian Church, the history of Ethiopian Christianity reaches back to the fourth century. Encounters with Syrian merchants first brought the faith to the land, and it retained strong ties with Coptic Christianity. Indeed, the titular head of the Ethiopian Church (the abun) was

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appointed by the patriarch of Alexandria. But centuries of isolation had left its mark. In essence, there were two pillars of the Ethiopian Church. On the one hand there was the monastic tradition, which was another legacy of the Alexandrian heritage. Monks could be influential figures, as was demonstrated in the fifteenth century when the Ewostathians, a northern group of precisionists, managed to force through their desired reform of the Sabbath. The other pillar was the emperor, the king of kings, who in effect reigned over what has been termed a ‘royal church’. For our purposes, the most important of the medieval kings in this sacerdotal mode was Zar’a Ya’ qob (r.1434–68), who announced after assuming power that ‘God made us king on this Orthodox throne of the kingdom so that we may root out all worshippers of idols’.69 True to his word, he oversaw a campaign of Christian reform so closely bound up with the intentions of the state that some scholars have spoken of a type of ‘religious nationalism’. And it was as relentless in its intentions as it was brutal in its methods. Zar’a Ya’ qob had numerous pagans flogged to death, including one of his wives. But he also introduced a number of important reform initiatives, particularly those issued at the council of Dabra Mitmaq (1449), and these imposed a sense of order and purpose on the Church that carried over to the early modern period. Having said this, however, we should not overestimate the structural integrity of the Ethiopian Church or place too much stress on reform or orthodoxy. In practice the Church remained fairly rudimentary: most churches were small grass-topped huts, there were no bishops or dioceses to speak of, and the abun, who could not even speak Ahmaric, the language of the majority, was little more than a figurehead. In reality, as one historian has remarked, ‘the religious life of the country simply flowed on, with little theology and less planning, in a river of rituals and of music’.70 The biggest threat to early modern Ethiopian Christianity was the destruction wrought by war. In part it was self-inflicted. A series of civil wars, succession struggles and weak regencies followed the reign of Zar’a Ya’ qob. But the most devastating period was the struggle against Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (r.1527–43), also known as Grañ (‘the left-handed’), who was a Somali imam and the military leader of the Islamic sultanate of Adal. Grañ declared a jihad against the Christian empire of Ethiopia and, with the help of neighbouring tribes, laid waste to the land. Throughout the 1530s Grañ’s armies pressed into the heartlands of Ethiopia, burning churches, including the ancient Cathedral of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Askum, levelling monasteries, destroying manuscripts and objects of worship and forcing conversions to Islam. Pressed back to an enclave in the northern plateau, the emperor Lebna-Dengel (r.1507–40) looked to the Portuguese for military aid. Although some years in the making, the Portuguese force (400 men in total)

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did eventually arrive, and in 1543, together with the Ethiopian troops under the leadership of the Emperor Gelawdewos (r.1540–59), they won a famous victory against Grañ, who was killed at Wayna Daga by a Portuguese musketeer. Gelawdewos was able to reclaim the lost lands of the kingdom, reimpose order on the government and restructure and renew the national Church. Additional reforms were made during the reign of Sarsa Dengel (r.1563–97), particularly to the army, and this allowed for further expansion and the forced evangelicalization of neighbouring tribes. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was an additional threat to the existence of the Church, namely the relentless advance of the Oromo (or Galla) people. In the face of this threat, the emperor Susenyos I (r.1606–32) looked to the Portuguese for aid, though on this occasion the alliance with Catholic powers brought with it a crisis in the Ethiopian Church.71 At some stage during the fourteenth century the myth of Prester John started to locate his kingdom in Ethiopia rather than India, no doubt due in large part to the fact that the Dominicans had been unable to find him in the East. In truth, the Ethiopian emperor was the ideal candidate for the lost Christian king, for although little was known about his kingdom, there had been enough contact through the years for the Europeans to know that he was indeed Christian. The appearance of the Ethiopian delegation at the Council of Florence (1439) removed any doubts. The Portuguese established regular contact with the kingdom in the 1520s, sending merchants, soldiers and even missionaries, most notably Francisco Álvares, who wrote a report on the land. The importance of the kingdom as a destination for missionary work was immediately recognized by the Jesuits (Loyola himself volunteered to go), and in 1555 the first priests were sent, followed by a more substantial mission in 1557 under the leadership of Andrés de Oviedo. This first wave of Jesuits had limited success. The main order of Catholic business was pointing up the errors of Miaphysite Christianity, but all this did was provoke opposition and resistance. Some of the most sophisticated apologies of Täwahedo Orthodoxy were written during this period, including a work by the emperor Gelawdewos.72 It was not until the second phase of missionary work that the Jesuits had any substantial success. The man responsible for this was Pedro Paez (1564– 1622), who first arrived in Ethiopia in 1603. Paez was a Jesuit in the mould of Matteo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili, whom we will meet in the next chapter. He recognized the importance of adapating to local circumstances, which in this case meant learning the language, respecting the traditions and teachings of the Church and engaging in dialogue with the Ethiopian elite. Over time, Paez’s efforts paid dividends. In 1612 Emperor Susenyos converted to Catholicism. Paez advised against a public conversion at that stage, but the

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emperor left little doubt about his Catholic leanings. He granted the Jesuits a plot for a new church, for instance, and approved the translation of works by Bellarmine. Thus when Susenyos did publicly convert in 1622 it was not a great surprise, but the official declaration did mark a turning point in the history of the Catholic interlude. Even more critical, however, was the arrival of Alfonso Mendes (1579–1659), the newly appointed Latin patriarch, a scholastic professor who travelled with the collected works of Francisco Suarez in his trunk. Together, Susenyos and Mendes worked to impose Catholicism on the realm, going so far as to demand rebaptism and reordination in accordance with the Latin rite. The result of their efforts was deep-rooted resistance, active opposition and open revolt. Ultimately, Susenyos was forced to decree freedom of worship, which granted the right to return to the traditional faith, and on his death the forced experiment in Latinization was abandoned altogether. Catholics were banished, Jesuits were expelled, and the process of rebuilding the Ethiopian Church began. A chant circulating at the time captured the mood: At length the sheep of Ethiopia freed From the bad lions of the West Securely in their pastures feed. Saint Mark and Saint Cyril’s doctrine have overcome The follies of the Church of Rome.73

Reference to Cyril of Alexandria takes us back to the deep roots of Ethiopian Christianity, so deep in fact that some historians have suggested that the initial influence was Jewish rather than Christian, which would help to explain why there is such a marked semitic character to the faith. Its liturgical language of Ge’ez is semitic, and it had retained a number of semitic rites, including the observance of the Sabbath, male and female circumcision and Jewish dietary laws. By its very nature, Syriac Christianity had a close relationship with Judaism, but the Ethiopian association with the Jewish tradition was particularly pronounced. It was woven into the Kebra Nagast (‘The Glory of the Kings’), for instance, a medieval myth of national origins, which claimed that the monarchy originated with Menelik, the son of the union between Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, who appears in the Book of Acts.74 Whatever the real history of its origins, by the time the Portuguese arrived the Ethiopian Church clearly had its own ancient traditions of belief. It was a form of Miaphysite Christianity, which meant that it taught the idea of the one nature of Christ, the union of spirit and flesh. The Ethiopians used the term täwahedo to refer to this union. It also had its own unique religious practices, which included open-air services with music and percussive

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instruments, an annual baptism ritual when hundreds of faithful gathered in rivers and springs, and its celebration of the Eucharist, which involved ad hoc words of consecration, wine made from water mixed with prunes, and thick loaves of fermented bread. Although it had an established corpus of orthodox texts, Ethiopian Christianity relied more on custom and memory than the written word. The vast majority of the local clergymen were illiterate, having been ordained in mass celebrations ministered by the abun, and beyond the larger monasteries books were in short supply. As a consequence, tradition tended to count more than the written word. And yet even without the textual memory of a religion like that of the Jesuits’ Catholicism, the Ethiopians were able to preserve their faith in the early modern period, even if it meant resorting to acts of violence or martyrdom when the times were particularly bleak. As the Latin missionaries soon realized, there was a very deep bond between the Ethiopian experience of life and the forms of their Christianity. The Jesuits were not able to overcome it.

CHAPTER

6

Christian Expansion Over the course of the early modern period Christianity spread throughout the globe to an extent unmatched since the first four centuries of its history. This was chiefly the achievement of the Latin Church. Eastern Christianity, the Russian Orthodox notwithstanding, was generally in stasis or retreat. In the West, however, Christianity, primarily Catholic Christianity, was able to follow in the wake of the rising early modern empires and put down roots on every continent that appeared on the newly published orthomorphic maps. Occasionally it was more a matter of rediscovering long-lost fellow Christians than planting the faith from scratch, as when the Portuguese made contact with the Miaphysite Täwahedo Church of Ethiopia and the Thomas Christians of Southern India, but in many instances it was the first time that Christians had arrived in numbers with the intention to stay, and the sheer scale of the venture was impressive. During the period under consideration in this book (c.1500–1685), Catholic missionaries were active throughout Asia, first in Japan and China, and then Korea, northern lands of Vietnam (Tonkin), Thailand and the Philippines. Parts of southern India were originally under the influence of the Portuguese, as were parts of Africa, most notably the Congo, which became a Christian kingdom, as well as Mozambique and Zimbabwe. But the major gains for Roman Catholicism were in the lands of the New World. Beginning with the islands of the Caribbean, which were Columbus’s first port of call, the Catholicism of Spain and Portugal was able to establish itself on the ruins of the kingdoms and empires of South America conquered by the conquistadores and subsequently occupied by the secular and spiritual agents of the Iberian kings. Compared to the Catholic efforts, Protestants were fairly slow to take up the missionary call, and when they did so, as when Swedish Lutherans went among the Laplanders or the English Congregationalists worked to convert the American Indians, the results were fairly modest. There were theological reasons for this failure to act, most famously the conviction that the original apostolic pronouncement to spread the Word of God made all 179

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later attempts redundant. But the main reasons were historical: the Catholic empires had a jump on the emerging Protestant lands, who in any event were too concerned with the survival of their own Churches to worry about the souls of the American natives. Protestant expansion thus began at a later stage, but it did occur, and ultimately it was no less important for the rise of global Christianity. In the early seventeenth century, the Reformed Dutch Republic started to push into the East Indies; by 1645 they had arrived in southern India. The Dutch also started to press into central Africa (1590s), as did the Anglicans of England (1590s), the Lutherans of Sweden (1649), Denmark (1651) and even the Electorate of Brandenburg (1685). But the main arena for Protestant expansion was North America. Dutch, English and Swedes established settlements in the north. Most important for the course of Protestant history were the English colony of Virginia (1607) and the Puritan settlements at Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630). New England Puritanism would add an important new chapter to the history of Christianity in the West.1 The marked differences in origins, contexts and rationales makes it difficult to speak of Christian expansion in a general sense. The experiences of the first generation of Catholic missionaries in South America and Asia had little in common with the experiences of the Puritan preachers who landed on the shores of New England, not least because the impact of the first conquest had altered the American environment, most notably through the decimation of the indigenous population by way of European disease. The rise of global Christianity in this period occurred in stages, and there is good reason for treating the Catholic and Protestant histories in different terms and in separate historical narratives. This chapter will examine two of these histories: first, the spread of Iberian Catholicism to the New World and Asia; second, the rise of American Protestantism in the colonies of New England. The Iberian empires and the spread of Catholicism On 2 January 1492, the day after the surrender of the Moors of Granada, a troop of armed Castilians entered the hilltop Muslim palace of Alhambra. To the chants of Te Deum laudamus, Castilian officials raised a cross three times, and then did the same with the standards of St James and the co-regents of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand. As this occurred a herald proclaimed the names of St James, Castile and Granada three times in succession and intoned the following text: For the very high, very powerful lords don Ferdinand and doña Isabella, king and queen of Spain, who have won this city of Granada and all its kingdom

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from the infidel Moors by force of arms, with the aid of God and the glorious Virgin his mother, and the blessed apostle St. James, and with the aid of our very holy father Innocent VIII, and the aid and service of the great prelates, knights, gentlemen, and communities of their kingdoms!2

With these words, which were no doubt made all the more memorable by the round of cannon shot and trumpet blasts that followed, the dual monarchs of Spain announced the end of the reconquista, the campaign of reconquest that had been waged against the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula. From this point forward the Christians of Granada would observe an annual feast termed the Toma, a ritual cycle of sermons, ceremonies and processions that helped to establish the foundations for a renewed sense of identity while reminding the community of its ancient and recently recovered Christian past. For the Christians of southern Spain gathered at the citadel of Alhambra, 1492 was the year when the Catholic Church returned in triumph. The conquest of Granada was final confirmation that the age of la convivencia (‘the coexistence’) was at an end. For over half a millennium, Christians, Jews and Muslims had been living in a state of coexistence on the peninsula, giving rise to a culture unique to Europe. Historians have long since dispelled the nineteenth-century notion that the peoples of these faiths lived in harmony and mutual respect. Quarrels, conflicts, slaughters and pogroms were frequent enough. But there are some signs that this forced experiment in close quarters had given rise to, at the very least, a readiness to compromise. The Jews of medieval Spain were not forced to wear the same distinctive markers as elsewhere, for instance, such as patches of yellow cloth or conical hats, and the kings of Castile were known to dress like Moors and employ Moorish cavalrymen. And there was cross-cultivation in the arts as well, particularly in ceramics and architecture. In Castile, the influence of the Mudejar style is evident in buildings as distantly related as the monastery of Guadalupe and the synagogue of El Tránsito. We should not confuse any of this with modern notions of tolerance, but there is evidence to suggest that the different faith communities were able to find practical solutions to their theoretical (or theological) problems, as was often the case in frontier societies of this kind.3 With Christianity triumphant, the persecution of the Jewish and Moorish communities took on a new intensity, and it soon gave Spain a reputation for intolerance that more than matched its earlier notoriety as an exotic melting pot. Relatively speaking, the Muslims of Granada were well treated immediately after the conquest, granted the right to practise their customs, laws and religion as before. With the accession of Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros to the Archbishopric of Toledo, however, the Crown started to adopt a hard-line approach. It became a choice between Christian baptism or

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expulsion from the land. Historians estimate than many of the Mudejars chose to leave, perhaps up to 200,000, the majority heading for the shores of Africa. Those who remained, known as moriscos, had been forced to convert to Christianity, but the conditions of life worsened over time. In Granada, many moriscos were harried out of their lands, deprived of their livelihoods and forbidden to observe their culture. Meanwhile the clergy, encouraged by the Jesuits and the inquisitors, abused the moriscos from the pulpit and excluded them from parish affairs. The situation was bad enough to unsettle the ambassador Don Francés de Álava, who described in a letter to Philip II how ‘between the consecration of the host and the wine the priest would turn to see if the Moriscos were on their knees and would cover them with such horrifying and arrogant abuse, in terms showing so much disrespect for God, that my blood ran cold . . . when they left mass the priests would go through the town with an air of bullying arrogance over the Moriscos’.4 The other victims of the rising intolerance were the Jews. The persecution of the Jewish communities preceded the final phase of the reconquista by many years. Tensions only increased in the fifteenth century, and indeed in large part because of the jealousy directed at the so-called conversos, men and women of Jewish heritage who had either recently converted to Christianity or were descended from a family of converts. By the end of the century, many conversos had worked their way into positions of social, political and economic prominence, and it gave rise to a widespread spirit of resentment among the Christian population that readily fed the fires of anti-Semitism. Even the historian Francesco Guicciardini accepted the notion that ‘the whole kingdom was full of Jews and heretics . . . who had in their hands all the main offices and wealth’.5 Riled by conspiracy theories of this kind, and further inflamed by the anti-Semitic sermons of the monks and the inquisitors preaching tales of ritual murder, both the Crown and the civic authorities began to step up their persecution of the Jewish communities. The end result was the expulsion order of 1492, when the remaining Jews of Castile, Aragon and Granada were given the choice between forced conversion to Christianity or expulsion from the realm. Once again, as with the Moors, many chose to leave, preferring to resettle in North Africa, Portugal, Italy and even Constantinople. One of the corollaries of the final phase of the reconquista was the strengthening of the Spanish Church. Both Ferdinand and Isabella were deeply religious rulers and both recognized the need for a strong domestic Church, free of papal interference, to facilitate the union of the Crowns. As a consequence, and in step with the political reform of the kingdoms, the dual monarchs set about reforming the Church. In 1478 Isabella oversaw the gathering of a national synod in Seville that addressed many of the main

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failings, including the problems of concubinage, absenteeism and the low standards of learning. At the same time the monarchs extended their control, securing their rights of patronage and nomination (including rights in Granada, the Canaries and the New World), pressing back the jurisdiction of the bishops, limiting the right of appeal to Rome and restricting the pope’s prerogatives in the appointment of the higher offices, to the extent that no archbishop, bishop, prior or member of the military orders could be appointed without a supplication to the Crown. Efforts were made to reform the ancient monastic orders, an initiative which led to the empowerment of the Observant movements, and in 1478 the monarchs set up the Inquisition in order to root out heretics and the feared ‘judaizers’ being sheltered by the converso communities. It would be misguided to think of this as a dry-run for the Counter Reformation. As one historian has remarked, ‘nothing remotely resembling a reformation’ resulted from these efforts.6 But it is evidence that the Spanish monarchy was occupied with the question of Church reform well before the emergence of Luther, Calvin or Loyola, and it did provide a solid foundation for the reforms of the sixteenth century, when Spain became the flagship of Catholic renewal. The emergence of Spain as the superpower of Catholic Europe occurred during the reign of two monarchs of deep piety and world-historical importance, Charles V and Philip II. Charles I of Spain, better known to posterity as Emperor Charles V (1500–58), was the most powerful monarch of the age. The empire that fell to him was the product of strategic forethought and unforeseen circumstance (as Fernand Braudel put it, Charles was ‘an accident calculated, prepared, and desired by Spain’).7 In 1506 his father Philip the Fair died, thus leaving the possessions of his Burgundian house. In addition to a claim to the duchy of Burgundy, the holdings included Franche-Comté and the provinces which made up the Netherlands. On the death of his grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon ten years later, Charles (together with his mother Juana) inherited Castile and Aragon and thus the kingdom of Spain. Castile also secured him sovereignty over much of the New World, while the Aragonese empire brought with it Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and the Balearic islands. When his grandfather Maximilian I died in 1519, Charles added the Habsburg dynastic lands of Austria, a stretch of territory that ran into parts of southern Germany and Tyrol. Finally, in 1519, he was elected Holy Roman Emperor and became the titular sovereign over an area which reached from the German-speaking heartlands, north-west to the Netherlands, further north to the regions of Holstein, Dithmarschen, Frisia and the Baltic lands of the Teutonic Order, east to Brandenburg, Pomerania, the kingdom of Bohemia and the Austrian lands, and as far south as northern Italy and Switzerland. Given the sheer expanse of his dominions,

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it is little wonder that his chancellor Mercurino di Gattinara spoke these words to the Habsburg heir after his accession to the imperial title: God has been very merciful to you: he has raised you above all the Kings and princes of Christendom to a power such as no sovereign has enjoyed since your ancestor Charles the Great. He has set you on the way towards a world monarchy, towards the uniting of all Christendom under a single shepherd.8

Charles’s significance for the history of Spanish Catholicism derived from his status as the universal guardian of the Catholic Church ( protector et defensor ecclesiae), invested in him by virtue of the imperial office. Two ancient and very broad concepts of sovereignty made up the idea. First, there was the notion invoked in the words of Gattinara, namely the concept of universal monarchy (monarchia universalis). Most historians agree that Charles never seriously entertained the idea of creating an autonomous political realm on the scale of empire. But he did take his role as guardian of Christendom very seriously, and this had the tendency to elevate Realpolitik into a manifestation of God’s will. Depictions of his military victories, for instance, whether against the Muslims at Tunis (1535), the Lutheran princes at Mühlberg (1547) or even the French army at Pavia (1525), were conceived in terms of the motif of the crusading emperor, heir to Charlemagne, taking up arms in defence of the Christian commonwealth. Second, and indivisible from his notions of universal rule, Charles had no doubts about his role as the custodian of a united Christendom, and he expected the monarchs of Europe to think in the same way. There was no separation of the sacred and the profane in this conception, and the emperor, strongly influenced by his Burgundian upbringing, often likened his role to that of a crusader knight who had taken up the fight against the Ottoman Turks and the German Protestants for the honour and reputation of all Christendom.9 It was during the reign of Charles V that the king of Spain began to take on the mantle of defensor fidei, the defender of the faith, for all of Catholic Europe. When Charles abdicated in 1556 and passed on the kingdom of Spain to his son Philip II (1527–98), he also passed on the idea that Philip had become the universal guardian of Latin Catholicism, the only difference being that, now that the Habsburg inheritance had been divided between the Spanish and Austrian lines, his personal dominions were smaller in scale. The defence of religion, as Charles wrote in his political testament, was the primary responsibility of the Spanish king, and he should be ever mindful to ‘submit all [his] desires and actions to the will of God’.10 Philip took this message to heart. If anything his sense of mission went beyond the crusader mentality of his father. Unlike Charles V, Philip II generally maintained good relations with the papacy, though Spanish dominance in the peninsula made it easy to

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dictate the terms. Much of his reign (and the majority of his wealth) was devoted to the fight against the enemies of the faith, both the Protestants of Europe, the most famous and costly being the wars against the Calvinist rebels in the northern Netherlands and the Protestant queen of England, and the Ottomans to the south, against whom he registered a famous victory at the Battle of Lepanto (1571). Although perceived by the king as defensive wars, in each case Philip’s sense of providentialism left him no choice but to take up the fight.11 It was a measure of his devotion to the defence of Catholicism that at his death Pope Clement VIII, whose pontificate was marked by ceaseless efforts to free Rome from Spanish hegemony, could claim that ‘the entire life of this king was a continual struggle against the enemies of our Holy Faith. When it comes to matters of piety and zeal, I can say that no one can compare with his Majesty, except for those saints who are enjoying heavenly bliss forever.’12 The idea that Spain and its kings had a special place in God’s great plan had profound consequences for the history of early modern Catholicism. For it soon became more than just a narrative trope woven into the royal chronicles, though this was certainly where it was first conceived. Under the patronage of Charles V, some of Spain’s finest scholars, from Peter Martyr to Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga, wrote histories of the recently united Hispania in order to reveal the divine imperative behind the rise of the monarchy. In such histories, this divine superintendence reached from the very origins of the nation to the present day, proof that the land and its people were, as Tommaso Campanella put it, founded on the ‘occult providence of God’.13 By the time Philip II had assumed rule, this idea had become a widespread conceit, and it provided a powerful source of purpose and legitimacy for the ruling elite, the conquistadores, the monks and friars and the Spanish armies as they pushed back the bounds of the Catholic empire. As the Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana declared, a new age had dawned, heralded by ‘a new and holy Spain, stronger and more powerful than ever before, a refuge, column, and support of the Catholic religion and one composed of all its parts . . ., able to extend its empire, as we now see, to the most remote parts of both east and west’.14 The origins of global Catholicism, at least in so far as they are associated with the Iberian empires, were rooted in the same spirit of crusade and providentialism that sustained Ferdinand and Isabella in the war against the Moors, Charles V in his war against the Lutherans of Germany and Philip II in his wars against the Calvinist rebels of the northern Netherlands. To borrow the phrase of one historian, it was nothing less than a sense of ‘messianic imperialism’.15 *****

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Catholicism reached the New World on the back of Spanish and Portuguese expansion. In the Spanish case, broadly speaking, the initial spread of Catholicism either followed in the wake of the conquistadores, who were private individuals in a contract (capitulación) with the Crown, or the rule of the governors, civic officials, judicial officers and trustees of the quasi-feudal encomienda system. In theory, all of these men were agents of the absolute power exercised by the King of Castile. By the mid-sixteenth century, they ruled over a territory roughly four times the size of Spain with approximately eight times as many people. The Spanish overseas empire originated with Columbus and his first points of contact in the Caribbean, namely the islands of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. Over time, adventurers used Cuba as a way station for forays into the Yucatán Peninsula, the most famous being the campaign led between 1519 and 1521 by Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), which resulted in the capture of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the conquest of Mexico. Ten years later Francisco Pizarro (1471–1541) marched with his men to the Isthmus of Panama and conquered the Inca empire, an area that took in much of modern Columbia and central Chile, stretching from the Andes to the Amazonian forests. Not long after these famous victories adventurers such as Fernando de Guzmán, Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado started to press into the interior, but the combination of treacherous terrain, poor equipment, shifty colleagues and the guerrilla-style tactics of the inland peoples meant that the first phase of Spanish settlement was largely restricted to the coastal strips and towns on the inland plateaus. Meanwhile the Portuguese, who took the long route to South America by way of their holdings in northern Morocco, the African coast and the Macaronesian islands, landed on the coast of Brazil in 1500 and set up trading posts in 1502. Royal government was not established in Brazil until 1549, but the Portuguese presence was secure enough by that time for the Jesuits to arrive in the same year and embark on missions to the Tupi- and Gêspeaking indians. There is no single reason, or indeed single cluster of reasons, why the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal embarked on overseas expansion. Of the reasons given, however, religion was often paramount. For the newly formed kingdom of Spain, it was easy to think of expansion overseas as a continuation of the reconquista. Ferdinand of Aragon certainly perceived it in these terms, and in 1494 this sense of messianic imperialism was given the highest stamp of legitimation with the Treaty of Tordesillas, when the papacy divided up the newly discovered lands of the New World between Spain and Portugal. In doing this Rome not only granted full sovereignty to the Iberian monarchs; more than this, as the jurist Juan López de Palacios

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Rubios observed, it also invested the two nations (particularly Spain) with the sacral duty to plant the Church and spread the Gospel among the natives.16 This note of providentialism ran throughout the entire enterprise. Columbus, for instance, who was well aware that his name ‘Cristoforo’ means ‘Christ-bearer’, was deeply convinced that he was acting out a predestined role. Even Cortés went into battle carrying flags with an image of the Holy Spirit in the hope of winning the Aztecs for ‘the one God from Castile’. But perhaps the most sophisticated strain of providentialism was that held by the first few generations of Francisans who came to the New World. Convinced that the discovery of America and its native peoples heralded the start of the third age, the so-called Age of the Spirit predicted by the medieval prophet Joachim of Fiore, many of the friars started to think of America as the final stage in the history of salvation.17 The planting of the institutional Church in the New World was the work of generations of clergymen, but it was entirely overseen by the state. Both Iberian monarchs had been granted rights of patronage (the patronato and the padroado) and with it control over religious affairs, from clerical appointment to jurisdiction and taxation. It was some time, however, before it paid dividends. During the initial phase of Spain’s conquest and expansion, the first forms of Catholic community were those provided by the religious orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and finally the Jesuits. Over time, however, once the responsibility for religious affairs had fallen to the Council of the Indies (1524), the Church began to take on a more substantial institutional shape. By the end of the century, 31 dioceses were in place, including the archbishoprics of Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Lima and Santa Fe de Bogotá. By the 1560s, as the number of parishes grew, the secular clergy started to press into the lands once monopolized by the missionary orders, and indeed in 1574 King Philip II published a code of orders that placed the preaching friars under the control of the Royal Church. We should not overestimate the reach or the power of the Church. Regular clergy continued to outnumber secular clergy until well into the seventeenth century, and the lines of communication and command were very weak, even by early modern standards. Nevertheless, the bishoprics served as important centres of power, patronage and wealth for both fledging empires, and there were occasionally men of great piety and quality in office.18 The Spanish conquest of the New World was the most ambitious experiment in Christian evangelizing since the days of the Apostles. What was envisioned was nothing less than the conversion of whole worlds of complete non-believers. For unlike the Jews and the Muslims, who sat within the Abrahamic ancestry familiar to most Europeans, the natives, at least in the minds of men such as Amerigo Vespucci, seemed to have no religion at

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all.19 Faced with such a formidable challenge, different methods had to be used to bring them into the fold. The regular clergy tended to rely on personal encounters, preaching the Word, catechizing the young and winning over the natives with communal projects, such as the building of hospitals and schools. The other means at their disposal was the use of sacraments and sacramentals. The Franciscans in particular used the sacraments to full effect, holding large outdoor celebrations of the Eucharist, staging recitations of the Credo and Our Father followed by public blessings and even exorcisms, and baptizing the natives in large group sessions twice a week by sprinkling them en masse with blessed water from an aspergillum. Once the Royal Church was in place, however, more draconian methods came into play. Soon after the establishment of the first bishoprics the secular clergy worked systematically to uproot and supplant the old religions. Idols and altars were destroyed, temples were razed and replaced by churches, the old priesthood was silenced and the images and codices were piled in great bonfires and burned.20 Despite the ongoing efforts of the missionaries and the growing reach of the Spanish Church, it proved difficult to plant Catholicism in the New World. It was not that the indigenous peoples refused to accept Christianity; it was rather that they saw no need to replace one religion with another, with the consequence that their notions of Catholicism tended to be a mix of the old and the new. We should not be surprised by this duality, for from the very beginning each side viewed the other from its own a priori point of view. Confronted by a people and a religion with no obvious place in the Christian or the classical tradition, the Spaniards made sense of the mesoamerican civilizations by fitting them into familiar historical and theological templates, some scholars proposing that they had been cut off by the flood, others that they might be displaced Egyptian, Chinese or Carthaginian tribes. Occasional references were even made to the works of Pliny and Mandeville, who spoke of sartyrs, cyclops and dog-faced men. Of their gods, the most obvious inference to make was that they were simply idols of the mind, of no more supernatural bearing that the deities of the Greco-Roman world. But there were more sinister explanations as well, not the least of which was that they were familiars of the Devil, made all the more plausible after it was announced that fragments of ancient crucifixes had been found in Mexico, Yucatan and Peru, which were considered proofs that Christianity had once flourished in the land.21 Like the Spaniards, the indigenous peoples had their own set of a priori spectacles for viewing the world. Once aware of the coming of Cortés, for instance, the Aztecs explained his appearance by identifying him as the god Quetzalcoatl (or his messenger) and interpreting events as the unfolding

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narrative of Aztec eschatology. Christianity could be accommodated in a similar way. It was not difficult to find a place for the saints in the pantheon of native deities, and many of the Christian rituals, from prayer and communion to feasts and processions, had an affinity with native cults. All Saints Day, for instance, was a ringer for the feast of the dead. And what of the gods themselves? What distinguished the Aztec goddess Tonantzin from the Virgin Mary, both of whom were life-giving mother-goddesses who sustained humankind? Or the god Xipe Totec, who was depicted as a man inside the skin of another man, from the Apostle Bartholomew, who was skinned alive? Or indeed the god Quetzalcoatl from Christ? Quetzalcoatl also served as an intermediary between humans and the divine, wore a crown of Agave thorns and at the moment of his auto-sacrifice muttered the words ‘this is my blood’.22 Granted, some Christian concepts did not easily translate from one culture to another. The natives of southern Mexico had difficulties with the idea of sin as an existential state. The closest analogues in the local languages referred to closed secrets or dark hearts, which were symptoms of a mental disposition. The notion of pure evil was also difficult to grasp. Spaniards such as Pedro de Cieza de León may have transfigured the god Sopay (zupay) into the Andean equivalent of Satan (Cieza going so far as to depict him with horns, a tail and goat’s feet), but to the native mind he was simply a spirit of mischief who could effect good or evil depending on circumstance.23 But in many other respects there were close affinities between the mesoamerican religions and Christianity. All tended to worship some form of archetypal divinity embodying the eternal cycle of death (or sacrifice) and resurrection, for instance, and even many of the practices were the same, including forms of penance, confession, communion, the worship of relics and the extistence of liturgical calendars and a hierarchical priesthood. Scholars have coined a range of word combinations to describe the hybrid forms of Christianity that emerged. Two of the most enduring have been ‘syncretic compromise’ and ‘creative synthesis’, and both are helpful in emphasizing the critical idea of dialogue. In order to communicate, even on the most basic level, both sides had to fall back on creativity and compromise. Although, of course, the dialogue was never on equal terms, there is evidence to suggest that influence went in both directions.24 Given the historical complexity that this type of dynamic evokes, it is not possible to paint a general picture of the conversion campaign or weigh up the ‘success or failure’ of Catholic evangelization. The best a historian can do, as one scholar has remarked, is to give a sense of the scale: ‘close to the spectral end of conversion one may classify Indian responses as syncretism (the blending of indigenous and Christian religions), nepantilism (from a Nahua word

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denoting the middle), or external conformity; closer to the rejection end, one may classify the responses as dissimulation, passive resistance and rebellion’.25 What can be said in a fairly general sense, however, is that the thinking behind the polytheistic religions of mesoamerica had little in common with the Catholic scheme of salvation. Creative syntheses may have helped the Amerindians naturalize the new faith, but as the clergy quickly recognized, it did not necessarily make them think like Christians. Indeed, instead of helping the natives to understand and ultimately embrace Catholicism, the substitution of one thing for another often left their core beliefs untouched. Realizing this, the later missionaries among the Nahua started to make use of Latin loan words, such as anima for the idea of soul, in order to avoid the dangers of too much slippage between the two world-views. Latin concepts still had to be defined against the matrix of Nahuatl thought, but at least there was a novelty in the sound of the word to jar the senses. And it also made it easier for both sides to maintain the critical differences between the two religious cultures, which became increasingly difficult after so much of the native tradition had been destroyed. That is what the Dominican Diego Durán meant when he referred to the campaign of destruction as a ‘great mistake’. Without the means to piece together the habitus of native beliefs, he remarked, ‘they can practice idolatry before our very eyes’.26 The gradual realization that most of the natives were half-Christian at best gave rise to a marked change of mood. Many of the first wave of missionaries had been full of hope and optimism, praising the civility, humanity and genius of the natives and their facility for learning. Convinced that the natives would convert if they could only understand, scholars, friars and missionaries began to study the local languages and cultures. This was one of the great intellectual projects of the century, pursued under conditions of exceptional hardship by men who effectively devoted their lives to the task. It was in this spirit of inquisitiveness, for instance, that Domingo de Ara compiled a manuscript dictionary of Maya-Tzeltal for his fellow missionaries in Chiapas (with over 20,000 entries), José de Anchieta published a grammar and dictionary in Tupí, Domingo de Santo Tomás published a Quechuan grammar and Luis Jerónimo de Oré wrote a catechism in the same tongue. A similar mindset motivated ethno-historians such as José de Acosta, whose Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590) was a sophisticated anthropological study of mesoamerican culture, and Bernardino de Sahagún, who spent years recovering myths and histories and, with the help of Nahua aides, shoehorning the pictographic Nahuatl language into an alphabetic form. And yet at the end of the century many of these same men were doubtful that the Indians could ever be saved. Mendieta concluded that their only hope was close supervision and the measured use of force; Sahagún

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compared them to a sick patient, ‘indolent and inclined to sensual vices’; Acosta also spoke of the need for a heavy hand, and added that he had deeper doubts about the capacity of their minds. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés simply denied that the higher truths of the faith were obtainable for such a ‘bestial and ill-intentioned mind’.27 The encounter with the indigenous peoples raised some profound questions about the nature of humanity and the scheme of Christian salvation. Nothing in the mental furniture of late medieval intellectuals had prepared them for the discovery of the Aztecs or the Incas. Searching for answers, scholars fell back on scholastic Aristotelianism, with the result that the natives were measured against categories such as reason, civility or restraint and, when found wanting, were filed away as barbarians. What was unique about the encounter with the New World, however, was that the ongoing process of discovery and expansion, experienced firsthand by men raised in the scholastic tradition, forced many thinkers to reassess the traditional categories and reconsider what it meant to be human, civilized or indeed Christian. In this sense the Spanish overseas empire was unique: it was constantly questioning the grounds for its own existence.28 Did Spain have the right to conquer and rule over the peoples of the New World? Were these men and women made of the same full humanity as the Spanish and thus equals in the eyes of the law? More importantly, were they equals in the eyes of God? These questions shadowed the conquest from the beginning. Efforts were made to find some sort of lasting solution, including the Laws of Burgos (1512) and the New Laws of 1542, both of which tried to protect the rights of the natives, but the results were limited. Eventually it reached the stage where Emperor Charles V was forced to intervene. In 1550 he summoned a group of jurists and theologians to meet in Valladolid to debate the treatment of the natives. This was a critical moment in the shaping of early modern Catholicism, for it represented a very public challenge to both the validity of scholastic categories and the integrity of the Church, and it planted the seeds of a cultural and religious relativism that would bear fruit in later years. The main defence of the Indians was mounted by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), a one-time lay beneficiary of the encomienda system who had entered the Dominicans in 1522. Others had spoken up before, including the preacher Antonio de Montesinos and the Salamancan theologian Francisco de Vitoria, but the most influential voice was that of Las Casas, for he not only made a case in defence of the idea that the Indians were (as he put it) ‘men like us’. He also challenged the validity of the scholastic categories, arguing that there were degrees of civility just as there were degrees of barbarity, and that within this scheme the Mexica and

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the Inca were no less human or civilized than the Romans or the Greeks.29 And perhaps even more important than his philosophical stance was the work he did as a propagandist. His work A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) was the first detailed description of the atrocities committed by the Spaniards and how the conquest had resulted in ‘so much harm, so many calamities, so much destruction, so many kingdoms devastated’.30 Las Casas’s efforts seem all the more remarkable when we call to mind the case put forward by his Valladolid opponent Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490– 1573). For the Aristotelian Sepúlveda, the natives failed to measure up to the status of humanity. They fell short of reason and civility and were in fact more akin to mechanical beings like bees and spiders. When it came to questions of wisdom and virtue, the Indians, he argued, ‘are as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults, women are to men, the savage and ferocious [man] to the gentle, the grossly intemperate to the continent and temperate and finally, I shall say, almost as monkeys are to men’.31 Sepúlveda’s views are abhorrent to the modern mind, but they were representative of a school of thought that was widely held and respected in the sixteenth century. It would take the better of two centuries before it fell out of favour. Little progress was made in the century after Valladolid to resolve the theological problems, but there were achievements in the upbuilding of the Church. By 1620 the Spanish Church in Mexico was able to sustain itself on the basis of its own income. The episcopal networks were in place, and by mid-century about 2,000 secular clergy were in the parishes, many of whom had been educated in the universities at Mexico City, Santo Domingo, Quito and Bogotá. In Brazil, the regular orders had settled in the main urban centres, and in 1676 the three dioceses of Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Luís do Maranhão were added to São Salvador da Bahia. Priests pressed further into the interior, and new orders arrived, including the Hippolytans, Antonins and Capuchins, while the Franciscans, Jesuits and Carmelites journeyed into the Amazon. As a result of these redoubled efforts, the missionary enterprise of the seventeenth century seems to have enjoyed greater success. The Jesuit reductions (reducciones) in particular, which were small-scale, self-sufficient Christian communities free of the intervention of the colonial powers, proved to be a very efficient way of bringing the natives to the faith. In the reduction of Rió de la Plata, whole tribes of the Guaraní Indians converted en masse. Meanwhile, the Church became more effective in its efforts, though more heavy-handed as well. The optimistic evangelizing of earlier generations started to give way to inquisitorial methods, which included the punishment and imprisonment of the indigneous peoples and staged burnings (or autos-da-fé) of idols, images and ancestral mummies.32

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And yet the same problems with half-hearted conversions and ongoing dissimulation remained. The sense of failure and frustration experienced by men such as Acosta and Sahagún continued well into the seventeenth century, though it should be added that the outlook had changed in one important respect. By that stage the Catholic Church had long since put its hopes in the East, where, Sahagún declared, ‘there are a very clever people, of great knowledge and good government’.33 ***** The spread of Catholicism in Japan occurred during the so-called Kirishitan period. The Japanese term Kirishitan is derived from the Portuguese word Cristão, and it refers to the history of Catholicism in Japan during the early modern age. Unlike the developments in South America, which primarily belong to the history of Spanish (or Castilian) expansion, Catholic expansion in the East belongs to the history of the Portuguese empire. Traditionally, the period begins with the arrival of the great Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (1506–52), who had previously been active in Portuguese India. After an encounter with a Samurai warrior in Malacca, Xavier grew convinced of the need to take the faith to Japan, and in 1549 he boarded a Chinese junk and sailed to the port city of Kagoshima. Xavier did not remain in Japan for long, and in fact he died at the mouth of the Pearl River in 1552 while waiting on permission to enter China; but he had already done enough in the areas around Kyushu and Kyoto to secure permission for Jesuits to preach, and he left behind a number of devoted men who went on to plant the first seeds of early modern Catholicism. Of these subsequent missionaries, the most important was Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), an aristocratic Neapolitan who had spent time studying in Rome before becoming the plenipotentiary visitor of the Indies, which in effect put him in charge of the entire Jesuit missionary enterprise from Mozambique to Miyako, an area that took in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Valignano became a critical figure in the spread of Catholicism in the East because he immediately recognized the antiquity and sophistication of Japanese culture and the need for the Europeans to engage with it on its own terms. ‘It may truly be said,’ he wrote, ‘that Japan is a world the reverse of Europe.’34 To speed the process of conversion, Valignano proposed that the Jesuit missionaries learn as much as possible about local customs and beliefs, from language and philosophy to clothes, domestic arrangements and forms of address, and then, without compromising Catholicism, tailor their approach to accommodate the Japanese mindset. This approach to proselytizing, termed ‘adaptationism’, proved to be a source of

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ongoing controversy in the Catholic world, but it seems to have been a useful way of easing the transition to Tridentine Catholicism. By the end of the century the Jesuits could claim considerable success. Numbers vary and are highly speculative, but historians have estimated that in 1569 there were approximately 20,000 new Christians in Japan (primarily in the areas around Kyushu-Osaka, Kyoto and Nagasaki), as many as 130,000 in 1579, 300,000 in 1601 and upwards of 760,000 by the 1630s.35 Unlike the missionary enterprise in the Spanish New World, the missions in Japan were closely controlled. To begin with, all Jesuits were subject to the Portuguese condition of patronage ( padroado), which meant that every clergyman, regardless of nationality, was accountable to the Portuguese (Spanish) Crown and the padroado bishops. Even more important than this, however, was the fact that once the Jesuits arrived in Japan, they were completely dependent on the support of the local feudal lords (the daimyo). Japan had been in a state of civil war since the mid-fifteenth century and power had devolved to hundreds of these regional barons. This could work in the favour of the Jesuits, as Xavier and Valignano quickly realized, for much like the cuius regio, eius religio principle in Reformation Germany, the conversion of the lord entailed the conversion of his subject peoples. But it also meant that the success or failure of the mission was entirely at the whim of an indigenous ruling elite. Throughout the 1580s and 1590s the ‘reluctant tolerance’ of two powerful warlords, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98), allowed for Catholicism to take root. If the Jesuit estimates can be trusted, hundreds of thousands converted and whole territories crossed over to the faith. But the faith had a precarious hold. This was also the stage when the Jesuits started to fall out of favour with the warlords. This change of fortune occurred in stages: a first expulsion order was issued in 1587, another was issued in 1597 – accompanied by the first public executions in Nagasaki – and this was followed by another decree in 1614 condemning the ‘evil laws’ of the Jesuits and exiling the Christian leaders. From this point onward the Christians in Japan were subject to regular persecution, which included the use of torture (for example, being suspended above the sulphur springs of Unzen) and public executions. During the great martyrdom of Nagasaki in 1622, up to 55 Christians may have died, 25 of whom were burned at the stake.36 The reasons for this change of heart were various. No doubt the desire to preserve the ancient beliefs played a role, as did the shift in economic relations that occurred once the Dutch and the English began to press out the Portuguese. But in the end politics was decisive. The warlord Hideyoshi began to suspect that the Jesuits were agents of the Portuguese king and, like

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the militant Buddhists, had designs of creating unrest and grabbing power. By 1614, as the expulsion order made clear, the warlords had grown convinced that Christians were not only sending vessels for trade, ‘but they also spread a pernicious doctrine to confuse the right ones, so that they would change the government of the country and own the country. This will become a great catastrophe. We cannot but stop it.’37 Historians have estimated that by the year 1644 not a single Jesuit remained in the land. The era of hidden Christianity began. Christians would not be able to worship in public again until 1873. When Catholic missionaries returned to Japan in the late nineteenth century, they encountered the traces of a living Christianity that had its roots in the teaching of the Jesuits. Valignano’s strategy of adaptationism had done much to spread the faith, as had his efforts to write grammars and catechisms, set up a printing press and found a language school and a seminary. The Jesuits under his charge had also done their part, preaching in the countryside, staging mass baptisms and winning over converts with sacraments, songs and prayers. But none of this had created a Catholic Church in any meaningful sense. In large part this was due to the political circumstances described above, which forced believers to go underground and become ‘hidden Christians’ (kakure kirishitan). But it was also due to the difficulties of finding a mode or a framework for the translation of Catholic theology. Xavier had encountered this problem when he first substituted the name of the Buddhist deity Dainichi for the Christian god. This tended to obscure more that it revealed, for not only was Dainichi just one god among many, he was already an established Buddhist deity with a fixed place in the religious world.38 Despite the catechisms, schools, group baptisms and mass conversions, the Jesuits were never really able to plant an evident understanding of the faith during their years of evangelizing. The hidden Christianity of early modern Japan remained more of a bricolage of beliefs than a meaningful reflection of Valignano’s Tridentine Creed. As later missionaries discovered, it was not unusual for images of Christ or the Virgin to be placed on the same altars alongside representations of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and peasants regularly used crosses, rosary beads or passages from Scripture as they would amulets or superstitious charms. Christianity was stitched into the broader fabric of Japanese beliefs.39 This tendency to synthesis is evident in the colloquial work The Beginning of Heaven and Earth, which scholars have likened to a type of Kirishitan bible. Most of it is based on ancient stories and folk plays, but there is a clear Christian element in the work and more than a fair share of Latin and Portuguese loan words. In this short passage, for instance, we can make out aspects of the narrative from Genesis, though it

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shares space with other ideas as well. [The reader can consult the endnote for a clarification of the text]: Deusu then created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and called into being tens of thousands of anjo just by thinking of them. One of them, Jusuheru, the head of seven anjo, has a hundred ranks and thirty-two forms. Deusu is the one who made all things: earth, water, fire, wind, salt, oil, and put in his own flesh and bones. Without pause Deusu worked on the Shikuda, Terusha, Kuwaruta, Kinta, Sesuta, and Sabata. Then on the seventh day Deusu blew breath into this being and named him Domeigosu-no-Adan, who possessed thirty-three forms. So this is the usual number of forms for a human being.40

In this passage it is difficult to see where Christianity begins and the blend of Buddhism, Shinto and folk beliefs ends, but there are clearly fragments of Jesuit teachings in the mix. The hazards of adaptationism became more of an issue once the missionaries reached China, which many Jesuits, Xavier and Valignano among them, believed to be the birthplace of oriental ideas. Attempts to gain entry had been made as early as the 1550s, but it was not until Valignano received permission in 1579 to dispatch a group of men to Macau that Jesuits had a foothold in the land. The founding father of the missionary effort in China, and perhaps Europe’s first sinologist, was Michele Ruggieri (1543– 1607). Although Ruggieri went with the intention, as he put it, to ‘confound their errors’, he recognized that this could only be done on the basis of an intimate knowledge of Chinese culture, and he devoted years of his life to the study of Eastern language, history and thought.41 But the man best remembered for translating Valignano’s policy of ‘sweet conversion’ into missionary success was Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), an Italian Jesuit who, fresh from his studies in Counter Reformation Rome, decided to devote his life to the ‘art of holy action’ and took ship to join Ruggieri in Macau in 1582. Ricci was remarkable for a number of reasons, and not least due to his perseverance. He remained in China for the rest of his life, gradually working his way into the provinces of Zhejiang, Guangxi, Huguang and Guangdon while taking up residence in important centres such as Nanchang, Nanjing and eventually Bejing, where he died and was buried in 1610. Like Valignano, Ruggieri and many other Catholic missionaries, Ricci spent countless hours studying Chinese culture in order to prepare the ground for conversion. As he remarked, ‘to know our own [letters] without knowing theirs serves nothing. . . . I myself value it [knowledge of Chinese letters] more than another ten thousand converts, since this is the way for the universal conversion of the realm.’42 This was a common conviction by this stage, but Ricci took the art of accommodation to

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a new level. He deciphered the language of power, for instance, familiarizing himself with the gestures, forms of address and rules of diplomacy. Flattery, flexibility and reason, rather than confrontation, were the routes to favour, as were gifts such as astrolabes, clavichords, clocks and quadrants. Socially, Ricci made sure to hit the right notes. When it became apparent that dressing like a Buddhist monk was hurting his chances with the mandarinate, he donned silk robes, grew out his beard to his waist, started wearing the four-cornered hat of the Confucian scholar and paid formal visits in a sedan chair. And no scholar did more to bring the thought of the East into contact with Latin Christendom. In his work True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603), he concluded that there was an ancient correspondence in the moral teachings of Confucianism and Christianity. Both were based on the principle of free will, in harmony with reason and natural law, and consistent with the moral commands revealed in the Decalogue. ‘The sect of the literati has little to say about the supernatural,’ he later remarked, ‘but its moral [ideals] are almost entirely in accord with our own.’43 Ricci’s approach to missionary work became extremely influential, particularly after his papers were pieced together by the Flemish Jesuit Nicolas Trigault and published in 1615. In effect, his style of adaptationism became official Jesuit policy in China during the seventeenth century, as did his tendency to target the elite and his method of using Western science for the purposes of Catholic evangelizing. Later generations quickly recognized the importance of Ricci’s status as a sage and master of Aristotelian, Euclidean and Ptolemaic science, and indeed to the point that the use of science, particularly astronomy and mathematics, became a ‘manifestation of authentic evangelical action’.44 Men such as Trigault may have thought of science as mere ‘bait’ to reel in the elite for more important things, but it was precisely the ability of missionaries such as Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) to chart planetary positions, predict eclipses and calculate ephemerides that secured him the position of imperial astronomer and enabled him to speak to the young emperor about Christianity and convert eunuchs and noblewomen at court. Despite its seeming success, however, not all clergy agreed with Ricci’s accommodationist approach. Hearing of his methods while in Japan in the 1620s, the Portuguese missionary João Rodrigues sent a report to the Superior General in Rome with claims that Ricci’s followers were abetting idolatry. By using Western knowledge as a form of intellectual bait and distorting Christian ideas in order to accommodate Confucian or Buddhist ideas, he argued, the Jesuits were trying to reconcile different beliefsystems that had nothing in common. The final result could only be a compromise, distorted to the point of profanation. The terms used to

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relate the notion of the Christian divinity, for instance, such as Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven), Shangdi (Sovereign on High) or Tian (Heaven), were quite specific Chinese concepts relating to divinity, or the idea of divine transcendence, and could not simply be used as substitutes. Once the Dominicans and the Franciscans arrived in Fujian in the 1620s they picked up on this dispute and also condemned the Jesuits for their willingness to occupy the middle ground. They also took issue with the Jesuit retention of ancestral worship. While Ricci argued that it was not a transgression of Christian norms to allow parishioners to honour their dead ancestors as long as they did not stage animal sacrifices or pray to them as intermediaries, in the eyes of the recently arrived Dominicans and Franciscans it was base superstition. Many of these men were fresh from the Spanish New World (or at least familiar with its history), and were, as Schall put it, ‘all swelled up with desires either to be martyrs or to convert the king and all the Chinese right away’.45 Rome endorsed Ricci’s approach in 1656, but this conflict, known to history as the Chinese Rites Controversy, continued for many more years. Chinese Catholicism in the early modern period always remained a marginalized faith, described by one historian as ‘vivid patches of baroque piety set in a vast and largely indifferent land’.46 Nonetheless, although there were setbacks to the missionary enterprise, particularly the periods of persecution in 1616 and 1664, when Jesuits were arrested, exiled and forced into hiding, Christianity was able to take hold under both the late Ming and the early Qing dynasties. It did so by attracting some important highranking figures to the faith in the manner described above. But it also found a following at the local level in the form of lay associations, fraternities or quasi-parishes marked out by a strong Christian presence. In order to maintain the community once the Jesuits had moved on, the Chinese Christians made use of the growing number of translations in circulation, and they also fell back on the services of the local lay catechists, who were instrumental in the preservation of the faith. As the polymath priest and scientist Athanasius Kircher described them in his China Illustrata (1667): These are men trained in the mysteries of the Christian faith, and full of the fervour and zeal of a holy apostle, who know how to show the path of salvation to others. They cannot join this number unless they have long shown forth solid virtue and holy life. Their function is to go around the villages and streets and when they find infants who have been cast out to perish, they baptise them. By word and the example of their lives they bring the untaught to the knowledge of God’s truth. They give spiritual pamphlets to those who do not have them. They resolve dubious matters and gain souls for Christ.47

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On the basis of these efforts, Christianity made slow but steady progress. A recent publication has offered the following approximate numbers: about 18 Christian converts in 1585, 100 in 1596, 2,000 in 1608, 6,000 in 1616, 70– 80,000 in 1663, and 105–120,000 in 1665. And there was continuous geographical expansion as well. If the Catholic mission began in the 1590s and 1600s along the coasts of the Guangdong macro region and followed Ricci to his residences in Nanchang, Nanjing and Beijing, by the 1610s it started to reach out to the east-coast Jiangnan area, with Jesuit residences in Hangzhou, Changshu and Ningbo, and from the 1630s there was a settled mission in the mountainous Fujian province as well as activity in Shaanxi and Shanxi. By 1663 there were 20 Jesuit residences in ten provinces, and Christians in these areas regularly built churches, commissioned icons and statues and staged religious processions in the public sphere.48 The origins of Catholic expansion in the East is largely a Jesuit story. Although they had to work within the constrictions of the Portuguese padroado system, once they reached China the Society members had enough elbow room to act independently and answer to their superiors in Rome. By the 1630s the Dominicans, Franciscans and Augustinians started to settle and spread throughout the Fujian province, slowly loosening the grip of the Jesuit monopoly. But even more important was the foundation of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) in 1622. With Pope Gregory XV’s creation of the Congregatio, Rome declared its intention to take up the reins of the missionary enterprise and establish a permanent means within the Church ‘through which men may be brought to the knowledge and adoration of the true God’.49 This was a turning point in the history of Catholic expansion, for the Church claimed universal authority for the cure of souls on both sides of the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas, and this meant that the relationships established under the patronage system were now subject to the intervention of Rome. None of this put an end to the Jesuit mission in China, but it did fundamentally weaken the influence of the Portuguese Crown in the East, which by necessity had a knock-on effect on Jesuit affairs, and it did open up the land to a new phase of Catholic expansion, which in the years to come would be borne by a new partnership between Paris and Rome. New England and the rise of American Christianity Early modern English Protestants of a heightened piety, once they had grown convinced that their Church was no longer in communion with God, were sometimes inclined to look for religious truths beyond the existing ‘outward and creaturely aids’.50 Most Puritans, as we have seen, remained members of the English Church. In testing times, they would assuage the

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pangs of conscience by forming smaller churches within the Church, creating godly communities at parish level and even appointing local elders and divines, who ministered the sacraments in accordance with a precisionist reading of the faith and met up with parishioners in conventicles and prophesyings. But some Puritans were unwilling to compromise. For these men and women, whose unbending religiosity was affronted by kneeling communicants or preachers with square caps, it was necessary to sever all ties with the established Church and gather in separate congregations. The clergyman Robert Browne (d.1633) of Norwich was one of the first to take this step. In language that recalled Grebel and the Swiss Brethren, Browne repudiated the Elizabethan settlement and spoke instead of the need to set up Churches of the elect without tarrying for the magistrate. Other like-minded precisionists followed suit: John Greenwood (d.1593) and Henry Barrow (1550–93) established separatist communities in London, while John Smyth (1570–1612) did the same among seekers and malcontents in the Lower Trent Valley.51 Eventually, all three of these men decided to leave English shores for the Low Countries, where they either founded Churches or joined existing congregations. Admittedly, not all precisionists thought distance and deliverance were necessary. The Puritan Henry Jacob (1563–1624), a onetime Amsterdam Brownist, held that the established English Church, while in need of a thorough reformation, was not so corrupt that the faithful necessarily had to jump ship in order to save souls. Jacob developed a model of semi-separatism that made allowance for the basic principles of the separatist impulse, but without demanding full apostasy. Jacob’s model would exercise considerable influence on later generations in England, even though its tone of accommodation was often undone by its own inner tensions, and indeed Jacob himself found it difficult to stay put in one place for very long.52 Historically speaking, however, the most influential communities were those that refused to compromise and moved away from England. Once they discovered that the northern Netherlands was also creeping with sin, they set off across the Atlantic. The Puritans who landed in America were not all of the same spirit, or even of the same faith. Subtle variations in teaching and degrees of exclusivity distinguished them. Many were not full separatists at all but rather semi-separatists, or non-separating congregationalists, who saw no necessary contradiction in speaking of the Church of England as ‘our dear Mother’ while setting up a covenanted Church with additional requirements for membership.53 Nor was the Puritan migration to the New World orchestrated or overseen by a quasi-international refugee Church in the manner of the Huguenot diaspora. Individual communities crossed the Atlantic at different times and settled in different locations,

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each with its own leaders, its own notions of covenant and its own reasons for leaving. First to arrive were the Pilgrim Fathers, who settled Plymouth in 1620. Their origins can be traced back to the Puritans of Scrooby, who had sought exile in the Netherlands before setting sail, via Southampton and Plymouth, for the New World. Under the leadership of William Bradford (1590–1657), chief architect of the Mayflower Compact, the Plymouth congregation became a fully separatist, covenanted Church. Smaller groups of émigrés followed in the 1620s and settlements emerged in Weymouth, Quincy and Beacon Hill, but the most substantial congregation took root in Salem, where among other things the parishioners ordained their own ministers, thus making it de facto a separatist undertaking. Following this first migration, though ultimately more important for the course of American history, were the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 and went on to develop the ‘New England Way’ under the leadership of John Winthrop (1588–1649). The Bay experiment in Protestant religiosity was less rigidly separatist than the Plymouth Churches. Indeed, part of the rationale behind the founding of the settlement, as Winthrop revealed in his famous declaration that the colony would be ‘a city on a hill’ for all to see, was to preserve the Pure Church until such time as the troubles in England and the wars in Europe had passed. It was not conceived as a final destination or a lasting utopia but as a temporary refuge and a beacon for the faithful, a gathering of the elect that would return to the land of origin, fully cleansed and with a surfeit of grace once the dangers had passed.54 The first problem facing the Puritans of America was that of order. The land they inhabited was, as Cotton Mather put it, ‘a land not sown’: there were no traces of Christian civilization, not even the ruins of the Catholic Church that once served as a waypost for the first reformers. The Protestants of Massachusetts Bay had to construct their religion from the ground up, and they did this by devising a balancing act of the secular and the spiritual that became known as the ‘New England Way’. Its foundations were unique. In the absence of monarchy ruling directly over both Church and state, the Puritans were relatively free to establish the model of a Protestant polity. Fully in keeping with their tendency to subject all earthly things to the better judgement and the will of the divine, they created a system approximating a theocracy. Theoretically, the magistracy could not trespass on the Christian conscience; but as the entire polity was in place in order to bring into being a sinless society (or its closest approximation), the lines of division were necessarily blurred. Godly politics would make for a godly Church and vice versa. New England society was thus a Christian republic in the complete sense, for not only did the extension of the vote to the freemen mean that the

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colony was ruled by a species of representative government, but because political office was limited to members of the Church – the so-called visible saints – religion remained the central pillar of rule and the guarantor of order. As the Boston clergyman John Cotton remarked, ‘purity, preserved in the church, will preserve well ordered liberty in the people’.55 To solve the problem of ecclesiastical order, or rather to square the circle of the Faustian union of the spiritual and the secular, the New England Puritans developed a sophisticated genre of covenantal (or federal) theology. In doing this they were drawing on a long Protestant tradition. Zwingli had provided a foundation with his recourse to the Old Testament in the face of the Anabaptist threat; Luther had set out the dialectic with his writings on law and Gospel; and Calvin had opened up the dialogue with his thoughts on the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments. But it was the second generation reformers who elevated the idea of covenant from a type of hermeneutical helpmeet to an organizing principle of the faith. And above all, it was the thought of the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75) that proved crucial, for Bullinger did not just draw a distinction between the prelapsarian covenant of works and postlapsarian covenant of grace in the manner of his predecessors. Bullinger argued that there was an eternal bond between the two covenants, that while Christ had freely fulfilled the covenant of works, humankind, having descended from Adam and inherited his sins, was nevertheless still bound to the demands of the law. This idea was further nuanced in the works of the Reformed theologians Kaspar Olevianus (1536– 87) and Zacharias Ursinus (1534–83), who thought that the act of redemption was in essence Christ stepping in as a second Adam, satisfying the covenant of the law and thereby pledging all Christians for all time to meet its conditions.56 For the Puritans of New England, who took up this theological tradition by way of the works of William Ames, the covenantal paradigm was an extremely effective way of ordering a new Church in a vast wilderness. Not only did it temper the near-despotism of the Calvinist God as taught by the high priests of Reformed predestinarianism, but by emphasizing the importance of the covenant of works it invested the believer with a moral function. To secure salvation, Bay Puritans had to meet the conditions laid down by the teaching of the Church, just like the Protestants in London, Zurich, Wittenberg or Geneva. According to the historian Perry Miller, the congregational system of Church government conceived by New England covenantal theology was ‘unlike anything the world had ever beheld’.57 In theory, each church was independent, founded wherever seven or more men came together in Christian fellowship, appointed the ‘pillars of the church’ (preachers, elders, teachers) and swore to observe the Word of God in a holy covenant held in

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place by the piety of the visible saints. Although there was no literal blueprint for the congregational system in Scripture, there were certainly enough of what John Cotton termed ‘parables and similitudes’ in the New Testament to support it, despite the doubts of the Presbyterians; and in any event, because the entire New England polity was, in effect, an extended congregation, it was easy enough to prop up any weak points in the system with recourse to the magistrates, who were after all the ‘nursing fathers’ of the Church.58 Over the course of the century, particularly once the Cambridge Synod of 1646 laid the foundations for a hierarchical network of synods and councils, the General Court began to chip away at the power of the congregations, but it remained the most autonomous form of Church rule in the Protestant world. What was particularly unique about the New England system were the strict rules relating to Church membership. All colonists were expected to attend Church services, but full religious life in the Church required membership, and this was first attained by approaching the elders with a request to join. At this point the aspirants would be examined by the original members, and once they were satisfied that there was sufficient evidence of grace, the candidates would appear before the congregation to provide a narrative of their spiritual history and proof that they walked in the ways of Christ. Following this, a vote was taken and, if found worthy, they were admitted to full membership. All churches in New England worked in this way. Degrees of intensity might vary from place to place – it was less rigorous in Connecticut, for instance, and more severe in New Haven – but in each case there was a fixed protocol that was applied to all potential members regardless of station. ‘We receive none as members into the church,’ wrote Cotton, ‘but such as may be conceived to be received of God. . . . This practice is a pillar of purity and piety. . . . We receive none but such as may be conceived to be regenerate . . . such as we conceive to be in a visible state of salvation.’59 Assuming there were candidates to choose from, this was an effective method of maintaining a level of piety in the scattered congregrations, for only the visible saints might join. It was also extraordinary in the amount of responsibility it placed on the individual believer, for even if the proper methods of preparation were clearly spelled out by the tracts on practical divinity, and even if the final judgement over the individuals’ spiritual state was at the whim of the existing members, the very act of preparing a conversion narrative required a degree of understanding and self-analysis that necessarily made New England’s visible saints a pious elite in Latin Christendom.60 No separatists or semi-separatists to that point had developed a covenantal theology with the sophistication or the comprehension of the

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New England system. It was, to quote Miller again, nothing less than ‘a scheme including both God and man within a single frame, a point at which, without doing violence to their respective natures, both could meet and converse’.61 Theologically, it was a gratifying solution, for it taught that the covenant of works was still in effect through a voluntary act of divine intervention, and since the observance of the law was proof of the ‘sweet concurrence’ of nature and grace, it made it possible for individuals to believe that their actions, though not meritorious of themselves, were somehow declarative of a choice they had made to follow the ways of Christ. For those concerned with Church order, it was equally expedient, because the proofs of election were to be found in the created order – in the scriptures, sermons, teachings and sacraments – which meant that the faithful were still subject to the Church, for it was the clergy who determined the means, methods and morphology of sanctification, while the Church and its sacraments facilitated and sealed the covenantal promise.62 Nor was that the outer limits of the bond. Because in New England the secular sphere intruded so closely on religious affairs, the ecclesiastical order was necessarily reflected in, and upheld by, the civic order. The believer was bound to the Christian polity no less than he was bound to the Church; and indeed, given that it was the obligation of the authorities to facilitate proper devotion and due obedience, it is not too much to say that citizenship was one of the conditions of salvation. Boston’s John Eliot considered it a small price to pay, for in his view ‘it is no impeachment of Christian Liberty to bow to Christian Lawes’.63 New England was a milestone in Protestant history, for here was the opportunity to lay the foundations for a public form of Christianity that, up to this point, had only been imagined in godly utopias. As Winthrop understood, ‘[t]hat which the most in theire Churches maintaine as a truthe in profession only, wee must bring into familiar and constant practise’.64 And since it was founded by a self-selecting spiritual elite, free of the interference of Canterbury or London, and with no Catholics to contend with, the only thing that could thwart the coming into being of this godly ideal were the ideals themselves. In the end, this proved sufficient. Ultimately the burdens of a pure Christianity proved too hard to bear. Once the religious vigour of the first generation began to wane, and once the earthly delights of the New World started to prove as seductive as the godly ideals of the Old, the New England Way began to lose its hold on the colonists. More and more of the younger colonists were unable, and unwilling, to meet the demands of membership, forcing the authorities to rethink the compact. The solution was the half-way covenant, devised by the clergy at an assembly in 1657 and then formalized in 1662. From that point onwards, in those churches that chose to adopt the half-way covenant, the children of full members were

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members in their own right, which meant that they were subject to discipline and could baptize their own children but without taking part in communion or voting in Church affairs. The need to provide evidence that one had experienced saving grace, the distinct mark of New England Protestantism, was no longer a condition. Ultimately, appeals to grace, Gospel and the errand of Protestant Christians to stand before God with a Bible in hand gave way to a religious culture articulated through orthodoxy, clericalism and the forms and institutions of the magisterial mode.65 It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the Bay experiment in Puritan religiosity simply ended with a return to the very modes of Christianity the Puritans first sought to escape. By the time the half-way covenant was formalized, New England had already given rise to a new type of Protestant, and these men and women would be instrumental in the shaping of American history. No other public Church in Christendom invested the parishioner with so much responsibility for his or her own salvation, and this certainly marked them out as individualists. But perhaps the most momentous mark of American Protestantism, at least during the period covered by this history, was the profound sense of religious destiny they seemed to share. Few early modern people were so certain of their place in the Christian narrative as the American Puritans. From the very first sailings from the ports of Plymouth and Southampton, the leaders of the congregations proclaimed that they were a chosen people heading for a chosen land. The very landmass itself, though presently inhabited by wild animals, native heathens and ‘that old usurping landlord of America’ (by which was meant the Devil), had been set aside as a type of ersatz Eden in order for God to fulfil his work through his chosen people.66 Years later, in his work Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), the New England clergyman Cotton Mather (1663–1728) would work up complex typologies of the history and the landscape of the New World in order to prove that it was here that God had ‘spied out’ a place of refuge for his Church, and thus it was precisely here where all things would converge in the millennium, where the New Jerusalem would find its place on earth.67 But one did not have to be a Christiano-geographer in the manner of Mather to make the connections. By situating the landscape within the narrative of Christian history and drawing on biblical metaphors that related the idea of grace and covenant (wanderings, wilderness, crossings, covenants), the Puritans turned the errand into the wilderness into a type of homecoming.68 Being the chosen people invested the American Puritans with a sense of election and duty that led to constant anxiety about the outcome of the errand. Later in the seventeenth century, when profits loomed and piety waned, the providential note of optimism was gradually replaced by a

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profound intellectual and psychological anxiety rooted in the conviction that the parishioners had failed to meet the demands of the covenant and the wrath of God would descend.69 This had implications for a people conditioned to believe that they were the elect. Failure could only mean one thing: they had fallen short of divine expectation. This sense of anxiety was captured in the so-called Jeremiads, the endless rounds of sermons preaching guilt and calling for repentance, all of which were symptoms of a tendency, particularly prominent in Protestant culture, to mark the ‘failures’ of the present in order to explain why the prophecies had not come to pass. Without a thorough reform of their conduct and a strengthening of their faith, so the divines reasoned, the colonists ran the risk of forfeiting the original covenant with God. Most American Jeremiads carried this mixed message of confidence and doom. The Massachusetts preacher Increase Mather captured the paradox in a sermon of 1674: ‘The Lord hath been whetting his glittering Sword a long time over New England. The Sky looketh red and lowring. The clouds begin to gather thick in our Horizon. Without doubt . . . the Lord Jesus hath a peculiar respect unto this place, and for this people. This is Emmanuel’s Land.’70 Regardless of whether it worked to liberate or to paralyse, the final effect of the Jeremiad was the same. For better or worse, American Puritans remained convinced that God had marked out their land and its people. The message was clear: they had a unique role in the history of salvation, predestined to bear the burden in the ongoing battle for the final victory of his Church. Over time this idea would seep out from the Puritan strongholds and into the American religious mentality at large, where it would enjoy a very long life.

Conclusion In 1643 the clergyman Jeremiah Whitaker, preaching before the English House of Commons, proclaimed that ‘[these] days are days of shaking, and this shaking is universal’. One year after King Charles I raised the royal standard in the Civil War, it is easy to see what Whitaker meant. And yet as bad as it was in England, he knew as well that all of Europe was plagued by disorder and unrest, ‘jointly and universally’.1 Part of it was due to the effects of dearth, disease and bad weather, all of which was interrupting agriculture and trade, especially in the early years of the century, when there appears to have been what historians have termed a ‘little ice age’. Nor was there a lack of natural disasters, including earthquakes and floods, or sidereal activities, including new stars and fiery comets, to heighten anxieties. But all of this was the just the backdrop for the lead rider of the apocalypse, the spectre of war. Of course, conflict had been a staple condition of the late medieval period, and there had been no shortage of religious wars in the sixteenth century. But the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) in the early seventeenth century visited the lands of Europe with an unprecedented scale of misery and destruction. This is what Whitaker meant when he spoke of universality: as bad as it was in England, all of Christianity seemed to be in flames.2 It is important to keep this background of disorder and conflict in mind when taking stock of the religious developments at the latter phase of the confessional age. Many of the developments of Church history during this period, from the rise of further reform to the process of confessionalization and even the Puritan exodus to the New World, were brought about in the shadow of the seeming chaos that had overwhelmed Europe. As far away as New England, Boston preachers were admonishing their congregations to reflect on the fate of ‘[m]any Churches in Europe, since the Reformation. In Saxony, Bohemia, Hungaria, Poland, France, and other places, Unchurched and Dissipated’.3 It was an age of shaking, as Whitaker remarked, and it culminated in the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century, when the tensions and disputes came to the surface in persecution, 207

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intolerance and open wars. These conflicts were symptomatic of a broader dynamic, itself the sum of two related parts: first, the rise of religion as the rationale of private and public affairs, and, second, the associated impulse to enforce religious uniformity, to unite the land and its people under the banner of a single, orthodox, uncontested faith. This created frictions and fault-lines, and yet none of the measures used to maintain stability, whether laws, treaties or pragmatic settlements, seemed capable of keeping the peace. Not even the Peace of Westphalia (1648) provided a solution, for although it confirmed the Augsburg settlement and recognized the Reformed faith, tensions between the confessional communities did not abate and there were numerous occasions when different Christian Churches thought they were on the brink of extinction. As late as 1685, for instance, the closing date of this volume, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was speaking of ‘the fifth great crisis of the Protestant religion’: In February, a King of England declared himself a Papist. In June, Charles the Elector Palatine dying without issue, the Electoral dignity went to the house of Newburgh, a most bigotted Popish family. In October, the King of France recalled and vacated the Edict of Nantes; And in December, the Duke of Savoy . . . recalled the Edict that his father had granted to the Vaudois [Waldensians]. So it must be confessed, that this was a very critical year.4

Any history of the Church in the early modern period has to take these two sides of its development into account. During the age of Reformation, Counter Reformation, Catholic expansion, renewed ecumenical dialogue, confessionalization and further reform and revival, the cultures of Christianity moved beyond the syntheses of the Middle Ages and took on wholly new forms. It was a period of immense creativity, resourcefulness and vision in the long history of the Church. At the same time, however, this creativity came at the expense of the timeworn rites, rituals and beliefs that had made up the essence of Christianity to that point, and the parting of the ways was often violent and abrupt. For every instance of religious creativity in the early modern period, there was an instance of destruction or loss. And for the Christians of the age, such as Bishop Burnet, there seemed to be no end to the cycle. In the West, the rise of the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent emergence of religious division ushered in the end of medieval Christendom and the myth of a Universal Church. It was no longer meaningful to speak in terms of a corpus Christianum sitting above the distinctions of time, place, people or language. Christendom, in this sense, had been pulled down to earth by events, and in its place we see the onset of the fragmentation of the confessional age, when the mainstream Churches began to divide and

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subdivide and search for legitimacy in the bosom of the state. From this point forward Latin Christianity was characterized by particularism. In an age that did not yet have a place for the theory or the practice of religious pluralism, this often resulted in narrow orthodoxies marked out by a lack of tolerance or understanding in relation to other faiths. This was certainly the case in Europe, where there were ongoing tensions and quarrels between Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Calvinists, and the mainstream Churches and those marginalized communities beyond the folds of the public faith. Moreover, once this spirit of religious particularism had joined up with the power and the purpose of the confessional states, these tensions and quarrels often passed over into violence, persecution, and religious wars, the most destructive being the Thirty Years War, which contributed to the contemporary perception that ‘God Almghty has a quarrel lately with all mankind’.5 But there were more subtle forms of religious warfare as well, not the least of which were the methods of discipline, punishment and exclusion that lay behind the process of confessionalization. When we call to mind the history of the Orthodox Churches in this period and their respective fates at the hands of the Islamic empires, it is natural to underscore the experience of intolerance and persecution. But the same experience runs through the history of the West, though in this setting it was Christian against Christian rather than Islam against the Church. And yet within this hothouse of religious discord were also the seeds of the new forms of Christianity that mark out this age as one of the most fertile and prolific in the long history of the Church. Whether through reform, renewal or rebirth, the faith was taken down completely new paths. It was, above all, a period of unprecedented energy and originality in the realm of religious thought and sentiment. Both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation threw up religious thinkers of genius, and even Eastern Orthodoxy, despite its straitened circumstances, produced numerous men of profound insight. But perhaps even more important than the ideas themselves was the dialogue they evoked. Never before in history had so many voices joined in the conversation about the meaning of Scripture and what this meant for the Church. And out of this dialogue came the great multiplicity of forms. Through reform and renewal, Catholicism confirmed its ancient teachings, strengthened its institutional moorings and empowered its clergy and its parishioners with the new sense of sacral energy and providential purpose that followed on from the period of Tridentine reforms. In the new world of Reformation Christianity, charismatic reformers convinced whole communities that they had rediscovered the nature of the true Church in their close readings of Scripture. This was the catalyst for the experiments in Protestant Christianity that would launch the faith into a

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completely new era. Some Churches retained a close family resemblance to the Catholicism they opposed, but others, born of the ‘conscientious Christianity’ awakened by the Protestant encounter with the Word, practised forms of the faith that went beyond anything ever witnessed before. Both traditions, Catholic and Protestant, reinvented the Christian Church in the early modern period and laid the foundations for the forms of the faith that would evolve in the modern age.

Notes Introduction 1 Clifford Edmund Bosworth, An Intrepid Scot: William Lithgow of Lanark’s Travels in the Ottoman Lands, North Africa and Central Europe, 1609–21 (Aldershot, 2006), pp 18–19, 20, 34, 37, 45, 68, 72, 82, 94. 2. Ibid., p 94. 3. Morwenna Ludlow, The Early Church (London, 2009), pp xiv–xvi. 4. Mark Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648 (London, 2014), pp 1–37, here p 1. Chapter 1. Renaissance Christianity 1. Eugene F. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1985), pp 84–115. 2. Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, 2004), p 82. 3. Paul Kristeller, ‘Humanism’, in Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996), p 113. 4. Kristeller, ‘Humanism’, p 126; Nicholas Mann, ‘The Origins of Humanism’, in Jill Kraye (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), pp 1–19. 5. Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995), p 159; Charles G. Nauert, ‘Rethinking “Christian Humanism”’, in Charles Mazzocco (ed), Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism (Leiden, 2006), pp 155–80. 6. See the discussions in Alasdair MacDonald, Zweder R.M.W. von Martels and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), Christian Humanism: Essays in Honour of Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 2009). 7. Erika Rummel, The Humanist–Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation (London, 1995), pp 10–95. 8. James Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton, 1984), pp 143–207, 167. 9. Lodi Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, 2002), pp 95–112.

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10. Nauta, In Defense of Common Sense, pp 191–208; Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, pp 80–95. 11. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, p 98. 12. Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983), pp 32–69. 13. Erika Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian (Toronto, 1986), pp 46, 153; Henning Graf Reventlow, History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 3, Renaissance, Reformation, Humanism (Atlanta, 2010), pp 11–22. 14. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, p 80. 15. Amos Edelheit, Ficino, Pico, Savanorola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology 1461/2–1498 (Leiden, 2008), pp 205–77. 16. Quoted in Jonathan Arnold, The Great Humanists: An Introduction (London, 2011), p 63. 17. Anita Traninger, Disputation, Deklamation, Dialog. Medien und Gattungen europäischer Wissensverhandlungen zwischen Scholastik und Humanismus (Stuttgart, 2012), pp 19–835; Levi, Renaissance and Reformation, pp 127–30. 18. Edelheit, Ficino, Pico, Savanorola, pp 279–367. 19. Ibid., p 338. 20. Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism, pp 61–8. 21. Nauert, Humanism, pp 130–2. 22. Quoted in Nauert, ‘Rethinking “Christian Humanism”’, p 177. 23. Cornelius Augustijn (trans Hinrich Stoevesandt), Humanismus (Göttingen, 2003), pp 56–8, 78–94. 24. Sheila M. Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the Three Maries Debates (Geneva, 2009), p 487. 25. Arnold, The Great Humanists, p 219; Guy Bedouelle, Lefèvre d’Étaples et l’intelligence des Écritures (Geneva, 1976), pp 210–11. 26. Eugene F. Rice, ‘The Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity: Lefèvre d’Étaples and his Circle’, in Werner L. Gundersheimer (ed), French Humanism 1470– 1600 (London, 1969), pp 163–80, 169; Philippe de Lajarte, L’humanisme en France au XVI siècle (Paris, 2009). 27. James McConica, ‘Erasmus’, in Renaissance Thinkers (Oxford, 1993), p 29; Reventlow, Renaissance, Reformation, Humanism, pp 52–64. 28. Alastair Hamilton, ‘Humanists and the Bible’, in Kraye, Renaissance Humanism, p 111; Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, pp 59, 76, 80. 29. Quoted in Cornelis Augustijn (trans J.C. Grayson), Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence (Toronto, 1991), p 86. 30. Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford, 2000), p 27; Augustijn, Erasmus, pp 43–70; McConica, ‘Erasmus’, pp 52–70. 31. Hamilton, ‘Humanists and the Bible’, pp 100–17; John Monfasani, ‘Criticism of Biblical Humanists in Quattrocento Italy’, in Erika Rummel (ed), Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus (Leiden, 2008), pp 115–38.

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32. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ, pp 70–111. 33. Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, p 27. 34. Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004), pp 117–35. 35. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ, p 180; Botley, Latin Translation, pp 115–63. 36. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ, pp 97, 105. 37. Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, p 98. 38. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ, p 199. 39. C. Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Oxford, 2012), pp 36–43. 40. J.H. Burns and Thomas M. Izbicki (eds and trans), Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge, 1997), pp viii–xxiii, 3; J.H. Burns, ‘Scholasticism: Survival and Revival’, in J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991), pp 146–58. 41. David V.N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists 1518– 1525 (Minneapolis, 1991), pp 33–4. 42. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, The Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago, 1984), p 79. 43. Ibid., pp 79, 125, 110–26; Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1979), pp 148–74. 44. Paul Adam, La vie paroissiale en France au XVI e siècle (Paris, 1964), pp 154–265, 148. 45. William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation (Berkeley, 1968), p 47; Cecilia Cristellon and Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Religious Life’, in Eric R. Dursteler (ed), A Companion to Venetian History (1400–1797) (Leiden, 2013), pp 384–5. 46. Denys Hay, The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), pp 9–25. 47. Norman Tanner, The Church in the Later Middle Ages (London, 2008), pp 71–108. 48. R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515 (Cambridge, 1995), pp 27, 10–41; Francis Rapp, ‘Les caractères communs de la vie religieuse’, in Marc Venard (ed), Histoire du christianisme, vol. 7, De la réforme à la réformation (1450–1530) (Paris, 1994), pp 248–67. 49. G.W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (New Haven, 2012), pp 87–116. 50. See Arnold Angenendt, Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 1997), pp 351–514; Miri Rubin, ‘Sacramental Life’, in Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500 (Cambridge, 2009), pp 217–37. 51. Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma, pp 50–1; Rubin, ‘Sacramental Life’, p 220.

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52. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, 1980), pp 216– 20; Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), pp 1–98. 53. Burns and Izbicki, Conciliarism and Papalism, pp xviii–xx; Burns, ‘Scholasticism’, pp 146–51; Oakley, The Western Church, p 171. 54. Gerald Strauss (ed), Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation (Bloomington, IN, 1971), p 6. 55. John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of Reformation (Baltimore, 1983), p 140. 56. Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations, p 150; Levi, Renaissance and Reformation, p 142. 57. Tanner, The Church in the Later Middle Ages, p 146. 58. Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford, 1987), pp 69, 76–9, 108–21. 59. Cameron, The European Reformation, pp 26–43. 60. See Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Antiklerikalismus und Reformation: Sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Göttingen, 1995). 61. On the comparative history of the different national churches, see the contributions in Venard (ed), De la rèforme à la réformation, pp 309–436. 62. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p 17. 63. Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, 1993), p 47. 64. R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France 1483–1610 (London, 1996), pp 102–3; Francis Rapp, ‘La France’, in Venard (ed), De la réforme à la réformation, pp 341–67. 65. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, 1988), pp 143–52; Elizabeth Rodini, ‘Describing Narrative in Gentile Bellini’s Procession in Piazza San Marco’, Art History 21 (1998), pp 26–44. 66. cf. Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum, 2002). 67. Edward Muir, ‘Representations of Power’, in John M. Najemy (ed), Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, The Short Oxford History of Italy (Oxford, 2009), pp 226–45; Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1980), pp 1–84. 68. Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), p 91; Iain Fenlon, The Ceremonial City (New Haven, 2007), pp 9–48. 69. Günther Vogler, ‘Erwartung – Enttäuschung – Befriedigung. Reformatorischer Umbruch in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg’, in Stephen E. Buckwalter and Bernd Moeller (eds), Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch: wissenschaftliches Symposium des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte (Gütersloh, 1998), p 384; Martial Staub, Les paroisses et la cité: Nuremberg du XIIIe siècle à la réforme (Paris, 2003), pp 36–200. 70. Gerhard Weilandt, Die Sebaldskirche in Nürnberg (Petersberg, 2007), pp 10–69.

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71. Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford, 2010), p 50. 72. R.W. Scribner (ed Lyndal Roper) Religion and Culture in Germany (1400– 1800) (Brill, 2001), pp 104–28. 73. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1992), pp 164–212. 74. Ibid., pp 214–361; Charles Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions, and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany’, Past and Present 118 (1988), pp 25–64, 62. 75. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, p 272. 76. Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany (Philadelphia, 2007), pp 25–45; Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp 288–92. 77. See the discussions in André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (London, 1993); William A. Christian, Jr, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (New Jersey, 1981); Berndt Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety (Leiden, 2004). Chapter 2. Reformation Christianity 1. Martin Brecht (trans James L. Schaaf), Martin Luther, vol. 1, His Road to Reformation (Minneapolis, 1993), pp 369–80. 2. Michael Mullet, Martin Luther (London, 2004), p 42. 3. Thomas Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation (Frankfurt am Main, 2009), pp 148–51. 4. Brecht, Road to Reformation, pp 125–55. 5. See the discussion in Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, pp 205–7. 6. Brecht, Road to Reformation, pp 204–5; Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation, pp 182–225. 7. Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation, pp 216–33. 8. Jens-Martin Kruse, Universitätstheologie und Kirchenreform: die Anfänge der Reformation in Wittenberg, 1516–1522 (Mainz, 2002), p 209. 9. Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation, pp 233–49; Heinz Schilling, Martin Luther: Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs (Munich, 2013), pp 186–90. 10. Leif Grane, Martinus Noster: Luther in the German Reformation Movement, 1518–1521 (Mainz, 1994), pp 115–87. 11. Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Reformation in its Own Words (London, 1964), pp 80–4. 12. Heiko A. Oberman (trans Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart), Luther: Man between God and the Devil (London, 1989), p 39; Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation, pp 289–99. 13. In Luther’s own formulation: ‘Christus est punctus mathematicus sacrae scripturae’, in Karl Drescher (ed), Tischreden (Weimar, 1913), vol. 2, nr. 2383, 439.

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14. Heinz Schilling, ‘Charles V and Religion. The Struggle for the Integrity and Unity of Christendom’, in Hugo Soly (ed), Charles V and his Time 1500–1558 (Antwerp, 1999), pp 296–315; Alfred Kohler, Karl V.: 1500–1558: eine Biographie (Munich, 1999), pp 153–58. 15. Kruse, Universitätstheologie und Kirchenreform, pp 31–52. 16. Ibid., pp 53–112, 237; Volker Leppin, Die Reformation (Darmstadt, 2013), pp 15–16. 17. Kruse, Universitätstheologie und Kirchenreform, p 1. 18. Geoffrey Dickens, Martin Luther and the German Nation (London, 1974), pp 1–48. 19. Grane, Martinus Noster, p 284. 20. Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma, p 127. 21. Brecht, Road to Reformation, pp 333, 365; Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp 12–64. 22. John Dillenberger (ed), Martin Luther. Selections from his Writings (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p 409. 23. Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (Oxford, 1993), pp 134–58. 24. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), p 110. 25. Dillenberger, Martin Luther, pp 58–59; Brecht, Road to Reformation, pp 369– 88, 407–11. 26. Berndt Hamm, ‘What was the Reformation Doctrine of Justification?’, in C. Scott Dixon (ed), The German Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 1999), p 79. 27. Berndt Hamm, ‘Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation – oder: was die Reformation zur Reformation macht’, in Berndt Hamm, Bernd Moeller and Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformationstheorien: Ein kirchenhistorischer Disput über Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation (Göttingen, 1995), pp 57–127. 28. Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation, p 532. 29. Peter Blickle (trans Thomas Dunlap), Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (London, 1992). 30. Rudolf Mau, Evangelische Bewegung und frühe Reformation 1521 bis 1532 (Leipzig, 2000), pp 40–51, 74–9, 89–92; Thomas Kaufmann, Der Anfang der Reformation: Studien zur Kontextualität der Theologie, Publizistik and Inszenierung Luthers und der reformatorischen Bewegung (Tübingen, 2012), pp 238–54. 31. Geoffrey Dipple, Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzburg and the Campaign against the Friars (Aldershot, 1996), p 125. 32. Christian Peters, Johann Eberlin von Günzburg ca. 1465–1533: franziskanischer Reformer, Humanist und konservativer Reformator (Gütersloh, 1994), pp 16–51. 33. Berndt Moeller and Karl Stackmann, Städtische Predigt in der Frühzeit der Reformation: eine Untersuchung deutscher Flugschriften der Jahre 1522 bis 1529

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(Göttingen, 1996); Miriam Usher Chrisman, Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Pamphlets, 1519–1530 (New Jersey, 1996). 34. Elizabeth Vandiver, Ralph Keen and Thomas D. Frazel (eds and trans), Luther’s Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther (Manchester, 2002), pp 60, 80, 106, 109, 101. 35. On the importance of the urban Reformation, see the discussion and the literature in Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, 2012), pp 212–67; Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, pp 101–10. 36. Robert von Frideburg, ‘Civic Humanism and Republican Citizenship in Early Modern Germany’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 1, pp 127–45. 37. Eberhard Isenmann, Die deutsche Stadt im Spätmittelalter: 1250–1500. Stadtgestalt, Recht, Stadtregiment, Kirche, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft (Stuttgart, 1988), pp 74–209. 38. Bernd Moeller (eds and trans H.C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr), Imperial Cities and the Reformation (Philadelphia, 1972); Peter Blickle, Die Reformation im Reich (Munich, 1992), pp 81–105. 39. Berndt Hamm, Bürgertum und Glaube: Konturen der städtischen Reformation (Göttingen, 1996), pp 128–40. 40. C. Scott Dixon, ‘The Imperial Cities and the Politics of Reformation’, in R.J. W. Evans, Michael Schaich and Peter Wilson (eds), The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (Oxford, 2011), pp 139–64. 41. Blickle, Communal Reformation. 42. Peter Blickle (trans Thomas A. Brady, Jr and H.C. Erik Midelfort), The Revolution of 1525 (London, 1981). 43. Michael G. Baylor, The Radical Reformation (Cambridge, 1991), pp 232–3. 44. C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation in Germany (Oxford, 2002), pp 114–27. 45. C. Scott Dixon, ‘The Princely Reformation in Germany’, in Andrew Pettegree (ed), The Reformation World (London, 1999), pp 146–68. 46. G.R. Potter, Zwingli (Cambridge, 1978), pp 1–46, 111. 47. This section is partially derived from C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Oxford, 2010), pp 24–33, 47–55. 48. Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002), pp 6–45; Thomas Maissen, Die Geburt der Republik: Staatsverständnis und Repräsentation in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft (Göttingen, 2006), pp 299–303. 49. Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, pp 46–85. 50. Robert C. Walton, Zwingli’s Theocracy (Toronto, 1967), p 77. 51. Oskar Vasella, Reform und Reformation in der Schweiz: zur Würdigung der Anfänge der Glaubenskrise (Münster, 1958), pp 49–71; Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, 2002), pp 19–32. 52. C. Arnold Snyder, ‘Word and Power in Reformation Zurich’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 8 (1990), pp 263–85, here p 269.

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53. Heiko A. Oberman, Werden und Wertung der Reformation (Tübingen, 1977), pp 237–303. 54. Berndt Hamm, Zwinglis Reformation der Freiheit (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1988), pp 2–99; Christoph Dahling-Sander, Zur Freiheit befreit: das theologische Verständnis von Freiheit und Befreiung nach Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, James H. Cope und Gustavo Gutiérrez (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), pp 100–71. 55. Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, pp 6–45; Gottfried W. Locher, Die Zwinglische Reformation im Rahmen der europäischen Kirchengeschichte (Göttingen, 1979), pp 452–501. 56. Gordon, The Swiss Reformation, pp 119–45. 57. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, p 77. 58. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, 2009), pp 1–47, 64–5; Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (Oxford, 1990), pp 21–78. 59. E. William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva (New York, 1967). 60. See William G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Manchester, 1994). 61. Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2000), pp 101–39. 62. Ibid., pp 101–39; McGrath, A Life of John Calvin, pp 129–74. 63. Randall C. Zachman, John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor and Theologian: The Shape of his Writings and Thought (Grand Rapids, 2006), pp 231–42; Randall C. Zachman, ‘John Calvin’, in Justin S. Holcomb (ed), Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction (New York, 2006), pp 114–33. 64. E. Monter, Calvin’s Geneva, pp 125–43. 65. John Witte Jr and Robert M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva (Grand Rapids, 2005), pp 62–79, 70. 66. Felix Emil Held, Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1916), pp 27–8. 67. Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford, 2004), pp 93–128, here p 106; Christian Link, Prädestination und Erwählung (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 2009), pp 33–96. 68. William R. Stevenson, Sovereign Grace: The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin’s Political Thought (Oxford, 2007), pp 59–86, 105–148, here pp 64, 120, 122. 69. Werner Schenck, The Concern for Social Justice in the Puritan Revolution (London, 1948), p 26. 70. See Denis Crouzet, La genèse de la réforme française: 1520–1562 (Paris, 1996), pp 266–83; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (London, 1965), pp 231, 256–8. 71. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, pp 49–114; MacCulloch, Reformation, pp 237–69. Chapter 3. Religious Division 1. Theodore G. Tappert (ed), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia, 1959), p 95.

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2. Brian Tierney (ed), The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, 1964), p 188. 3. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1997), pp 194–9. 4. Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma, p 52; Adams, Later Theories of the Eucharist, pp 4–28. 5. Gary Macey, ‘The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994), pp 11–41. 6. Stephen E. Lahey, ‘Late Medieval Eucharistic Theory’, in Christopher Levy (ed), A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2012), p 491. 7. See the contributions in Levy, A Companion to the Eucharist; Paul J.J.M. Bakker, La raison et le miracle: les doctrines Eucharistiques (c.1250–c.1400) (Nijmegen, 1999), 2 vols. 8. Cited in Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp 165–6. 9. Robert Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith (Oxford, 2009), p 142. 10. Ibid., p 145; Bernhard Lohse, Luthers Theologie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung und in ihrem systematischen Zusammenhang (Göttingen, 1995), pp 143–53; Thomas J. Davis, This is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids, 2008), p 29. 11. Bart Jan Spruyt, Cornelius Henrici Hoen (Honius) and his Epistle on the Eucharist (Leiden, 2006), pp 44–165. 12. Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy (Oxford, 2011), pp 60–4, passim. 13. Ibid., p 69. 14. Ibid., p 102. 15. Dorothea Wendebourg, Essen zum Gedächtnis: der Gedächtnisbefehl in den Abendmahltheologien der Reformation (Tübingen, 2009), pp 23–39. 16. Gottfried Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden, 1981), p 223. 17. W.P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford, 1986), p 223. 18. Wendebourg, Essen zum Gedächtnis, pp 101–38. 19. McGrath, Reformation Thought, pp 181–5, here, p 183; Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge, 2006), pp 139–207. 20. Lohse, Luthers Theologie, pp 187–94. 21. Christian Grosse, Les rituels de la cène: le culte eucharistique réformé à Genève (XVIe – XVIIe siècles) (Geneva, 2008). 22. John Langlois, A Catholic Response in Sixteenth-Century France to Reformation Theology (Lewiston, 2003), pp 165–223. 23. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II (Washington, 1990), pp 733–4; Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, pp 208–55. 24. Tanner, Trent to Vatican II, p 735.

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25. Gerald Strauss, ‘Ideas of Reformatio and Renovatio from the Middle Ages to the Reformation’, in Thomas A. Brady, Jr, Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracey (eds), Handbook of European History 1400–1600, vol. 2, Visions, Programs, and Outcomes (Leiden, 1995), p 18. 26. José Pedro Paiva, ‘Spain and Portugal’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia (ed), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford, 2004), pp 295–6. 27. Erika Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age (1999), p 63, passim. 28. Christopher M. Bellitto, Renewing Christianity: A History of Church Reform from Day One to Vatican II (New York, 2001), pp 144, 145. 29. Thomas Brockmann, Die Konzilsfrage in den Flug- und Streitschriften des deutschen Sprachraumes 1518–1563 (Göttingen, 1998), pp 270–1. 30. Elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley, 1993), pp 91–110, here pp 106–7; Duffy, Saints and Sinners, pp 210–13. 31. John O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (London, 2013), p 201, passim; R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998), pp 10–25. 32. O’Malley, Trent, p 97. 33. Ibid., p 109. 34. Hubert Jedin (trans Ernest Graf), A History of the Council of Trent (London, 1962), vol. 2, pp 166–96, 239–316, here p 195. 35. Quotations in this paragraph are taken from Tanner, Trent to Vatican II, pp 672, 675–6, 678. 36. O’Malley, Trent, p 218. 37. Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), pp 264, 266. 38. J.H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598 (London, 1968), p 149. 39. Pierre Janelle, The Catholic Reformation (Milwaukee, 1963), p 75. 40. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, pp 114–21. 41. See the comments by Allain Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente (1518–1563) (Paris, 1997), p 806. 42. Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, pp 488–90. 43. John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p 67. 44. Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories (London, 2004), pp 13–63, here p 47. 45. Ursula Paintner, ‘Deß Papsts neue Creatur’: Antijesuitische Publizistik im deutschsprachigen Raum (1555–1618) (Amsterdam, 2011), pp 1, 136–207. 46. Hsia actually works with a threefold scheme – the church triumphant, the church militant, and the martyred church. For reasons of space I have limited my focus to these two. See Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, pp 42–91. 47. Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore, 1992), p 49. 48. Helen Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke, 2002), p 66.

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49. Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame, pp 48–81. 50. MacCulloch, Reformation, pp 401–16. 51. Maciej Ptaszynski, ‘The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’, in Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock (eds), A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe (Leiden, 2015), p 61. 52. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, pp 60–6, here p 66. 53. R.J.W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), pp 3–79, here p 17; Regina Pörtner, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2001), pp 71–107. 54. Thomas Winkelbauer, Fürst und Fürstendiener: Gundaker von Liechtenstein, ein österreichischer Aristokrat des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Vienna, 1999), pp 85–103. 55. Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009), p 46. 56. Ibid., p 320. 57. Katja Burzer, San Carlo Borromeo: Konstruktion und Inszenierung eines Heiligenbildes im Spannungsfeld zwischen Mailand und Rom (Berlin, 2011), p 21. 58. Giuseppe Alberigo, ‘Carlo Borromeo between Two Models of Bishop’, in John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (eds), San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century (Washington, 1988), p 253. 59. Adriano Prosperi, ‘Clerics and Laymen in the Work of Carlo Borromeo’, in Headley and Tomaro (eds), San Carlo Borromeo, p 115; Stephan D’Amico, Spanish Milan: A City within the Empire, 1535–1706 (Basingstoke, 2012), pp 98– 104. 60. Agonstino Borromeo, ‘Archbishop Borromeo and the Ecclesiastical Policy of Philip II in the State of Milan’, in Headley and Tomaro (eds), San Carlo Borromeo, p 95. 61. Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, 2001), p 45. 62. Simon Ditchfield, ‘Carlo Borromeo in the Construction of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion’, Studia Borromaica 25 (2011), p 13. 63. Cristellon and Menchi, ‘Religious Life’, in Dursteler (ed), A Companion to Venetian History, p 398. 64. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense, pp 52, 82, 315, passim. 65. Ibid., pp 369, 466. 66. Ibid., pp 366, 480. 67. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (trans Albert R. Baca), Epistola ad Mahomatem II (New York, 1990), p 17. 68. Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London, 2007), p 264; Anthony Bryer, ‘The Roman Orthodox World (1393–1492)’, in Jonathan Shepard (ed), Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (c.500– 1492) (Cambridge, 2008), pp 852–80; Michael Angold, ‘Byzantium and the West, 1204–1453’, in Michael Angold (ed), Cambridge History of Christianity,

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69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

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vol. 5, Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), pp 53–78; David M. Nichol, Byzantium: Its Ecclesiastical History and Relations with the Western World (London, 1972), pp 315–39. Deno John Geanakoplos, Interaction of the ‘Sibling’ Byzantine and Western Churches in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (New Haven, 1976), pp 231– 53, here p 244; Deno John Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, 1962), pp 53–70, here p 13; Jonathan Harris, Greek Emigres in the West 1400–1520 (1995), pp 20–67, 119–49. Nevra Necipoglu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire (Cambridge, 2009), pp 117–232, here p 195; Jonathan Harris, The End of Byzantium (New Haven, 2010), pp 127–54; Angold, ‘Byzantium and the West’, pp 73–7. Harris, The End of Byzantium, p 145. Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (Cambridge, 1959), pp 131–79, here p 145; A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford, 2010), pp 151–72, here p 170. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700) (Chicago, 1974), pp 8–36, here p 23; John Anthony McGukin, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture (Oxford, 2011), pp 90–119. Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge, 1968), p 85. Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, p 33. Gill, The Council of Florence, p 227. Necipglu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins, p 214. Stephen W. Reinert, ‘Fragmentation (1204–1463)’, in Cyril Mango (ed), The Oxford History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2002), p 283; Harris, The End of Byzantium, pp 155–77. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, ‘Orthodoxy and the West: Reformation to Enlightenment’, in Angold (ed), Eastern Christianity, p 191. Elizabeth A. Zachariadou, ‘The Great Church in Captivity, 1453–1586’, in Angold (ed), Eastern Christianity, pp 169–86; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, pp 165–85; Bryer, ‘The Roman Orthodox World’, pp 852–80; Theodore H. Papadopoullos, The History of the Greek Church and People under Turkish Domination (Brussels, 1952), pp 1–122. Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople (Cambridge, 1965), pp 133–50. Gülru Necipoglu, ‘The Life of an Imperial Monument: Hagia Sophia after Byzantium’, in Robert Mark and Ahmet Cakmak (eds), Hagia Sophia: From the Age of Justinian to the Present (Cambridge, 1992), pp 195–225. Papadopoullos, The History of the Greek Church, pp 1–95; Zachariadou, ‘The Great Church in Captivity’, pp 16–86; Bryer, ‘The Roman Orthodox World’, pp 868–80; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, pp 186–207.

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84. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, pp 204–5; Erich Bryner, Die orthodoxen Kirchen von 1274 bis 1700 (Leipzig, 2004), pp 59–61. 85. George A. Hadjiantonious, Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris, 1572– 1638, Patriarch of Constantinople (London, 1961), p 51. 86. Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1923 (Cambridge, 1983), pp 95–6. 87. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, p 205. 88. Wilhelm de Vries, Rom und die Patriarchate des Ostens (Munich, 1963), pp 74– 87; Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, pp 67–88; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, pp 226–37. 89. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, p 254. 90. Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie: der ökumenische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der Württembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II. von Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1573–1581 (Göttingen, 1986), pp 151–6. 91. Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie, pp 151–206; Ernst Benz, Wittenberg und Byzanz: zur Begegnung und Auseinandersetzung der Reformation und der östlich-orthodoxen Kirche (Munich, 1971); Kitromilides, ‘Orthodoxy and the West’, pp 188–91; Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, pp 238–58, here p 256. 92. Colin Davey, ‘Metrophanes Kritopoulis and his Studies at Balliol College from 1617 to 1622’, in Peter M. Doll (ed), Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 Years after the ‘Greek College’ in Oxford (Oxford, 2006), p 59. 93. Hadjiatoniou, Protestant Patriarch, p 64. 94. Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, p 285. 95. Gunnav Hering, Ökumenisches Patriarchat und europäische Politik 1620–1638 (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp 176–206; Kitromilides, ‘Orthodoxy and the West’, p 200. 96. Hering, Ökumenisches Patriarchat, pp 195–206; Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, pp 286–98; Gerhard Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821): die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des Westens (Munich, 1988), pp 119, 137–40. Chapter 4. Church and State 1. Recent overviews include Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Konfessionalisierung’, in Friedrich Jaeger (ed), Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2007), pp 1053– 70; Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘Confessionalization’, in David Whitford (ed), Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research (Kirksville, 2008), pp 136–57; Thomas Brockmann and Dieter J. Weiss (eds), Das Konfessionalisierungsparadigma: Leistungen, Probleme, Grenzen (Münster, 2012). 2. C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation in Germany (Oxford, 2002), pp 114–28; Eike Wolgast, ‘Die deutschen Territorialfürsten und die frühe Reformation’, in Stephen E. Buckwalter and Bernd Moeller (eds), Die frühe Reformation als

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Umbruch: wissenschaftliches Symposium des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte (Gütersloh, 1998), pp 407–34. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, pp 202–29; MacCulloch, Reformation, pp 253–69; Heinz Schilling, ‘The Second Reformation – Problems and Issues’, in Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society (Leiden, 1992), pp 247–301; Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994). Francis Oakley, ‘Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–1550’, in J.H. Burns (ed), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp 160–92, here p 174; James M. Estes, Peace, Order and the Glory of God: Secular Authority and the Church in the Thought of Luther and Melanchthon (Leiden, 2005). Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, p 7. C. Scott Dixon, ‘The Politics of Law and Gospel: The Protestant Prince and the Holy Roman Empire’, in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds), The Impact of the European Reformation: Princes, Clergy, and People (Aldershot, 2008), pp 48–51; Heinz Duchhardt, ‘Das protestantische Herrscherbild des 17. Jahrhunderts im Reich’, in Konrad Repgen (ed), Das Herrscherbild im 17. Jahrhundert (Münster, 1991), pp 33–4. Henry Cohn, ‘The Territorial Princes in Germany’s Second Reformation, 1559–1622’, in Menna Prestwich (ed), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp 135–65, here p 151; Paul Münch, Zucht und Ordnung: reformierte Kirchenverfassungen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Nassau-Dillenburg, Kurpfalz, Hessen-Kassel) (Stuttgart, 1978), pp 125–62. Dixon, ‘The Politics of Law and Gospel’, p 47. R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London, 1989), pp 4–5; foundational is Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich, 1965). Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo (New Haven, 2003), pp 457–85; Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation, pp 570–623. See the discussion and the literature in Dixon, ‘The Politics of Law and Gospel’. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978), pp 151–75. John F. Frymire, The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany (Leiden, 2010), p 27. Dixon, Reformation in Germany, p 169. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline; Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003), pp 1–77; Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, pp 53–4, 172–4. Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, pp 252–3. Richard van Dülmen, ‘Reformation and the Modern Age’, in Dixon, German Reformation, p 203; see the discussion in Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, pp 181–96.

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18. Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2007), pp 38–84; Walter Ziegler, ‘Altgläubige Territorien im Konfessionalisierungsprozeß’, in Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler (eds), Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung (Münster, 1997), vol. 7, pp 67–90; Hsia, Catholic Renewal, pp 73–9. 19. Forster, Catholic Germany, pp 38–75, here p 65. 20. Eike Wolgast, Hochstift und Reformation: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichskirche zwischen 1517 und 1648 (Stuttgart, 1995), pp 147–66; Hsia, Catholic Renewal, pp 111–12; Johannes Merz, ‘Julius Echter als “Typus der Gegenreformation”’, Historisches Jahrbuch 192 (2009), pp 65–82. 21. Walter Ziegler, ‘Bayern’, in Schindling and Ziegler (eds), Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung, vol. 1, pp 56–780. 22. Andrew L. Thomas, A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in the Holy Roman Empire (c. 1550–1650) (Leiden, 2010), pp 103 – 4. 23. Dieter Albrecht, Maximilian I. von Bayern 1573–1651 (Munich, 1998), pp 292, 285–337. 24. Ibid., pp 285–337. 25. Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill, 1990), pp 136–61; Albrecht, Maximilian, p 326; Thomas, A House Divided, pp 50–1. 26. Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation (Washington, 1995), p 105. 27. Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles: The CounterReformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, 2009), pp 225, 236. 28. Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation, pp 208–55; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, pp 67–70, 147–50, 158–76, 205–6. 29. Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints: Counter Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1999), pp 75–100. 30. Tanner, Trent to Vatican II, p 775. 31. On the role of the senses in reform see Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (eds), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013); Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge, 2013). 32. Jeffrey Chips Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Gemany (Princeton, 2002), p 47. 33. Ludger Sutthoff, Gothik im Barock: zur Frage der Kontinuität des Stils ausserhalb seiner Epoche (Münster, 1990), pp 29–37. 34. Smith, Sensuous Worship, pp 57–101, here p 77. 35. John O’Malley, ‘The Society of Jesuits’, in Hsia (ed), Reformation World, p 231. 36. Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, pp 121–46. 37. Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles, pp 133–51. 38. Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Pressures towards Confessionalization? – Prologomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age’, in Dixon, German Reformation, p 182; see also the discussions by Schilling and Reinhard in Wolfgang Reinhard and

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39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Heinz Schilling (eds), Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: wissenschafliches Symposium der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Christianum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte (Gütersloh, 1995). Stella Rock, ‘Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture, 1380–1589’, in Angold (ed), Eastern Christianity, p 271. Basil Lourié, ‘Russian Christianity’, in Parry (ed), Eastern Christianity, pp 207–12; Rock, ‘Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture’, pp 253–61; Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980–1584 (Cambridge, 1995), pp 255–66. Daniel Ostrowski, ‘The Growth of Muscovy, (1462–1533)’, in Maureen Perrie (ed), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, From Early Rus’ to 1689 (Cambridge, 2006), pp 213–39; James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture (London, 1966), pp 78–114; Martin, Medieval Russia, pp 267–301. Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (London, 1987), pp 133–7. MacCulloch, History of Christianity, pp 524–5; Isiah Gruber, Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles (DeKalb, 2012), pp 34–5; Martin, Medieval Russia, p 261. Paul Bushkovitch, ‘The Formation of a National Consciousness in Early Modern Russia’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10 (1986), p 366. Lee Trepanier, Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice (Lanham, 2007), p 63; Gruber, Orthodox Russia in Crisis, pp 23–50. Trepanier, Political Symbols, p 51. Sergei Bogatryrev, ‘Ivan IV (1533–1584)’, in Perrie (ed), From Early Rus’ to 1689, pp 240–63; MacCulloch, History of Christianity, p 330. Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia (New Haven, 2005), p 58. Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford, 1992), pp 22–6; Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible, pp 75–91. Trepanier, Political Symbols, p 40; Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia, pp 10–31; Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, 1977), pp 112–17. Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible, p 26; Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, pp 129–31. David B. Miller, ‘The Orthodox Church’, in Perrie (ed), From Early Rus’ to 1689, p 351. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia, p 15; Rock, ‘Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture’, pp 268–73. Lourié, ‘Russian Christianity’, p 216. A.P. Pavlov, ‘Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov (1584–1605)’, in Perrie (ed), From Early Rus’ to 1689, p 274. Robert O. Crummey, ‘The Orthodox Church and the Schism’, in Perrie (ed), From Early Rus’ to 1689, pp 618–39, 620; Robert O. Crummey, ‘Eastern

NOTES

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

227

Othodoxy in Russia and Ukraine in the Age of the Counter-Reformation’, in Angold (ed), Eastern Christianity, pp 302–24; Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 1613–1801 (London, 1982), pp 1–25; Lourié, ‘Russian Christianity’, pp 217–21. Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, p 23. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, pp 85–92; Miller, ‘The Orthodox Church’, p 354; Michael Khodarkovsky, ‘“Not by Word Alone”: Missionary Policies and Religious Conversion in Early Modern Russia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996), p 272. Georg Bernhard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1999), p 189. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, p 120. Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels: A History of the Skomorokhi (Oxford, 1978), p 60. Wolfgang Heller, Die Moskauer ‘Eiferer für die Frömmigkeit’ zwischen Staat und Kirche (1642–1652) (Wiesbaden, 1988), pp 71–94; Crummey, ‘The Orthodox Church and the Schism’, pp 626–9; Billington, The Icon and the Axe, p 131. Crummey, ‘The Orthodox Church and the Schism’, p 632. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, p 139; Crummey, ‘Eastern Othodoxy in Russia and Ukraine’, pp 312–24; Lourié, ‘Russian Christianity’, pp 222–3; Buchkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia, pp 62–73. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, pp 154–5. Ibid., pp 154–5; Buchkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia, p 65. Lourié, ‘Russian Christianity’, p 223. Michels, At War with the Church, pp 21–64; Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 (Madison, 1970), p 12; Robert O. Crummey, ‘The Origins of the Old Believers’ Cultural Systems: The Works of Avraamii’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 50 (1995), p 130. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist, pp 1–57; Michels, At War with the Church, pp 21–64; Nickolas Lupinin, ‘The State of Religion in a Religious State: The Russian Church in the Reign of Tsar Aleksei 1645–1676’ (Dissertation, 1973, New York University), pp 125–50. Michels, At War with the Church, pp 65–105. Lupinin, ‘The State of Religion in a Religious State’, p 211; Michels, At War with the Church, pp 121–216; Georg B. Michels, ‘Some Observations on the Social History of Old Believers during the Seventeenth Century’, in Georg B. Michels and Robert L. Nichols (eds), Russia’s Dissident Old Believers 1650– 1950 (Minneapolis, 2009), pp 131–68; Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist, p 19. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, p 145. Nancy Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2012), p 340; Robert O. Crummey, ‘Ecclesiastical Elite and Popular Belief and

228

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Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia’, in James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Cambridge, 2004), p 62. Chapter 5. Further Reform 1. See the discussion in Dixon, Protestants. 2. See George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962), pp xxiii–xxxi; Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, pp 88–95; Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Religiöse Bewegungen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1993), pp 59–107. 3. Michael G. Baylor (ed and trans), The Radical Reformation (Cambridge, 1991), p 52. 4. Leppin, Reformation, pp 44–5. 5. 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, 2007), pp 5–20. 6. Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (London, 1969), p 273. 7. Baylor, The Radical Reformation, p 28. 8. Ibid., p 154. 9. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (London, 1985), p 278. 10. Hans-Jürgen Goertz (trans Trevor Johnson), The Anabaptists (London, 1996), pp 52–3. 11. Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal and the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2013), pp 33–6, here p 35. 12. C. Arnold Snyder, ‘The Birth and Evolution of Swiss Anabaptism 1520–1530’, The Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (2006), pp 429, passim. 13. Andrea Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli: die frühe Täuferbewegung in der Schweiz (Berlin, 2003), pp 121–291. 14. Strübind, Eifriger als Zwingli, pp 202–91; Gordon, Swiss Reformation, pp 191–227. 15. Astrid von Schlachta, ‘The Austrian Lands’, in Louthan and Murdock (eds), A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe, p 79. 16. Werner O. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore, 1995), p 55. 17. John D. Roth, ‘Marpeck and the Later Swiss Brethren, 1540–1700’, in John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (eds), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden, 2011), pp 348–88. 18. Ibid., pp 381–8. 19. Packull, Hutterite Beginnings, p 63; Snyder, ‘Birth and Evolution of Swiss Anabaptism’, pp 623–29. 20. James M. Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal, 1991), pp 139–59, here pp 154–5. Gelassenheit denotes a sense of abandon or inward calm.

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21. Andrea Chudaska, Peter Riedemann: konfessionbildendes Täufertum im 16. Jahrhundert (Gütersloh, 2003), pp 216–55. 22. Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (Ithaca, 1972), pp 296–7; Stayer, The German Peasants’ War, pp 142–52, here p 148. 23. Piet Visser, ‘Mennonites and Doopsgezinden in the Netherlands, 1535– 1700’, in Roth and Stayer, A Companion to Anabaptism, pp 299–345; Samme Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden (Hilversum, 2000), pp 126–339. 24. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), pp 63–201. 25. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, ‘Radical Religiosity in the German Reformation’, in Hsia, Reformation World, p 71. 26. Hans Schneider, ‘Der radikale Pietismus in der neueren Forschung’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 8 (1982), i, pp 15–42; ii, pp 117–51. 27. Rufus Matthew Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1914), p 49. 28. Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), p 357. 29. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp 156– 71; M.M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago, 1939), pp 163–246. 30. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, pp 230–3. 31. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism, pp 187–216. 32. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp 13–80, 72, 249. 33. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism, p 351. 34. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, pp 30–50, here p 42. 35. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp 333–82, 364; Knappen, Tudor Puritanism, pp 283–302. 36. Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), p 539. 37. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp 105–83, 133– 5, here p 148. 38. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain, pp 183–331; Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts 1636–1641 (Stanford, 2002), pp 28–43; Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middleton, 1984), pp 155–84; Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1989). 39. This discussion of Dutch Reformed developments is derived from Dixon, Protestants, pp 185–6. 40. Johannes van den Berg, ‘Die Frömmigkeitsbestrebungen in den Niederlanden’, in Martin Brecht (ed), Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 1, Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1993), pp 57– 112; Benedict, Christ’s Churches, pp 355–64.

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41. To-Hong Jou, Theodor Undereyck und die Anfänge des reformierten Pietismus (Bochum, 1994), pp 136–76; Johann Friedrich Gerhard Goeters, ‘Der reformierte Pietismus in Deutschland 1650–1690’, in Brecht (ed), Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert, pp 240–77. 42. F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden, 1965), pp 202–12. 43. Douglas H. Schantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2013), p 27. 44. Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, pp 205–6. 45. Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus (Göttingen, 2005), pp 28–47. 46. Martin Brecht, ‘Das Aufkommen der neuen Frömmigkeitsbewegung in Deutschland’, in Brecht (ed), Der Pietismus vom siebzehnten bis zum frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert, 140–8; Wallmann, Der Pietismus, pp 40–2. 47. Jonathan Strom, Orthodoxy and Reform: The Clergy in Seventeenth-Century Rostock (Tübingen, 1999), pp 120–238; Brecht, ‘Das Aufkommen’, pp 174–5. 48. H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968), p 28. 49. Ibid., p 37. 50. Peter Mack, ‘Montaigne and Christian Humanism’, in MacDonald (ed), Christian Humanism, p 203. 51. cf. John Bossy, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present 97 (1970), pp 51–70. 52. Hsia, ‘Religious Cultures’, in Ruggerio (ed), Worlds of the Renaissance, pp 338– 40. 53. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, p 144. 54. Ibid., p 138; Amy E. Leonard, ‘Female Religious Orders’, in Hsia (ed), Reformation World, pp 237–54. 55. Alexander Sedgwick, The Travails of Conscience: The Arnauld Family and the Ancient Régime (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp 4, 42. 56. Ibid., pp 79, 170. 57. Jacques Plainemaison, ‘Qu-est-ce que le jansénisme?’ Revue Historique 109 (1985), pp 120–1. 58. Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago, 1995), p 9. 59. Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1998), p 347. 60. Bernard Chédozeau, Port-Royal et la Bible: un siècle d’or de la Bible en France, 1650–1708 (Paris, 2007), pp 55–78; Julie Candler Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (Stanford, 2009), pp 26–61, here p 50. 61. Eric Bryner, Die Orthodoxen Kirchen von 1274 bis 1700 (Leipzig, 2004), pp 114– 23, here p 121. 62. Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, vol. 2, Modern Christianity from 1454 to 1800 (Maryknoll, 2012), pp 130–2, 302–5.

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63. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, pp 67–150; De Vries, Rom und die Patriarchate des Ostens (Munich, 1963), pp 74–87. 64. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, p 142. 65. Dickran Kouymjian, ‘Sous le joug des Turcomans et des Turcs Ottomans (XVe–XVIe siècle)’, in Gérard Dédéyan (ed), Histoire du peuple arménien (Toulouse, 2007), pp 377–412; S. Peter Crowe, ‘Church and the Diaspora: The Case of the Armenians’, in Angold (ed), Eastern Christianity, pp 430–56. 66. Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, 2011), pp 23–43, here p 75; Crowe, ‘Church and the Diaspora’, pp 430–56; Bryner, Die orthodoxen Kirchen, pp 124–7. 67. Vazkan S. Ghougassion, The Emergence of the Armenian Diocese of New Julfa in the Seventeenth Century (Atlanta, 1998), pp 1–194, 204–5. 68. John M. Flannery, The Missions of the Portuguese Augustinians to Persia and Beyond (1602–1747) (Leiden, 2013), pp 111–47, here p 131. 69. Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450–1950 (Oxford, 1994), pp 3–45; here p 34; Donald Crummey, ‘Church and Nation: The Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahedo Church (from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century)’, in Angold (ed), Eastern Christianity, pp 457–70. 70. Hastings, The Church in Africa, pp 132 –3. 71. Taddesse Tamrat, ‘Ethiopia, the Red Sea and the Horn’, in Roland Oliver (ed), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3, From c.1050 to c.1600 (Cambridge, 1973), pp 164–82; M. Adir, ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa’, in Richard Gray (ed), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4, From c.1600 to c.1790 (Cambridge, 1975), pp 537–49. 72. Hervé Pennec, Des Jésuites au royaume du Prêtre Jean: stratégies, recontres et tentatives d’implantation 1495–1633 (Paris, 2003), pp 40–69, 185–240. 73. Hastings, The Church in Africa, p 156; Leonardo Cohen, The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) (Wiesbaden, 2009), pp 15–49; Philip Caraman, The Lost Empire: The Story of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, 1555–1634 (London, 1985), pp 58–96. 74. MacCulloch, Christianity, pp 24–5, 279–35, 711–13. Chapter 6. Christian Expansion 1. For the grand sweep of Christian expansion in this period, see MacCulloch, History of Christianity, pp 689–731. 2. A. Katie Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, 2007), p 88. 3. Chris Lowney, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (London, 2005), 199–208; Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London, 1977), pp 188–201. 4. Henry Kamen, Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict (London, 1991), pp 172–95, here p 194.

232

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5. J.N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms 1250–1516 (Oxford, 1978), vol. 2, pp 367– 483, here p 453; Kamen, Spain 1469–1714, pp 1–45; J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London, 1963), pp 15–76. 6. Kamen, Spain 1469–1714, p 47; Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, pp 394–483. 7. Cited in Peter Burke, ‘Presenting and Re-presenting Charles V’, in Hugo Soly (ed), Charles V (1500–1558) and his Time (Antwerp, 1999), p 474. 8. Karl Brandi (trans C.V. Wedgwood), The Emperor Charles V (London, 1965), p 112. 9. Kohler, Karl V, pp 70–80. 10. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, 1998), p 77. 11. Ibid., pp 77–109, here p 93. 12. Carlos M.N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), pp 352–3. 13. Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, 2009), pp 57–93; Parker, The Grand Strategy, p 99. 14. Kagan, Clio and the Crown, pp 94–123, here p 120; Parker, The Grand Strategy, pp 100–6. 15. Parker, The Grand Strategy, p 93. 16. D.A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1866 (Cambridge, 1991), pp 79–90. 17. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604) (Berkeley, 1956), pp 42–65, here p 57; Jaime Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Indiana, 2004), pp 41–89. 18. John Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492– 1830 (New Haven, 2007), pp 66–72, 198–202; Joseph M. Barnadas, ‘The Catholic Church in Colonial Spanish America’, pp 509–40; Eduardo Hoornaert, ‘The Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil’, in Leslie Bethell (ed), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 1984), pp 509–40, 541–66. 19. David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008), p 246. 20. Oswaldo F. Pardo, The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Ann Arbor, 2006), pp 20– 48; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964), pp 98–135; Robert Ricard, La “conquête spirituelle” du Mexique: essai sur l’apostolat et les méthodes missionaires des ordres mendiants en Nouvelle-Espagne de 1523–24 à 1572 (Paris, 1933), pp 103–16. 21. Sabine MacCormack, ‘Limits of Understanding: Perceptions of GrecoRoman and Amerindian Paganism in Early Modern Europe’, in Karen Ordahl Kupperman (ed), America in European Consciousness: 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, 1995), p 96.

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22. Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492– 1763 (London, 2002), p 376; Lara, City, Temple, Stage, p 4. 23. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, 1991), pp 254–7. 24. Terraciano, ‘Religion and the Church’, in Hsia (ed), Reformation World, pp 344–9. 25. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, pp 172–3. 26. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp 69–70; MacCulloch, Christianity, p 701. 27. Terraciano, ‘Religion and the Church’, in Hsia, Reformation World, p 341; Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, pp 114–15; MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, pp 285–69; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, p 57. 28. MacCulloch, Reformation, p 428, citing Fernando Cervantes. 29. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), pp 119–45; Brading, The First America, pp 79–101. 30. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, 1993), p 69. 31. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p 117. 32. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp 38, 198–9; Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, pp 170–3; Barnadas, ‘The Catholic Church in Colonial Spanish America’, pp 527–35; Hoornaert, ‘The Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil’, pp 541–6; MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, pp 383–433. 33. Brading, The First America, p 122. 34. Michael Cooper, ‘A Mission Interrupted: Japan’, in Hsia (ed), Reformation World, p 399. 35. Kentaro Miyazaki, ‘Roman Catholic Missions in Pre-Modern Japan’, in Mark R. Mullins, Handbook of Christianity in Japan (Leiden, 2003), pp 1–7; Andrew C. Ross, A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742 (Edinburgh, 1994), pp 13–47. 36. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, pp 178–86; Ross, A Vision Betrayed, pp 47–117; Kentaro, ‘Roman Catholic Missions’, pp 1–18. 37. Ikuo Higashibaba, Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice (Leiden, 2001), p 139. 38. Ibid., pp 1–28. 39. Ibid., pp 30–49, 85–95. 40. Christal Whelan, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth: The Sacred Book of Japan’s Hidden Christians (Honolulu, 1996), p 39; for the interpretation, p 74: Deus, the Latin word for God, has been rendered into Deusu, and there are Portuguese loan-words as well: anjo is the Portuguese for angel, and the days of the week are Segunda, Terça, Quarta, Quinta, Sexta and Sabado. Jusuheru designates Lucifer, and the name for Adam, Domeigosu-no-Adan, can be derived from two possible forms: the Latin Dominus would mean ‘Adam who belongs to the Lord’, while the Portuguese Domingo, signifying Sunday,

234

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

THE CHURCH IN THE EARLY MODERN AGE

would mean ‘Adam who was made on Sunday’, which is consistent with the account in Genesis. At the same time, there are clearly traces of Shinto belief and Buddhist teachings. The reference to ranks and forms, for instance, comes from the belief that Buddha had 32 unique bodily marks that marked him out from the rest of humanity, while the four elements (earth, water, fire, wind) represent four of the five elements of Buddhist cosmology (only space has been omitted). Salt and oil may well be Christian add-ons, the sacramental elements of baptisms, blessings and extreme unction, though salt had a resonance as a purifying agent in Japanese culture as well. Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579– 1724 (Cambridge, MA, 2007), pp 25–56, here p 34. R. Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford, 2010), p 282. David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart, 1985), p 63. Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, pp 224–44. Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago, 2009), pp 13–50, here p 14. Brockey, Journey to the East, pp 57–151, here p 104. Ibid., p 7. Nicholas Standaert (ed), Handbook of Christianity in China (Leiden, 2001), pp 470–1. Standaert (ed), Handbook of Christianity, pp 286–341, 456–577, estimates of numbers at pp 380–6; Brockey, Journey to the East, pp 125–63. Tara Alberts, Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2013), pp 18–46; Brockey, Journey to the East, pp 151–63. Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), pp 91–2. Watts, The Dissenters, pp 7–76. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, 1971), pp 1–32. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 2004), pp 121–84. Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp 81–3. Michael Winship, ‘Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity’, William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2006), pp 427–62, 455; Ahlstrom, Religious History, p 156. David A. Weir, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought (Oxford, 1990), pp 1–147; Peter Opitz, Heinrich Bullinger als Theologe: eine Studie zu den “Dekaden” (Zurich, 2004), pp 317–52, MacCulloch, Reformation, pp 178–9, 389–91, 540–1. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p 439. Ahlstrom, Religious History, p 156; Miller, The New England Mind, p 438.

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59. Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966), p 135. 60. Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1983), pp 163–84; D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005), pp 33–60. 61. Miller, The New England Mind, p 378. 62. Morgan, Visible Saints, pp 64–112; William K.B. Stoever, ‘A faire and easie way to Heaven’: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, 1978), pp 81–118; E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570– 1720 (New Haven, 1974), pp 139–96. 63. Miller, The New England Mind, pp 398–431, here p 420. 64. Lambert, Founding Fathers, p 74. 65. Robert Gardner Pope, The Half-way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, 1969), pp 3–75. 66. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, p 190. 67. Cotton Mather (ed Kenneth B. Murdock), Magnalia Christi Americana (Cambridge, MA, 1977), p 118. 68. Avîhû Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, 1992), pp 131–9. 69. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1976), pp 72–108. 70. Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, pp 54–5; full citation in Frank Shuffelton’s review of Bercovitch in Eighteenth Century Studies 15 (1981/2), p 233. Conclusion 1. Parker, Global Crisis, p xxi. 2. Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, pp 675–80. 3. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford, 1986), p 109. 4. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, p 337. 5. Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, p 676.

Further Reading The below represents a selection of English texts that may be useful to readers who wish to learn more about the themes of early modern Christianity discussed in this book. Additional texts can be found in the relevant endnotes. General histories Angold, Michael (ed), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5, Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006) Brady, Jr, Thomas A., Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracey (eds), Handbook of European History 1400–1600, vol. 2, Visions, Programs, and Outcomes (Leiden, 1995) Duffy, Eamon, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven, 2002) Greengrass, Mark, Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648 (London, 2014) Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia (ed), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6, Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 2007) Irvin, Dale T. and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement, vol. 2, Modern Christianity from 1454 to 1800 (Maryknoll, 2012) MacCulloch, Diarmaid, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London, 2009) McGukin, John Anthony, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture (Oxford, 2011) McManners, John (ed), The Oxford History of Christianity (Oxford, 1990) Parry, Kenneth, The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity (Oxford, 2007) Rubin, Miri and Walter Simons (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500 (Cambridge, 2009) Ware, Timothy, The Orthodox Church (London, 1983) Renaissance Celenza, Christopher S., The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (Baltimore, 2004) Hay, Denys, The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977)

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Kraye, Jill (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996) Levi, Anthony, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, 2002) Nauert, Charles G., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995) Nauta, Lodi, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla’s Critique of Scholastic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2009) Oakley, Francis, The Western Church in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1979) Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1992) Ruggerio, Guido (ed), A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2007) Rummel, Erika, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford, 2000) ———, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation (London, 1995) Skinner, Quentin and Eckhard Kessler (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996) Swanson, R.N., Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515 (Cambridge, 1995) Tanner, Norman, The Church in the Later Middle Ages (London, 2008) Reformation Benedict, Philip, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, 2002) Cameron, Euan, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991) Dixon, C. Scott, Contesting the Reformation (Oxford, 2012) ———, The Reformation in Germany (Oxford, 2002) Gordon, Bruce Calvin (New Haven, 2009) ———, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester, 2002) Grane, Leif, Martinus Noster: Luther in the German Reformation Movement, 1518– 1521 (Mainz, 1994) Greyerz, Kaspar von, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 2008) Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia (ed), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford, 2004) ———, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London, 1989) Lindberg, Carter, The European Reformations (Oxford, 1996) MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003) McGrath, Alister, Reformation Thought: An Introduction (Oxford, 1993) ———, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford, 1987) Ozment, Steven, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, 1980)

FURTHER READING

239

Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, The Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago, 1984) Pettegree, Andrew (ed), The Reformation World (London, 1999) Rublack, Ulinka, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005) Scribner, Bob, Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge, 1994) Tracy, James D., Europe’s Reformations 1450–1650 (Oxford, 1999) Catholic reform and Counter Reformation Bamji, Alexandra, Geert H. Janssen and Mary Laven (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013) Bireley, Robert, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation (Washington, 1995) Eire, Carlos M.N., From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995) Evans, R.J.W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979) Evennett, H. Outram, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968) Forster, Marc, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2007) Hsia, R. Po-Chia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998) Kamen, Henry, Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, 1993) Louthan, Howard, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009) O’Malley, John, Trent: What Happened at the Council (London, 2013) ———, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993) Pörtner, Regina, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2001) Rawlings, Helen, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke, 2002) Radical Protestants, Puritans and Pietists Baylor, Michael G., The Radical Reformation (Cambridge, 1991) Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, 1988) Clasen, Claus-Peter, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (Ithaca, 1972) Delbanco, Andrew, The Puritan Ideal (Cambridge, MA, 1989) Dixon, C. Scott, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–1740 (Oxford, 2010) Goertz, Hans-Jürgen (trans Trevor Johnson), The Anabaptists (London, 1996) Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1980) Lindberg, Carter (ed), The Pietist Theologians (Oxford, 2005)

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Roth, John D. and James M. Stayer (eds), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden, 2007) Rupp, Gordon, Patterns of Reformation (London, 1969) Shantz, Douglas H., An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal and the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2013) Stoeffler, F. Ernest, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden, 1965) Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978) Williams, George Huntston, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962) Orthodox Christianity Billington, James H., The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture (London, 1966) Bushkovitch, Paul, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford, 1992) Harris, Jonathan, The End of Byzantium (New Haven, 2010) McGukin, John Anthony, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture (Oxford, 2011) Mango, Cyril (ed), The Oxford History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2002) Nichol, David M., Byzantium: Its Ecclesiastical History and Relations with the Western World (London, 1972) Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700) (Chicago, 1974) Perrie, Maureen (ed), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, From Early Rus’ to 1689 (Cambridge, 2006) Runciman, Steven, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge, 1968) Shepard, Jonathan (ed), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (c.500– 1492) (Cambridge, 2008) Siecienski, A. Edward, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford, 2010) Africa Gray, M. Richard (ed), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 4, From c.1600 to c.1790 (Cambridge, 1975) Hastings, Adrian, The Church in Africa 1450–1950 (Oxford, 1994) Oliver, Roland (ed), The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 3, From c.1050 to c.1600 (Cambridge, 1973) South America Bethell, Leslie (ed), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 1984)

FURTHER READING

241

Brading, D.A., The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492–1866 (Cambridge, 1991) Elliott, John, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2007) Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, 1964) González, Ondina E. and Justo L. Gonzàlez, Christianity in Latin America: A History (Cambridge, 2008) Kamen, Henry, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492–1763 (London, 2002) Lara, Jaime, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Indiana, 2004) MacCormack, Sabine, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, 1991) Pagden, Anthony, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, 1993) ———, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982) Pardo, Oswaldo F., The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Ann Arbor, 2006) Asia Alberts, Tara, Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2013) Brockey, Liam Matthew, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA, 2007) Higashibaba, Ikuo, Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice (Leiden, 2001) Hsia, R. Po-Chia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford, 2010) Moffet, Samuel Hugh, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 2, 1500–1900 (New York, 2005) Mullins, Mark R., Handbook of Christianity in Japan (Leiden, 2003) Ross, Andrew C., A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742 (Edinburgh, 1994) Standaert, Nicholas (ed), Handbook of Christianity in China (Leiden, 2001) North America Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 2004) Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000) Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1976)

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Bonomi, Patricia U., Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford, 1986) Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (London, 1990) Caldwell, Patricia, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1983) Canny, Nicholas (ed), The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 2001) Lambert, Frank, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, 2003) Quinn, David D. and A.N. Ryan, England’s Sea Empire, 1550–1642 (London, 1983) Zakai, Avîhû, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge, 1992)

Index Abbas I, shah of Persia, 173 – 4 Acosta, José de, 190 – 1 Adal, sultanate of, 175 – 6 adaptationism, 193– 6 Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (Grañ), 175 – 6 Álava, Don Francés de, 182 Alba, bishopric of, 18 –19 Albrecht V, duke of Bavaria, 123, 127 Aldine Press, 97 Aleandro, Girolamo, 12, 47 Aleksei, tsar of Russia, 137 – 9 Allstedt, 146 – 7 Almain, Jacques, 21 Altenburg, 46 America, 199 – 206; see also New England Ammann, Jacob, 151 Amsdorf, Nicolaus von, 40– 1 Amsterdam, 200 Anabaptists, 149 – 55; see also radical Protestants Anchieta, José de, 190 Andreae, Jakob, 106 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 62– 3 anticlericalism, 23 – 4, 47– 8 apocalypticism, 131, 141– 2, 147– 8, 188 Ara, Domingo de, 190 Armenian Church, 172 – 5 Arnauld, Antoine, 167 – 9

Arnauld, Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique, 166 –8 Arndt, Johann, 161 – 3 art, 128 – 9 Augsburg, 122 Confession of, 58, 67, 106, 116 Peace of, 121 Austria, church in, 90 –1 Avraamii, 140– 1 Avvakum, 137 – 40, 140–2 Aztecs, 189 –93 Baden, disputation of, 58 baptism, 151, 154, 204– 5 Barrow, Henry, 200 Bavaria, 121– 30 Béda, Noel, 14 Bell, Johann Adam Schall von, 197 –8 Bellarmine, Robert, 84, 94, 95, 177 Bellini, Gentile, 25 – 6 biblicism, 146, 154, 157 –9, 161, 200; see also Scripture, interpretation of Biel, Gabriel, 17, 23 bishoprics, 18 –19, 122 –3 body of Christ, theories of, 20 – 1, 29 – 31, 68 – 77, 127; see also communion; corpus Christi; Eucharist Böhme, Jakob, 149 Book of Concord, 116

243

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Book of One Hundred Chapters (Stoglav), 134 Borromeo, Carlo, 92 –3 Bracciolini, Poggio, 5 Bradford, William, 201 Brant, Sebastian, 23 – 4 Brazil, 186, 192 Brenz, Johannes, 36, 46, 115 Briçonnet, Guillaume, 78 Briesmann, Johannes, 47 Browne, Robert, 200 Bucer, Martin, 36 Bugenhagen, Johannes, 46, 115 Bullinger, Heinrich, 64, 202 Burckhardt, Jacob, 26 Burnet, Gilbert, 208 Byzantine commonwealth, 95 – 110 Cajetan, Thomas de Vio, 15 –16, 36 Calvin, John 59 –65 theology of, 60 – 4, 74– 5 Calvinism, 59 – 65, 114, 115, 155 – 60; see also Reformed Protestantism Campanella, Tommaso, 185 Canesius, Peter, 89, 129 Capuchins, 105 Cartwright, Thomas, 158 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 191 – 2 catechisms, 118, 129, 188 Catholicism, 15 – 25 post-tridentine, 77 –95 Chalkokondyles, Demetrios, 97 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 38 –9, 121, 183 –4, 191 – 2 China, 196 –9 Christian humanism, 2– 3, 8– 14; see also humanism church rule, Catholic forms, 17 –18, 87– 90, 122 –6, 182 – 3 Protestant forms, 62 –3, 113 – 16

Cisneros, Francisco Jiménez de, 13, 78, 181 –2 civic humanism, 27 – 30 civic religion, 25 – 9, 49 – 51, 94; see also urban Reformation clergy, 18, 62 – 3, 83 –4, 88, 183 – 4 Cochlaeus, Johannes, 48– 9 coexistence, 89, 181 – 2; see also tolerance Columbus, Christopher, 186 –7 communal reformation, 51– 3, 149 – 50 communion, Protestant theory of, 20 –1, 61, 75– 7 Catholic theory of, 61, 67 – 74; see also Eucharist community of goods, 152 – 3 conciliarism, 21 – 2, 81 confession, sacrament of, 93, 126 confessionalism, 67, 116 –17, 135, 151 –2 confessionalization, 91, 111 – 30, 136 – 9, 142, 164 confraternities, 25 – 6 Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, 199 congregationalism, 50 –2, 149 – 51, 152 – 3, 201 – 6 conquistadores, 186 –7 conscience, 38 – 9 Constantine XI, Byzantine Emperor, 100 Constantinople, 96, 100 – 1, 102, 105 Contarini, Gasparo, 80 Contzen, Adam, 125 conversion, 90– 1, 154, 176– 7, 187 –9 Cordoba, Francisco, 81 Coptic Church, 170, 174 –5 corpus Christi, 29 –30, 69 –77, 126 – 7; see also body of Christ Cortés, Hernán, 186 – 7 Cotton, John 202– 3 councils, 21– 2, 79, 99 – 100

INDEX

Counter Reformation, 77 –85, 85 –95, 111 –12, 121 –30, 163 – 4, 201 – 4 covenantal theology, 202 – 4 crusades, 96 Crusius, Martin, 106 Dabra Milmaq, council of, 175 daimyo, 194 –5 decadence theory, 15, 18 Demetrios, deacon, 106 devotion moderna, 8 – 9, 11 discipline, 62 – 3, 119 – 20, 121 Donation of Constantine, 4 –5, 16 Doré, Pierre, 76 Downame, John, 159 Dülmen, Richard van, 120 Durán, Diego, 190 Dutch Republic, 159 –60 Eastern Orthodox Church, 169–78; see also Armenian Church; Ethiopian Church; Oriental Orthodox Church Eck, Johannes, 36 –7 Ecumenical Patriarchate, 95 – 110, 169 post-conquest, 102 – 10 education, 86 – 7, 118, 129 Edward VI, King of England, 155 Eisleben, 33 –4 Ejmiacin, 172 –4 election, 63– 4, 146 –8 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 155 England, 24, 155 – 9 Erasmus, 9, 11 – 14, 24, 42, 73, 77 Philosophia Christi, 11 – 12, 23 erastianism, 115 – 17 Erastus, Thomas, 115 Erfurt, 34 Ethiopian Church, 174 –8 Eucharist, 29 – 31, 61, 68 – 77 Catholic theory of, 68 – 71, 75– 7, 126– 30

245

Orthodox theory of, 98 – 9, 107 Protestant theory of, 71– 6, see also body of Christ; corpus Christi Eugenikos, Manuel, 99 evangelical movement, 42– 52 Evennett, H. Outram, 164– 5 Ewostathians, 175 Exsurge Domine, 37 – 8 faith, 45 –6, 83 –4, 156 –8, 161 –3, 167 – 8 Farel, Guillaume, 59 female spirituality, 165 – 7 Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Spain, 180 – 3, 186 – 7 Ferdinand II, archduke of Austria, 90 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 91 Ficino, Marsilio, 6 –7, 97 Filaret, patriarch of Moscow, 135 –6 Filioque, controversy, 98 –9 Filofei, 132 Fiore, Joachim of, 187 Florence/Ferrara, council of, 97 –100, 172, 176 Fortuné, Robert 10 France, 25, 166– 9 Franck, Sebastian, 154 – 5 Frankenhausen, 147 Friedrich III, Palatine Elector, 114– 15 Friedrich the Wise, elector of Saxony, 36, 40 further reform (nadere reformatie), 159 – 60 Gabriel VII, Coptic pope, 170 Gabrielites, 151 Gattinara, Mercurino 184 Gelawdewos, Ethiopian emperor, 176 Geneva, 59 – 65

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Germany, 8, 31 Counter Reformation in, 121 – 30 Reformation in, 34 – 53, 113 –200 Gerson, Jean, 17 Gessner, Conrad, 170 grace, theories of, 167 – 8 Granada, 180 – 2 Grebel, Conrad, 149 –50 Greek Orthodox Church, 95 –110; see also Orthodox Church Greek scholars, 96 –8 Greengrass, Mark, 115 Greenwood, John, 200 Groote, Geert, 8 Grossgebauer, Theophil, 163 Günzburg, Johann Eberlin von, 47– 8 Hagia Sophia, 100, 103 half-way covenant, 204–5 Hauranne, Jean du Vergier de (Saint-Cyran), 167 –8 Heidelberg, 36, 115, 160 heresy, 22 – 3 Hesse, Philipp, Landgrave of, 113, 153 hesychasm, 96, 100, 135 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi, 194–5 Hoen, Cornelius Henricxz, 72 – 3 Hoffman, Melchior, 153 Hosius, Stanislaus, 89 Hsia, R. Po-Chia, 87 Hubmaier, Balthasar, 148, 149 – 50 Hugwald, Ulrig, 47 humanism, 2 – 8, 41 –2, 96 –7; see also Christian humanism Hut, Hans, 157 –8, 150 Hutten, Ulrich von, 42, 48 Hutter, Jacob, 151– 2 Hutterites, 151– 3 Ignatius Loyola, 85 – 6 images, 127, 128– 9

imperial cities, 49 – 50 Inca empire, 186 – 93 indigenous religions, 187 –92 individualism, 12, 38 –9, 120, 148 –9, 154, 205 – 6 indulgences, 35 – 6 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 60 –1, 118 Isabella of Castile, queen of Spain, 78, 180 – 3 Isidore of Thessalonica, 130 Islam, advance of, 95 –110, 175 – 8 Italy, church in, 18 –19, 31, 88 –9, 92 –5 Ivan III, grand prince of Russia, 131 – 2 Ivan IV, tsar of Russia, 132, 133 –5 Jacob, Henry, 200 Jansen, Cornelius, 167 –8 Jansenism, 166 –9 Japan, 193– 6 jeremiads, 206 Jeremias II, ecumenical patriarch, 106 – 7, 135 Jerome, saint, 1 Jesuits, 85 – 7, 91, 105 –6, 108, 127 – 8, 129 – 30, 171, 176 – 8, 193 – 9 Jewish communities, 182 –3 Joasaph II, ecumenical patriarch, 106 Johann, elector of Saxony, 113 John VIII Palaiologos, Byzantine emperor, 97 – 8 Johnson, Trevor, 126 Joseph II, ecumenical patriarch, 97 –8 justification, theories of, 45 –6, 61, 82 – 3, 146 Kappel wars, 58 Karl II, archduke of Austria, 90 Karlstadt, Andreas, 37, 41, 72 –3, 144– 6 Kebra Nagast, 177 Kircher, Athanasius, 68, 198

INDEX

Kirishitan period, 193 –6 Kolakowski, Leszek, 168 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 2 Kruse, Gottschalk, 47 Laetentur Caeli, 100, 130 Lang, Johannes, 40– 1, 43 Latomus, Jacob, 14 Lebna-Dengel, Ethiopian emperor, 175 – 6 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 9– 10, 77 Leipzig, 37 Leisnig, 46– 7 Léon, Pedro de Cieza de, 189 liturgy, 29, 99 –100, 139, 146 Lodenstein, Jodocus van, 160 Lucaris, Cyril I, ecumenical patriarch, 107 – 9 Luder, Peter, 8 Luther, Martin, 33 –46 theology of, 35– 7, 41, 43 –5, 71– 2 Lutheran Church, 113 – 20 relations with state, 112 –20 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 45 Makarii, metropolitan of Moscow, 132 – 3, 136 Mantz, Felix 149 Margounios, Maximos, 109 Mariana, Juan de, 185 Maronite Church, 171 Marpeck, Pilgram, 151 Marsilius of Padua, 22 Mass, 69 – 71, 75 –7; see also Eucharist Massachusetts Bay, 201 – 6 Mather, Cotton, 205 Mather, Increase, 206 Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, 123, 124–5 Maximos the Greek, 131, 136

247

Mehmed II, the Conquerer, 95 – 6, 100 – 1 Melanchthon, Philipp, 37, 43, 79, 106, 114 –15 Mendes, Alfonso, 177 Mennonites, 153 Mespelbrunn, Julius Echter von, 122, 128 Mexico, 186 – 93 Milan, 92 – 3 Miller, Perry, 202, 204 missions, 166, 170 – 1, 175 – 6, 179 – 99 monasticism, 134–5, 137–40, 165, 166–9 Montaigne, Michel de, 70, 164 Moravia, 150 – 1 moriscos, 181 –2 Moscow, 130 –4 as Third Rome, 132 patriarchate, 131 –3, 135 Mühlhausen, 146 –7 Müller, Heinrich, 163 Munich, 128 –9 Münster, 152 –3 Müntzer, Thomas, 146 – 8 Mutianus, Conrad, 3 Myconius, Friedrich, 46 mysticism, 162, 146 –7 Nadal, Jerónimo, 85 Nagasaki, 194 –5 Nahuatl, 189 –90 Naples, 89 Nashe, Thomas, 148 neoplatonism, 5– 8 new birth, 154 – 5, 160 New England, 201 –6 New England Way, 201 –6 New Julfa, 173 – 4 New Testament, 4– 5, 10, 12 –14, 78 –9, 82, 123; see also Scripture New World, 186 – 93, 199 –206; see also South America

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Nicolas of Cusa, 30, 69 Nikon, patriarch of Moscow, 138 – 9 Ninety-Five Theses, 35 –6, 42 Nobunaga, Oda, 194–5 nominalism, 23, 70 – 1 Nuremberg, 27 – 8, 49 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 74 Old Believers, 136 – 42 Olevianus, Kaspar, 202 oprichnina, 133 Oriental Orthodox Church, 169 –78 Orlamünde, 145 –6 Orthodox Church, 95 – 100 relations with West, 95 –110, 106 – 7 relations with Islam, 101– 10 theology of, 98 – 100, 106 –7, 108 –9; see also Eastern Orthodox Church; Greek Orthodox Church; Oriental Orthodox Church; Russian Orthodox Church orthodoxy, theories of, 67, 162 Osiander, Lukas, 106 Ottoman empire, 169 –75 Paez, Pedro, 176 –7 papacy, 15 – 18 criticism of, 21 –2 theories of primacy, 15 –17, 68 –9 reaction to Reformation, 16 –17 Paracelsus, 148, 162 Paris, 59 patronage, 26, 103 – 4, 187, 194 – 5 Peasants’ War, 51– 3, 147– 8 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 43 penance, 20 – 1 Perkins, William, 157 Perrin, Ami, 60 Persian empire, 172 – 4 Peru, 186 –93

Pfeiffer, Heinrich, 147 Philip II, king of Spain, 87 – 8, 93, 184– 5 Philip II, metropolitan of Moscow, 134 Philippites, 151 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 78, 97 Pietism, 161 – 3 piety, forms of, 30 – 1, 135, 136 –40, 161 –2, 164– 8 pilgrimage, 30 – 1 Pirkheimer, Willibald, 36 –7, 42 Pizzaro, Francisco, 186 Plymouth, 201 Poland-Lithuania, 89 Popes, Adrian VI, 79 Boniface VIII, 68 Clement VIII, 185 Eugenius IV, 97 Gregory XV, 199 Julius II, 79 Leo X, 36 –8 Paul III, 80 –2 Pius II, 95 – 6, 100 popular religion, 19 – 20, 28 – 9, 30 – 1, 123 – 4, 136 Port Royal, 166 – 9 Portugal, 87 Portuguese expansion, 193 –4 possessors/non-possessors, 134 – 6 poverty, 143 –5, 147– 8 practical divinity, 158 –9 predestination, 63 –4, 157 presbyterianism, 62 –3, 157 – 8 Prester John, 176– 7 priesthood of all believers, 44 primitivism, 145 –50, 157 –8, 201 – 4 princely reformation, 52–3, 113–20, 125–6 Protestant expansion, 179 –80, 200 –6 providentialism, 187, 205 – 6 puritans, 155 – 60, 199 –206 theology of, 156– 8, 202 –6

INDEX

Quistorp, Johannes, 162 –3 Rader, Matthäus, 123 radical Protestants, 144 –55 religiosity of, 144 – 5; see also Anabaptists reconquista, 180 –2, 186 reform (reformatio), 8– 14, 15, 48, 77 – 8, 79, 183 –4 Reformatio Sigsmundi, 22, 42 Reformation, origins of, 35 – 45, 55 –58 spread of, 45 –53, 57 –64 Reformed Protestantism, 53– 8, 59 – 65, 114– 15, 144, 155 –60, 199 – 206; see also Calvinism Reinhard, Wolfgang, 112, 129 –30 relics, 27– 8, 29 – 30, 40 Renaissance, 1 –2, 3– 8, 26 –7, 96 –7 and Christianity, 2 – 14 Reublin, Wilhelm, 149 – 50 Ricaut, Paul, 104– 5 Ricci, Caterina de’, 165 Ricci, Matteo, 196 –7 Riedemann, Peter, 152 Romanov, Michael, tsar of Russia, 135 – 6 Rome, 15– 17, 88 – 9 Rosa of Lima, 165 Rostock, 162 –3 Ruggieri, Michele, 196 rural reformation, 51– 3 Russia, 130 –42 Russian Orthodox Church, 130 –42 relations with tsars, 131 – 40 theology of, 131 –2 Ruthenian Orthodox Church, 108, 136 sacramentality, 30 –1, 126 sacraments, 20, 29, 30 – 1, 45, 69 –70, 93, 126– 7, 182

249

Sahagún, Bernardino de, 190, 193 saints, 26 –8, 165 – 6 Salutati, Coluccio, 1 salvation, theories of, 20 –2, 81 – 3, 158 –9, 161 – 2, 167 – 8, 190 sanctification, 154 – 5, 161 – 2 Sanfelice, Tommaso, 82 Sarpi, Paolo, 94 –5 Sarsa Dengel, Ethiopian emperor, 176 Saxony, 113 –17, 120 Scheurl, Christoph, 42 Schmalkaldic League, 58 Scholarios, Georgios (Gennadios), 100, 101 scholastic Aristotelianism, 3– 8, 69 –70, 71, 100, 191 scholasticism, 3 –4, 17 –19, 23 – 4, 69 –71 criticisms of, 4– 5, 11 – 12 Schröder, Joachim, 162 Schwenckfeld, Kaspar von, 148, 150 Scripture, Protestant interpretation of, 44, 56, 61, 117 – 18, 146 – 7, 148, 149 – 50, 156– 7 Catholic interpretation of, 17 ,44, 82 –3, 164 translations of, 9 – 14, 78 – 9, 82 Second Reformation, 114 separatism, 147– 8, 149– 154, 200 –2 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 185, 192 sermons, 118 – 19, 129 Servetus, Michael, 60 Severos, Gabriel, 109 Simons, Menno, 153 Sis, 172 – 3 skomorokhi, 137 Solovetskii monastery, 141 Sorskii, Nils, 134 –5 South America, 186 – 93 Catholicism in, 187 – 92

250

THE CHURCH IN THE EARLY MODERN AGE

Spain, church in, 24 –5, 78 –9, 87– 8, 180 –5 religion in, 31, 180 –5 Spanish empire, 185 – 93 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 162 Spengler, Lazarus, 48 Spirit, theories of, 146 –8, 149, 152 spiritualism, 147–9 Strasbourg, 51 Strauss, Jacob, 47 Streihagen, Peter, 160 Stumpf, Simon, 149 Susenyos I, Ethiopian emperor, 176 –7 Switzerland, 54– 5, 59 – 60 Reformation in, 53 –65 syncretism, 188 – 90 Teellinck, Willem, 160 Tenochtitlan, 186 Teresa of Ávila, 165 territorial church, 114– 20 Tetzel, Johann, 16, 35– 6 Thirty Years War, 207 – 8 tolerance, 101 – 2, 180 – 2 Tordesillas, Treaty of, 186, 199 transubstantiation, 69 –71, 73 Trent, Council of, 76 – 7, 80 –5 Trinity, theories of, 99 –100 Tübingen, 106 – 7 two kingdoms, theory of, 114– 16 Udemans, Godefridus, 160 Undereyck, Theodor, 160 Ungnad, David von, 106 Uniates, 171 urban Reformation, 49 – 51, 56 –7; see also civic religion Ursinus, Zacharias, 202

Valignano, Alessandro, 193 –4 Valla, Lorenzo, 4–6 Valladolid debates, 191 – 2 Vasilii II, grand prince, 130 Vasilii III, tsar of Russia, 132 Venice, 18, 25 – 7, 93 – 5, 97 vestments, 156 Voetius, Gisbertus, 159 –60 Volotskii, Joseph, 134 – 5 Walburg, Otto Truchess von, 122 Walpot, Peter, 152 Weigel, Valentin, 148 – 9, 162 Westphalia, Peace of, 208 Whitaker, Jeremiah, 207 Wilhelm IV, duke of Bavaria, 123 Wilhelm V, duke of Bavaria, 123, 125, 128 Wilsnack, 30 – 1 Winthrop, John, 201, 204 Wittenberg, 35 –6, 40– 1, 47, 72, 144 Wittenberg movement, 144– 5 Worms, 38 Edict of, 39, 123 Würzburg, 122 Wycliffe, John, 22 – 3 Xavier, Francis, 193 – 4 Zar’a Ya’qob, Ethiopian emperor, 175 zealots of piety, 138 –40 Zúñiga, Diego López de, 14 Zurich, 53 –8, 149 – 50 Zwickau, 146 Zwilling, Gabriel, 144 –5 Zwingli, Huldrych, 53 – 8, 149 – 50 theology of, 55, 57, 73 –5, 202

‘C. Scott Dixon’s work on early modern religion is never less than humane, scholarly and elegant. This highly readable work is all those things, and besides demonstrates a remarkably broad field of view, unusual in books of this kind, and a great gift for the telling anecdote and the illuminating vignette.’ Euan K. Cameron, Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, author of The European Reformation and Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History ‘C. Scott Dixon paints on a broad canvas, moving far beyond the customary constraints of a history of early modern religion. The deft touch that he has previously brought to studies of Protestantism and the German Reformation is here applied to a thoughtful and profound consideration of the religions of Christendom in an age when their influence became global. Judicious, evocative and elegant, this text should become a standard resource for all those interested in these extraordinary events and their consequences.’ Andrew Pettegree, Professor of History, University of St Andrews, author of The Reformation World, Europe in the Sixteenth Century, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion and Brand Luther ‘C. Scott Dixon is Britain’s leading scholar of the German Reformation. In his new book he retells the familiar stories with shrewd insight – but there is a great deal more to the volume than discriminating recapitulation. The author has a keen eye for human drama, and for the telling and unusual detail; more importantly, he manages to show how these great events were understood in their own times by people who did not know what was coming next. He has a perceptive awareness of the textures of early modern life and how these affected religious change. He also gives full attention to those parts of the story normally dismissed as peripheral, and is as sure-footed when discussing the Orthodox patriarch who flirted with Calvinism, or the liturgical culture of Ethiopian Christianity, as he is in assessing the significance of Martin Luther. This is one of the best volumes in the fine I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church series.’ Alec Ryrie, Professor of the History of Christianity, Durham University