The Saved and the Damned: A History of the Reformation 9780198841043, 0198841043

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TH E SAV ED A N D TH E DA M N ED

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TH E SAV ED AND

TH E DA MNED A H i story of t h e R e f or m at ion

T HOM A S K AU FM A N N Translated from the German by

TON Y C R AW FOR D

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Originally published in German as Erlöste und Verdammte: Eine Geschichte der Reformation by Thomas Kaufmann © Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München 2017 The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948835 ISBN 978–0–19–884104–3 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Publisher’s Acknowledgement

The publisher would like to express warm thanks to Professor Euan Cameron of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, for his expert historical advice on the English translation of this book.

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Contents

Chronology Illustrations 1. Luther and the Reformation 1.1. A European Event 1.2. Ideal and Actual Reformations 1.3. One Reformation or Many? In the Beginning Was Luther

ix xvii 1 1 3 6

2. European Christendom c.150010 2.1. Construction of a Continent 2.2. Structures 2.3. Nations and Powers in Europe 2.4. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation 2.5. Shared Spiritual and Clerical Cultures 2.6. Cultural Awakenings

10 17 22 27 33 46

3. The Early Reformation in the Empire, 1517–30

53

3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 3.7. 3.8. 3.9.

Thirteen Turbulent Years Martin Luther: A Portrait The Drop-­Out: A Young Augustinian Monk The Exegete of Wittenberg Luther’s Break with the Pope The Imperial Diet of Worms, Rebellion, and Upheaval Zwingli and the Urban Reformation in Zurich Intra-­Reformation Disputes Political Decisions of Church and State

4. Post-­Reformation Europe, 1530–1600 4.1. Language, Education, Law: Religious Culture Reformed 4.2. Early Reformation Movements outside the Empire 4.3. John Calvin and the Reformed International 4.4. The Royal Reformations in Scandinavia and England

53 56 59 68 76 86 96 106 122

132 132 136 153 176

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Con t e n ts

4.5. The Pacified, Restive Empire 4.6. The Transformation of Roman Catholicism 4.7. Dissenters and Nonconformists 4.8. Latin Europe after the Reformation

188 205 217 229

5. The Modern Reception of the Reformation

235

5.1. Reformation Jubilees: 1617 to 2017 5.2. Interpretation and Debate

6. The Reformation and the Present: An Appraisal 6.1. Time Accelerated: A Change or an Apocalypse? 6.2. Impact on the Modern West 6.3. Global Protestantism

Endnotes Further Reading Index

235 244

269 269 273 282

287 305 349

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Chronology

1356 1384 1397–1523 c.1400–68 1414–18

1415/16 1417–31 1419 1431–42 1452–93 6 April–29 May 1453 1455–1522 1456 1458–64 1461 1466/9–1536 1482–1531 10 November 1483 1484–1531 1485 1486–1541 1486–1525

Golden Bull of Charles IV; Charles elected emperor by the college of seven Electors Death of John Wycliffe, professor of theology, Oxford Kalmar Union of northern European kingdoms Johannes Gutenberg; invents the printing press with movable type c.1450; prints the forty-­two-­line Vulgate Bible c.1455 Council of Constance; end of the Western Schism (begun in 1378); high point of conciliarism; legal requirement to convene councils regularly Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague burnt at the stake in Constance Pope Martin V University of Leipzig founded Council of Basel–Ferrara–Florence; union with Eastern churches; seven sacraments pronounced dogma (1439) Emperor Frederick III Siege and conquest of Constantinople; Istanbul becomes capital of the Ottoman Empire Johann Reuchlin An army of Christian Crusaders led by John of Capistrano defends Belgrade against the Ottomans Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) Last Christian outpost, Trabzon on the Black Sea, falls to the Ottomans Erasmus of Rotterdam Johannes Oecolampadius Martin Luther born in Eisleben, Thuringia Huldrych Zwingli Saxony divided between two branches of the House of Wettin, Duke Albert and Duke-­Elector Ernest Andreas Bodenstein of Karlstadt Elector Frederick III ‘the Wise’ of Saxony

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x 1488–1523 1489(?)–1525 1491–1551 1492

1493–1519 1494(?)–1536 1495 1496 1497–1560 1498 1500–39 1502 1503–13 1505 1509–64 1509–47 1510(?)–57 1512 1512–17 1512–20 1513–23 1513–21 151(4)–72 1514–68 1514–17/19 1515 1515 1515–47 1516

Ch ronology Ulrich von Hutten Thomas Müntzer Martin Bucer Granada, the last bastion of Muslim Andalusia, falls to the Catholic Monarchs; climax of the Reconquista; Columbus ‘discovers’ America Emperor Maximilian William Tyndale Imperial diet of Worms; ‘Imperial Reform’ adopted; ‘Eternal Peace’ prohibits feuds Marriage of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile Philip Melanchthon Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola executed Duke George ‘the Bearded’ of Saxony University of Wittenberg founded Pope Julius II Luther enters the monastery of the Hermits of St Augustine in Erfurt John Calvin King Henry VIII of England Mikael Agricola Luther takes his doctorate and a professorship in Wittenberg Fifth Lateran Council Ottoman Sultan Selim I King Christian II of Denmark Pope Leo X John Knox Duke Henry of Brunswick-­Wolfenbüttel Reuchlin-­Pfefferkorn controversy; ‘Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum’ Habsburg-­Jagiellonian double marriage Indulgence bull to finance the building of St Peter’s in Rome King Francis I of France Novum Instrumentum omne, first published Greek New Testament, edited by Erasmus of Rotterdam, printed in Basel by Johannes Froben

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Ch ronologyxi 1516/17 26 April 1517 31 October 1517 1518–67 26 April 1518 October 1518

1519–56 1 January 1519 27 June–16 July 1519 summer/ autumn 1520 1520–66 15 June 1520 10 December 1520 3 January 1521 16–26 April 1521 1521 May 1521– March 1522 25 May 1521 1521 24 January 1522 March 1522 1522 1522 1522–3 1522–3 1522/4

Ottoman conquest of Egypt and Syria, destruction of the Mamluk sultanate Karlstadt’s 151 Theses Dissemination of Luther’s Ninety-­Five Theses begins Landgrave Philip ‘the Magnanimous’ of Hesse Heidelberg Disputation Luther questioned by Cajetan in Augsburg; first collected works of Luther printed in Basel by Froben; international reception of Wittenberg theology begins Emperor Charles V Zwingli begins preaching in Zurich Leipzig Disputation: Luther and Karlstadt vs Johann Eck High point of Luther’s publication of Reformation polemics (On Good Works; The Freedom of a Christian; To the Christian Nobility; The Babylonian Captivity) Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I ‘the Magnificent’ Promulgation of the bull Exsurge Domine threatening Luther with excommunication Luther burns Exsurge Domine, canon law, and several scholastic textbooks outside the Elster Gate of Wittenberg Luther excommunicated by the bull Decet romanum pontificem Luther attends the imperial diet in Worms Ottomans conquer Belgrade Luther held at the Wartburg by Elector Frederick of Saxony; intense literary productivity (On Monastic Vows; Postil; German translation of the New Testament) Edict of Worms Melanchthon’s Commonplaces, first Reformation dogma Ordinances of the Wittenberg city council, chief result of the ‘Wittenberg movement’ Luther returns from the Wartburg; Invocavit sermons Fast-­breaking in Zurich Knights Hospitaller surrender on Rhodes; Ottoman control of Venetian and Genoese trade Pope Adrian VI (Adriaan Boeyens of Utrecht) Knights’ Revolt Imperial diet of Nuremberg

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xii From 1523 1523–34 1523–60 1 July 1523 1523/4

1524–5 1525–32 24 February 1525 1525 1525

15 May 1525 August 1526 29/30 August 1526

1526/9 May 1527 1527 3 November 1527 1528

1529 29 June 1529 3 August 1529

Ch ronology Beginning of reform in Zurich; 1st and 2nd Zurich Disputations Pope Clement VII King Gustav I Eriksson Vasa of Sweden First Reformation martyrs executed in Brussels Luther definitively breaks with Müntzer and Karlstadt; September 1524: Karlstadt banished from the Electorate of Saxony; contacts between Saxon and Swiss dissenters; autumn 1524: Intra-­ Reformation controversy over the Eucharist begins Peasants’ War; controversy between Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam on free will (De servo arbitrio) Elector John of Saxony Battle of Pavia; Francis I taken prisoner by Charles V Lands of the Teutonic Order secularized as Duchy of Prussia First adult baptisms in Zurich; expulsion of Anabaptists from the city and surrounding region; Zwingli’s Commentarius de vera et falsa religione Battle of Frankenhausen; Thomas Müntzer captured; executed 27 May 1525 First imperial diet of Speyer Battle of Mohács; Ottoman victory over an army led by King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia; vassal regime in Hungary under John Zápolya Visitations begin in Saxony; evangelical church organization in Saxony and Hesse Sack of Rome Church property transferred to the Swedish crown; introduction of the Reformation in Sweden begins Ferdinand of Austria crowned king of Hungary Luther’s last treatise and confession in the Eucharistic Controversy; instruction of the visitors; formation of evangelical confessions begins Second imperial diet of Speyer; 19 April: protest by the evangelical estates (‘Protestants’) Peace agreement between Charles V and Clement VII in Bologna Treaty of Cambrai

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Ch ronologyxiii September/ October 1529 October 1529 24 February 1530 1530

1531 1531 1532–47 1532 1533

1534 1534–5 1534–49 1534 1535 1535/6 1536 1536–59 1536 1538 1538–41 1539 1539/40 1540

Ottoman siege of Vienna defeated Marburg Colloquy on the Eucharist; only personal meeting of Luther and Zwingli; Marburg Articles Charles V crowned emperor in Bologna Augsburg imperial diet; evangelical confessions promulgated (Confessio Augustana; Confessio Tetrapolitana; Fidei ratio); Schmalkaldic League founded SecondWar of Kappel; Zwingli dies in battle; Oecolampadius dies of plague Ottoman conquest of Tunis; 5 January: Ferdinand of Austria elected king of Rome Elector John Frederick of Saxony Religious peace of Nuremberg; Protestant estates of the empire promise aid against the Turks Peace treaty between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire; Hungary divided between John Zápolya and Ferdinand I Philip of Hesse conquers the Duchy of Württemberg; 29 June: Treaty of Kaaden Anabaptist Kingdom in Münster Pope Paul III Act of Supremacy of Henry VIII separates Church of England from Rome Charles V conquers Tunis First trade agreement between the Ottoman Empire and France Council summoned to Mantua; Luther writes Schmalkaldic Articles King Christian III of Denmark and Norway; definitive adoption of the Reformation in the kingdom Wittenberg Concord: agreement on the Eucharist between Wittenberg and the southern Germans Duchies of Cleves and Guelders unite Calvin in Strasbourg Treaty of Frankfurt Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) founds the Society of Jesus Bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse

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xiv 1540–1 1541 1541–53 1542 1543 1543–6 1544 1545–63 18 February 1546 1547

1547 1547–59 1547–53 1547/8 30 June 1548 1549 1549

1550–5 1550/1 1551 1552 15 August 1552 1553–8

Ch ronology Religious colloquies at Hagenau, Worms, and Regensburg; Confessio Augustana variata Death of John Zápolya; Ottoman conquest of Buda and Pest; annexation of central Hungary Duke Maurice of Saxony (Elector from 1547) Campaign of the Schmalkaldic League against Duke Henry of Brunswick-­Wolfenbüttel War of the Guelderian Succession Reformation attempt in Cologne by Archbishop-­Elector Hermann of Wied Treaty of Crépy between Emperor Charles V and King Francis I; end of the Franco-­Ottoman alliance Council of Trent; 1st–8th Sessions: 1545/6–7; 9th–14th Sessions: 1551–2; 15th–25th Sessions: 1562–3 Death of Martin Luther Charles V wins the Schmalkaldic War (1546–7) after the Battle of Mühlberg on 24 April 1547; John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse captured Truce of Adrianople obligates Ferdinand I to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire King Henry II of France King Edward VI of England; systematic church reforms begin ‘Armed diet’ of Augsburg Augsburg Interim ‘Leipzig Interim’; intra-­ Lutheran controversies begin: Interim Controversy; Adiaphoristic Controversy Consensus on the Eucharist between Zurich and Geneva (Consensus Tigurinus); Second Eucharistic Controversy between Lutherans and Reformed churches Pope Julius III Maurice of Saxony besieges Magdeburg; polemical campaign by the ‘Chancellery of God’ Habsburg family treaties regulate the ‘Spanish succession’ in the Empire Princes’ Revolt Treaty of Passau Queen Mary I of England; campaign to reinstate Catholicism

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Ch ronologyxv 25 September 1555 1555–9 1556 1556–64 1556–98 21 September 1558 1558–1603 1559 1559 1561–8 24 August 1572 1559–65 1573 1577 1598

Peace of Augsburg Pope Paul IV Charles V abdicates Emperor Ferdinand King Philip II of Spain Death of Charles V Queen Elizabeth I of England First national synod of the Reformed congregations of France in Paris Geneva Academy opens as an international training institution for the Reformed churches Mary Queen of Scots St Bartholomew’s Day massacre Pope Pius IV Warsaw Confederation Formula of Concord; theological consolidation of Lutheranism King Henry IV of France (1589–1610) issues Edict of Nantes on religious tolerance

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Illustrations

1. Allegorical map of Europe, Sebastian Münster © akg-­images 12 2. Germanus, Map of the world © akg-­images 14 3. Bartholomäus Bruyn, The three estates of Christendom 19 4. Johannes Stumpf, map of Germany, Wikipedia 29 5. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, the two-­headed eagle representing the Holy Roman Empire © akg-­images 30 6. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, disputation between Christians, Jews, and heathens, exlibris-­insel.de/Alamy Stock Photo 35 7. ars moriendi, The temptation of doubt—­the consolation of faith 41 8. Sandro Botticelli, Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist © akg-­images/Erich Lessing 51 9. Baptista Mantuanus’s Carmen in agonem divae Margaritae, Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek 62 10. Luther’s theses against scholastic theology, Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek 71 11. Luther’s Ninety-­Five Theses, printed by Jakob Thanner at Leipzig, 1517, Privy State Archives PK 74 12. Title page of the first Latin Luther anthology, printed at Basel in October 1518, Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich)78 13. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther as an Augustinian Monk © akg-­images 90 14. Albrecht Dürer, Philip Melanchthon, copper engraving, 1526 © akg-­images 92 15. Lucas Cranach the Elder, diptych of a husband and wife © akg-­images 94 16. A pamphlet by Hans Fuessli, Martin Säger, and Huldreich Zwingli, printed in Zurich in 1521 by Christoph Froschauer the Elder © akg-­images 100 17. Two-­sided handbill Crucifixion of 1528/9, with a text by Ludwig Hätzer and a woodcut by Hans Weyditz, printed in Strasbourg by Johannes Prüss the Younger, bpk/Kupferstichkabinett, SMB/Volker-­H 120 18. Title page of the 1525 book Iohannis VViclefi Viri Undiquaque piissimi 143

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I llust r at ions

19. René Boyvin, Portrait of John Calvin at the age of fifty-­three, c.1562 © akg-­images 20. Francis Hogenberg, The Beeldersturm in Antwerp on 20 August 1566 © akg-­images 21. Title page of John Foxe’s book Acts and Monuments © akg-­images/WHA/World History Archive 22. The executed Anabaptists © akg-­images 23. Martin Luther and Reformers, Wikipedia 24. Illustrated handbill on the Reformation jubilee, Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek 25. Postcard, ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ © akg-­images/arkivi

159 173 184 225 231 239 243

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1 Luther and the Reformation 1.1. A European Event

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he scene is Wittenberg, ‘on the edge of civilization’.1 Beginning in this little German university town of no historic significance, the Protestant Reformation very quickly became an event of European import. That was attributable in part to the political structures and constellations of the time: Charles V, the young emperor from the Habsburg dynasty which had controlled the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation since 1520/1, ruled a polymorphic, transnational system of dominions. In addition to extensive European possessions in the Netherlands, Austria, Lorraine, and the Iberian and Apennine peninsulas, the empire also included vast territories outside Europe on the newly discovered American continent. From the early 1520s on, the conflicts which Charles V fought in and outside of Europe, in particular those with France and the Ottoman Empire, had directly affected his political scope of action within the empire and in relation to the political forces which supported Luther and the Reformation. Rapid communications within the world of European states and the global structures of the Latin church shaped the prevailing cultural, legal, mental, and religious circumstances in Europe. They also ensured that the crisis of the church’s traditional doctrines and ways of life, unleashed in Germany by the Thuringian Augustinian monk Martin Luther, had far-­ reaching consequences. The shared experience of a threat to Europeans from the mysterious and universally dreaded Turkish superpower, with its foreign religion, was another substantial factor which ensured that the religious changes precipitated by the Reformation immediately took on European and, indeed, global proportions. The European scale of the Reformation became apparent early on, as a few loosely connected facts may illustrate by way of introduction: in early

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1519, the printer Johannes Froben of Basel was pleased with the distribution of his first Complete Works of Luther in France, Italy, Spain, and England, and reported that no book of his had ever sold so well.2 Immediately after the publication of Luther’s most radical treatise on the sacraments, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (De captivitate babylonica) in 1520, the English king Henry VIII wrote a rebuttal against the German theologian, and was rewarded by the pope with a Golden Rose and the title Defensor Fidei, ‘Defender of the Faith’. In May 1521, a tribunal was held near St Paul’s Cathedral in London on Luther and his followers. Also in the spring of 1521, after condemnations had been pronounced by the universities of Cologne and Leuven, the most prestigious university in the Occident, the Sorbonne in Paris, likewise condemned Luther’s doctrine as heretical. In the summer of 1521, the Reformation preacher and agitator Thomas Müntzer, driven out of Zwickau, travelled to Prague to meet with representatives of the Hussite movement. The Danish king Christian II, driven from the throne by the Danish nobility in 1523, spent a part of his exile in Wittenberg. During this time, Lucas Cranach the Elder drew a portrait of him which was included in the Danish translation of the New Testament published a short time later. Francis Lambert of Avignon, William Tyndale, and Hans Tausen, later protagonists of Reformation developments in France, England, and Denmark, all studied in Wittenberg in the early 1520s. In a letter written in 1525, the Jewish scholar Eliezer Ha Levi in Jerusalem saw the apocalyptic expectation of a collapse of Christianity and the beginning of Israel’s redemption ‘confirmed by the appearance of Martin Luther’.3 In 1532, the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), asked an envoy from the Holy Roman Empire how old Luther was. The sultan was sad to hear that the Reformer was already forty-­nine, but instructed the envoy to tell him he would find him ‘a gracious lord’. From the early 1520s, Luther’s and other Reformers’ ideas were discussed in the circle of Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, and the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. The 1534 ‘Affair of the Placards’, in which Protestant handbills in France penetrated as far as the apartments of King Francis I, marked the turning point to the French king’s staunchly anti-­Reformation policy. The European or pan-­Christian scale of the turn or new departure that began with Luther’s Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, also known as the Ninety-­Five Theses, is also made plain in the history of the Reformation by the superintendent of Gotha, Friedrich Myconius.

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Lu t h e r a n d t h e R e for m at ion3

According to Myconius, the Ninety-­Five Theses traversed Germany in fourteen days, ‘all Christendom in four weeks, as if the angels themselves had been couriers [cf. Psalm 103:20] and brought them before all people’s eyes.’4 Myconius was also well aware of the European dimensions of the Reformation in regard to the universities that debated Luther’s case, the places where his writings were burnt, the connections between the individual protagonists in England, France, Hungary, and Scotland, and the challenges of the Ottoman Empire. The Scot John Knox, the Swiss Heinrich Bullinger, and the Frenchman Theodor Beza took similar views in their narratives of the Reformation. It is evident from these snapshots that the Reformation was an inter­ nation­al event from its very inception. The assertion that it was not until John Calvin (1509–64), whose earliest Reformation writing dates perhaps from November 1533,5 that ‘the internationalism of the Reformation’ was established ‘through its integration of French and other European traditions’6 is inaccurate and misleading. The cultural revolution that had resulted from the invention of printing with movable type in the late fifteenth century also played a critical part in the rapid growth of the Wittenberg movement to European proportions and political importance. And, not least, the European scope of the Roman Catholic church, generally communicating in Latin across territorial and linguistic boundaries, was also propitious to  the formation of an international uprising against it. A history of the Reformation that remains bound up in national histories cannot escape the shadow of the nineteenth century, nor do justice to the specifically European character of the Reformation.

1.2.  Ideal and Actual Reformations The concept of the Reformation itself is fuzzy and variable, so that a preliminary definition is helpful. In the currently usual, widespread usage, it denotes a certain historical phenomenon and a specific historical epoch in Latin European history: namely the changes in the church and society that began with Luther’s critique of indulgence in the autumn of 1517, leading to the creation of Protestant congregations and churches independent of Rome at the municipal, regional, or national level, and to the fragmentation of the Roman Catholic church into different denominations. The fact that

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the term ‘Reformation’ is used to sum up this complex process and the whole era in which it took place is essentially a result of Protestant-­ dominated, nineteenth-­century German historiography, as authoritatively presented for over a century in Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Reformation in Germany (1839–47). The use of the word ‘reformation’ to denote changes in church and society is older, however. As early as the fifteenth century, the call for a thoroughgoing reform had caused turmoil and strain in the Latin church. The ‘reformation’ (causa reformationis) had been one of the major themes of the Council of Constance (1414–18): to ensure the continuing ‘cultivation of the Lord’s field’ and uproot the ‘briars, thorns and thistles of heresy, error and schism’, to ‘correct excesses’ and to ‘reform what is deformed’,7 this general synod of Latin Christendom had ordered the regular observance of church councils at fixed intervals. The first was to be held within five years, the second seven years later, and subsequent general councils every ten years. The Council of Constance defined itself as the highest authority in all matters concerning the faith, the unity of the church, and its ‘reformation in head and members’,8 including the papacy. Thus ‘reformation’ was considered to be a fundamental task of the church which concerned all Christians, which could never be finished, but must always begin anew. Claims to the contrary9 notwithstanding, the principle that the church must be continually reformed (ecclesia semper reformanda) is not an invention of the Reformation. After the end of the Council of Constance, successive consolidations of the papacy restored it to its former power and advanced it further, so that conciliarism and its concept of constant reform gradually lost ground. In the decades before and after 1500, scepticism about the chances of a general reform grew. Geiler von Kaysersberg, one of the most influential preachers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, saw deep deficits in all the estates of contemporary Christianity—­the lay, the clerical and the monastic. He described the clerical estate, that is, secular priests, as ‘lazy and useless’ (‘full und sol nüt’), marked by ‘pride, haughtiness’ (‘hoffart, übermut’); its members, he wrote, ‘heap one benefice on another’ and live in ‘unchastity’, ‘wallowing in dirt and filth’. The monastic orders are ‘ragged’, ‘at the forefront of all vice’, and so caught up in ‘pride’, ‘greed’, and ‘unchastity’ that they ‘can no longer be helped’. Likewise the secular, political estate, Geiler wrote, was deeply ‘depraved’, the princes incessantly fighting and disputing—‘how

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Lu t h e r a n d t h e R e for m at ion5

would one go about reforming them?’ asked the preacher of Strasbourg Cathedral.10 The Council of Basel (1431–37/49), Geiler continued, had debated for six years as to how ‘a complete reformation of Christendom could be accomplished, and yet nothing came of it’.11 Since a general and comprehensive reformation seemed unfeasible, the only course that remained, according to Geiler, was that of many small reforms under the specific responsibility of the separate estates.12 ‘A bishop in his bishopric; an abbot in his cloister; a councillor in his city; a burgher in his house: that would be easy. But a general reformation of all Christendom, that is hard and heavy, and no council has been able to consider it and find a way.’13 In his view, everyone from the given authorities in the three estates—­church, monastery, and world—­on down to the ‘house father’ should push for a remedy, that is, a reform, of the existing deficiencies within their jurisdiction. Geiler’s reform concept is based on a model of piety that was characteristic of his time: God would reward the efforts exerted and would recognize even imperfect reforms as proof of good will. In theological terms, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther’s conception of a reformation was different. During his struggle against indulgence that began in autumn of 1517, he found that ‘The church needs a reformation which is not the work of man, namely the pope, or of many men, namely the cardinals, both of which the most recent council [the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512–17] has demonstrated, but it is the work of the whole world, indeed it is the work of God alone. However, only God who has created time knows the time for this reformation.’14 In view of the fundamental ills that Luther perceived in the church and the society of his time, human agents seemed to be doomed to failure. Only God Himself could reform His church. To Luther, it was self-­evident that God would use for that purpose the heads and hands of precisely those authorities in all the estates which Geiler had mentioned. In the summer of 1520 in any case, in his great reformatory manifesto To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation), he sought to mobilize precisely these forces for his reformation. Over the rest of the sixteenth century, it became customary among his followers and fellow reformers to call the changes brought about in church and society as a ‘Reformation’. Towards the end of that century, the custom arose among those who looked back on the beginnings of the Reformation

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to use the same word for the period in which the changes took place that they considered improvements in the church. By about 1600, it had become usual to call Luther a reformer, and the turning point in salvation history which he had brought about—­which was seen as a revelation of the Gospel and a liberation from the yoke of an Antichristian papacy—­a Reformation.15 As a part of salvation history, this ‘Reformation’, the liberation from ‘Roman tyranny’, was often compared with the biblical flight of the children of Israel from their Egyptian captivity. The Lutherans’ perception of the impending ‘end of times’, fed by the prophetic sources of holy scripture and extra-­biblical testimonies, was still quite vital around 1600—much more so than in the competing denominations, Roman Catholicism and the Reformed churches. God spoke to humanity by special signs, such as ap­par­itions in the heavens; most of these were interpreted by Lutheran theo­lo­gians as admonitions to repent. In reflections on the previous century that were offered in sermons at the beginning of the year 1600, the Lutherans’ historic memory condensed into a compact historic image of the Reformation as an epoch of the eschatological salvation of Christianity from the pope as Antichrist. The reference to this Reformation also served to reassure the Lutherans that they were on the right side in the struggle to ascertain the true Christianity—­a struggle which was fought in earnest, and indeed could erupt in military conflict at any time. Luther’s Reformation, in which a little David had prevailed against the pope as an overpowering Goliath, seemed to prove that God had chosen it and protected it, as did the continued existence of the ‘evangelical’ church that invoked Luther’s name. This conception of history, interwoven with eschatological elements and defiant triumphalism, shaped the Lutherans’ mood and mentality and the conditions under which this Reformation entered the cultural memory, especially in Germany.

1.3.  One Reformation or Many? In the Beginning Was Luther For some time there has been a rather tacit disagreement in international research on the Reformation in regard to nothing less than the very heart of the matter: that is, a disagreement as to what we mean by ‘Reformation’. Do we mean all those developments and fundamental changes that occurred between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries on the Western European

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continent which favoured the rise of a ‘Western modern age’—the geographic developments, for example; the disciplined, efficient, and ­ ­controlled statecraft, with a religious regimen to match; humanism, critical philology, literacy, and the creation and development of the educational system; the media revolution; and other developments? From this point of view, it does not make sense to make the religious and social forces ori­gin­ at­ing with Luther and Wittenberg into the pivotal element of the historical developments. On the contrary: a great number of diverse developments over a long segment of time—­between about 1450 and 1650—must be taken into consideration, and the ‘reforming’ impulses, which then means, essentially, the modernizing forces leading to our civilization, must be ­analysed with a broad focus. If we understand ‘Reformation’ in this general sense as a historical force,16 then it is only logical and compelling to pluralize ‘reformations’ to mean all those developments that led to the ‘early ­modern’ and then the ‘modern era’. A similar point can be made in regard to the spectrum of religious traditions and positions: naturally the developments in the Catholic church, in the Protestant ‘sects’, especially among the Anabaptists, and in ‘Protestantism’, which is so diverse in itself that it too could easily be pluralized,17 all led in their respective ways to the very diverse and contradictory ‘modern age’. As with other historic phenomena, such as the Enlightenment, the tendency towards the plural ‘Reformations’ is prevalent today. It brings with it the drawback of blurring the contours of the formerly distinct, unambiguous historical term of ‘the Reformation’. The present portrayal takes a different approach: instead of subsuming under the term ‘Reformation’ all the upheavals and new departures, all the changes occurring between the fifteenth century and the seventeenth century that led out of the ‘Middle Ages’, this account uses ‘the Reformation’ to refer to a certain historic complex of events that was condensed under the historical concept of ‘Reformation’ as early as the end of the sixteenth century, and widely commemorated, especially in the tradition of ‘Reformation jubilees’. This coherent historical narrative of ‘the Reformation’ had a definite beginning: namely Luther and his conflict with the papal church. It was undisputed among all the principal sixteenth-­ century actors, including Luther’s opponents, that Luther’s conflict with the Roman church, the announcement of his excommunication on 15 June 1520, and the ensuing aggravations, controversies, and condemnations were what set in motion the unique events which led to the rise of local, territorial, and national

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churches independent of Rome—­in other words, were what caused the ‘Reformation’ as the sum total of these small-­scale processes of change. Placing Luther at the beginning must not imply inflating him to a monumental scale. He stands at this beginning, not primarily because of his many special characteristics, but because of a singular convergence of historical factors which made it possible for a disputation on indulgence—­which never took place—­to grow into a radical, revolutionary change in the institution of the church. But placing Luther at the beginning also means situating him in his time, including the mentalities, the social and political orders, the modes of religious and economic activity, the university, the religious community of his familiars, as well as the fears and awakenings of the period around 1500. In the account that follows, special emphasis is placed on the role played by the reformers’ use of the printed word as a polemical medium. Luther wrote as if his life depended on it; indeed he saved his life through his publications, through his writing. The growth of publishing in the years from 1518 to 1521 was sim­ul­tan­ eous with the rise of a reformation movement that rapidly gained visibility beyond the borders of the empire and became a European phenomenon. None of the reform movements or processes of change in the individual European countries—­ in Switzerland; in France, the Netherlands, and England; in Denmark and Sweden; in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia—­arose independently of Luther and the events in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. Accordingly, none of the European Reformation can be explained primarily by late medieval forces of reform, although it is without a doubt accurate to say that many traditions of the late Middle Ages lived on—­and still older predispositions regained vitality—­in, with, and under the Reformation. But all the will to reform that had built up, and the looming will of kings and princes to seize the institution of the church, the resentment against the curia that had accumulated over Roman fiscal policy—­ all of this only condensed into a historical change after the mendicant monk from Wittenberg, ‘on fire with zeal for Christ, as I thought, or with the heat of youth, if you prefer’18 was driven out of his corner19 and entered the historical stage. The universal im­port­ ance of the pope, whose indulgences were at issue, contributed to the rapid escalation of the conflict over the Saxon monk. Not until the rumbling had spread in the empire, Luther’s texts and those of his early allies had been distributed abroad, and the humanists’ European communication network had begun to buzz did those events begin that ended in the many

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Reformations and hence the one Reformation that marked an epoch in the history of Latin European Christendom. Of course, seeing Luther as the beginning of the ‘Reformation’ does not mean discounting the originality or diminishing the importance of all the other actors, including the other reformers who arose alongside him or in opposition to him. By the time Zwingli, for example, heard of Luther, he was already a mature intellectual personality in many ways; he was not about to begin following Luther blindly. And yet Zwingli’s ideas and actions took on a direction, a tendency, a focus, and a momentum because of the history that had begun with Luther—­more specifically, with Luther’s controversy over indulgence—­that they would not otherwise have had. And the same can be said, cum grano salis, for all the other protagonists. Of course the epoch-­making phenomenon of ‘the Reformation’ depended on a multitude of factors that favoured its development or made it possible at all: the pol­it­ ical conflicts in Europe; the legal structures of the empire, a pressure to reform that took many different forms; the fear of the Ottoman Empire; specific developments in the national churches of the various European countries; the surge in communication caused by the printing press; and so on and on. But Luther is the only person without whom the ‘story’ of the Reformation cannot be told at all.

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2 European Christendom c.1500 2.1.  Construction of a Continent New Horizons

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n the decades preceding the Reformation, the gravest menace to Christian Europe was the fleets and armies of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, this threat from its margins was the inducement to construe the continent as a unit. The dramatic rise of the most powerful empire of the time took place during the hundred years from the mid-­fourteenth to the mid-­fifteenth century. That hundred years begins in 1351, the date of the Turks’ first military alliance with one Christian state, namely Genoa, against another Christian state, Venice, followed by the establishment of the first Ottoman base in Europe, at Gallipoli on the Dardanelles, in 1354. The end of the period is marked by the siege and conquest of Constantinople from 6 April to 29 May 1453. The dominance of the Ottomans in the Balkan peninsula—­their victory over the Serbs in 1371, the subjection of the Bulgarian tsars in 1388, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389—seemed briefly to be threatened in the early ­fifteenth century by Timur Lang (or Tamerlane), the restorer of the Mongol Empire, but then continued and expanded throughout the Mediterranean region, with the invasion of Thessalonica and West Anatolia in 1430, the victory over an army of Crusaders at Varna in 1444, suzerainty over the Peloponnese in 1460, and the conquest of Syria and Egypt and the fall of the Mamluk sultanate in 1516/17. In Europe, the rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire created a novel experience of menace that sometimes took on an apocalyptic character. In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, Pope Pius II exhorted his contemporaries to look to the last remaining home of Christianity after the complete Muslim conquest of the formerly Christian continents of Africa and Asia, proclaiming ‘Europe the homeland’ of the Christians (Europa id est

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patria, domus propria).1 Europe was called upon to fight, both in intellectual and in military terms. The head of the Latin church sought to create this Europe of solidarity against the external enemy of the Christian faith by acting as if it was already a reality. Pius urged Christendom to undertake an armed pilgrimage, a crusade—­ an unsuccessful one, in the event—­ that would stand up to the recalcitrant enemy under the crescent moon. After years of strenuous negotiations to mobilize for the war against the Turks, the exhausted pope ended his last voyage on 15 August 1464: Pius II died within sight of the Venetian fleet which had just sailed into the port of Ancona, and which was supposed to form the core of the campaign against the Ottomans. His successor Paul II then negotiated again, especially with the Italian potentates who were not eager to pay, who were notoriously mistrustful of, if not hostile to, one another and the pope, and sometimes went as far as to threaten to ally with Turkey. In spite of all papal exhortations, Europe was not united in the willingness and ability to confront an Islamic threat, nor did it become united in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The presence and dominance of the Ottomans in the Levant caused effects that went far beyond reactivating what were perhaps the most medieval religious and cultural practices: the Crusades and indulgence. The frenzied search for a sea route to India, which was to lead to the great geographic discoveries with their global political and economic consequences, was the result of a desire to enjoy and to market the highly demanded trade goods from the East, especially silk and spices, without having to pay the Ottomans’ continuously rising tariffs. The Europeans’ hunger for the exotic; an early capitalist entrepreneurial spirit expanding into the wide world from fourteenth- and fifteenth-­ century Italy; novel nautical and geographical capabilities; and the Christian ambition of reaching remote if not legendary brothers in faith in India, the St Thomas Christians—­all of these factors lent momentum to developments that would lead to a changed, globalized world. Since the early fifteenth century, the Portuguese had gradually advanced southwards along the west coast of Africa and established bases to secure the newly exploited region. In 1487, Bartolomeu Díaz first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa. A good decade later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed with four caravels from Lisbon to Kozhikode (Calicut): thus an ocean route to India was discovered. In the certainty of having attained the long-­sought ‘Christians and spices’,2 the Portuguese sailors cele­brated their first Mass on Indian soil. The church in which that Mass

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Fig. 1  Map of Europe in the shape of a female figure with imperial attributes. The Mediterranean forms the border between Europe and Africa, the Black Sea that between Europe and Asia. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographey, 1st edn 1550; various printings.

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took place was decorated with many pictures of saints: ‘They were painted variously’, one witness reported, ‘with teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms.’3 Evidently the Portuguese had prayed in a Hindu temple. Subsequently, travelogues from the remote corners of the Earth rapidly reached the various European countries, including Germany. The Neue Zeitung, originating in Portugal, appeared in the German-­speaking ter­r i­tor­ies in 1505, and reported on ships that had just returned from ‘Presilg Landt’, the land of Brazil, where the missionary apostle St Thomas was allegedly revered: ‘And when they speak of St Thomas, they say he is the lesser god, but that there is another god who is greater’.4 Foreign cultures were thus interpreted in a Christian-­European cultural frame in which it went without saying that the Gospel had been carried to the ends of the Earth during the time of the apostles. In 1508, a travel account was published in Nuremberg by a certain Balthasar Springer who had taken part in a journey to India as an emissary of the Welser family’s trading company. Literature of this genre was frequently translated into several vernacular languages and distributed throughout Europe. It satisfied a considerable interest in the exotic worlds, and may also have contributed to a certain cultural integration of Europe. Inspired by the old idea, common among scholars, that the Earth was spherical, and urged by the Florentine physician and geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli that Asia could be reached by sailing westwards, the Genoese-­ born Christopher Columbus, after a few failed experiments, entered the service of the Spanish ‘Catholic monarchs’ Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. With their support, he proposed to find the westward route to India and the Far East. Like his patrons and many other explorers, Columbus was driven by a number of disparate interests. The insoluble tangle of religious and secular motives was typical of premodern mentalities: gold, as a personal fortune and for the Spanish crown; fame and glory; spreading the true faith; and bourgeois—­that is, early capitalist—­trade interests. It was no coincidence that Columbus’s major success came, thanks to the support of their Catholic majesties, in the year 1492. His expedition became, de facto, a part of the broadly conceived Reconquista, the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula and adjoining spheres of interest from the vestiges of Islamic rule, bringing to a close the centuries of Christian–­Muslim coexistence which had followed the Arab conquests of the early eighth century. On the second day of the year 1492, the Emirate of Granada, the last bastion of Islamic Spain, fell to the triumphant Christians. A few months later, the

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systematic expulsion of those Jews who were unwilling to be baptized began, accompanied by an ethnic cleansing of Marranos and Moriscos, those who were alleged to have converted falsely from Judaism and Islam. Columbus’s discoveries were thus a contribution to the worldwide spread of Christianity under the Spanish flag, which did not tolerate unorthodox religious confessions and notions. The massive exclusionary policy of the Spanish Reconquista as a whole, saturated as it was with proto-­racist motives, was a novel phenomenon. The spiritual head of European Christendom, the Roman pope, saw himself as the ruler of the world, and by that token as authorized to distribute rule—­dominium—­over the newly discovered islands and countries. And Pope Alexander VI did so in the bull Inter cetera of 4 May 1493: he granted the two maritime powers of the Iberian peninsula the right to appropriate all the treasures of the newly discovered countries—‘gold, spices and very many other precious things of divers kinds and qualities’—but in doing so he also laid on them the duty ‘to bring under your sway the said mainlands and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the

Fig. 2  The map of the world by Nicolaus Germanus appeared in the first edition of Ptolemy printed in Germany: Ulm, 1482.

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Catholic faith’.5 The order in which the duties are listed—­subjection and conversion (subjicere, reducere)—was quite clear. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal divided the extra-­ European world between themselves: the eastern half would be Portuguese and the western half Spanish. Regardless of all competition in their extra-­ European fields of activity, they were united in the self-­evidence, confirmed and legitimized by the pope, with which the Europeans conceived the worlds overseas as objects at their material and religious disposal. With our hindsight of the ambivalent consequences of colonialism and the Europeanization of the world, we will no doubt be inclined to confront the narrative of heroic European explorers with George Christoph Lichtenberg’s no less European scepticism: ‘The American who first discovered Columbus made a fatal discovery.’6

New Economic Spheres The long-­term economic consequences of the geographic discoveries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were tremendous. Up to then, the European seas—­the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the North Sea—­had shaped the centres of economic activity, the Hansa region, southern Germany and Italy, as well as the maritime cities such as Venice, Genoa, and Lübeck. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, they were overtaken by the Atlantic trade. Around 1500, the Mediterranean region was nonetheless still the core region of the European economy: this was the crossroads of the most important trade routes between North and South and between East and West. The huge imports of long-­distance trade made large profits possible, although they also involved gigantic risks. They required greater financial investments, thus generally favouring the expansive tendencies of capitalism. Significant amounts of money—­precious metals—­flowed out of the importing countries and regions, resulting in a constant money shortage there. Indebtedness and a lifestyle based on luxury goods from overseas began to spread, which seems to have increased the social pressure on the lower-­ income population groups—­the status oeconomicus or ‘household estate’. On the whole, the European economic situation c.1500 showed the characteristics of expansion, caused in part by increasing long-­distance trade, but primarily by continuous population growth. The sharp demographic declines caused by the plague epidemics that had haunted Europe since the

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mid-­fourteenth century had been overcome. In keeping with the typical conditions of preindustrial societies, economic development was beset by crises of scarcity: overpopulation led to food shortages and famines, which made the people more susceptible to disease. High mortality rates in turn improved the survivors’ chances of occupational success, marriage, and reproduction. The increase in urbanization in the early sixteenth century stimulated the economy of the whole society. As long-­distance trade expanded, big mercantile companies took on ever greater importance. They were able to finance overseas transport, and in some cases the production of goods as well. They organized profitable sales and distribution of the trade goods through branch offices. New methods of financial accounting and new credit instruments, and the subversion of the canonical prohibition of usury, pursued with the acquiescence of the church, strengthened the major merchant clans, such as the Fuggers and the Welsers in Augsburg and the Strozzis and the Medicis in Florence. Simultaneous participation in all the growth industries of the time—­ mining, overseas trade, and banking—­ was characteristic of the biggest entrepreneurs. A few wealthy merchants in Italy and southern Germany had significant influence on ecclesiastical and political decision-­making as bankers and creditors. The workshop system, a novel production form of highly concentrated capital, created dependencies between entrepreneurs who ‘advanced’ raw materials and tools to small producers, then marketed the finished products themselves, and thus were able to dictate prices.Tendencies towards monopoly in food supplies, especially the practice of forestalling—­ buying up foodstuffs in times of surplus in order to force up prices—­were stigmatized by mendicant monks, and gave rise to communal precautions such as granaries. Surreptitious forms of usury, against which the formal prohibitions were in practice relaxed, were common and tolerated by the church, especially Zinskauf, a kind of mortgage transaction in which a debtor posed as the seller of a property to a creditor, then paid an annuity for the use of it. Similar patterns and practices were found in economics and religion: spiritual riches could be accumulated; services performed could be regarded as investments. Nonetheless, one person’s prosperity went hand in hand with another person’s want. The gap between rich and poor widened constantly in the years around 1500. The first signs of overpopulation, increasing urbanization, and rural hunger uprisings appeared.

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2.2. Structures Estates-­Based Societies Latin Europe’s ecclesiastical and cultural borders with the Muslim Ottoman Empire and with the Orthodox Grand Duchy of Moscow did not shut out all political and economic relations with those states. Nonetheless, Latin Europe as the jurisdiction of the Roman pope is a unique historical and cultural quantity. In the period around 1500, a pol­it­ical culture formed in Europe which was defined by predictable forms of communication, strategic balances of power, and the rational pursuit of self-­interest. In Italy first, but soon throughout the continent, diplomatic missions arose on a bilateral basis, attempting to channel conflicts by maintaining constant contacts. A system of ambassadors took shape, which included the church’s political representatives vis-­à-­vis the secular states, the nuntiatures. The European society of that time was thoroughly structured by estates, although the forms of dominion and participation in power varied substantially from one region to another. The assemblies of the estates in the various European regions generally offered opportunities for the higher clergy and the nobility generally, but rarely for peasants and burghers, to participate in government. There was little mobility between the estates; people lived and died within the estate to which they were born; denying or leaving one’s estate was met with suspicion and resistance.The organization of society in estates was considered divinely ordained, grounded in Creation. At the top of the social hierarchy were the emperor and the pope, the nobility, that is, the sovereign princes and kings, and the higher clergy—­bishops, abbots, and prelates—­who were often recruited from the nobility. The nobility were not a homogeneous social group; they comprised a broad spectrum of very different, hierarchically ordered ranks, from the lower rural gentry, who were culturally close to the peasantry, to the high aristocracy, who exercised or aspired to dominion over territorial states. In some European countries (Spain, Portugal, France, Hungary, Poland), more than 4 per cent of the population belonged to the nobility; in the empire and England, about 1 to 2 per cent did. As a whole, the nobility justified their claim to a position of social and political leadership by military expertise, land ownership, hierarchically structured manorial and juridical

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powers, their ‘noble’ origins and inherited rights and privileges. Commercial activity was generally considered incompatible with aristocratic pride of rank, yet the nobility played an important part in the lucrative mining industry which flourished around 1500. The noble estate’s mostly endogamous marriage strategies were aimed at securing dynasties, increasing political influence, and expanding networks. Matrimonial alliances spanning Europe were quite natural around 1500, especially in the higher ranks of the nobility. The church had an important function in providing for later-­born male and unmarried female nobles. Posts as bishops, abbots, canons, or abbesses were fall-­back positions befitting the rank of noble descendants. In an influential model of the contemporary social order called the doctrine of the three estates, the nobility were the political or the armed estate (ordo or status politicus, bellatores; in German Wehrstand), responsible for the polity’s external defence, its legal and political organization, punishing wrongdoing, establishing justice, etc. Like those of the other estates, the duties of the political estate were considered as fulfilling a destiny appointed by God. The clerical estate (ordo or status ecclesiasticus, oratores; Lehrstand), consisted mostly of the hierarchically organized secular clergy and the monastic orders, whose task was to obtain eternal salvation for the whole society. Because of this function, the clergy saw themselves as the highest of the estates, since they transformed material into spiritual goods: food and donations into prayers and hymns; secular expenditures into spiritual capital. For the sake of the soul’s salvation, huge church buildings were maintained for the clergy’s services; for that purpose they prayed, practiced an exemplary Christian lifestyle, administered the sacraments, studied and taught the rest of Christendom—­indeed the whole world. They were the actual vehicle of the literacy that made Europe’s cultural genesis possible. Through special material and financial endowments called Stiftungen, lay persons could receive certain religious services from individual clerics or from spiritual bodies and institutions, such as Masses for the dead, regular cycles of prayers, or sermons. Because of the parochial structure in which the Latin church was organized in cities and rural areas throughout Europe, individual local clerics—­parsons, curates, parish priests—­were responsible for the souls of their congregations. Parish churches, with their surrounding cemeteries, were generally the nuclei around which rural and urban settlements crystallized—­all over Europe. Under the bannus parochialis, every European was bound to a certain parish priest for the administration of the sacraments that structured Christians’

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Fig. 3  Bartholomäus Bruyn the Elder, The Three Estates of Christendom, oil on wood, c.1530/40. Christ institutes the three estates: at left we see the high clergy—­ probably the Doctores ecclesiae—­and, kneeling, the donor, Lambert Bracke, canon of Cologne Cathedral and professor. At right are the secular authorities in archaizing Roman armour, led by the emperor, probably Charlemagne. In the middle of the picture are two much smaller representatives of the peasantry, the labouring estate. Each estate is associated with a banderole representing a celestial commandment: ‘Tu supplex ora’ (‘You, pray humbly’); ‘Tu protege’ (‘You, protect’); ‘Tuque labora’ (‘And you, work’).

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lives from the cradle (baptism) to the grave (extreme unction). According to the binding canons of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the European Christian was to confess his sins and attend Mass at least once a year in his own parish church. Exceptions to this important bond to one’s parish priest were admissible only by means of a special privilege, and required a ­com­par­able relationship to a chosen cleric, such as a monk. Hence the members of the spiritual ordo ecclesiasticus, acting through very diverse organizations, were in open competition for the allegiance of the faithful. The uncontestedly lowest estate was the household estate (ordo or status oeconomicus, laboratores; Nährstand). Its members were the peasants, artisans, merchants, and tradesmen—­that is, all those who as a rule neither exercised dominion nor ex officio taught and prayed, but supported themselves by the work of their hands and ate their bread in the sweat of their brow. This third estate was the most numerous. It ensured the necessary supply of elementary consumer goods and commodities, allowing the two higher estates to pursue their clerical-­spiritual and seigniorial activities. Representatives of the household estate were not regularly involved in ruling. In the cities, tradesmen were organized in guilds, which in some places were able to gain rights of participation in the municipal government—­ that is, to wrest such rights from the patricians, the aristocracy of the cities. The social group of burgesses lived in the cities, participating in elementary freedoms that only the city could offer: as a marketplace and an economic association; as political and administrative unit protected by a wall and a castle; as a community bound by laws and duties. As marketplaces, the cities and towns were closely connected with the countryside, culturally and economically. The close cohabitation, the great diversity of artistic, scholastic, ecclesiastic, and manual activities and talents, the wealth of merchandise and the mobility of their visitors—­all these made the cities into cultural centres. Beginning in Italy, the cities also influenced the fashions and styles at European courts, and produced those objects of art, literature, and elevated taste which rulers with a sense for culture and prestige demanded, as well as the advisors, orators, and scholars they recruited. In the fine arts, which saw immense development, earthly history and salvation history moved closer together, to the point of interpenetrating.The realm of the saints no longer appeared to the viewer’s gaze only on gilded backgrounds, but also in, with, and among the elements of the contemporary life-­world and culture. The social and legal position of the peasants varied significantly between different regions: from the free peasants of Frisia and Allgäu, who participated

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in assemblies of the estates, to the villeins and serfs who owed high taxes to their noble or ecclesiastical lords. Hence their situation cannot be uniformly portrayed as oppression. Nonetheless, in the closing decades of the fifteenth and the early decades of the sixteenth century, the signs of growing discontent and yearning for freedom multiplied, especially in the lower strata of the population. Food shortages due to crop failures or price manipulation, for example, increased the disposition to conflict that erupted in local or regional peasant uprisings. In the southwest of the empire, these included the Poor Conrad revolt of 1514 and the conspiracies of the Bundschuh movement in 1502, 1513, and 1517. These protests sometimes took on a massively anticlerical character, turning against the ecclesiastical beneficiaries of the feudal system.

Political Structures The political structures in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and in Europe as a whole have several characteristics in common. By its theological legitimation, dominion was considered a divine gift; princes ruled Dei gratia: ‘by the grace of God’. Resistance against the existing order was legitimate only where the holder of a political office was guilty of exceeding his powers and breaking the law—­that is, tyrannically perverting dominion. Dominion in Europe around 1500 was exercised by monarchs or by likewise sovereign aristocrats of the upper nobility. Trends towards a social segregation of the nobility and a standardization of ascension to the nobility were reinforced in the course of the sixteenth century. Procedures of ennoblement by the monarchs were established, and assiduity at court was often crucial to the nobleman’s status and success. Where the nobility had once been accustomed to decide for themselves who belonged to their number and who didn’t, kings now took over this function. In Italy, where there was no monarchical authority, an urban upper class in the various cities set itself apart from the rest of the burghers, claiming an aristocratic status. The period around 1500 was one of a progressive concentration of state structures as a consequence of increasing administrative and fiscal cen­tral­ iza­tion, which were often enforced with the help of academically educated, professionalized officers. The nobility’s participation in political rule was mostly realized through diets, or assemblies of the estates. The princes and lower nobles took part in the political decision-­making and administrative processes of their countries, such as tax levies, in imperial and state diets.

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In the various countries of Central Europe—­in Bohemia, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Denmark, and Sweden—­r ivalries and conflicts between the  monarchs or ruling lords and the estates were the order of the day. The rights of the estates in the elections of kings in Poland, Bohemia, and the empire required compromises and compensatory agreements which were codified in electoral capitulations. In England, the hereditary monarchy was subject to certain limitations in its freedom, first by the rights of the aristocracy, who were represented in both houses of parliament, and of the higher clergy, and second by the rights of the gentry, the burgesses, and the lower clergy. In the Western European monarchies of Spain and France, the crown attained more comprehensive centralized powers around 1500 than in the other European countries; relations with the church were closely involved. Through privileged relations with the Roman curia, the ‘Catholic monarchs’ Ferdinand and Isabella were able to institutionalize the Inquisition in their dominions as a function of the state. By the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438, the French kings usurped the right to appoint high ecclesiastic officers.

2.3.  Nations and Powers in Europe The diverging fates of the Reformation in the countries of Europe were fundamentally connected with the diverse political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and social conditions. This section presents an outline of those conditions. After successfully ending the Hundred Years’ War with England, which had in fact lasted more than a century, from 1337 to 1453, the Valois dynasty in France had stabilized their claim to the throne, rounded out their territory, and increased the country’s prosperity. The last bastions of the English in Normandy had been reconquered. Joan of Arc (c.1410–31), the ‘Maid of Orleans’ executed as a heretic by the English on the market square in Rouen, had become a national martyr. The descendants of the Gauls began to see themselves as a chosen people. The ‘Liberties of the Gallican Church’, granted by the Holy See in return for money, allowed the national church to develop in relative independence from Rome. These liberties were confirmed in 1516 in a concordat between King Francis I and Pope Leo X. All 110 bishoprics, some four hundred abbeys, and all prelatures lay under the jurisdiction of the French king—­a disposition that no kind of reformation could have improved.

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The fact that the French kings styled themselves ‘Most Christian Majesties’ reflects a hegemonic claim vis-­à-­vis all other Christian nations. It also determined the axis of conflict between France and the Habsburg emperor which proved important for the political history of the Reformation. In England we find a stabilization of the Tudor monarchy towards the end of the fifteenth century. After the Wars of the Roses had raged for about three decades between the two branches of the House of Tudor—­the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York—­Henry VII Tudor, heir of the House of Lancaster, solidified his position at the cost of the nobility and with the help of the high clergy. Not least because of the popes’ exile in Avignon (1309–76), an onerous dependency on the French crown, England had developed a marked remoteness from the papacy. The English monarchs were de facto lords over the country’s secular clergy, particularly the bishops. However, English bishops were much less frequently recruited from the nobility than those in the other countries of Latin Europe; their qualifications were rather academic education and particular loyalty to the king. Once consequence of the royal administration’s dominance in granting benefices was that England was less plagued than the continent by the sale of offices (simony), the accumulation of offices, and the vicariate system—­the fulfilment of a clerical post by a less qualified, underfinanced representative of the actual officeholder. Spain’s role in European politics around 1500 was characterized, first of all, by the significant power it had gained in Italy (Sicily, Naples, Sardinia) in the later Middle Ages—­alongside France. Conflicts over territorial claims in Italy regularly took on European proportions. Second, the dynastic connection with the Habsburgs, which placed the Spanish infante Charles, the grandson of Emperor Maximilian I, on the throne of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, making him the ruler of a gigantic world power, was to give an international if not a global dimension to the events surrounding the Reformation in Germany. In the decades preceding Charles’s regency, Spain had developed into the most Catholic country in Europe. The expulsion of actual or alleged Jews and Muslims in the course of the Reconquista, the establishment of draconian Inquisitional punishments and their theatrical execution, the militant hatred of heresy as a fundamental Christian duty, an exaggerated sense of mission as a chosen people engaged in a holy war, stopping not even at compulsory conversion, a deep respect for the church and its earthly head, the strict discipline of the Spanish monarchs in appointing the country’s clergy—­all of this contributed to a resolutely Catholic mentality. Emperor Charles V became its most powerful protagonist.

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Italy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was—­alongside the similarly developed, economically flourishing Burgundy—­the country most hotly contested among the European powers. The relatively stable equilibrium between the five major states that shaped Italy’s political system—­Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States, and Naples, which had been governed since 1458 by a branch of the Aragonese royal house—­had begun to totter. The outward reasons included a military campaign by the French king Charles VIII, who had conducted an intervention on the Italian peninsula in 1494/5 and, with the support of Milan and Genoa, easily reconquered the kingdom of Naples, which had been an Angevin dominion in the aftermath of the Hohenstaufen reign. A broad coalition quickly formed in opposition to the French supremacy, a ‘Holy League’ in which the pope was joined by Venice, the Habsburg emperor Maximilian, and Milan, which Maximilian claimed as an imperial fief. In 1497, the status quo ante was restored; in 1500, France successfully counter-­attacked and annexed Milan, disregarding its feudal connection to the empire. France’s possession of Milan and Spain’s possession of Naples shaped the two powers’ policies from that point forward. As a result of the Spanish-­ Habsburg ‘double alliance’ (1496/7)—the dynastic marriages between Maximilian’s children Philip and Margaret and the Spanish princes John and Joanna—­the conflicts over Italy regularly caused tensions in large parts of Europe. The constant military conflicts between the French king Francis I and Charles V formed a structural axis of European politics in the era of the Reformation, one that encouraged the spread of the Reformation in the empire. Within the Italian political system, the papacy played a certain role as a territorial state, but also as a formative factor in national attitudes. With few exceptions, the popes of the late medieval and early modern periods were Italians, and the fact that the papacy practically belonged to the country was a matter of national pride. After the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, the expansion of the Patrimonium Petri to form a territorial state was intended to safeguard the independence of the papacy and prevent future dependence on other powers. This political option brought with it a dilemma, however, since the Renaissance popes increasingly subordinated ecclesiastical matters to political interests. Since Sixtus IV (1471–84), the popes had used clerical appointments as a source of income, and spiritual disciplinary measures were used for purposes of political dominance. Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI

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(1492–1503), tried to secularize the Papal States as a hereditary principality. The ‘warrior pope’ Julius II (1503–13) primarily engaged in military activities. Nepotism—­favours to members of the pope’s family—­further aggravated the dilemma. All of these developments of the Renaissance papacy burdened the credibility of the curial system, weakening any appeal to the holiness of the vicar of Christ and the spiritual character of his office. One of the crucial conditions at the time of the Reformation was the fact that the Roman curia’s contacts with the empire were less intensive than those with other countries, and that the Germans, unlike the other major European nations, were unable to ‘shape’ their relations with Rome in a way ‘that would have suited national interests’.7 Several territories had complicated and controversial relations with the empire around 1500. One of these was Burgundy, situated between France and Germany: the Habsburgs raised claims resulting from the marriage of Maximilian of Austria and Mary of Burgundy in 1477. After military conflicts between Maximilian and France, the Burgundian legacy was divided: the Free County of Burgundy (Franche-­Comté) and the Dutch possessions as far north as West Frisia and Luxembourg were conceded to the Habsburgs; Picardy and the Duchy of Burgundy to France. In consequence, conflicts between France and Habsburg continued, and were repeatedly waged militarily. In principle, the Netherlands were an imperial fief, but in practice, the Habsburg emperors Maximilian I and Charles V had an interest in keeping this territory at a certain distance from the empire. The Swiss Confederation had maintained its own independence from the empire since the high Middle Ages. A significant factor in its relations was its republican, cooperative federal structure, which made it politically and constitutionally a different kind of state. After a successful military op­pos­ ition to the Habsburgs in the Swiss or Swabian War, the Confederation stipulated in 1499 that they would no longer be included in the institutional structure of the empire. From 1530 on, the imperial cities in the Swiss Confederation stopped attending the imperial diet. These late medieval developments are the reason why the Swiss Reformation went on with a high degree of political independence from the Germans. The Lands of the Teutonic Order bordered on the empire to the east, but did not belong to it, although the later Grand Masters selected to lead it were sons of German princes—­ Frederick of Saxony from 1498; Albert of Brandenburg-­Ansbach from 1511. Legally, however, the State of the Teutonic Order was not a German imperial estate, but under Polish suzerainty. After

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its secularization as the Duchy of Prussia and the dissolution of the order, which by this time numbered only fifty knights, Albert was enfeoffed with the duchy by a decree of the Polish Sejm. Poland-­Lithuania, Hungary, and Bohemia were politically and culturally part of Latin Europe. In contrast to their western neighbours, however, the social and political conditions in these countries were shaped by an influential nobility, which also played a leading economic role by means of agricultural exports to the west. The large land holdings, which were ruled by the nobles with plenipotentiary powers and cultivated by serfs, were the source of the aristocracy’s political and economic power. The kings of these three countries were elected; in the assemblies of the estates, the nobility notoriously worked to weaken the monarchy, or to obtain rights for themselves which restricted the powers of the crown. Members of the Lithuanian dynasty of the Jagiellonians who at various times wore the crowns of Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Lithuania were elected in part because they acquiesced in, or outright promoted, the nobility’s politics—­constantly oppressing the peasants, undermining the economic importance of the cities, and concentrating power in their own hands. Since the Golden Bull of 1356, the king of Bohemia had been the foremost of the empire’s four secular electors. Having relaxed its ties to the empire in the course of the fifteenth century, Bohemia was de facto released from imperial jurisdiction. The self-­assured, independent religious development called the Hussite movement, after the Prague theologian Jan Hus, accelerated the secession of a Bohemian national church, and that of the kingdom of Bohemia from the empire. In the fifteenth century, Bohemia was more or less denominationally divided into three parts: the Germans, who lived primarily in the cities, and parts of the higher nobility were Roman Catholic; the majority of the Bohemians, including professors at the University of Prague, were Utraquists, who followed a moderate interpretation of Hus’s doctrine, secularizing church property and administering the Eucharist to the laity in both bread and wine. A minority of city-­dwellers and peasants were more radical Hussites or Taborites.The Unity of the Bohemian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), founded as an autonomous sect, developed early affinities to the Reformation of Wittenberg. Poland and Lithuania had been ruled in personal union since the late fourteenth century, a situation which mainly continued, with certain interruptions, until the late sixteenth century. In the course of the fifteenth century

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this territory came under military pressure from the Turks to the south and from the Muscovite tsar Ivan III to the east. The Muscovites pursued the restoration of a greater Russian Empire through conquests of territories such as Novgorod and attacks on Lithuanian possessions in the Ukraine. The 1471 election of the Polish prince Vladislaus as king of Bohemia—­king of Hungary as well in personal union from 1490 on—­reinforced Bohemia’s independence from the empire. A treaty between Vladislaus and the Habsburg emperor regulated the succession in Bohemia and Hungary: Emperor Maximilian’s daughter Mary of Austria married the Jagiellonian Louis of Hungary and Bohemia; his sister Anna of Hungary and Bohemia married Ferdinand, the younger brother of the future Emperor Charles. In 1526, when Vladislaus’s son Louis was killed in the Battle of Mohács against the victorious Ottoman Empire, the arranged succession took place: those parts of Hungary which did not fall to the Ottoman Empire were inherited by the Habsburgs, together with Bohemia. Scandinavia was heavily involved, through the trade network of the Hansa League, in Western and Central Europe, but most of all in Eastern Europe. Many Germans lived in the eastern and northern countries of Latin Europe, especially in the cities. They must have had a significant influence on the progress of the Reformation in Poland, Hungary, Prussia, Lithuania, and Sweden. Since the Kalmar Union of 1397, the Nordic countries had been united under Danish leadership. Swedish longings for independence came to fruition in 1523 with the election of King Gustav I Vasa by a diet in Strängnäs. The rapid introduction of the Reformation here was part of the trend towards greater national autonomy which had begun in the late Middle Ages with increasing agitation in the kingdom for a national church, especially for the appointment of clerical offices. In every European country, the course of the Reformation was substantially determined by the political constellation; and where the Reformation prevailed, the mode of its success depended primarily on ‘the secular politics of principalities and powers’.8

2.4. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation The hub of Europe was the political system of the Holy Roman Empire, which differed in characteristic ways from the development of the monarchic

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nation states in Spain, France, and England on the one hand, and from the aristocratic-­republican tendencies of Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary on the other. From the late fifteenth century on, the name of the empire bore the suffix ‘of the German nation’ (nationis Germanicæ). In contrast to the older habit of naming countries for geographic features such as mountains, rivers, and seas, it was now customary, the Basel cosmographer Sebastian Münster wrote in the early sixteenth century, to distinguish countries from one another by ‘languages, regimes, and rulers’. For Germany, a delimitation by language and culture is most apt, for reasons which have to do with the complex, elusive structure of the empire: ‘And consequently, in our time we call Germany everything that uses German languages, whether it lies that side or this of the Rhine or the Danube. And thus Germany extends as far as the Meuse to the west, and a bit beyond it in the Netherlands, where it borders on Flanders. But to the south it spreads as far as the high Alps, and in the east it borders on Hungary and Poland. But in the north, it stops at the sea, as in times long past.’9 The many different ‘regimes and rulers’ in Germany had their places under the umbrella of the empire—­a historically and politically unique phenomenon that was thought to be the last of the four world empires according to the theological history of the Book of Daniel (7). The ‘Roman’ empire had passed into the hands of the ‘Germans’ with Charlemagne, and with its revival by Otto the Great. At the end of this last empire, Christ would come again and begin the Last Judgement. The empire was headed by an emperor who represented the universality of earthly rule and surpassed all rulers and nations in power and honour. This conception, and the claim to primacy of the emperor and the imperial ‘German’ people which it implied, was in conflict both with the ambitions of other European monarchs and with the political realities and procedures of the empire itself and its institutions. As a framework for political negotiation, the empire had a dual nature combining federative, provincial elements, such as imperial princes and imperial estates, and centralistic, monarchical elements, including imperial sovereignty and imperial institutions. The emperor’s throne was an elective office. The seven prince-­electors who were entitled to choose the emperor were the ‘pillars of the empire’: three spiritual electors, the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne; and four secular electors, the Duke of Saxony (Luther’s sovereign), the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, and the king of Bohemia. Since the Golden Bull of 1356, which defined the role of the electors, the emperor’s coronation by the pope was

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Fig. 4  Johannes Stumpf ’s map of Germany depicts the territory of the empire, but without drawing any borders. Lands considered German are named in Gothic script, while the non-­German territories are labelled in Roman. The map was prepared by the woodcarver Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder, and appeared in 1548 in Johannes Stumpf ’s Schweizer Chronik [Swiss Chronicle] (Zurich: Christoph Froschauer).

no longer constitutionally necessary. Maximilian was the first German emperor not to be crowned by the pope. His grandson Charles V, who was crowned king of the Romans in Aix in 1520, above the bones of Charlemagne, had himself crowned by the pope ten years later in Bologna—­in keeping with his conception of his universal rule—­but no other emperor after him did so until the end of the ‘Old Empire’ in 1806. The imperial regalia, usually kept in Nuremberg—­ crown, sword, ­sceptre, orb, and holy lance—­were presented in annual displays of relics, ac­com­pan­ied by grants of indulgence. Furthermore, their presence at the act of cor­on­ation integrated each successive ruler of the empire in the salvation history. The empire was considered divinely ordained, and its connection with salvation history was also represented in the symbolic ceremonial acts of the imperial diet, such as the enfeoffments by the emperor.

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Fig. 5  The two-­headed Quaternion Eagle, an allegory of the empire, bears the coats of arms of the imperial states. Unlike other representations of the imperial eagle, this one by Hans Burgkmair the Elder (Augsburg 1510) includes the pope in the midst of the seven prince-­electors. Reprint by Nickel Nerlich, Leipzig, 1571.

In its political reality, however, the empire did not conduct itself as a monarchy. Although from 1438 the prince-­electors always selected a link in the generational chain of the Habsburg dynasty, the election of the emperor was usually the result of tough negotiations: the choice was based on the candidate’s grants and concessions, which were set down in written elect­ or­al capitulations. During the reign of Maximilian I (1493–1519), the rapid territorial expansion of the Habsburgs’ power—­mainly by means of the marriage alliances which united the Burgundian and Spanish monarchies in the person of Charles, and the Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian lines of succession in the person of his brother Ferdinand—­reinforced the leading imperial states in their self-­image as preservers of the empire’s traditions: they must tenaciously guard their rights and prevent the emperor from attaining absolute power. The reign of Emperor Maximilian saw an attempt at imperial reform (1495), which was to have consequences for the later processes of political regulation in the context of the Reformation. The elements of reform can also be

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seen as an attempt to condense the organization of the empire into something more like a centralized state. The successes and failures of the imperial reform provide insights into the structure of the empire. One major ob­ject­ ive of the reform was concerned with external and internal security. The ‘perpetual peace’ (Ewiger Landfriede) of 1495 put an end to the right of feud between individual states and persons; instead, the new Imperial Court of Justice (Reichskammergericht) was to ensure the rule of law, and in fact was, over time, a crucial factor in the elimination of feuds. The separation of this judicial institution from the emperor’s court and the assignment of jurisdiction to professional legal scholars encouraged the development of uniform legal principles throughout the empire based on scholastic Roman law; consequently, the judiciary functions of the estates declined in importance. The penal code of Charles V adopted at the diet of Regensburg in 1532, the Constitutio criminalis Carolina, established the first uniform criminal and procedural code for the whole empire based on Roman law. After the definitive division of the empire into two confessions by the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the Imperial Court of Justice played a crucial role in preserving peaceful coexistence between the religions and the integrity of the empire. The imperial diet, which represented the nation in the form of its ­ter­r i­tor­ial and regional rulers, became the most important instrument in regulating the estates’ participation in the government of the empire. The diets were convened by the emperor, who was also responsible for setting the agenda. The diet held hearings in three colleges, the College of Electors, the College of Princes, and the College of Cities, all of which excluded the emperor. The most important of the three was the College of Electors, whose agreement was required for the adoption of a resolution.The College of Princes was composed of the secular princes and counts and the clerical prelates, including the numerous imperial prince-­bishops. The clergy had a significant majority in this chamber, and its agreement was necessary for the passage of resolutions. The third college was composed of some sixty-­five imperial cities. The two princely colleges saw themselves as the deciding bodies and considered the cities’ function merely consultative: the vote of the third college was generally obtained only after the other two colleges had come to an agreement. The political influence of the burghers, who bore a significant fiscal burden, was therefore severely limited in comparison with that of the nobility and the high clergy. Resolutions of the imperial diet, published on the

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authority of the emperor in a recess at the end of each diet, required the agreement of the two princely colleges and the sovereign. In the absence of an executive branch, the enforcement of the diet’s resolutions was left to the individual estates of the realm. This political structure was one of the principal reasons why the Edict of Worms of 1521, which called for Luther and his followers to be apprehended and punished, remained ineffective in large parts of the empire. The imperial diets would become the most important political platform at which the protagonists of the Reformation were able to express their views and, in the end, prevail. The attempt to impose an imperial tax as part of the reform of the empire under Maximilian did not meet with resounding success. For one thing, the estates of the individual countries often had to be included in fiscal legislation, and for another, the estates of the empire felt that a tax levied directly by the empire itself amounted to a curtailment of their powers. With time, it became more customary for the individual estates of the empire to contribute to the funding of the imperial institutions, and then pass on the costs to their subjects.The attempt to institute a Reichsregiment—­something like a uniform imperial government, headed by the emperor and with the participation of the estates—­failed mainly because the empire itself had no ef­fect­ ive executive administration. In all, the imperial reform did achieve a certain modernization of the imperial institutions: it ensured the cohesion of the empire, and at the same time created flexible conflict-­management instruments of regulation and compensation which would prove themselves precisely in dealing with the problems raised by the Reformation. During the reign of Emperor Maximilian, tensions increased between the empire and the Roman curia. After the 1448 Concordat of Vienna, concluded between Emperor Frederick and the pope against the will of the estates, protests were raised, mainly by the German high clergy, in ‘catalogues of grievances of the German nation’ (gravamina nationis germanicae) against papal rights to grant benefices and church appointments, as well as against financial payments after such appointments. This did not stop the territorial rulers of the empire from seeking their own advantage in Rome, and pursuing appointments to their advantage in particular. In Germany as elsewhere, even before the Reformation, princes claimed a ‘summepiscopat’— seigniorial rights as the head of the church in their respective countries—­ thus integrating some abbots and bishops in their territorial religious policies.

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Emperor Maximilian used the Gravamina movement, which made itself heard at the imperial diets, to combat the material ‘draining’ of Germany by Rome. His example and standard was the French model of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, although in the second half of the fifteenth century the French crown had drawn closer to the pope. The diet of Augsburg in 1518 was an opportunity for Emperor Maximilian I to make arrangements for his grandson Charles’s election as his successor to the imperial throne. The Roman trial against the Augustinian monk from Wittenberg, Martin Luther, was discussed informally at the diet, and the Gravamina were employed to reject a levy by the pope to finance the war against the Turks. During the reign of Maximilian, who was involved in massive conflicts with the papacy especially over his Italian policy, the Gravamina were a crucial factor paving the way for widespread acceptance of the Reformation movement’s anti-­Roman polemics in Germany. The perceived ‘suffering’ of exploitation by Rome, which was out of proportion to the real burden of payments, was widespread in the society—­perhaps not least because of reflexive feelings of ‘German’ subjection by the ‘Romans’—and were easily activated by the Reformation movement, in particular by Luther’s 1520 treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. The ecclesiastical and political circumstances in Germany were thus very particular, and they were necessary conditions for the Reformation.

2.5.  Shared Spiritual and Clerical Cultures The ubiquity of danger, the daily experience of disease and death were a fundamental condition shaping the religious mentality of premodern Europe. Crises and disasters were often accompanied by fearful expectations of the Last Judgement. In principle, all Europeans shared the same basic environmental conditions: the constant threat of famine as a result of storms, crop failures, and climatic changes; low life expectancy because of natural disasters and epidemics, to say nothing of frequent wars. The statistical life expectancy of Europeans was about thirty years, and women’s was significantly lower than men’s. An estimated 10 per cent of all births were stillborn; 25 per cent of babies did not survive their first year; about half the children died before the age of six. The average fertility was six children per woman. By about 1500, Europe had more or less recovered from the sharp drops in population during the

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recurring plagues of the fourteenth century. The empire, including the Netherlands and Bohemia, was the most populous area in Europe, with some sixteen million inhabitants. The population of Italy is thought to have been about ten million, that of England four and a half million, and that of Spain about nine million. The European population grew continuously during the sixteenth century.The vast majority of Europeans—­about 90 per cent overall, with regional differences—­lived in rural areas. The societies of all the countries in Latin Europe were officially Christian, and thus had several elements of their religious life in common: the authority of the pope; the church calendar of feast and saints’ days organizing the year; pilgrimages; Latin as an obligatory language of learned communication, but also of religious communication in worship services; canon law, which divided Christians into clerics and laymen; the hierarchical and highly diverse institutional structure of archbishoprics and bishoprics, and churches maintained by endowments and colleges, orders and parishes. The triumph of the universities, which exerted a growing influence on the intellectual and administrative elites in church and state, had continued and accelerated in all European countries since the thirteenth century. A  characteristic of many of these institutions was the privileges granted them by the universal authorities, the emperor and the pope: these lent a general validity throughout Europe to the degrees awarded, encouraging the mobility of teachers and students within the European cultural area and contributing significantly to a culture of rational discourse. Seven new universities had been founded in Europe between 1378 and 1400, and forty-­one between 1400 and 1500. Around 1500, Europe had sixty universities which formed an important network of communication and knowledge and—­like the merchants, pilgrims, and mendicant monks—­ brought a high degree of mobility to the European societies. In their structure, many universities followed the faculty model of the University of Paris: the artistic or philosophical faculty provided a basic education in the septem artes liberales. The seven liberal arts consisted of the trivium of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Graduation in the seven liberal arts, with the degree of Baccalaureus or Magister artium, was the prerequisite for study in the three higher faculties of theology, medicine, and law. The most prominent and most effective ‘heretics’ of the late Middle Ages, JohnWycliffe in Oxford and Jan Hus in Prague, had been university t­ heologians. Eventually, every major territory in the empire had its own university, and

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Fig. 6  Hans Burgkmair the Elder, disputation between Christians, Jews, and heathens. This woodcut is the title page of Johannes Stamler’s Dialogus de diversarum gentium, sectis et mundi religionibus, Augsburg, 1508. It shows six persons debating which is the true religion. The ultimate winner is Christianity, the ‘One Holy Mother Church’ symbolized in the upper half of the image. A layman and representatives of Islam and Judaism provoke brilliant ripostes by the Christian theologians. In the end, the challengers want to be baptized.

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the Reformation began at one of them, the University of Wittenberg, founded by the Elector of Saxony in 1502. Non-­Christian religions were not tolerated in Latin Europe; Judaism was in some measure an exception. In the course of the late Middle Ages, in­toler­ance against the Jews increased, especially after the plague epidemics of the fourteenth century. They were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1394. Spain began a rigorous expulsion policy in 1492, and Portugal followed suit a few years later. These forced migrations increased the Jewish presence in Central Europe until the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when Jews were also expelled from German countries and cities: from Mecklenburg in 1492; from Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola in 1496; from Brandenburg in 1510. The imperial cities of Nuremberg, Reutlingen, Ulm, Strasbourg, Nördlingen, Colmar, and Regensburg had been purged of Jews by about 1500. The expelled Jews fled to Eastern Europe and to territories under Ottoman rule. Those Christians who took an interest in Judaism and Islam generally did so with the intention of proselytizing and demonstrating the superiority of Christianity.

Forms of Piety Admission to the Christian community took place throughout Europe by baptism, which was usually performed shortly after birth. The custom of naming children after the saint on whose feast day they were born or baptized was widespread throughout Europe up to the Reformation. It persisted in the Catholic countries, while the Protestants preferred biblical names. Integration in the redeeming sacramental church was ubiquitous, and the soul of every Christian in Latin Europe was in the care of the pastor of his parish.The seven Sacraments—­codified since the Council of Florence of 1439 as baptism, confirmation, matrimony, the Eucharist, penance, holy orders, and extreme unction—­lent a firm structure to day-­to-­day religious practice. After the Great Plague of 1348–9, all of Europe continued to be afflicted by frequent plague epidemics. Sermons on repentance hence commanded great attention all over the continent. Certain prominent mendicant friars, such as Bernardino of Siena and John of Capistrano, attained European popularity as itinerant repentance preachers, and acquired a reputation of sanctity.The same was true of the Dominican repentance preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who had a large and enthusiastic following—­before and after his

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condemnation as a heretic. Collections of sermons and all kinds of books on repentance were printed and read in great quantities. In the fifteenth century, certain new developments and religious trends arose throughout the territory of the Latin church. These included, for example, the ‘observance’ movement which permeated many monastic orders, and prompted numerous cloisters, especially among the mendicant orders, to follow their rules mores strictly. The fifteenth century saw a dramatic growth in church-­organized religious activity generally. In France, England, Italy, and Germany, a significant increase in numbers of clergy has been noted, corresponding with a general rise in endowments. Ecclesiastical building activity in Europe increased, especially during the second half of the fifteenth century. In France, more than 1,200 church buildings were built during this period; the number in Germany is probably similar. On the eve of the Reformation, more building was done for the church than ever before or since. It is by no means clear that ecclesiastical Christianity as a whole was in crisis, as some have claimed, pointing to popes of dubious morals or a few frivolous freethinkers among Italian humanists. On the contrary: people in general placed greater, and different, expectations on the church and its institutions than on all other contemporary forces of order in their lives. Occasional antagonism towards the clergy on the part of the lay population should not be overestimated as an indication of fundamental anticlericalism. Concrete hostility occurred mostly when the holders of clerical offices failed to fulfil reasonable expectations, by leading unchaste lives or by levying charges that were felt to be unfair, for example. The papacy too was held in high esteem by a broad segment of Latin European Christendom. Another element in the overall picture of a stable church around 1500 is the fact that there were few heretics left. Where they did appear, they stood for religious beliefs that later became popular in the Reformation, such as the layman’s Bible, the equality of priests and lay Christians, the orientation of the church’s form of life after its apostolic antecedents, the criticism of clerical luxury, the rejection of indulgence and ostentatious forms of piety. Some Waldensian groups had gone to Bohemia and Brandenburg in the fourteenth century, and formed close ties with the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century. Lombard Waldensian groups had survived in the Cottian Alps west of Turin, in Provence, and in Calabria, and had been persecuted again and again: the beginnings of the early modern witch hunts are his­tor­ ic­al­ly connected with the campaign against the Waldensians. The Romance

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Waldensians had close contacts with the Reformation beginning in the 1520s. The English Lollards, followers of John Wycliffe, had survived since the fourteenth century only in the underground, particularly in home groups. The fact they were still persecuted in the sixteenth century implies at least that there were still some of them in existence. Where scattered remains of heresy had survived in Europe, they acted as, or were later represented as, precursors of the Reformation. The confraternities—­spiritual communities of lay and clerical Christians, some of which were closely linked with guilds and consecrated to specific saints—­also had their heyday around 1500. Members prayed together for their deceased brothers and their families, and collectively organized li­tur­ gic­al funeral services that went beyond the means of individual families. Many people were members of several confraternities, multiplying their benefits and blessings. In the cities most of all, the religious ambitions of burghers increased continuously in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. One indication is the explosive growth in the production of vernacular religious literature in general. In Germany, fourteen Bibles in High German and four in Low German had been published by 1522, as well as a great number of plenary missals containing the Gospel and Epistle readings of the liturgical year. The high demand for the biblical Word in the vernacular, in spite of attempts by church authorities to restrict such access to scripture, was an important circumstance for the reception of the Reformation, in which Christianity’s oldest and most revered document played a central role. The townspeople were willing to pay to hear the Christian faith expounded in sermons. In many cities, the burghers established endowed preacherships and appointed learned men, often doctors of theology, to fill them.Their primary task was to provide rational orientation in the Christian faith to a bourgeois audience which was now intellectually demanding and no longer satisfied with the mere performance of the sacramental rituals. The burghers’ efforts were also aimed at attaining greater control over the ecclesiastical institutions within the city walls, raising the moral consciousness of the priests and integrating them legally in the civil structure, limiting mendicancy and relieving the church of responsibility for the welfare of the poor, minimizing the authority of bishops over the cities, establishing civil regulation of the financial investments in salvation, and exercising a significant influence in the appointment of urban pastors. For these reasons, the consensus in research is that an urban church governance existed before the

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Reformation. It is only logical that Reformation events of the 1520s included the implementation of decisions planned and taken in the pre-­Reformation era. A fundamental trait of many contemporary practices of piety was the aspect of accumulating, amassing, counting, and reckoning: the economics of salvation in the religious culture reflected the ethos of the early capitalist economy. More Masses were said for the salvation of souls; more processions in which the venerable sacrament was presented to the people’s eyes, prayers were offered for protection from harm, and fields and pastures blessed; more indulgences were granted to lessen the pain of Purgatory; more relics exhibited for public veneration, also granting indulgence; more pilgrimages made to the many regional sites of miracles newly discovered around 1500, and to the classic pilgrimage sites of Latin Europe, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Jerusalem; more prayers measurably said in the form of set penances; more saints and patrons distributed throughout Europe in the form of translations of relics, helping and protecting the faithful (with an increasing tendency towards specialization in the relief of all kinds of hardships); more portraits were exhibited for veneration, donated in great numbers and produced with great skill, likewise salutary in some way to those who prayed before them or touched them. This more was more clearly visible in the places where the contemporary culture was concentrated—­ the cities, courts, and palaces; the densely in­habit­ed areas of northern Italy, Burgundy, the Netherlands, southern and central Germany—­than in the rural and less inhabited regions of Europe. The functional principle of this quantifying was do ut des—‘I give so that You give’. The underlying logic that more devout action must result in more assurance of salvation was universally plausible. The scholastic the­ ology of the contemporary universities favoured a doctrine of grace in which Christians’ pious activity—­their ‘good works’—intermingled and interacted with divine and sacramental succour.The theological mainstream of the time naturally assumed that the individual played a part in the process of personal salvation or damnation by doing, or omitting to do, what human nature permitted ( facere quod in se est). Mary stood out among the helping saints, covering the complete spectrum of connotations and life projects, from the Queen of Heaven to the poor maid, from the birth-­g iving or grieving mother to the Madonna spreading her protective cloak, from the virtuous wife and dutiful daughter to the enthroned Mother of God, from the erotic beauty to the co-­Saviour. Although there was controversy and indeed struggle over the dogma that

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Mary’s own conception was immaculate and free of original sin, her mother and grandmother, St Anne and St Emerentia, were firmly anchored, alongside the ‘Holy Family’, as points of reference of the devout bourgeois sense of family in contemporary piety and art. The devout practice of the rosary, in which a string of beads was used to count prayer elements of Hail Mary and Our Father, was popular in all social classes around 1500, and was at bottom a part of Marian devotion. The cult of Christ at the time was no less colourful. It too covered almost the complete spectrum, from the Son of God seated in judgement to the suffering Son of Man, from the child in the manger to the man of sorrows, from the sacrificial Lamb of God to the teacher of virtue, from the mutilated martyr to the transfigured and resurrected Saviour. In the course of the fifteenth century, meditative contemplation of Christ’s suffering and death was widely practised, called the ‘imitation of Christ’ (imitatio Christi) in the title of a widely known book of edification by the Dutch priest Thomas a Kempis, which is associated with the pious movement of devotio moderna. Devotio moderna advocated a religious style that was in many respects at odds with the cumulative and externalizing devotional tendencies of the time. The members of the non-­ monastic community founded by the preacher Gerard Groote, the Brethren of the Common Life, sought to live communally in the humility of Jesus and in imitation of the original community of the Apostles, while at the same time probing the individual conscience, assimilating biblical topics through meditation and deeper religious readings. This individualizing model of piety, so to speak, was open to mys­ tic­al experiences, and became very popular particularly in the cities of the Netherlands, Flanders, northern and central Germany, Alsace, and the Rhineland. In the houses of the Brethren and the Sisters of the Common Life, the copying and typographical reproduction of vernacular religious writings, including the Bible, was a major activity. The religious education of lay people, which is documented particularly in urban areas around 1500, received significant assistance from devotio moderna. What was ‘modern’ about this devotional movement, whose influence extended to Luther and the great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, was that it marked a turn towards individual religious experience, promoted religious education for the lay population, de-­emphasized the relationship between clergy and laymen, and centred spirituality on Christ. The unpretentious, sober churchiness of the devotees and their distance from hier­ arch­ ic­ al clerical attitudes and outward ritualistic practices may have reinforced positions that continued to be influential in the Reformation.

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Fig. 7  The temptation of doubt—­the consolation of faith. Diptych from an ars moriendi, a book on the ‘art of dying’, produced about 1450/60. Eleven woodcuts contrast the distress of dying and sources of consolation—­here, the succour of Christ, Mary, the Apostles, and the Prophets. Temptations grow as death approaches, and the ailing in spirit needs concentrated solace.

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The literary genre of the ars moriendi illustrates a model of piety that is oriented towards the care and salvation of the individual soul. These devotional books, which were often richly illustrated, were intended to encourage a meditative contemplation of mortality with the goal of preparing the individual Christian for death. Meditation on the Passion of Christ was accorded particular importance, alongside the sacramental aids offered by the church—­the Eucharist and extreme unction.Through faith, the consolation of Christ’s resurrection was to be grasped and internalized in his suffering, as victory over the Devil was to be found in the cross. Literature of this kind in many respects approaches the patterns of piety that influenced or were encouraged by the Reformation. There are also bridges from the pluralistic culture of devotion around 1500 to the denominational cultures of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Diversity in Theology The theological landscape around 1500 was extraordinarily varied.Theology was practised in very different places, by a variety of literary and linguistic means. Scholastic theology in its ‘late’ and mature manifestations had its home at most of the sixty or so universities and in the libraries of the mendicant monastic orders, which were ubiquitous in Europe in the late fifteenth century. In addition, a mystical theology with links to Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart enjoyed a growing popularity, both within and without the abbey walls. Scholastic theology was expressed primarily in the form of Latin text and strictly regulated academic discourse, but mysticism favoured the vernacular and was disseminated to lay believers by preachers and the printing press. Attempts to bridge the gap between scholarly academic theology and everyday forms of devotion—­a ‘pastoral theology’ or ‘theology of piety’—were also an important theological phenomenon of the time. Counted among the most important proponents of this current is the Parisian theology professor Jean Gerson, who wrote both academic the­ ology and pastoral works with an emotional or affective appeal.These writings were directed primarily to the devout nobility and the arising urban bourgeoisie—­in other words, at laymen. Gerson wanted to furnish this audience with basic knowledge of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and certain rules of confession. In Germany around 1500, Johann von Staupitz and Johann von Paltz, Augustinian friars of the generation

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preceding Luther’s, were among the most important pastoral theologians. Paltz strove to reconcile the Augustinian doctrine of grace, which was important primarily in the Order of the Hermits of St Augustine, with the institution of indulgence. Staupitz centred his thinking on the pre­des­tin­ ation to salvation implied in Christ on the Cross. The radical theology of grace, which Augustine had developed in contradiction to the monastic theologian Pelagius’s emphasis on free will, was still current among Augustinians, and gaining favour again around 1500: a renaissance of St  Augustine is observable in the early sixteenth century. This trend was reflected in Luther’s appeal, in his early debate with opponents from the papal church, to the Augustinian Gregory of Rimini, proponent of a radical Augustinian theology of grace.10 Other scholastic teachers, such as the Nominalist Gabriel Biel of Tübingen for example, formed a counter-­current to the well-­received Augustinianism, insisting that the grace of God is interdependent and necessarily intermeshed with human beings’ endeavours to do what is humanly possible (facere quod in se est, literally ‘to do what is in one’). Epistemological dissonances with origins in the fourteenth century persisted in scholastic theology and philosophy around 1500, and have gone down in history as a ‘conflict between the viae’—that is, between an older, ‘Realistic’ doctrine, the via antiqua and a younger, ‘Nominalist’ or ‘Terminist’ one, the via moderna. The Realists—­ such as the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas and those following his tradition—­assumed that the mind’s universal concepts actually exist in the world, and that God is bound by an order in the world which is knowable by rational means.To the Nominalists—­ such as the prominent Franciscan William of Ockham—­concepts could not be taken to imply the existence of any underlying thing outside the human mind. The crucial task of cognition consists in analysing the concepts and the individual linguistic phenomenon. Nominalism therefore coincides with an interest in linguistic detail and precise observations of text.Although the disagreements between the schools had by no means been eliminated around 1500, there was a growing tendency to incorporate both ways in the same university. This was the case at the University of Wittenberg. In the Nominalist tradition, there was a greater gap between theology and philosophy, faith and knowledge than in the via antiqua. The task of theology, Ockham insisted, was essentially to interpret the revelation present in the Bible. The great Franciscan teacher ascribes particular importance to the absolute sovereignty of God (potentia dei absoluta). In that absolute freedom, however, God has ordained that the divine power (potentia ordinata)

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acts only justly and mercifully. Within the salvation history which God has ordained, God recognizes human merit. In Ockham’s theology, as well as in Biel’s, which Luther studied intensely, there was dramatic tension between the Augustinian dominance of grace and the emphasis on human works. The theology of Luther’s time had many answers to the questions that preoccupied him, but no unanimous solution. According to Ockham, the correct interpretation of scripture was not the prerogative of the hierarchical clergy crowned by the papacy, but of the church as the assembly of the faithful. A layman appealing to scripture could expound true doctrine against an assembly of clerics. On the relation between scripture and tradition, and on the question of the authority of one over the other, there was a broad spectrum of opinions in the theology and jurisprudence of the time. The learned English theologian John Wycliffe sought to make the Bible available to the laity in the vernacular and to reform the church of his day to resemble the early Christian community as portrayed in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. He took a sharply anti-­papal and anti-­hierarchical tone as early as the fourteenth century, which retained a subliminal presence in Central Europe through the ­theological mediation of Jan Hus and his followers and became prominent in the early Reformation. The same can be said of Wycliffe’s and Hus’s criticism of indulgence.

Indulgence In many respects, indulgence was the most characteristic and widespread element of late medieval devotion. The pope’s ability and authority to forgive the punishments of Purgatory, which mortals must otherwise suffer after death as penalty for their sins, was based on the doctrine of the the­ saurus ecclesiae, the ‘treasure of the church’: as the bearer of St Peter’s keys, the pope can avail himself of this treasure and distribute the merc­ies it contains by means of plenary indulgences. Such extraordinary papal plenary indulgences promulgated the complete forgiveness of sin and guilt, usually on the occasion of jubilees or in the course of special campaigns, such as pre­par­ ations for crusades against the Turks or the Russians, or sometimes against opponents within the Catholic church, and in support of church building projects. Smaller, less spectacular indulgences were almost always available in any church: since the fourth Lateran Council of 1215, prelates of the church could grant remission of forty days’ extended penance. Attendance at a

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major display of holy relics could bring with it an indulgence of millions of years. This practice was based on the residual influence of a reckoning system handed down from the early days of the institution of penance, in which certain sins were compensated for by precisely stipulated periods of acute penance. The place where penance was imposed was at confession, which every mature Christian must perform at least once a year. By adding up different indulgences, the individual believer could be forgiven his due terms of punishment and balance his account of sin and penance. Indulgence in this form was predicated on the institution of confession and penance, and mitigated its severity. Plenary indulgences were the exclusive prerogative of the pope and granted the complete remission of punishment for all sins (plena remissio peccatorum). One peculiarity of late medieval practice was that some indulgences not only completely remitted the imposed penance (poena) for sins, but also promulgated the complete forgiveness of guilt (culpa). This form of indulgence subverted and endangered the institution of penance, however, whose purpose was to make absolution from guilt dependent on oral confession (confessio oris) and compensatory works of penitence (satisfactio operis). The original function of indulgence was only to grant dispensation from penance. The impression that plenary indulgences forgave ‘sin and punishment’ threatened to make them a kind of special, papal sacrament which would undermine the whole structure of the sacramental church. Because there was no binding doctrinal decision on the powers and limitations of indulgence, it seems clear that the practice took on a significant momentum of its own. In addition to the inflation of plenary indulgences in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, another innovation marked a historic turn in indulgence practice: the ad instar indulgence. This type of indulgence transferred the graces granted at certain holy sites, such as certain churches in Rome or the Portiuncula Chapel in Assisi, to other places. Thus the blessing of Assisi came, by a papal dispensation, to the Castle Church of Wittenberg on a certain feast day. In specially designed campaigns developed by the French cardinal Raymond Peraudi and initiated mainly north of the Alps—­in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia—­the indulgence that was obtainable in a jubilee year was transferred to any place in the Occident. In their perfected form, which became customary in the early sixteenth century, letters of indulgence provided not only complete forgiveness of sins on the spot, but

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also ensured the same absolution, regardless of pastoral care, in the hour of death, or as often as necessary. As a result, of course, the letter of indulgence became an instrument that made penance, repentance, and moral betterment practically superfluous. The acquisition of a letter of indulgence was generally contingent upon a financial donation which was commensurate with the social status of the beneficiary. Not all and often not even half of the revenues of the campaigns were forwarded to Rome. Thus we should not overestimate the proportion of the overall budget of the papacy which was financed by the sale of indulgences. Usually, various secular authorities shared in the revenues and, in the case of the Crusade indulgences in particular, used the income to finance military operations. One of the most important innovations in the practice of indulgences was the introduction of indulgences for the dead. These granted a donor’s dear departed immediate release from Purgatory.The motto ‘When the coin in the coffer rings, the saved soul into Heaven springs’ (Wenn das Geld im Kasten klingt, die Seele in den Himmel springt), later attributed to the hucksterish indulgence preacher Johannes Tetzel, described the theological implication of a widespread indulgence practice. The inflationary dissemination of plenary indulgences from the fifteenth century on seems to have led gradually to declining sales: the documented revenues, in any case—­mainly in Germany—­decrease with the approaching year 1517, which marks the beginning of Luther’s public criticism of indulgence. Exactly how widely accepted indulgence was among theologians and churchmen around 1500 cannot be determined. The popes’ practice of cancelling the plenary indulgences of their predecessors in order to make their own more desirable—­and indeed the monetization of the soul’s salvation per se—­must have been repulsive to some. Supposing that there was a smouldering discontent with the excesses of indulgence makes it easier to understand the great response which Luther’s critique evoked.

2.6.  Cultural Awakenings The Print Revolution We have mentioned in passing the printing press with movable type. This epoch-­making invention, associated with the work of Johannes Gensfleisch

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of Mainz, also known as Gutenberg, had cultural consequences without which the Reformation, and indeed the development of modern Europe, would not have been conceivable. By a tedious process of trial and error, Gutenberg succeeded in developing a method that combined existing techniques: relief printing with matrices, which had been used to print cloth and book covers; casting, which was common in making bells; engraving techniques of goldsmithing; the presses used in winemaking and since the late fourteenth century in German paper mills for an even distribution of force. The essence of Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention consisted in breaking down text into its smallest units, the twenty-­six letters of the Latin alphabet, and then recombining reusable letters to compose words and texts as desired. The use of a long-­lasting material, preferably lead, ensured a long useful life of the cast type. Gutenberg’s objective was to reproduce complex book manuscripts in an appealing, easily readable form and in many copies. In the design of his printed books, he largely followed the aesthetics of handwritten codices and the experience gained in their production: consequently, the more costly and durable parchment continued to be used, alongside paper, as a print substrate. After the text was printed, illuminators, illustrators, and cal­lig­raph­ ers embellished individual copies, serving buyers’ preferences. The potential of printing with movable type became apparent only in the decades that followed, as did the social consequences of Gutenberg’s invention, which extended far beyond his horizons. Gutenberg’s book production began in the early 1450s. By about 1500, there were more than a thousand printers in over 150 cities throughout Europe, and they had produced some thirty thousand distinct titles in about nine million copies.There were probably more books made in the five decades of the Gutenberg era than in the entire preceding millennium in all the abbey scriptoria of the Latin Middle Ages. The rapid spread of the new technology, reaching printers and publishers in Germany and Italy within Gutenberg’s lifetime—­ in Bamberg, Strasbourg, Cologne, Subiaco near Rome, and Venice—­was welcomed euphorically by those of his con­tem­por­ ar­ies whose lives were devoted to books. Church and state agencies and members of educational institutions, especially the Latin schools and the universities, were quick to make use of the new technology. Initially, the chief motivation was the desire to provide and distribute venerable and sacred texts, especially the Latin Bible—­the first printed book in Europe. Other early printed books included classics such as the Institutes

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of Justinian, the Corpus iuris civilis (one of the most important sources of ancient Roman law, printed in some two hundred editions by 1500), the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the great summæ of theological doctrine. Smaller and commercial works were another important source of income, and helped to cushion the economic risks of major printing projects. Even Gutenberg himself printed calendars, Latin school grammars, pamphlets against the Turks—­who had drawn perilously near since the conquest of Constantinople in 1453—broadsides on all kinds of current issues and, most of all, letters of indulgence. As part of one indulgence campaign for a crusade against the Turks, 190,000 letters of indulgence are thought to have been printed, some of them on precious parchment. The spread of typographical infrastructure resulting from the booming sales of indulgences in the late fifteenth century created a communication network connecting distant places in Europe, which was an important condition for the dynamics of communication in the early Reformation. The specific constellation of the Ottoman threat, the flourishing indulgence business, and the invention of the printing press were the conditions for the start of Europe’s path to the modern era.There may be a connection between the falling revenues of the indulgence campaigns and a certain decline in the printing industry around 1500: this circumstance may have favoured the printers’ willingness, indeed eagerness, to turn to the new tasks and new business prospects presented by the Reformation. It would be hard to exaggerate the long-­term consequences of the printing press. In contrast to the manuscript era, in which an unknown number of classical and medieval texts were lost, the printing press has been able to preserve and to disseminate a heritage of gigantic importance for the history of humanity. It brought forth and maintained intellectual traditions that were by no means free of conflicts with Latin Christianity under the guidance of the Roman popes. Everything that has been printed since printing began has remained, in one way or another, in the world. The diversity of intellectual currents, which promoted and necessitated productive controversy, is a result of the fact that printed knowledge could not be per­man­ ent­ly or completely restricted: the history of premodern censorship is, overall, a history of failure.

The Humanists’ Mobility A group of protagonists who had a crucial influence on book production were the humanists. Since the fourteenth century, a movement had been

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forming in Italy which spread quickly in Europe and contributed to the increasing importance of classical models and ideals. In that regard, the humanists also made a crucial contribution to Europe’s cultural integration: in the fine arts and literature, in rhetoric—­which gained in value—­and in the classical languages. The starting point of humanism and the ‘rebirth’ of classical antiquity, the Renaissance, was Italy. From the fourteenth century, artists and writers appeared in the peninsula who chose classical works of art as the elusive model for their own efforts, who received the literary qualities of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and also Augustine as a challenge and a stimulus, who developed a new kind of sensitivity for the modelled form, and who placed themselves—­the receptive subject, humanity itself—­at the centre of their studies. At the universities, the artists—­the representatives of the seven liberal arts—­were gradually able to resist the traditional dominance of the higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine, and strengthen the studia humaniora, that is, the subjects that are particularly concerned with humanness.The rise of the cities and the prospering economy created the social and financial conditions for an unprecedented cultural upsurge. Religious art too, with the double support of clerical and secular patrons, attained a pinnacle never equalled since then. Renaissance humanism was accompanied by a curiosity about foreign and past cultures that also enlivened the inventions and discoveries of the time. The development of the heliocentric model of the universe by the Polish astronomer and church functionary Nicolas Copernicus, whose revo­lu­tion­ary consequences only very gradually became apparent, was the result of his study of the ancient authorities, empirical observations, and his own experience. The fine arts began to focus on the human creature; the saints and biblical figures were ‘humanized’. The humanists’ interest in history and philology favoured many classical authors, and inflamed a passionate search for new and unknown texts. Thanks to the printing press, many of the discoveries that the humanists made, primarily in the libraries of Europe’s monasteries, were widely disseminated. Some of the foreign texts and ways of thinking that came into circulation in this way were critical of Christianity. Although many humanists were unquestioningly attached to the Christian faith, the long-­ term consequences of the movement certainly encouraged the diversification and plur­al­iza­tion of religious culture. Philosophical traditions were now ac­cess­ible which were difficult to reconcile with Christianity, or received as en­ticing

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alternatives. Hermetic, cabbalistic, cynic, Pythagorean, atomistic, and other philosophical traditions of antiquity were printed for the first time; newly discovered texts by known and canonical authors such as Plato and Aristotle, who gradually began to be studied in the original Greek, stimulated thought as well as some doubts as to Christianity’s claim to ul­tim­ate truth. The contemporary ethos was deeply affected by classical models of virtue and pagan heroics. Many humanists found it natural to revere Socrates alongside Christ, Cicero alongside St Paul, Virgil alongside St Augustine. Theologians educated in the humanist tradition felt a duty to think about how and whether the noble pagans could find salvation, never having known the path of the Christian church. Among the Italian humanists were a number of freethinkers and agnostics who took an aloof if not hostile position towards Christianity and its ecclesiastical representatives, whether or not they were in the service of the church. The humanists’ motto ad fontes!—‘back to the sources!’—expressed not only an appreciation of the surviving classical languages and works, resulting in an immense boom in the knowledge of ancient languages, but also brought with it the first historical critiques, which relativized claims to authority and canonicity. Newly discovered sources such as Tacitus’ Germania inspired a bourgeoning national feeling: the German humanists took the noble Teutons as positive models against the supposed superficiality and slyness of the Romance peoples, the Italians and the French.Vernacular literature in various European countries also underwent an upsurge under the influence of humanism. The humanists north of the Alps made particular efforts to revitalize Christianity through classical antiquity. The most important protagonist of this ‘biblical’ or patristic humanism was the Dutch theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was fond of portraying himself as a quiet scholar in the pictorial tradition of St Jerome in his study. He more than anyone strove to reform Christianity in the spirit of its oldest sources. As the editor of numerous Greek and Latin Church Fathers—­St Jerome (1516), St Cyprian (1520), St Arnobius (1522), St Hilary (1523), St John Chrysostom (1525–33), St Irenaeus (1526), St Ambrose (1527), and St Augustine (1528/9)—whose first editions were published by the leading printer of Basel, Johannes Froben, Erasmus had a profound influence on the theology of his time. As the author of edifying works advocating a devout pattern of life and imitation of Christ, and deeply sceptical towards outward religious practices such as pilgrimages, veneration of the saints, and indulgences, Erasmus

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Fig. 8  Sandro Botticelli, Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist, oil and tempera on wood, 1470. Among the great Florentine artists of the age, Botticelli is the master of the human body’s harmonious beauty.

influenced the generation of the Reformers. By publishing the first New Testament in the Greek original with his own Latin translation, and vehemently advocating the dissemination of the Bible in vernacular translations, he helped significantly to relativize the importance of the Latin version then considered authoritative, the Vulgate, and to make possible a novel, immediate encounter with scripture in its original form. The consequences went far beyond what Erasmus had intended. His later disavowal of the Reformation movement was an opposition to developments that he himself had helped to bring about. The humanists were an agile, curious, vocal community. Wherever they put down roots—­at princely courts, in urban administration, in publishing houses and universities, all over Europe—­they worked on promoting

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intellectual communication. They were the most intellectually mobile of their time, quick to assimilate and pass on scholarly communications. Because they generally corresponded with their peers in Latin, they were not limited by language barriers. They were also the first to find out about the events concerning the Augustinian monk Martin Luther of Wittenberg, and to distribute his writings.

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3 The Early Reformation in the Empire, 1517–30 3.1.  Thirteen Turbulent Years

T

he outbreak of the conflict over indulgences in autumn of 1517 was the beginning of the specific sequence of events which led to Luther’s Roman trial, his excommunication, the European reception of his writings and those of his early partisans, the formation of a reform movement, the pol­it­ical support of various secular authorities, and the isolated regional, ter­ ri­tor­ial, or local reform of the existing Latin European church—­the events which led, in a word, to the Reformation. The fact that these changes were dependent on certain conditions, prerequisites, and constellations for their success does not mean that the Reformation followed predictably or neces­ sarily from its historic antecedents. The issue which set it off, however, was not a mere coincidence. In the matter of indulgences, conflicting funda­ mental questions of theology and ritual issues collided and overlapped with issues of publication and socio-­economic and political interests. Hence it followed from the inherent logic of the early modern society that this and not some other issue of ecclesiastical life became a conflict of unprece­ dented momentum in the history of the church and Christianity. The 1530 imperial diet of Augsburg and the confession of faith pro­ claimed there, the Confessio Augustana, was an important turning point in the history of the Reformation.This assembly, the highest political forum of the Old Empire, made it unmistakably clear that the unity of the Latin European church was finally—­and, judging in historical retrospect, we may add: definitively—­broken. At the same time, with the diet of Augsburg, if  not before, the question of religion became a dominant political issue. Although it was the theologians who drafted the Confession, its presentation,

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signing, and public defence was a matter for the politicians—­that is, the ­territorial princes who proclaimed it. The Confessio Augustana was the for­ mulation of an ‘evangelical’ doctrine in the world which was to serve as the decisive doctrinal standard defining the theological position permitted in the empire, at first temporarily and then, from 1555 on, permanently, for followers of the Reformation. In addition to its significance in the Holy Roman Empire, the Confessio Augustana was also a highly influential document on a European scale: its promulgation made the Reformation politically irreversible. The crucial processes of differentiation within the emerging Reformation camp took place during the decade from Luther’s break with the papacy in 1520 to the Augsburg diet of 1530.The differences concerned, for one thing, the question who had a right to undertake ecclesiastical changes: the ­congregation of a given place or parish, individual groups within that con­ gregation, or the political authorities—­that is, the magistrates of a city, the nobles, or the territorial rulers? In the course of this decade, the scales tipped increasingly towards a process of reformation under authoritarian control. The Peasants’ War of 1524/5, which profoundly affected large parts of southern and central Germany, had an indirect but nonetheless decisive influence in that shift. Those persons and groups who were not willing to adapt to the tendency towards an authoritarian or ‘magisterial’ Reformation were marginalized—­although many of them adhered to concepts which were the same as, or similar to, those advocated by Luther himself in the early 1520s. Historical research assigns most of them to the multifaceted ‘radical Reformation’ or situates them in the ‘left wing’ of the reform movement. The decision in favour of the authoritarian reformations meant that the dominant organizational structure of Christianity remained ‘one church for all’, that is, a church which included all the members of a local community—­ except the Jews. Every person was a member from birth, automatically and unasked, admitted at baptism; the magisterial Reformation did not bring with it any lasting religious choices for ordinary Christians. At the time of the Augsburg diet, most of the decisions in this regard had already been made.A second process of differentiation, one which is connected in many ways with the first, concerned theological doctrine. Among those who favoured an authoritarian Reformation, an irreconcilable conflict arose in regard to the understanding of the Eucharist. The core issue concerned the question of the relation between the elements of the Eucharist—­the bread and wine—­with the body and blood of Christ, with which they were

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i­dentified by the words of institution (Matthew 26:26–8 par.). Differences in Bible hermeneutics also played a part in this debate, especially between the southern German and Swiss reformers who were strongly influenced by humanism—­first and foremost Huldrych Zwingli—­and the partisans of Martin Luther. The question of the Eucharist was a point of crystallization for exegetical, liturgical, ecclesiological, and Christological issues. At the same time, the importance which the controversy over the Eucharist took on reflected the central role in pre-­Reformation church devotion held by the Mass, that is, the bloodless repetition of Christ’s self-­sacrifice on the Cross in and through the priest’s action. Because the disputing parties agreed that, Roman Catholic tradition notwithstanding, ‘scripture alone’ was the sole criterion of doctri­ nal truth, the controversy over the interpretation of scripture shed light on the limits of the scriptural principle. This context explains how the controversy over the Eucharist was able to develop such force in the early Reformation (1524–9) that it irreparably fragmented the unity of the Reformation movement. ­At the Augsburg diet it could no longer be overlooked that the break between Zurich and Wittenberg, between Zwingli and Luther—­or, as it would later be called, between ‘Reformed churches’ and ‘Lutherans’—was irreconcilable. None of the later processes of differentiation and division within the ‘Evangelical’ or ‘Protestant’ Christian groups (to use a term propagated as a positive self-­ designation from the eighteenth century on) that issued from the ‘magiste­ rial’ Reformation ever matched or exceeded this early schism. Not until the Leuenberg Concord adopted in 1973 by all the major Protestant churches in Europe would the two large groupings definitively overcome their deep-­ seated mutual rejection. In the brief phase between the onset of Luther’s criticism of indulgences and the imperial diet of Augsburg’s proclamation on religion, pillars of the existing order were rapidly overturned: the Reformation definitively sep­ar­ ated from the papal church; it divided into two magisterial and confessional main currents of Reformation Christianity; the magisterial, ecclesiastical traditions of Christianity separated from the ‘sectarian’ Anabaptist movements, defined on the basis of voluntary, communal faith; the existing church organization increasingly shifted towards governance under the auspices of urban magistracies or territorial regimes. These few years, in which, Luther felt, ‘almost a new epoch arose’,1 must therefore be accounted for as a separate unit with its own historical value.

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3.2.  Martin Luther: A Portrait The history of the Reformation cannot be recounted without the person of Martin Luther. His importance goes beyond the controversy over indul­ gences that he unleashed to include a number of crucial developments. The ways in which Luther used what freedom he had shaped the subsequent course of history. Even in regard to his trial in Rome, it is clear that if Luther had availed himself of the opportunity to recant, he would not have been declared a heretic and the resulting schism of the Latin church would not have occurred. The same can be said of his reaction to dissent within the Reformation: if Luther had sought or accepted a compromise with his Wittenberg colleague Karlstadt, and later with Zwingli and others, the denominational division of the Protestant camp and the separation of the ‘spiritualists’, Anabaptists, and sectarians would not have occurred. Without Luther’s decision to translate the Bible into German, the history of the Reformation in Europe would have taken a different shape. If Luther had not opposed the tol5erance of Jewish life in Protestant territories towards the end of his life, relations between Judaism and the Reformation or Protestantism might have taken a different course in the long term. Because of the incomparable authority that Luther had, both during his lifetime and after his death, he became a key figure, indeed the central figure, of the Reformation. A number of remarkable personal qualities and idiosyncrasies of Luther occur in specific historic situations, and thus should not be misunderstood as representing an atemporal psychology. Any attempt to explain Luther’s actions as the result of psychopathological dispositions is subject to narrow methodological limits. Luther was deeply involved in the mentality and world view of his time: he assumed the existence of demons, witches, and magicians, feared the devil, and was haunted by a deep, self-­tormenting consciousness of sin; he ‘knew’ that paranormal phenomena existed, not least because they were documented in the Bible. In relation to the beliefs in miracles which were common in his day—­in Eucharistic hosts that bled and objects that had magical powers—­ Luther’s conception of faith as orient­ed to the biblical text was able to furnish him with a critical standard. To him, it went without saying that God and his word could work through all sorts of intermediate effects in the world.

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Once Luther had arrived at certain convictions and beliefs, he advocated them with all the means at his disposal, accepting all the consequences. In that regard, he is a classic objector of conscience. His most important tool was language: he mastered an extraordinarily broad range of expression, from sensitivity to harshness, from empathy to pugnacity, in German most of all, but also in Latin. He was sweetly solicitous, urgently consoling, espe­ cially as a preacher and a letter-­writer—­and he was extremely aggressive and repellent. His polemics were often immoderate; when he was really opposed to someone or something, he acted with fierce acrimony. In his relations with the papal church, he had no trace of aloof objectivity; his bit­ terness may have had its roots in the fervent love with which he had devoted himself to that church as a monk and priest. After his break with Rome in the summer of 1520, if not before, Luther saw himself as an interpreter of holy scripture with a divine calling, a ‘prophet’. His academic profession, which he exercised from 1512 to his death on 18 February 1546, was devoted to the exegesis of the Bible. The Bible was his window on the world; it was his textbook of rhetoric and writing; St Paul served as the model for his own work, interpretation, and judgement. During the early controversies, from about 1517 or 1518 on, Luther gradually began writing freely; his stylistic mastery grew steadily, reaching its qualitative and quantitative peak in the early 1520s. His publica­ tions were often strategic and efficient: he knew exactly what he needed to do to expose or silence certain opponents. The horizons of Luther’s perception were crucially shaped by his under­ standing of Christianity and the Bible. He was not interested in, or ig­nor­ ant­ly rejected, what he did not find there, or what he found contradicted there—­whether it was Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the cosmos, con­tem­por­ary discoveries in science or geography, or unknown wares and luxury goods from far-­off countries. Where he did take notice of new knowledge, he did so in relation to the examples and lessons it could offer a Christian. He remained anchored in the conventional organization of society in estates, which he considered to be that ordained by God. To Luther, obedience to secular authorities was a divine commandment; he abhorred cowardliness of all kinds. In his own behaviour, he sometimes overstepped the bounds of his estate: as a monk, he married a nun, Katharina von Bora; as a reformer, he criticized authorities where he deemed they exceeded their powers; as a Christian, he granted asylum to the persecuted

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and the condemned; as a church leader, he performed acts of investiture with no other empowerment than his own authority and his doctorate. When Luther hated, he could act as pursuer, prosecutor, and informer. As he grew older, the fear of his wrath grew stronger in Wittenberg, shielding him from unpleasant news that those around him thought would arouse his displeasure. He allowed himself to be importuned by all kinds of petitioners, and pleaded their claims before superiors; he kept an open house and received people of all estates. Luther spent much of his time working; he wrote whenever he could. He collaborated very closely and conscientiously on certain literary tasks, such as the revision of the Bible, with some of his colleagues at Wittenberg. In communications among friends and in personal retrospection, he was able to admit his limitations and weaknesses without detriment to his undis­ puted leadership in the Wittenberg group of reformers. Towards opponents, however, he was often haughty and distressingly self-­assured. Luther was on the whole a gregarious person, apparently with the excep­ tion of certain phases in his early monastic life; he sought contacts with others; he invited others to his home. He was not made for solitude. The Reformer became a family man; he used the house he lived in—­the Augustinian monastery—­for many kinds of meetings and for hospitality. He took responsibility for the care of his ageing parents, and maintained contacts with his siblings and their families all his life. He was lovingly devoted to his wife and sought to ensure that she would be financially inde­ pendent after his death. He was ardent in his role as father to his six children. Luther was largely carefree in dealing with material possessions; he was not motivated by acquisitiveness; in this regard, he remained a monk. He did not mind that others, such as publishers, earned a great deal by him, although he did try to ensure some semblance of fair distribution among the Wittenberg printers; furthermore, the dissemination of his Bible took priority over all his other publishing interests. Luther was most widely known in Germany and in Europe in the early 1520s, his pre-­denominational period, so to speak; his later influence was mainly concentrated in those territories and states that were becoming ‘Lutheran’. There, though, the breadth of his literary works exceeded that of all other Lutheran theologians: he was a catechist and a hymn lyricist, a preacher and a homilist, a Bible translator, an author of literary consolations and of polemics. Consequently, Luther’s works met with considerable demand even during his lifetime. The unprecedented enthusiasm that he inspired

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between 1519 and the beginning of the Peasants’ War formed the basis for all that followed. The powerfully eloquent heretic Luther was fascinating primarily for what he ‘did’—in other words, for his speech acts.

3.3.  The Drop-­Out: A Young Augustinian Monk Nothing in Luther’s early life suggests that he was destined to become famous, much less an important figure in world history. Nor did the newly founded University of Wittenberg, which Luther himself situated ‘at the edge of civilization’ (in termino civilitatis)2 seem pre­ disposed to attract special attention; thus it is no wonder that partisans of Luther drew a parallel between this marginal site of the ‘rebirth of the Gospel’ and the remote birthplace of Christ, Bethlehem.3 It would appear unproductive, therefore, to view Luther’s later influence in close connection with his early biography. Luther was born the son of Hans Luder, a farmer’s son who had risen from a hewer to the owner of a small mining business, and his wife Margarethe, née Lindemann, whose roots were in the urban bourgeoisie of Thuringia. Nothing in Luther’s family background marked him for the career of a religious reformer. That career was the result of the very specific historic constellation of the late 1510s and the early 1520s in Germany: it is doubtful whether Luther would have had a similar success if he had come along a little earlier or a little later.

Secular Career Plans There is every reason to believe that Luther’s family environment was well within the boundaries of traditional church devotion. The fact that he gave his mother a pamphlet by Staupitz with a personal dedication4 in early 1518 shows that she was literate and suggests that she was receptive to devotional literature. An affinity for higher education, the most important prerequisite for Luther’s theological career, is documented especially in his mother’s side of the family. Baptized on 11 November 1483, the feast day of St Martin of Tours, Martin later called himself Luther in an elegant Hellenic spelling (after the Greek eleutheria, ‘freedom’), at least from the beginning of the dispute on indulgences. After primary schooling in Mansfeld, Luther was enrolled in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life in Magdeburg in 1497. Acquaintances from his school days, which may have been refreshed

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during visits to the city while Luther was vicar provincial of his order (1515–18), would pave the way for the Reformation in Magdeburg in the early 1520s.5 Between 1498 and 1501, Luther attended the Latin school of St George’s in Eisenach. An anachronistic legend—­still propagated by an inscription at the site—­holds that Luther was influenced at this time by the Franciscan friar Johannes Hilten, who was imprisoned in Eisenach and is said to have prophesied that the papacy would be overthrown through the work of a monk arising in 1516. In fact, we know that Luther never met Hilten during his school days, and that he first learned of Hilten’s prophecies, which also included the prediction of Christianity’s downfall at the hands of the Ottomans, in 1529.6 In his school days in Eisenach, Luther also made the acquaintance of the priest Johannes Braun, his earliest known connection with a churchman. He later continued to correspond with Braun, and held him in high esteem. In the choir of St George’s, Luther also acquired the thorough know­ ledge of music and liturgy which he would later put to such skilful use. It made sense geographically for Luther to go from Eisenach to Erfurt to study, and it also allowed him to keep in constant touch with his parents and extended family. The basic programme of study that Luther completed in January of 1505 with the degree of liberalium artium magister was still thor­ oughly oriented after Aristotle’s major works on logic, ethics, politics, eco­ nomics, rhetoric, and natural philosophy. At that time, scholarship at the University of Erfurt was dominated by the ‘younger’ philosophical current of nominalism (the via moderna), in contrast to the realist doctrine (or via antiqua), which was based on the objective reality of universals. Luther’s later interest in particulars, including particular linguistic phenomena, may have been substantially influenced by the anti-­speculative, empirically oriented character of his philosophical training at Erfurt. In Erfurt, Luther came into contact with the humanistic tendencies of the time. It was during his studies that he made the acquaintance of the man of letters and later rector of the University of Erfurt (1520/1) Crotus Rubeanus, who was a member of the humanistic circle centred on the poet Mutianus Rufus and corresponded with Ulrich von Hutten. A recently discovered note by Luther, possibly the earliest authentic docu­ment in his handwriting, is in a book containing a poem by the Italian Baptista Mantuanus, a poet revered by many humanists, and attests to the fact that Luther was preoccupied even then by the question of the concep­ tion of faith (fides).

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It seems that Luther’s performance and ambition developed well during his studies: after passing the baccalaureate exam in autumn of 1502, after three semesters, as the thirtieth of fifty-­seven candidates, in January 1505 he was the second best of seventeen who sat the magister exam. The rising achievement curve of the rapidly progressing, apparently industrious stu­ dent made good his parents’ expectations and investments, and seems to have given rise to further hopes for advancement. In the summer semester of 1505, Martin began studying law, which he had initially felt to be foreign to him, probably as the next step in a long-­term parental career plan. During that summer semester, the 21-­year-­old magister, whose father respectfully addressed him as ‘Ihr’ (after Martin’s conversion to monasticism, he would go back to the familiar ‘Du’),7 returned to his home town of Mansfeld. The reasons for this not entirely customary visit home are not known. Perhaps the trip was occasioned by Luther’s father’s attempt to free him from the ‘hot youth’ in which he was clad (fervente . . . adolescentia indutus) by the hobble of an ‘honorable and wealthy marriage’ (vincire honesto et ­opulento coniugio).8 It is also possible that the son’s intention of becoming a monk was already the subject of a dispute with his father.This would at least explain why Luther wrote, in a retrospective letter to his father of 1521, that he had become a monk ‘against your will’ (invito),9 and reported that friends of his parents’ had pleaded with his father to agree to ‘offer’ his beloved son to God. We may assume that Martin Luther had been thinking about his salvation and about the possibility of entering a monastery for some time before he experienced a lightning strike perilously close to him on 2 July 1505, near Stotternheim. This may help us to understand his radical reaction to the terrifying natural event: the conversion to monasticism. It also lends greater plausibility to Luther’s father’s opposition: his son was reacting, not to a menacing and demanding God, but to a ‘phantom’,10 a ‘phantasm’ (praestigium) or an ‘illusion’ (illusio).11 Martin was probably using the experience of the force of nature, which doubtless had agitated him, as a pretext for his deci­ sion to enter the cloister of the Hermits of St Augustine in his university town of Erfurt before his family and fellow students. He referred to a vow which he had allegedly made in the moment of the fear of death: ‘Help thou, St Anne, and I will become a monk.’12 Thus the monastic option may have been furthered rather than engendered by the lighting strike. Yet this vow made in extreme circumstances would not have been ­binding at all, and could easily have been nullified—­by a letter of indulgence, for example. The fact that Luther kept the vow suggests that he was persistently

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Fig. 9  Marginal note in an edition of Baptista Mantuanus’s Carmen in agonem divae Margaritae (Erfurt, Wolfgang Shenck, 1505). Ulrich Bubenheimer has attributed the handwriting to Luther. The volume was in the possession of Luther’s fellow Augustinian Johannes Lang. Luther commented beside the sixth line of the page shown: ‘Justus Ex fide vivit’. This gloss, which refers to Habakkuk 2:4 and Romans 1:17 and probably dates from about 1508, deserves particular attention because Luther, in later reflections on his life, ascribed a prominent role in his road to the Reformation to the understanding of Romans 1:17. The glossed text, by the Mantuan Carmelite who was hailed by contemporaries as a new Virgil, deals with the martyrdom of St Margaret.

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pursuing a path to monasticism, rejecting any ‘discounting’ of the dictates of his religious conscience. The act of God which he experienced, ‘the terror and the agony of sudden death’ (terrore et agone mortis subitae),13 evidently confronted him with the fact that his sinful existence was in danger, and he must be prepared for eternal damnation. His response could only be the complete repudiation of his life up to then. On entering the particularly strict mendicant order of the Hermits of St Augustine, the young Luther struck out on a life path that was autonomous, determined by his own fears and longings for salvation against the goals and plans of his family—­a path of high principles and great sacrifice, but one with a sure promise of eternal life. Thus his first autonomous decision amounted to removing himself from his own or his parents’ disposition and placing himself in God’s hands—­or rather in those of a monastic order which commanded obedience. Luther apparently wanted, in this delicate phase of his life, someone else to dispose and decide for him. This self-­sacrifice in the service of God, the church, the Order, may have been all the easier for Luther in the summer of 1505 since he was escaping his previous life and with it his father’s ‘indignation’, which ‘was for a time implacable’ (indignatio . . . aliquamdiu implacabilis).14 In that regard, Luther—­ like many monks before and after him—­was a drop-­out. Although the religious conventions of the time obliged Luther’s father outwardly to acquiesce, his persistent expressions of scepticism may have engendered faint or perhaps distinct doubts in Luther’s own mind about the correctness of his decision.The zeal with which Luther led his monastic life was his attempt to subdue his father’s, and probably his own, second thoughts and spiritual crises. As a monk, Luther seems in retrospect to have had something strained, zealous, about him. Certainly his mostly negative retrospections on his time in the monastery should be read critically. Nonetheless, Brother Martinus’s irreproachable accommodation to the strict expectations and standards of piety of the Erfurt monastery, which was aligned with the Observant con­ gregation, can hardly be interpreted as an expression of an inner content­ ment in the ‘sure path’ of monasticism. Luther remained a restless seeker, unhappy, driven, continuing to overexert himself.

The Zealous Monk After a one-­year novitiate spent in strict enclosure and devoted to self-­ examination and familiarization with the organization of monastic life, the

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liturgy, and the Bible, Luther professed the lifelong vows of the Order, after which he was instructed by the prior of the Erfurt monastery to prepare for the priesthood. Luther began an intensive study of the Mass, the central liturgical act of the priestly life, using the exposition of the canon of the Mass by the late scholastic philosopher Gabriel Biel of Tübingen. He learned about many issues connected with the church’s theology and pastoral practice from the confessional summa of Angelo Carletti di Chivasso. Both of these works were in keeping with the received scholastic theology of the time. The first Mass celebrated by the newly ordained priest on 2 May 1507 was a public event attended by members of his family, including his father. Luther’s theological studies leading up to his doctorate went very rapidly at first. In addition to his own studies, he also taught as a magister in the Faculty of Philosophy. Luther would also have been involved in church work as a result of his monastery’s presence in the religious life of the city, especially in the form of preaching and pastoral care. The superiors of his order, in particular the vicar general of the German Observant congregation of Augustinian Hermits, Johannes von Staupitz, were pleased on the whole with Luther’s development.They appreciated his fervent interest in scripture and rapidly entrusted him with teaching respon­ sibilities and political functions in the order. Especially in the years 1508 to 1509, when Luther held the Augustinian Hermits’ chair in moral philosophy in the Faculty of Liberal Arts of the newly founded University of Wittenberg, while studying theology at the same time, he became closer to Staupitz as a teacher and a confessor.The theological and spiritual ideas he received from Staupitz can hardly be overestimated: the biblical character of Staupitz’s ‘devotional theology’, with its reference to Christian life in the world, his concentration on the suffering of Christ, his theological orientation to the patron of their order, St Augustine, and his doctrine of grace, deeply marked Luther’s own understanding of the Christian faith and profoundly influ­ enced his development as a reformer. Luther held his teacher Staupitz in grateful memory as long as he lived. The years of Luther’s theological studies in Erfurt and Wittenberg were also marked by a controversial political debate within the order.The ‘Staupitz controversy’ resulted from a plan to integrate all the Augustinian m ­ onasteries in Saxony in the reformed congregation headed by Staupitz. Several Observant monasteries resisted, including Luther’s monastery in Erfurt. That monastery’s acts of resistance and protest against Staupitz and his leadership of the order included suddenly recalling Brother Martin from his posting at Wittenberg,

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without regard for his theological graduation (promotion to baccalaureus biblicus on 9 March 1509; interruption of his gradu­ation to baccalaureus ­sententiarius in the autumn of 1509; teaching as a sententiarius in Erfurt from spring of 1510 to the summer semester of 1511) and without consulting his mentor Staupitz, who was in southern Germany at the time. The measure was apparently aimed both at Staupitz and at the university he had founded in Wittenberg. In August of 1511, after the Erfurt monastery had rejected compromises with Staupitz and the instructions of the order’s general in Rome, Luther left Erfurt together with his friend and brother in the order Johannes Lang. There are many indications that Luther supported Staupitz’s political course—­against his own recalcitrant convent. This may have been the rea­ son why Luther was sent to the seat of the order in Rome to seek further instructions, together with another brother who negotiated for the monas­ tery, from October 1511 to February 1512. Nothing is known about the specific results that the two monks brought back with them (they returned separately to increase the chances that one of them would reach Staupitz alive). In May of 1512, the conflict in the Order of Augustinian Hermits was resolved at a chapter meeting in Cologne. Luther remained in Wittenberg, and after his promotion to doctor of theology on 18/19 October 1512, he took over Staupitz’s professorship. That would be his professional base until his death thirty-­four years later. Certain negative judgements about the moral self-­ righteousness of Observant monks, in Luther’s first lecture on the Psalms (Dictata super ­psalterium, 1513/14), for example, reflect his experience of the ‘Staupitz con­ troversy’. These conflicts probably contributed to Luther’s scepticism towards human fantasies of perfectibility. In keeping with the monastic piety centred on spiritual attainment, he was equally sceptical of himself, and was often conscious of his personal failings. The monk Martin Luther was burdened by the awareness of his own sinfulness. His confessions, which were much more frequent than the rule of the order required, often gave him firmer footing amid the turbulence of doubts and self-­contempt, according to his later recollections. Furthermore, the stabilizing influence of Luther’s brother monks, some of whom became his lifelong friends, should not be neglected in the overall evaluation of his monastic life. The intensity with which Luther strove to lead an exemplary Christian life in the monastery is of inestimable im­port­ance for his personal development. The most revered spiritual and theo­logic­al

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traditions of Latin Christianity were the object of the young monk’s most earnest study, the milieu in which he lived, the sacramental relief he drew on; and it was ultimately in reference to those traditions that he felt inadequacy and failure. If Luther had not been an irreproachable monk, he would hardly have become the Reformer. During his four-­week sojourn in Rome15 Luther most likely lived at the monastery of San Agostino, where the general of the Augustinian Hermits, Giles of Viterbo, resided. Luther took advantage of the spiritual offerings available to pilgrims, running—­as he later recounted ironically—­like a ‘fanatical saint’ through ‘all the churches and crypts’16 to accumulate a wealth of graces for himself and his family through confessions and fasts, and by celebrating masses over the tombs of the martyrs. He did so with conscientious feeling, and he noticed that the Italian priests rattled off the liturgy of the Mass mechanically and much faster than he. In later recollec­ tions, this journey to Rome, which would be the longest journey of his life, supplied him with arguments that the eternal city was a den of vice and a hotbed of infidelity. During his visit, however, there is every indication that he saw the ‘holy city’ primarily as a place of Christian martyrs and saints.17 Luther was not receptive to the artistic remodelling of Rome into a Renaissance metropolis, which was in full swing at the time.The old Basilica of St Peter had been demolished; nothing was visible of the new church that was planned. It is not certain whether Luther personally saw the current pope, Julius II; only much later did it occur to Luther that the alleged dream of a Franciscan friar (probably Johannes Hilten) which Staupitz had heard about in Rome—­that a ‘hermit’ would attack the papacy under Leo X—­might refer to himself.18 As far as his attitude towards the pope and church is concerned, the Thuringian visitor to Rome in winter of 1511/12 was no exception to the customs of his time. But he differed from a number of other critics of the church in having seen and experienced from within what he later so emphatically rejected and opposed, and this lent colour and force to his polemics. In the summer of 1520, for example, Luther wrote in the manifesto that defined his ul­tim­ate break with the papacy, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, about the ‘datary’, the papal office responsible for approving dispensations and the sales of offices, which had received a new building in the Renaissance style under Pope Innocent VIII: ‘Finally, the pope has built his own store for all this noble commerce; that is, the house of the datarius in Rome. All who deal in benefices and livings must go there. Here they have to buy their

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glosses, and transact their business. . . .’19 Luther’s impressions of his sojourn in Rome resounded in this and other polemics. Another, much more important connection between Luther’s activities as a monk and as a reformer concerned the Bible. It is no secret that Luther saw himself in this regard as an executor of the will of his mentor Staupitz, who had ‘restored’ (restituit)20 the status of the Bible in the monasteries under his responsibility, and placed it at the focus of his academic teaching. It was in the monastery that Luther first became an intensive Bible reader; the monastery placed a copy of the Vulgate bound in red leather at the ­disposal21 of the young man ‘despairing of himself ’ (desperans de me ipso).22 He apparently read it twice through every year, and the knowledge of the Bible he acquired in this way was widely recognized. He later quoted it from memory; he was well aware that his knowledge of the Bible was superior to that of his theological rivals from both his own and the papal camp. Looking to the Bible as Luther did for answers to all questions of life and salvation, basing one’s entire conception of the world and reality on scripture, was by no means something taken for granted among his contemporaries. Luther saw the substance of his theological profession as thumping the Bible to make the word of God jump out. In the fulfilment of his teaching duties too, Luther centred his work on the Bible, again following Staupitz’s lead. Throughout his teaching career at Wittenberg, Luther lectured on no other subject except scripture. Beginning in 1517/18, the course in theology at Wittenberg was restructured to focus with a new single-­mindedness on the Bible. This was in keeping with the orientation Luther shared with the humanists towards the ‘true sources’ of the Christian faith, but at the same time was fed by his certainty of being uniquely blessed with God’s will and eternal salvation in the biblical word. This expectation, no doubt sown in the monastic phase of his life, has become a vital current of the Reformation. Monasticism and the university, the two most dynamic institutions of Latin Europe, shaped Luther profoundly; without them, his Reformation would not have existed. Luther’s appointment in 1515 to the Augustinian office of vicar provincial for Saxony and Thuringia, making him responsible for ten monasteries, and eleven after the founding of the Eisleben convent in 1515/16, brought him a deeper familiarity with regional church issues, and deeper insight into problems of monastic discipline and the financial administration of the individual abbeys. Although he was a profound inter­ preter of the Bible, we should not imagine Luther as an individualist isolated

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from his fellows; on the contrary, the same Luther who strove to understand every single Bible verse was involved as sub-­prior in the organization of the Wittenberg monastery and the course of study in theology, and as vicar provincial in the regional government of the order—­a multi-­faceted prep­ ar­ation for challenges he would encounter in the course of the Reformation.

3.4. The Exegete of Wittenberg Grace and Justification According to the scholarly consensus, Luther’s lectures, many of which are extant, having been handed down with surprising consistency, reflect a ­process of growing insight and clarity in regard to his understanding of ‘justification’—that is, how a human being becomes righteous in the eyes of God through the gift of grace—­and the consequences for ‘good works’, or human services to the heavenly Lord. Although this process of theological clarification cannot be reconstructed in detail, there is no doubt about its results: the justification which makes a person appear righteous to God is received not by virtue of what a person actively does, but solely by virtue of the grace which a person passively receives from God. The doctrine formulated by Luther called the ‘Reformation doctrine of justification’ arose in connection with the doctrine of St Paul—­expressed mainly in his epistles to the Romans and the Galatians—­and with the church Father Augustine, whose theology the young scholar in Wittenberg held in high regard, as he did the ideas of Bernard of Clairvaux and several other mystical thinkers, such as Jean Gerson, Bonaventure, Johannes Tauler, and the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica, which Luther published in 1516/18. It is a matter of controversy whether the doctrine of justification is an ‘original’ theological innovation on Luther’s part, or whether it is part of a broad current of late medieval theology of grace—­which was particularly well rooted in the tradition of Luther’s order. Similarly to Paul, Augustine, and the monastic tradition of ‘conversion’, Luther claimed in retrospective remarks—­most of them written much later, motivated not least by a need for legitimation—­that he had had a situative, life-­changing momentary experience of insight. In doing so, he emphasized that he had advocated nothing but the original doctrine of the Apostle as renewed by Augustine—­in particular, his understanding of God’s righteousness in Romans 1:17 as a

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reality granted through faith. Luther claimed ‘originality’ at most in the sense of restoring Christianity to its original form. Luther explained human passiveness in relation to salvation by other terms as well, such as those of divine mercy or love, the gift of freedom, and the repentance made possible by God. At the centre of this Reformation theology stood the sufferings of Christ, whose righteousness redeems sin­ ners.Where Luther had once been driven into the monastery by a wrathful, punishing, all-­destroying God, he found—­not least in Staupitz’s instruction23— the loving will of the heavenly Father in the abjectness of the crucified Son. The historic influence of the doctrine of justification is primarily con­ nected with the consequences Luther gradually drew from it. In the positive sense, it revalued faith as mortals’ fundamental relationship to God; in the negative sense, its consequence was a rejection of the various devout ‘works’ that were then offered and demanded by church practice. In spite of certain theological parallels to the advocates of a comparable doctrine of justification in the context of the broader Augustinian renaissance, the historic signifi­ cance of the doctrine’s ‘Reformation’ version, first expounded in Wittenberg, is its explicit statement of the doctrine’s consequences—­centring Christianity on faith and mobilizing it against works—­and, finally, the influential publi­ cation of that position. Luther expounded the Reformation doctrine of justification not only from his chair at the University of Wittenberg and in his functions as an officer of his order, but also from the pulpits of his monastery’s little church and of the city’s Church of St Mary, where the city council had appointed him a preacher early on, probably in 1513 or 1514.These closely intertwined ecclesiastical and academic activities formed the background experience and the experimental context which contributed to Luther’s rapid develop­ ment as a vernacular writer. From the outbreak of the controversy over indulgences in autumn of 1517, his literary talent practically exploded, burst­ ing forth in an unprecedented storm of publications; Luther soon became the most-­read author in the German language.The remarkable ability of the Augustinian monk from Wittenberg to make use of, indeed to master, the media that allowed him to communicate with the common man—­sermons in printed or spoken form and vernacular treatises—­grew and matured in the course of the disputes with the representatives of the ecclesiastical ancien régime. Luther had long since been accustomed to preaching to non-­scholarly audiences whose cares and wants were familiar to him from the milieu in which he had grown up.

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His lectures reflect, with increasing clarity, Luther the academic teacher as a passionate ‘Paulinist’, sometimes formulating the consequences of a piety founded solely on faith and God’s gift of grace, in relation to the bust­ ling activity of the late medieval piety of works. In learned disputes within his faculty with the theologian Andreas Rudolf Bodenstein, called Andreas Karlstadt after his Franconian city of origin, Luther was able to prove that his interpretation of justification solely on the basis of grace and faith, with­ out all works, could be attributed to Augustine, as he had expressed it in a debate with the British monk and theologian Pelagius which had been little known up to then. Along with his colleague Nicolaus von Amsdorf, the much more intellectually independent Karlstadt had been an important partisan of Luther’s in the theological faculty at Wittenberg since 1517. He was also the first to defend Luther’s Ninety-­Five Theses publicly, and he worked to raise the profile of the University of Wittenberg as a centre of the Augustinian order through his publications. From about 1520, a dissent becomes visible between Karstadt and Luther: its roots lay not only in a certain personal rivalry and in incompatible theological views, but also in their reform strategies: while Karlstadt saw urban or rural congregations as the legitimate sponsors of a reform of church governance, Luther insisted with increasing clarity on the authority of the territorial rulers. Luther and Karlstadt, who between 1518 and 1520 came to be seen as the most important representatives of the ‘Wittenberg school’, were in agreement in their position ‘against scholastic theology’ (contra scholasticam theologiam).24 In his theses published in September 1517, Luther criticized the whole Aristotelian foundation of church scholarship, blaming it for the conception of justification before God as a process of habitual training to be shaped by human effort. Circulating copies of this Wittenberg edition of the Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam—­ the only early Reformation broadsheet which is still extant, in a single copy—­first brought Luther to the attention of thinkers, and humanists in particular, outside his immediate spheres of  Wittenberg and the Augustinian order. At the same time, the theses contained an agenda for the reform of the course of study in theology, which was to be carried out in the years that followed with the support of Philip Melanchthon, who was appointed Professor of Greek in 1518. The turn towards the Church Fathers and, most importantly, towards the Bible, accompanied and underpinned by a solid humanistic education in the clas­ sic­al languages, gradually changed the curriculum of faculties of liberal arts

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Fig. 10  Luther’s theses against scholastic theology, the Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam, were printed in September 1517 in Wittenberg by Johann Rhau-­ Grunenberg. The first edition illustrated here may give an impression of what the Ninety-­Five Theses may have looked like in their first printings, which are not extant. But this publication also suggests that a certain scepticism is in order in regard to the titles of the disputations that have been handed down in the reprints of the Ninety-­Five Theses in anthologies (primarily the Basel, Leiden, and Paris editions): such titles may be later additions.

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and theology at the University of Wittenberg, making it in this regard the most modern of the German universities.

The Ninety-­Five Theses against Indulgence In the months leading up to the publication of his famous Ninety-­Five Theses, Luther had familiarized himself with the theological and legal questions connected with indulgences and the boundaries of the existing church doctrine in relation to indulgence practices. The immediate occa­ sion prompting Luther to publicize the critical insights he had gained in the process to a broader academic audience was an indulgence campaign being carried out under the auspices and in the church provinces of the arch­ bishop of Magdeburg and Mainz, the young Hohenzollern prince Albert of Brandenburg. The proceeds of the campaign were to be divided between the building of the new Basilica of St Peter (the indulgence offered was therefore called the Petersablass, or ‘St Peter’s indulgence’) and paying down the debt Albert had incurred towards the Fugger clan to pay the curial fees for a dispensation in regard to his elevation to a second archiepiscopal see, which was against canon law. Both of the Saxon dukes, Frederick III, surnamed the Wise, Luther’s ter­ ri­tor­ial sovereign in Ernestine Saxony, and George the Bearded in the Albertine territories of Saxony, rejected the sale of the indulgence in their lands. They did so for dynastic and economic reasons: the loss of the arch­ bishopric of Magdeburg to the rivals in Brandenburg was bitter. Moreover, the ducal capital Wittenberg had been expanded at significant cost into a reliquary centre where powerful grants of indulgence could be acquired on certain feast days, and the Saxon dukes did not care to see any funds flow out of their dominions into Albert’s campaign. Later writings of Luther’s indicate that individual inhabitants had acquired the indulgence outside the Electorate of Saxony, and asked Luther as their confessor for absolution from their sins with no penance at all.25 The im­port­ance of this motive should not be overestimated, however, in view of the fact that Luther’s criticism of indulgences was quite fundamental in nature and deeply rooted in his theology of grace, which was well devel­ oped by that time. Luther did not consult with his colleagues at the university nor with his liaison in Duke Frederick’s government of the Electorate of Saxony, his humanist secretary Georg Spalatin, on the step he was taking out of his

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corner26 and into the public academic sphere with his Ninety-­Five Theses, probably first published in a Wittenberg printing. There are indications that he had to overcome certain inner resistances before stepping forward. The fact that he began to use the name ‘Eleutherius’27 supports the inference that ‘free’ criticism of this ecclesiastic practice was important to him. Luther was demanding in no uncertain terms the immediate abolishment of the existing practice of indulgence, which stood in irreconcilable contradiction to the preaching of the Gospel.The unscrupulous sermon of the indulgence advocate Johannes Tetzel, he argued, endangered the souls of those lulled into a false sense of security. A copy of the Ninety-­Five Theses was also enclosed in Luther’s letter to Archbishop Albert, who was responsible for the marketing of the St Peter’s indulgence. Whether they were also presented to the academic public of Wittenberg in the usual form—­that is, by posting on church doors—­is not documented, but probable. In contrast to the otherwise customary disputa­ tion theses, the extant editions of the Ninety-­Five Theses which were pub­ lished in rapid succession at Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Basel bear neither the date of a planned disputation nor the name of a respondent. This character­ istic is not unique to the Ninety-­Five Theses, however, but shared with a list of theses by Karlstadt on Augustine’s doctrine of grace dated 26 April 1517. Karlstadt’s theses were issued immediately before a high feast day, Misericordias domini; Luther’s theses appeared on the eve of All Saints’ Day, the first of November. On these two holy days, special grants of indulgence were avail­ able in Wittenberg, and hence great numbers of visitors could be expected. Karlstadt too had named neither a disputation date nor a respondent on his  theses, and they are likewise only extant in editions printed outside Wittenberg. In the latter case, however, it is known that the theses were posted in conformance with university statutes. While Karlstadt was pri­ marily interested in a live academic debate, such as the disputation which actually took place in the summer of 1519 in Leipzig, Luther’s publication of his Ninety-­Five Theses was aimed at initiating a debate in print. Luther probably ordered the Leipzig reprint of his Theses, and that edition did away with the arrangement of theses in groups of twenty or twenty-­five, which was oriented after the usual conduct of disputations. If the Ninety-­Five Theses became the spark that ignited ‘the’ Reformation, it was in part because of the intensity and rapidity of their distribution, and in part because Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg seized them as an oppor­ tunity to have Luther’s orthodoxy examined by the theological faculty of

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Fig. 11  Luther’s Ninety-­Five Theses, printed by Jakob Thanner at Leipzig, 1517. At the upper right is a handwritten note: ‘Anno 1517 ultimo Octobris, vigiliae Omnium sanctorum, indulgentiae primum impugnatae’ [‘In the year 1517, on the last day of October, the eve of All Hallows, indulgences were first attacked’]. In Ulrich Bubenheimer’s estimation, the handwritten note is by Luther’s brother Augustinian Johannes Lang, whom Luther sent a copy on 11 November 1517. There was probably a Wittenberg printing of the Ninety-­Five Theses; certain amendments to the text and the amended numbering of the Leipzig edition suggest that Luther ordered this one too.

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the University of Mainz, and to have him tried in Rome for heresy. Another reason for the impact of the Theses lay in their content: the reference to the New Testament conception of penance or repentance as a lifelong exercise of faith (Thesis 1)28 cast fundamental doubt on the practice of indulgences. The Theses reject indulgences for the dead, the power of the pope implied by the practice of indulgence, the false certainty that the indulgences conveyed, their nefarious effects on preaching and other works of love, the  doctrine of Purgatory, the greed of the indulgence profiteers, and more. Luther addressed all of these issues in connection with the doctrine of indulgences. With his criticism of indulgences, Luther had taken up a ‘grumbling’ of the common people, but the diversity of contemporary responses shows that it was initially unknown what resonance he would evoke in the various ecclesiastical and social circles. Adolf of Anhalt, bishop of Merseburg, is known to have been pleased with the Wittenberg monk’s action: he hoped that Luther’s ‘conclusiones’—that is, the Ninety-­Five Theses—­would be ‘posted in many places’ to warn the ‘poor people’ against ‘Tetzel’s fraud’.29 Erasmus of Rotterdam inserted a jab at indulgences in the preface of his Manual of a Christian Knight (Enchiridion militis christiani), which rose from 1518 on to become a best-­seller, and distanced the pope from the practices of those who cited him: ‘So much have the Philistines grown in strength . . . preaching earthly things and not the things of heaven, human things and not divine—­those things, in fact, which tend not to Christ’s glory but to the profit of those who traffic in indulgences . . . and suchlike merchandise. And this traffic is all the more perilous because they give their greed a façade of great names, eminent princes, the supreme pontiff, and even Christ himself.’30 Luther too had chosen a rhetorical strategy in his Theses that suggested an expectation that the pope himself would intervene against the indulgences being distributed in his name. ‘If, therefore, indul­ gences were preached according to the spirit and intention of the pope,’ Luther claimed, ‘all these doubts would be readily resolved.’31 Although Luther probably learned early on from his friend the law professor Jerome Schurff 32 that his attack on indulgences, at its core, questioned the authority of the papacy, he may have hoped for some time that he would receive sup­ port from the head of the church, from the pope himself. For he loved his church; he was grieved by the loss of credibility it had suffered from the sales of indulgences; as an ‘appointed Doctor of Theology’33 he wanted to help to remedy these faults by every means at his disposal. The most im­port­ant of

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such means appeared to him to be a preaching focused on Christ’s cross: then, when the Christians were admonished to follow their head through suffering, death, and hell, rather than choosing the incomparable conveni­ ence of indulgence, they could ‘be confident of entering into Heaven through many tribulations’.34 This ‘theology of the Cross’ (theologia crucis), which revived ascetic, austere motifs of biblical, patristic, and monastic tradi­ tions, formed the unshakable theological foundation of Luther’s criticism of contemporary phenomena in the church. This foundation would support him through the turbulences that were to come. In retrospect, he wrote that his attack on indulgences had amounted to nothing less than ‘demolishing Heaven and consuming the earth with fire’.35

3.5.  Luther’s Break with the Pope Polemics and Controversies From the end of 1517 to his death in the spring of 1546, Luther was involved in literary debates with his opponents. In the early period of the Reformation—­that is, the years from 1518 to 1521—these controversies also had a substantial importance in the definitive shaping of Luther’s theology. In arguing, Luther precisely expounded such matters as the doctrine of the sacraments, the concept of the church, and the relation between scripture and other authorities; hence the controver­ sies he got into can be seen as having a clarifying function.The controversial theology mustered in opposition to Luther also showed that some of the contours of Roman Catholicism had been unclear until the conflict with the Reformation, when its papalist profile became unambiguous. The frenzied battles in print, and also the more edifying literary produc­ tion that occupied Luther, were reflected in an unprecedented number of publications. Luther discussed elementary questions of Christian faith, such as the question of appropriate penance, correct preparation for receiving the sacraments or for death, the contemplation of Christ’s suffering, Christian living in accordance with the Ten Commandments, and more, mostly in a completely unpolemical way. This spiritual writing proved to be in particu­ larly high demand, and Luther the spiritual comforter paved the way for Luther the church critic.

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After having published a total of twenty-­two works in Latin and eighteen in German—­in 136 separate editions—­in the years 1518 and 1519, Luther’s German publications increased the following year to about twenty in over 150 editions, while his Latin works declined to eleven, in forty-­three edi­ tions. The theological debates, which had at first been conducted in Latin, the language of scholars, now went on mainly in the vernacular. Many of Luther’s German writings were reprinted more than ten times. Publication in Latin remained important, however: in fact, many of Luther’s works that were first published in German also appeared in Latin translation. The Latin-­speaking scholarly spheres of Europe were increasingly inter­ ested in the progress of Luther and his supporters. Some of Luther’s writings also began appearing in translation into various European vernaculars. Luther, incidentally, was the first German author to be so honoured. In sev­ eral countries, his works were attributed to other authors, or to none: in Italy, for example, some appeared under Erasmus’s name; in France, most were published anonymously. From October 1518, when the printer Johannes Froben of Basel had pub­ lished a first Latin anthology of Luther’s writings, Luther must have enjoyed a broad reception among European scholars. In February 1519, Froben informed Luther that he had sent six hundred copies of the book to France, that resales to Spain were brisk, and that he had heard that professors at the Sorbonne were interested in the book. He wrote Luther that the great cand­our (talem libertatem) of his writing was appreciated in Paris: Luther would not be condemned by the most prestigious university of the time for another two years. Luther also learned that the bookseller Franciscus Julius Calvus of Pavia had imported another lot of the booklets (libelli) to Italy, where it was now distributed in all cities (per omnes civitates). Froben had never printed a book that sold better than this edition.36 The distribution of Luther’s works benefitted from the European network of booksellers which had been established, reinforced, and invigorated by the rise of humanism. Nor should we underestimate the importance of students as mobile agents in the distribution of Reformation ideas and evangelical writings. Students occasionally performed demonstrative and spectacular acts, such as burning works of their Wittenberg teacher’s opponents or, in autumn of 1520, sinking reprints of the bull threatening Luther with excommunication, Exsurge Domine, in the river Gera at Erfurt. After the Ninety-­Five Theses, a Latin interpretation of them (Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute) was published in the summer of 1518,

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Fig. 12  Title page of the first Latin Luther anthology, printed at Basel in October 1518. This edition included an anonymous foreword by Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, a Basel professor of theology and close ally of Erasmus, and was decisive in establishing Luther’s renown in the world of scholarship. It was the best-­selling book that the humanistic printer Johannes Froben had ever published: the edition was sold out by February 1519.

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after a Sermon on Indulgences and Grace in German, aimed more specifically at the laity, in the spring—­this was Luther’s earliest publishing success, printed in twenty-­three editions by 1520. From the very first literary debates, adversaries such as Johannes Tetzel, his academic partisan Konrad Wimpina in Frankfurt on the Oder, and the Ingolstadt theology professor Johannes Eck, who would soon become Luther’s most energetic and persistent op­pon­ent, portrayed the Augustinian from Wittenberg in connection with Jan Hus and the Hussite movement. They also placed the issue of au­thor­ ities, and especially that of the pope’s role, at the centre of the debate. This controversial theology progressively forced Luther to clarify his standpoint in relation to Rome, canon law, and the significance of the ecumenical councils. A discussion on Luther that rapidly arose within his order also contrib­ uted to the European reception of his person and his causa. Agreement with Luther’s theology was particularly widespread among his fellow Augustinians. Accordingly, the animosity that Luther met with from the competing men­ dicant orders, especially the Dominicans, was vigorous, and further strength­ ened the solidarity of Luther’s order. At a general chapter meeting of the reformed congregation of the Augustinians in Heidelberg on 26 April 1518, Luther was presented with the opportunity to present the outlines of his theology of the Cross (theologia crucis) based on St Paul and St Augustine in contrast to a scholastic ‘theology of glory’ (theologia gloriae). The Dominican friar and later Strasbourg Reformer Martin Bucer, who was then studying in Heidelberg, sent a euphoric account of this event to his humanist friend Beatus Rhenanus, remarking on Luther’s complete agreement with Erasmus while praising Luther’s more open and resolute teaching style.37 A number of humanistically educated students who later emerged as ‘Reformers’ of southern Germany—­Johannes Brenz, Theobald Billicanus, Franz Irenicus, Erhard Schnepf, Martin Frecht, and perhaps Johann Isenmann, Paul Fagius, and Sebastian Franck—­attended the Heidelberg disputation and were won over by Luther. Alongside the distribution of Luther’s writings in print, this event was the most important stimulus for the rise of a Reformation move­ ment in the southwestern part of the empire. The canonical and political decision on Luther’s teaching was consider­ ably delayed by very specific historic circumstances. Chief among these was the fact that the focus of national and international politics in the years 1518/19 was occupied by the question of Emperor Maximilian’s successor. The Medici pope Leo X tried to foil the candidacy of Maximilian’s grandson Charles to break the supremacy of the Habsburgs. For that purpose,

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he needed the support of the powerful Saxon elector Frederick, and so the heresy trial of the Wittenberg friar was adjourned. Instead of summoning Luther to Rome, the curia reached an agreement with the Electorate of Saxony to have him questioned before the pope’s legate at the imperial diet in Augsburg, Cardinal Thomas de Vio, known as Cajetan, a Dominican theo­lo­gian of high intellectual reputation. At this time, Luther was already considered a ‘declared heretic’. In case the accused Augustinian refused to recant, Cajetan was given far-­reaching authority to excommunicate him, arrest him, and deport him to Rome. In the examination, which went on for several days, Cajetan demon­ strated that Luther’s idea that the believer could be certain of salvation on the sole basis of the word of absolution spoken in the sacrament of penance was ‘un-­Catholic’ and amounted to building a ‘new church’. According to Catholic doctrine, the certainty of salvation could not be based on an immediate relationship to God, but only on membership of the holy insti­ tution of the church as a mediator. The brilliant theologian Cajetan no doubt recognized more clearly than Luther himself had up to then that the emphasis on personal certainty of salvation was bound to shake the funda­ mental structure of the papal church as the institution of salvation. Cajetan identified Luther’s questioning of papal power over the church’s treasure (thesaurus ecclesiae) as a fundamental attack on the authority of Christ’s vicar. Here too, the cardinal saw the consequences of Luther’s criticism of indul­ gences more clearly than Luther himself did: Luther imagined he was still in agreement with an orthodox mainstream of doctrinal development. The last ambiguities which Luther had exposed in the Roman doctrine of indulgences were eliminated by the papal bull Cum postquam, written by Cajetan and promulgated by Leo X on 9 November 1518. From then on, church doctrine definitely established that the living and the dead could be granted indulgences for the remission of temporal punishments, based on the administration of the church’s treasure of merit through the papal power of the keys, either through intercession or by direct authority. Thus the remaining gaps between the practice and the dogmatic theory of indul­ gences were now closed. Luther responded to his unsuccessful hearing and the further developments in a manner that would become typical of him: he took the bull by the horns, appealing his case in print to the reading public. By the end of 1518 at the latest, Luther had no doubts about the power that lay in Johannes Gutenberg’s invention. He knew how to use it as no other, and it was to save his life.

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Soon after the beginning of the controversy over indulgences, cor­res­ pond­ences in Latin began, at first in handwriting and soon in printed pub­ lications, between the theologian Johannes Eck of Ingolstadt, one of the most respected representatives of the open-­minded, humanistic young gen­ eration, and his coeval Wittenberg colleagues Karlstadt and Luther. A plan gradually emerged to hold a public disputation at which controversial ques­ tions of the Augustinian doctrine of grace would be discussed in relation to human freedom and to the authority of scripture, tradition, the pope, and the church councils. In Wittenberg, Karlstadt in particular closely followed the project. Leipzig was agreed upon as the location, but the faculty there refused to serve as arbiter. After an unusually wide-­ranging series of pre­lim­ in­ ary publications, including theses and antitheses by Eck, Luther, and Karlstadt, an agreement was reached through the mediation of the Albertine ruler Duke George the Bearded that the entire disputation would be recorded verbatim. The resulting text would not be published, however, but instead submitted to the theological faculties of Paris and Erfurt for a doctrinal judgement. The Sorbonne issued its judgement on 15 April 1521; the Erfurt faculty refused the task. The Leipzig Disputation lasted three weeks, from 27 June to 15 July 1519, and attracted significant public attention. The delegation from Wittenberg included not only the duke’s appointed rector and numerous professors, but also a great number of students who took pleasure in heckling Eck and cheering their professors. Every day, several hundred listeners assembled in the ducal castle of Pleissenburg, including followers of Jan Hus from Prague. They had come seeking an initial contact with Luther, which they con­ tinued after the Leipzig Disputation in written form. It was thanks to the influence of his Bohemian correspondents that Luther in the autumn of 1519 roundly supported the demand that the laity receive the sacrament of the Eucharist in both kinds (sub utraque specie), that is, as bread and wine,38 in a sermon which soon appeared in Czech translation. Luther’s contacts with Utraquists also motivated him to study the theology of Jan Hus and his heirs, and ultimately to publish Hus’s principal work, De ecclesia (On the Church). Gradually, regular relations arose between Wittenberg and the most recent pre-­Reformation heresy in Bohemia. After having been the more active of the Wittenberg combatants in the preliminary publications, Karlstadt increasingly fell under the shadow of his colleague Luther at the Leipzig Disputation. This was in part because the central topic of his debate with Eck was the Pauline-­Augustinian doctrine

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of grace as expounded in Wittenberg, on which Eck conceded a certain rapprochement. The debate between Luther and Eck, on questions of the universal validity of papal supremacy (which Luther denied) and an in­fal­ lible church norm (which Luther contested in the form of a general synod as well), apparently had greater volatility and greater public impact than the topics of Karlstadt’s debate. Moreover, Karlstadt, with his scholarly, deliberate, rule-­ abiding, even scrupulous manner, supporting his arguments with a wealth of book learning and authoritative citations, seems to have been overshadowed by the more temperamental, rhetorically robust, and charismatic Luther—­an ex­peri­ence which would recur in the years to follow, and which weighed upon their collegial relations. Eck purposely polarized the debate by portraying Luther in immediate proximity to Hus and Wycliffe, who had been condemned as heretics at the Council of Constance. In his view, it was only logical after the Leipzig Disputation to insist personally that the Roman trial be resumed and brought to a conclusion. The imperial succession had been decided in June of 1519 in favour of Charles of Spain; hence there was no need for the curia to delay the close of the causa Lutheri out of diplomatic considerations.

Luther Writes to Save His Life The brief year or so that lay between the end of the Leipzig Disputation and the promulgation of the Roman condemnation of Luther in the form of the bull Exsurge Domine, which threatened him with excommunication, on 15 June 1520—it was known in Wittenberg by October—­may have been the period of Luther’s most influential literary activity. He gradually wrote him­ self into the role of a reformer. It is safe to assume that Luther’s fear for life and limb in view of the condemnation hanging over him was a unique stimulation to his creativity, force of expression, and productivity. Luther was writing for his life. His works met with tremendous popularity and dis­ semination; he was read by everyone everywhere; readers inspired by him came forward in turn as Reformation authors, giving rise to a ‘reformation movement’. In this way Luther’s work itself was a key reason why the trad­ ition­al method of fighting heresy—­burning books and their author—­was doomed to failure. Although his sovereign offered him protection, what saved him was Johannes Gutenberg’s invention. Luther’s case was the first in which the

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church hierarchy’s traditional instruments of repression were clearly seen to fail against the uncontrollable dissemination of dissent: it was a first step—­an uncertain but decisive one—­into a new age. In the brief year from the summer of 1519 to early autumn of 1520, Luther presented a radically new interpretation of the church’s sacraments, counting at first only three of them, penance, baptism, and the Eucharist, then—­because penance lacked an outward sign—­reducing them to two, and interpreting them as affirmations and enactments of a divine promise. Luther’s treatise De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae (On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church), published in October 1520, mercilessly tore down the time-­ honoured Roman Catholic edifice built upon the seven sacraments. Some learned humanists who had followed Luther sympathetically up to this point now shuddered at the implacable ruthlessness with which he swept aside ecclesiastical customs that lacked a biblical foundation, declared provi­ sions of canon law null and void, and recognized only the individual’s faith in God as having religious meaning. This treatise more than any other divided Luther’s followers from his critics. Luther followed it with On Good Works (1520), a theological refounding of the Christian ethos presented in the form of an interpretation of the Ten Commandments. His intention here was to identify morally good acts per­ formed for the benefit of others as the spontaneous consequence of faith. The faith expressed in love activates a devotion to the service of the world bestowed by Christ. The treatise contains an early expression of themes of social reform—­such as the treatment of luxury in dressing, eating and drinking, sexuality, money-­lending, etc.39—which Luther would discuss in more detail in his most influential manifesto, the open letter To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate, published in the summer of the same year.40 This text, which soon appeared in fifteen editions, completed Luther’s definitive break with the papacy—­which he now publicly called an ‘Antichrist’—and at the same time sketched the outlines of a new church. The project of building it was to be carried out primarily by the secular authorities, the emperor and the territorial princes, the nobility, the city magistrates, and by every individual Christian within the sphere of his responsibility. Luther now declared the ‘clerical estate’ to be mostly corrupt and beyond reform. Legitimation of the laity’s authority to act was provided by the concept of the ‘priesthood of all the believers and the baptized’ which Luther developed at the beginning of his treatise. The passage in

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question, however, was probably composed near the end of Luther’s work on the treatise. To the Christian Nobility is not cohesive in a literary sense, and not unambiguous in regard to the question who should be responsible for creating and reforming institutions. Ultimately, everyone might feel called upon to support the ‘reformation of the Christian estate’ in his respective place. In that regard, To the Christian Nobility offered a platform for all the different developments that would arise in the years to come under the auspices of territorial princes, aristocracies, cities, and rural parishes. Claiming to act out of necessity in the face of the irreparable corruption of the existing church, Luther invoked a number of different agents of reformation, which soon competed with one another, and which he could no longer dispel. The treatise To the Christian Nobility is one of the few works by Luther that did not appear in Latin, and translations into other contemporary ver­ nacular languages were published only much later. Although it was the most important and influential text in regard to the course of the Reformation in the empire, it was practically unknown in the other European countries—­a situation which had grave consequences. Luther’s rapid development into a brilliant publishing strategist in the course of the literary battles he was obliged to fight is especially evident in the dissemination of what is probably his most-­read text today, On the Freedom of a Christian. Its publication was connected with the work of a Saxon nobleman in the service of the pope, Karl von Miltitz, who fed the hopes of the Duke of Saxony and Luther’s fellow Augustinians that, in spite of Leo X’s promulgation of the bull Exsurge Domine, all diplomatic avenues had not yet been exhausted in the quest for reconciliation with Rome. After negotiations, Luther agreed to write a letter to the pope, in Latin and German, in which he would tell ‘his story’,41 blame Eck for the conflict with Rome, and supply the pope with proof of his spiritual loyalty. At that time, Luther no longer had any serious hope of a reconciliation with Rome, but he could not disregard the expectations of the Elector of Saxony, whose protection he enjoyed. The letter was back-­dated to September 1520, at which time the papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication was not yet known in Wittenberg. The Latin version of the Letter to Pope Leo X was published jointly with the Latin versions of the altogether unpolemical treatise on freedom; in German, however, the two texts were kept separate. Luther cannot have wanted his German-­language audience to see him as willing to negotiate with a pope he had just exposed as an ‘Antichrist’. The international audience, however, had exactly that perception.

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In the treatise On the Freedom of a Christian, Luther expounded the p­ aradoxical existence of Christians as free spiritual lordship and as utter servitude to all, a condition by which a person participates in the dual nature of Christ. The inner freedom which one acquires in faith is actual­ ized in loving attention to one’s neighbour. These ideas were drawn from the most vital New Testament sources, which must be unobjectionable even to the head of the Roman church. As far as the existing institution of Christianity was concerned, however, it was clear to Luther in the summer of 1520 that a radical transformation was the only possible solution—­barring a pope who would dissolve the entire curial hierarchy and make a radical break with the past. No such thing could be expected of Leo, the ‘lion’, who  sat amid the curia—­as Luther ironically put it—‘like Daniel in the midst of lions’.42 The bull Exsurge Domine was the product of a curial commission in which Johannes Eck had probably played a critical role since early 1520.The brief for a condemnation of Luther and his doctrines drew on the existing judgements of the universities of Leuven and Cologne. After discussion among the cardinals at further papal consistories, the bull was promulgated on 15 June. At the heart of the document were forty-­one largely reformu­ lated, mostly not quoted statements from Luther’s writings which contained ‘condemnable doctrine’. They were taken from works which had been ­published by early 1520, and were thus not up to date in regard to the tre­ mendous development which Luther’s theology had undergone, and the radicalization of his church politics, in the intervening year. In addition to Luther’s criticism of indulgences and the pope, the bull condemned all kinds of expressions in which he had advocated a radical consciousness of sin which could not simply be eradicated by the sacra­ ments, propounded a radical conception of penance which differed from the sacrament of confessional penance, and contested the concentration on faith in the pronouncement of absolution as a basis for the certainty of redemption. Luther’s doubts of Purgatory and his acknowledgement of Hus were also condemned. The Roman church saw a challenge to fundamental practices such as the Inquisition and the Crusades in sentences such as ‘Burning heretics is contrary to the will of the Holy Spirit’43 and ‘Making war on the Turks means opposing God, who punishes us through them’.44 Luther wanted a ‘different church’, different from the one that condemned him: the hierarchy in Rome had discerned that, and Wittenberg too drew its conclusions.

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Luther was given sixty days’ notice to recant from the day he received the bull; that delay seems to have ended on 10 December 1520. From that day on, he was a legally condemned heretic; on that same day he answered his excommunication with a criminal act: he burnt the codex of canon law and the bull Exsurge Domine before Wittenberg’s Elster Gate. This symbolic act can only be interpreted in the context of contemporary legal practices and the Inquisition. In connection with biblical tradition (Acts 19:19), certain agents, including popes, synods, bishops, Inquisitors, and the directors of corporations such as abbeys, orders, and universities, had the right to eradi­ cate an error by destroying its material basis: the books in which it was written. In his act of 10 December, Luther referred to that tradition, claim­ ing for himself the right to excommunicate the papal church founded on canon law in the name of the true church of Jesus Christ. This act, rapidly publicized and exhaustively justified in writing by Luther, had the effect of a clarion call to insurrection. The path of the papal nuncio Jerome Aleander, furthermore, who propa­ gated the bull in the western territories of the empire, had long been lined with bonfires, but now they were fuelled by Luther’s books and those of his growing numbers of followers. In the generally incendiary mood, debates became heated; ‘all Germany’ seemed to be ‘up in arms’; ‘nine out of ten’, the nuncio reported to Rome, were raising ‘the battle-­cry: “Luther!” and as for the tenth, if he was indifferent to Luther, his motto was at least, “Death to the Roman court!” ’45 Unrest, uncertainty, general agitation. What would happen next? And—­ could Germany’s most-­read theologian be a heretic?

3.6. The Imperial Diet of Worms, Rebellion, and Upheaval Refusal to Recant The Elector of Saxony and his court had repeatedly demanded that Luther be heard in the highest political forum of the empire, the imperial diet, no matter whether Rome had passed judgement on him or not. This idea was difficult to reconcile with existing imperial law, which called for imme­ diate execution of the church’s judgement against a condemned heretic. Luther’s summons to the imperial diet at Worms—­in spite of the bull

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excommunicating him, Decet Romanum Pontificem, promulgated on 3 January 1521—was the result of intricate diplomatic action. Frederick of Saxony had embraced Luther’s claim that his teaching had not been refuted by holy scripture, and the other estates of the empire agreed, situating the causa Lutheri in the context of the Gravamina tradition. Aleander worked to oppose a summons, but the young emperor conceded to the estates that Luther would be given an opportunity to recant. However, in a mandate published in late March 1521, Charles V ordered the sequestration of all of Luther’s writings. Luther had been summoned to Worms on 6 March with the emperor’s promise of safe conduct there and back, and he only learned of the mandate against his writings while travelling. To the last, he expected an objective, unprejudiced discussion of his teaching on the basis of holy scripture: he had no qualms or fears about such a hearing. During his two-­week journey to Worms, from the 2nd to the 16th of April, Luther became aware how well known he had become, and what great enthusiasm people showed for him and for what he stood for: his ‘evangelical’ doctrine and his resistance against Rome. Terms coined for his followers gained currency, including ‘Martinians’, ‘Lutherans’, and ‘Evangelicals’; the consciousness of a definitive break with the ‘papists’, or ‘Romans’ or ‘romanists’, took on firm contours. At some of his stops on the way to Worms, Luther preached; a few cities, such as Erfurt, gave him a cere­ monial reception by their political and academic representatives. Everywhere he was made aware of the people’s great interest in his fate, and in his cause: many Germans placed their hopes of throwing off the heavy ‘Roman yoke’ in him.These experiences reinforced his consciousness of having been chosen, of having a prophetic mission. As Luther travelled, he was met by Martin Bucer, a humanistic theo­lo­ gian with whom he was familiar from the Heidelberg disputation, who was now in the process of leaving the Dominican order. Bucer brought him the offer of the powerful imperial knight Franz von Sickingen of asylum in his castle, the Ebernburg. Luther declined. With a sure sense of the necessary risks and the challenge facing him, he mistrusted the secret diplomacy of the emperor, who had sent his confessor Jean Glapion to Franz von Sickingen to lure Luther away from the stage of imperial politics.Worms was to be his test. Luther was well aware of Jan Hus, the heretic who had been burnt in Constance after a promise of safe conduct had been made and then broken. Yet, if Luther had fled from danger before Worms, his life would have taken a completely different course.

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His refusal to retract his writings and the doctrine they contained—­the only option allowed him, to his honest surprise, on 17 and 18 April in examinations before the emperor and the empire—­became the only really great, indeed historic scene of his life. His pastoral and edifying works, he said in a well-­prepared speech on the second day, required no retraction, since they contained uncontested Christian doctrine. He would not retract the treatises against the papacy, since they were vindicated by the Bible, and in part even by canon law. Furthermore, to retract them would be to capitu­ late before the papacy. His writings against representatives of the papacy, Luther continued, may have been exaggerated at times in their polemical severity, but in their substance, he knew of nothing to retract in them either. His conscience was bound, he said, by the words of scripture (capta conscientia in verbis dei).46 ‘Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scrip­ tures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted.’47 The sense that Luther’s speech was an important and exemplary act is underscored by the fact that the contemporary account closes it with the emotive formula—­ probably an editorial insertion—‘I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen.’48 In the cultural memory, the scene at Worms became symbolic of unshakable faith, witness, and conscience. The roots of this glorifying interpretation reach back to the historical event itself. The symbolic scene of unswerving conviction has been a con­ stant inspiration to the Protestant self-­image of protest. Nonetheless, the key political result of the diet of Worms in regard to religion consisted in an imperial edict confirming the papal judgement of heresy, prohibiting the dissemination of Reformation literature, and placing Luther and his followers under the imperial ban. The Edict of Worms would be the rule which guided Charles V for the next three decades—­until his religious policy was finally superseded in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg, which would grant Protestants recognition under imperial law. When the edict became effective, on 26 May 1521, Luther had already left Worms. On his way home, his carriage was captured by a pre­ tended attack ordered by the Elector of Saxony, and Luther was taken to the Wartburg overlooking Eisenach. There he spent the next ten months away from the public eye, sometimes suffering from solitude. Luther’s enormous literary production during this outwardly silent and sometimes lonely sojourn on a hilltop above the forests of Thuringia would

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prove vital to the subsequent progress of the Reformation. At the Wartburg, Luther wrote works which would form the foundation of a new ‘evan­gel­ic­al’ church: a book of exemplary sermons on the Gospel readings of the liturgical year, which provided a new basis for preaching all over the country; a translation of the New Testament, published, after a revision in con­sult­ation with the Greek scholar Philip Melanchthon, in September of 1522, in time for the Leipzig book fair, which profoundly shaped both the Reformation movement and the subsequent evolution of the German language; a defini­ tive critique of monasticism, De votis monasticis (On Monastic Vows), which would do away with the rights of monasteries in a Protestant church, and which became the literary instigation to a mass exodus from monasticism.

Agitation, Protest, Unrest Even before and during the imperial diet at Worms, public defences of Luther and his cause proliferated. The nuncio Aleander hoped that Luther’s growing ‘malignance’49 and acerbity would ‘benefit’ the Roman cause,50 and in the same spirit the Franciscan friar Thomas Murner translated Luther’s treatise De captivitate Babylonica into German in the expectation that ‘exposure’ before the laity would damage Luther’s popularity. Such hopes were disappointed, however. The nuncio witnessed people in the market­ place at Worms proclaiming that Luther ‘was free of all sin and hence had never erred’.51 Disconcerted, he reported to Rome that pictures were in circulation representing Luther as a saint, ‘with the Dove above his head and with the Lord’s Cross, or, on another handbill, with a halo’; ‘and they buy it, kiss it, and take it even into the palace’.52 Around the diet of Worms, Luther was the contemporary person most often portrayed. He would remain so, represented in his various roles as a preacher, as a husband in double portraits with his wife Katharina, as a doctor of the church, and as a witness, throughout his life, and even after his death, while dynastic rivalries over his tomb went on between the two Saxon states. In central Germany, the portrait style introduced by Lucas Cranach, the court painter of the Elector of Saxony and a close associate of Luther’s, was dom­ in­ant; in southern Germany, meanwhile, independent pictorial concepts arose with an unmistakable tendency to portray Luther, by reference to humanistic traditions, as a warrior or a hero. Ironically, no personage of the sixteenth century, or indeed the entire early modern period, was as present in effigie as Luther, who had declared he was ‘not partial to’53 images.

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Fig. 13  Lucas Cranach the Elder drew Luther in 1520 in a three-­quarter view. The inscription reads: ‘Lucas engraved the mortal face of Luther; he himself engraved the immortal image of his mind.’

In the early 1520s, the field was often dominated by anonymous or pseud­ onym­ous vernacular texts: pamphlets containing dialogues in which witty peasants fought rhetorical skirmishes with orthodox opponents of Luther, or humanistically oriented literary miniatures which compared Luther’s hearing in Worms with the Passion of Christ in Jerusalem. There were polemics in circulation by authors close to the Latin poet, pamphleteer and anti-­papalist Ulrich von Hutten, who issued a call to ‘war on priests’, advocating subversive military action against the clergy and their property, imagining himself—­mistakenly, from a theological point of view—­to be in consensus with Luther, whose favour he courted.Anonymous serial publications arose, such as the Fifteen Confederates, attributed to the former Franciscan friar Johann Eberlin von Günzburg. This work evoked

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the social and political concept of a confederation formed across the estates for the purpose of reforming the church, a model encountered particularly often in pamphlets originating in southern Germany. The most important places where texts of this kind were printed were—­in order of their production figures—­Augsburg, Strasbourg, and Basel, while the printing industry in central Germany was largely dominated by Luther and the other Wittenberg authors, especially Karlstadt and Melanchthon. Philip Melanchthon, called the ‘little Greek’, had taught Greek at the University of Wittenberg from 1518 on, and went on to set standards in the production of Latin doctrinal treatises in the course of the Reformation. The very industrious and learned humanist with a penchant for teaching and writing gradually became Luther’s most loyal collaborator. In many respects, Luther’s reformation would hardly have taken on a stable form without Melanchthon. Luther was fond of saying that Melanchthon’s Commonplaces (Loci communes), a book of key theological doctrines in regard to salvation, published in 1521 in Latin and later in the vernacular, was the best book after the Bible.54 The Commonplaces are considered the first book of Reformation dogmatics to draw strictly on the Bible—­especially the Epistle of Paul to the Romans. In his book, Melanchthon put the theology of the Wittenberg Reformation in a compact and highly influential form. From the diet of Worms to the Peasants’ War, the publication of Reformation pamphlets grew continuously: such works now appeared mostly in the vernacular, and a considerable proportion of the authors were lay people. During the five-­year boom of Reformation pamphlet production—­between 1520 and 1524—the quantity of topical, inciteful, and propagandistic literature aimed at changing people’s actions and attitudes was several times greater than in the decade before or afterwards: almost one and a half thousand to two thousand printings each year. Individual works also appeared in particularly high numbers of reprintings during these years. Especially in southern Germany, the production of illustrated broadsheets bourgeoned, bringing the message of the Reformation to illiterate recipi­ ents as well. There can be little doubt that scholars were involved in the production and distribution of the handbills. Luther held this kind of ma­ter­ ial in low regard, however. As a result of the Peasants’ War of 1524/5, a sharp decline in vernacular pamphleteering occurred, and the number of literary protagonists among the laity also dropped significantly.The structural transformation in Reformation publishing went hand in hand with a clear shift in the principal actors: the

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tendency towards a reform process controlled by existing authorities pre­ vailed, allowing the theologians to hold the public stage as the chief thinkers and interpreters of Christianity; from this point on, the voice of the laity was hardly audible. Beginning in 1521, a Reformation movement had arisen in the cities especially, often inspired by preachers who read Reformation works, and supported by lay people of all social strata who were able to read or willing to hear. This movement now increasingly called for changes in the exist­ ing church. In the domestic sphere and in public places—­market squares, public houses, parish churches—­people talked about Luther, the papal church and its representatives, the ‘Christianity’ of lifestyles such as monasticism,

Fig. 14  Albrecht Dürer, Philip Melanchthon, copper engraving, 1526 © akg-­images. The inscription reads: ‘Dürer’s hand was able to portrait Philipp’s face but not the learned mind.’

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marriage for priests, etc., disrupted the sermons of orthodox clerics, violated canonical dietary rules; in short, people questioned existing practices and thought of remedies for grievances. Representatives of the church’s ancien régime, monks, secular priests who overtly did not keep celibacy, became the victims, individually or collectively, of physical assaults and concerted attacks. Rebellious action spread against monasteries or church furnishings, espe­ cially pictures or sculptures of the saints, which had been objects of ritual reverence up to now, forcing city magistrates to intervene and channel the ‘common man’s’ potential for conflict and violence. A group of craftsmen from Zwickau, apparently inspired by Waldensian traditions, had been ‘awakened’ to reformation by the charismatic preacher Thomas Müntzer, and became the first in this era to question infant baptism, making claims of immediate spiritual revelation. This lay group, labelled the ‘Zwickau prophets’ and successfully opposed by Luther from 1522 on, had attracted the follow­ ing of individual Wittenberg academics, and was one of the rare examples of the persistence or reawakening of a pre-­Reformation ‘heresy’ in the con­ text of the Reformation. Significantly, the first acts of protest of the kind described took place at the origin of the Reformation itself: in Wittenberg. As far as we know, its leading instigators were Wittenberg students and Luther’s brother Hermits of St Augustine. In the aftermath of the Leipzig Disputation, the young Universitas Leucorea—­as the humanists Hellenized ‘Wittenberg’—had begun to shine in the academic world as Europe’s most frequented university. Students swarmed in by the hundreds from Erfurt, Leipzig, and the rest of the empire, including Bohemia, and soon many other European countries. With the support of their professors Melanchthon, Amsdorf, and Karlstadt, they clamoured for tangible changes to practices that had been identified as corrupt and contrary to the gospel. On Karlstadt’s initiative, the Eucharist was celebrated under both kinds—­bread and wine—­first among students, then, at Christmas, in the castle church, with a capacity of two thousand. Low masses—­celebrations of the Eucharist by priests alone, without the participation of the congregation—­were attacked or abolished. Marriages of priests were held publicly, and pamphlets were published to advocate and legitimate them. Images were removed from churches; the care of the poor was reorganized and begging abolished.The municipal code of Wittenberg of January 1522, which was the result of joint con­sult­ations among representatives of the city council and professors of the university, codified most of these resolved or already implemented changes.

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After his return from the Wartburg, Luther recorded his impression that the Wittenberg movement was an act of disobedience and disorder. That does not do justice to the situation, however. Luther’s criticism demanded unconditional submission to the territorial ruler as the competent agent of reform, but that standard was not applicable to most of the protagonists in the city and the university. They took for granted the right to take church reform in their city into their own hands, and the Elector’s government had limited itself to more or less guarded warnings and admonitions. Luther’s return from the Wartburg marked a change of course: from that point, he took the helm and pursued the goal of a Reformation headed by the ter­r i­ tor­ial sovereign. The vast majority of Wittenberg protagonists of the Reformations fol­ lowed the lead of the charismatic preacher who, now bearded and quasi ennobled, called for ‘protecting the weak’ and claimed to ensure order. Only

Fig. 15  Lucas Cranach the Elder painted this diptych of a husband and wife, probably Andreas Karlstadt and his wife Anna von Mochau, who married on 19 January 1522. She was about fifteen years old, from Seegrehna near Wittenberg, of the lesser nobility, and she called attention to the fact that her marriage was against canon law. If Alejandro Zorzin’s identification of the subject is correct, this is the earliest portrait of a married Reformation clergyman.

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Karlstadt remained aloof: his conception of community reformation no longer had currency in Wittenberg.Thus Luther’s contested colleague began his career as a dissident and exile, which would end only a decade later, when he found more tenable positions as a Swiss city pastor in Zurich and Basel. The code of the city of Wittenberg, the first Reformation church ordinance, was distributed beyond the borders of Saxony in several an­onym­ ous editions—­that is, with no indication of the printer or place of printing—­ and thus became the model and source of inspiration for the new constitutions of ‘evangelical’ churches elsewhere.

Changes in the Cities The processes of reform in the individual cities, beginning in 1521/2, are highly idiosyncratic: the events in each case were determined by conflicts, negotiations, compromises between different protagonists and interest groups; reforms by city councils and by congregations were interwoven. In some cities, such as Nuremberg and Zurich, some of the patrician families revealed affinities with the Reformation early on. Some of them perceived an opportunity to reshape the church after their own conception, or to eliminate problems such as begging, which had been religiously sanctioned up to then, since giving alms was counted as a ‘good work’. Bringing church property under municipal control was also a motive. In other cities, such as Magdeburg, Göttingen, and Strasbourg, the Reformation was supported especially by those social groups or guilds which up to then had been excluded from the city councils and now sought participation. And in many places, including Erfurt, Constance, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and Braunschweig, the developments fed the struggle for greater autonomy against episcopal or princely rule. On the whole, the cities, which were particularly flourishing culturally and economically in the early sixteenth century, were strengthened by the Reformation, although no fundamental restructuring of political power ensued. Many urban reformations were instigated by preachers who—­usually after reading Luther’s works—­persuaded larger or smaller groups of lay ­people that the existing church ran counter to biblical teachings. Such Reformation preaching and the uncontrollable results of its reception often led to spectacular acts, such as marriages of evangelical priests, the singing of Reformation songs, readings of Luther’s German translation of the New Testament, first published in 1522, the celebration of the Eucharist under

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both kinds, and attacks on symbols and representatives of the orthodox church. Such events served in turn to mobilize larger groups. Processes of reformation began earlier in the cities than the developments in the coun­ tryside, the territories, and the courts of the aristocracy. By the same token, the influence of the urban events extended to those political and cultural spaces—­just as the books printed in the cities penetrated into castles and rural life-­worlds. After early conflicts between the protagonists of the Reformation and the magistrates of the cities, strategies were often negotiated to mitigate or overcome the religious disagreement, which was in itself a danger to the urban community. Thus the various ‘foreign policy’ considerations of the city governments played a significant role. When cities decided to establish the Reformation—­sometimes by adopting a church ordinance to that effect; often by appointing evangelical preachers and introducing communion under both kinds and a vernacular liturgy—­they generally reinforced their political contacts to like-­minded evangelical cities or princes; those cities and estates that retained the ‘old faith’ acted analogously.The general uncer­ tainty of religious policy at the imperial level thus encouraged political cooperation within the developing denominational camps. Whether the ‘common man’—and the ‘common woman’, who was becoming increas­ ingly visible as a religious subject—­were content and able to identify with these processes of establishment will never be known. From the mid-­1520s, the opportunities for their self-­expression, which had briefly opened up in the course of the Reformation movement, rapidly diminished.

3.7.  Zwingli and the Urban Reformation in Zurich Stipendiary Priest at the Grossmünster The Reformer Huldrych (or Ulrich) Zwingli, and the reformed Protestant church tradition which he founded, have always declared both their affinity with and their independence from Luther—­and justifiably so. Born in 1484 in Wildhaus, in the valley of Toggenburg in eastern Switzerland, Zwingli studied in Vienna and Basel from 1498 to 1506, earned the title of magister and was consecrated a priest. The charismatic Zwingli preached as a stipen­ diary priest in Zurich from 1519 on. The date of 1516 for the beginning of

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his reform activity is characteristic of his public self-­descriptions from the first: ‘Long before anyone in our region knew anything of Luther’s name, I began in the year 1516 to preach the gospel of Christ thus, that I ascended no pulpit except having taken the word of the gospel that was to be read the same morning in Mass for my text and interpreting it solely according to biblical scripture.’55 In other words, Zwingli saw his activities leading up to ‘the’ Reformation as beginning with his habit of explaining the day’s gospel readings in relation to the Bible itself. He did so under the influence of Erasmus, whom he ardently admired, and to whom he was thoroughly devoted after having met him in person. In a retrospection dated 1523, however, Zwingli also admitted that he had not been fully oriented after ‘scripture alone’ at his parish of Einsiedeln, where he had ministered to the population around the pilgrimage convent, but had followed ‘the old teachers’,56 that is, the orthodox exegetes. He dated the actual beginning of his strictly Bible-­oriented style of preaching to the beginning of his work in Zurich on 1 January 1519. At that time, he had broken with the orthodox lectionary and, like the Church Fathers Chrysostom and Origen, begun his series of exegetic sermons with an interpretation of the gospel of Matthew. All he knew of Luther at this time was his criticism of indulgences.57 Luther is first mentioned in Zwingli’s correspondence in December 1518.58 We may assume that the humanist Zwingli was involved in the com­ munication networks that promptly picked up all matters relating to Luther. In his correspondence with the lawyer Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg—­who, after initial enthusiasm, had gone over to the camp of older humanists who were sceptical of Luther, primarily because of Luther’s criticism of the papacy—­Zwingli had defended the Wittenberg theologian, calling him an ‘Elijah’, that is, a prophetic figure appointed by God, in the aftermath of the Leipzig Disputation.59 Apparently, Zwingli was impressed by the in­dom­it­ abil­ity which Luther seemed to have in common with the Old Testament prophet from Thisbe in Gilead. We may be certain that Zwingli eagerly used Luther’s scriptural exegeses, and was drawn by them to a closer study of St Augustine. The critical influence in Zwingli’s theological development, however, both before and during his readings of Luther, was Erasmus of Rotterdam. Although Zwingli may at times have strongly emphasized his independence from Luther in self-­defence, his theology and his actions as a reformer indisputably have a specific profile of their own. Zwingli was lastingly influenced by humanism

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in particular: by its orientation after Renaissance philosophy and the clas­sic­al authors, and by its interest in an ethical approach to life in this world and a just and free order of living. His humanistic ideals persisted even after 1522, when he began to turn away from Erasmus, who remained loyal to Rome. Zwingli’s cultural horizons were unusually broad, and contributed sig­ nificantly to the autonomous nature of his theological development. Because his library has been largely preserved, we know a great deal more about the origins of his intellectual interests than about those of most of his learned contemporaries. In addition to the classics and the Church Fathers, Zwingli was well acquainted with scholasticism, especially the Scotist tradition, that is, the current oriented after John Duns Scotus. Unlike Luther, who was primarily schooled in the via moderna, Zwingli was more strongly influ­ enced by the via antiqua. The Platonism of the Florentine Renaissance, which he encountered mainly in the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was another lasting influence. Neo-­Platonist influences can be found in the sharp distinctions between spirit and matter—­between the external and the internal—­which are crucial for Zwingli’s hermeneutics, his doctrine of the sacraments and his theological disagreement with Luther. When can Zwingli’s work first be called ‘Reformation’? The answer to this question is significant in regard to certain other urban reformers as well. Should we designate preaching which questions important phenomena of the existing church as a ‘Reformation’, or should we reserve the word for certain practical consequences that result from such activity? About three years passed between the beginnings of reform preaching of a kind com­par­ able to Zwingli’s and the first visible changes in the church. As early as 1521, however, Zwingli had been involved as a secret mediator in the publication of a quite successful pamphlet which was ultimately printed in six editions: the Description of the Divine Mill. A lay author had contacted Zwingli in confidence; Zwingli had arranged for it to be printed, and probably con­ tributed the idea for the title page illustration.60 It is an exemplary allegory of the process of communication which char­ acterized the Reformation.The picture reverses a popular motif of the time, the ‘Eucharistic mill’, a representation of the miracle of transubstantiation. Christ pours grist into a mill in the form of the four evangelists—­symbolized by an angel, a lion, an ox, and an eagle—­and St Paul; the freshly ground flour, labelled with the cardinal virtues ‘faith, love, hope’, is shovelled into a sack marked with a cross and a millwheel by a person labelled ‘Erasmus’; the dove hovering over the flour sack symbolizes the presence of God in the

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person of the Holy Spirit, set free by the original Greek gospel. The mendicant monk ‘Luter’, working at a kneading trough, makes the flour into Reformation books, which are then carelessly dropped by the church hierarchy, represented by the pope, a cardinal, a bishop, a canon, and a monk. Over the heads of the clergy, a dragon cries ‘Ban’: the only thing the church hierarchy can think of when confronted with the living Word of God, the image insinuates, is to condemn Luther and his followers. Standing beside Luther is a man ‘distributing’ the Word of God, dressed as a scholar or a secular priest—­an urban preacher like Zwingli involved in the Reformation process of communication. In the background is the menacing figure of ‘Karsthans’, the shrewd peasant figure which first appears in Reformation pamphlets in early 1521, here raising a flail to thrash the clergy. Verbal and pictorial media of this kind are an early form of Reformation propaganda which was another factor, alongside sermons, in condensing new attitudes into action. The earliest acts in Zwingli’s immediate surroundings in Zurich which followed from his sermons date from the spring of 1522. On the first Sunday in Lent, a demonstrative meal of sausages was held at the home of the Zurich printer Christoph Froschauer, a close associate of Zwingli, attended by ten or twelve persons. The event was probably a symbolic mockery of a Eucharistic ceremony rather than a full meal. Zwingli was present, although he did not partake, as was his colleague Leo Jud. In contrast to other com­ mon violations of the rules of canon law on feasting and abstinence, the participants apparently had an interest in making their act publicly known. There was a close connection between their behaviour and what Zwingli had been preaching in his sermons for some time. Referring to and continuing both humanism and Luther’s cause, Zwingli had taken positions against tithes, the rules of abstinence and fasting, the veneration of Mary and the other saints, monasticism, celibacy, and all kinds of ‘secular’ displays of devout zeal, and also against canon law as a whole. He had advocated an inward theology entirely focussed on the ‘spirit’ rather than the ‘flesh’, drawing on the Neo-­Platonist philosophical traditions of classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. In a sermon that was later published, Zwingli justified the sausage meal as a legitimate rebellion against the rules of abstinence on the part of a conscience bound by scripture alone. He did everything in his power to publicize the act. The appeal to the public was crucial for this and other processes of Reformation in the cities: by publicizing their own disobedience

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Fig. 16  A pamphlet by Hans Fuessli, Martin Säger, and Huldreich Zwingli, printed in Zurich in 1521 by Christoph Froschauer the Elder © akg-­images. The picture describes the communicatio process taking place in early Reformation: Erasmus published the Greek New Testament, Luther and other preachers popularize it. In the background a peasant called Karsthans attacks the cler­ic­al estate.

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against the existing church law and familiar church customs, urban reformers produced opportunities for solidarity, and for imitative acts which often had publicizing effects in their turn. The more people protested, the harder it must have been for the church to punish such violations. Similar demonstrative acts in Zurich soon followed. The city council of Zurich responded by asking three local secular priests for an expert opinion. This step is primarily interesting in that the city council did not address its request to the supervisory authority responsible for the clergy, the bishop of Constance. The secular priests’ opinion called for the fast-­breakers to be punished, but did not refer the matter to the bishop’s jurisdiction. The con­ stellation that first appeared here, in the spring of 1522, was characteristic of the later Reformation in Zurich and in many other cities: the municipal authorities cooperated with individual clergy members of a reformational frame of mind to take control of the church in their city and its dependent rural territory, excluding the authorities of the diocese and the church hierarchy. As the year 1522 progressed, Zwingli played a key role in other conflicts which arose in Zurich. In a disputation with the French itinerant preacher Francis Lambert of Avignon about the veneration of the saints and the cult of Mary, Zwingli was able to persuade the Franciscan friar that the cult of the saints was incompatible with the Gospel. Lambert thereupon made his way to Wittenberg; a year later he married, probably the first French clergy­ man to do so. From 1526 on, he would play an important role in intro­du­ cing the Reformation in Hesse. As the result of another disputation in July 1522, this one with Zurich priests in religious orders and representatives of the chapter of Grossmünster, Zwingli persuaded the city council to demand that the gospel be preached alone, without scholastic interpretations. In the same spirit, when the bishop of Constance issued an admonition that canon law must be observed, the council of Zurich asked him to state the biblical basis for the rules of fasting and abstinence. Thus the onus of legitimation was now placed on the trad­ition­al practices, not the new ones: a far-­reaching paradigm shift had occurred. The strategy that took shape in the summer of 1522 determined the Zurich city council’s further action: public disputations were held on the controversial religious issues between representatives of the two camps, the orthodox ‘old believers’ and the ‘evangelicals’ led by Zwingli. The pro­ gramme of the disputations was set by the council, or its advisor Zwingli,

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whose influence grew with the evangelicals’ majority in the city council. The sole criterion for decisions on the truth of contested doctrines was the Bible; the debates were judged by the council itself. The universal priest­ hood of all baptized believers, which Luther propagated in his treatise To the Christian Nobility, found its realization in the urban Reformation of Zurich, where the right to interpret scripture was exercised by the municipal authority, the magistracy. Two outstanding disputations held in January and October of 1523, now known as the First and Second Zurich Disputations, had historic repercussions throughout German-­speaking Switzerland and southern Germany. Because the documentation of these events was rapidly and widely disseminated in print, many other cities were able to take them as models, adapting them to local conditions as necessary. These disputations made Zwingli an exemplary figure of the Reformation, especially in southern Germany and Switzerland. From this time on, the Disputations took on great importance as an instrument for the introduction of urban reformations, just as parish visitations would later become a means of imposing territorial reformations. Zwingli can be considered to some degree the inventor of the disputa­ tion as a form of public discussion and decision outside the academic con­ text. A similarity to the synods of the early church was intentional, and lent the procedure legitimacy. In contrast to university disputations, which gen­ erally followed the same rules of order everywhere, the debates were now held in the city hall, the questions were decided by the city council, the basis of judgement was the Bible, and the official language was German. Perhaps the equally irregular Leipzig Disputation had provided inspiration; on the other hand, disputations may have been practised in the communal sphere before the Reformation, although not as a means of decision-­making on church policy. Theses written by Zwingli were distributed only very late; they did not play a central role in the disputations. The First Zurich Disputation on 29 January 1523 attracted the parish priests of the city and territory of Zurich, several hundred laymen and scholars, and a delegation from the bishop of Constance led by the vicar general and doctor of theology Johann Faber. The orthodox camp, simply by participating, was lending legitimacy to a procedure that was actually incompatible with its own assumptions: a doctrinal decision by a lay body; the contestation of canon law and the church tradition; the adjudication of doctrinal truth on the sole basis of the Bible. And in fact, in the course of  the Disputation, the traditionalists were marginalized. The council

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announced its judgement after just a half-­day of debate: because no one had been able to show that Zwingli was in error, he was to continue his preach­ ing based on the gospel; all the preachers in the city and territory of Zurich were to follow Zwingli’s doctrine. Soon afterwards, in an extensive interpretation of the Sixty-­Seven Articles originally conceived as theses for the First Zurich Disputation, Zwingli offered a comprehensive presentation of his reform doctrine in all its aspects, mentioning specific changes in practice. After this first major disputation, Zwingli’s position had been strengthened by the support of the city council—­and the reformation of the church was only a matter of time. The Second Zurich Disputation, held from 26 to 28 October 1523, was preceded by provocative acts in which several persons close to Zwingli, and some who claimed to be acting on his authority, attacked elements of the old church. Images and crucifixes had been removed from churches in the city and territory of Zurich, for example; ‘eternal lights’ had been extin­ guished, and the customary practice of the sacrificial mass had been modi­ fied. Among the protagonists were close partisans of Zwingli such as the former priest Ludwig Haetzer, who had written a pamphlet of strictly bib­ lical arguments against the ‘idolatrous’ images, published in 1523. The Second Disputation lasted three days and drew more participants than the first. Of the other Swiss cities, only Schaffhausen and St Gallen were represented. The Swiss bishops had been invited, but not one sent a representative. The reformers hoped the event would have propaganda effects, and these were achieved primarily through the publication and distribution of official minutes.The most important representative of the traditionalists present was the Zurich canon Conrad Hofmann; Zwingli’s followers predominated. The first day’s agenda called for a debate on images; the second and third days were devoted to the Mass. Very clear differences in strategies and concepts of reform became appar­ ent between individual reformers, with important consequences for the disputation and for the further course of the Reformation. A number of Zwingli’s earliest followers, such as the future Anabaptists Conrad Grebel, Simon Stumpf, and Balthasar Hubmaier, urged more resolute action on the Mass and the abolition of images than Zwingli himself advocated. Moreover, they disputed the Zurich city council’s right to decide on the ‘idols’ and the Mass, first because the biblical injunction against images was clear and unambiguous, they argued, and second, because each church congregation,

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and not a political authority, must be the active subject of church reform. Zwingli, however, pleaded emphatically for the concept of a Reformation under the auspices of civil authority as the only way to prevent unrest. The council must be allowed to exercise its judgement in liturgical changes to avoid chaos and inconsistency. Accordingly, a council edict was enforced after the Second Zurich Disputation under which the images and the Mass were left as they were for the time being. In some respects, Zwingli’s exposed position against the radicals among his own clientele resembles the tensions in the Wittenberg camp after Luther’s return from the Wartburg. In both cases, the oppositions centred on the question who was responsible for enacting church reforms and how they should be carried out. Luther and Zwingli each placed their confidence in the most robust political authority at hand: the Electorate of Saxony in the one case, the city council of Zurich in the other. Their further action was based on the support that Luther found in the Elector and Zwingli in the patrician families of Zurich, who approved of the changes in the church. Because the reforms of the liturgy and the organization of the church amounted to grave violations of canon law, the reformers were eager to have them sanctioned by effective secular authorities. And in any case, that was the realistic approach: it would have been impossible in the long term to impose reforms or innovations against the will of the secular governments. The side effect—­placing religion under state control—­was the price of the Reformation.

An Evangelical, Municipal Church That fact that Zwingli, the humanistically educated newcomer to the city, succeeded in spreading his concept of a Reformation in Zurich may be in part the result of the high ‘urban affinity’ of his theology. His ideas empha­ sized responsibility for communal institutions in general, and integrated the inhabitants, who had previously been divided into clergy and laity, to form a Christian community of responsible citizens. In contrast to his radical followers, who saw no alternative to the immediate and uncompromising realization of biblical commandments, Zwingli—­ like Luther—­ took the incompletion of human righteousness into consideration. The improve­ ment of Christian community which was possible and attainable through preaching the gospel, he felt, would necessarily fall short of the ideals which the radicals pursued. In their theological acceptance of the discrepancy

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between learned ideals and real life, between radical Reformation and their magisterial Reformation, Zwingli and Luther were brothers in spirit. The reform measures carried out in close collaboration between the city council and the leading evangelical clergy in the two years following the major disputations established an evangelical, municipal church: saints’ feast days, processions, fasting, and abstinence were abolished; images, crucifixes, and organs were removed from the churches; baptismal and Eucharistic liturgies in the vernacular were introduced; monasteries and canonic chap­ ters were successively dissolved and their assets placed at the disposition of the council. In 1525, a novel institution was created which would also prove influential for other Reformation cities, including Strasbourg and later Geneva: the Prophezei, a kind of public bible school. Every day, Latin ­scholars, learned theologians, interested laymen, and priests still inexperienced in Reformation exegesis from the city and the surrounding countryside assem­ bled in the choir of the Grossmünster to listen to educational lectures on  successive excerpts of the Bible which were translated from Greek, Hebrew, or Latin. These translation exercises, in which Zwingli and the other clergy of the city were leading participants, formed the nucleus of the 1530 Zurich Bible, the first complete, homogeneous Reformation Bible. Another important institution founded by the Zurich city council, and adopted elsewhere in many variations, set new standards for church dis­cip­ line: the marriage and morals court. A body appointed by the council consist­ ing of four secular and two clerical judges assumed competency to adjudicate marital matters (mainly divorces, impediments to marriage, and the certifi­ cation of legitimate betrothals) and other moral and disciplinary disputes. It had the power to levy punishments such as the lesser ban (exclusion from the Eucharist) and the greater ban (excommunication). There was contro­ versy within the reformed tradition as to whether the secular authorities should have the right to sanction citizens, thus acting as a kind of morals police, with coercive measures of an ecclesiastic nature. For his part, Zwingli approved of this theocratic tendency. From the mid-­1520s on, Zwingli developed into the charismatic leader of a ‘reformed’ school of the Reformation that was increasingly independent of Luther and Wittenberg. Thanks to his close connections to the printer Christoph Froschauer of Zurich, he had an uncommonly powerful typo­ graphic infrastructure at his disposal, and no one did more than Zwingli to keep the presses working. Zwingli’s influential publications made him well

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known as a Bible commentator and a pamphleteer, both in Latin and in the vernacular. In the first comprehensive work of Reformation dogma, De vera et falsa religione commentarius, published in 1525, Zwingli uniquely integrated the causes of humanism and the Reformation.

3.8.  Intra-­Reformation Disputes The Reformation movement was able to prevail historically because it was unanimous in its opposition to the traditional church, in its acceptance of the gospels as set down in the Bible as the sole authority, and in its solidarity with Luther, who had been condemned as a heretic without a hearing.This unanimity at first masked all the differences that existed in the beginning, or that became discernible later, between the various Reformation theologians—­ with their various intellectual backgrounds. These theological differences led to open conflicts especially in those cases where one position claimed leadership before another, or when in­ter­pret­ations of certain biblical statements were accompanied by exclu­ sive claims. Because there were no universally recognized arbiters of doctrine, and the Bible served as the sole standard of truth, most intra-­Reformation con­ troversies culminated in disputes over the meaning and the applicability of specific biblical passages. Usually, these disputes revealed divergent political conceptions concerning the relation between ecclesiastical and secular communities, the appropriate instruments of reform, the responsibilities and limitations of authorities, and the moral quality of the ‘true church’. From the mid-­1520s, it was public knowledge that nothing remained of the Reformation movement’s initial unanimity. Luther’s publications on the Peasants’ War damaged his reputation among parts of the evangelical camp, encouraging those who would criticize his Bible interpretations too as ‘­fallible’: Luther was no longer seen as inspired by the Holy Spirit. The processes of political and theological dissociation are thus more than chronologically related. The orthodox camp decried Luther, the arch-­heretic, as the cause of all the diverse phenomena of decay; the grain of truth in that judgement was that the Wittenberg Reformer and his diverse writings represented the most important points of origin, reference, and conflict for all the ramifications of Reformation theology. From the mid-­1520s, it became customary within the broad Protestant camp to contest the late Luther by appealing to an earlier Luther—­dialectically

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interpreting Luther as an opponent of Luther. Conversely, as the Lutheran denomination took shape, it went without saying that his latest and most recent statements were to be taken as authoritative, giving the ‘old’ Church Father precedence over the ‘young’ revolutionary.

Franz von Sickingen and the Knights’ Revolt After certain vacillations in the year of his excommunication, Luther reached a position, which he consistently professed from January 1521 on, prohibiting the use of ‘violence and murder for the Gospel’61 and declaring military means out of the question in the struggle against the papal Antichrist and his secular satraps. Luther wanted to fight him by the Word alone,62 and the rapid progress of the Reformation movement by means of the printed and spoken word, which now, at the end of time, deluged the world like ‘a passing shower of rain which does not return where it has once been’,63 confirmed him in this purpose. Because of his non-­violent position, Luther distanced himself from the military movement of Franz von Sickingen. The famous and infamous knight from the Palatinate had acquired power, wealth, and political influence by his escalating feuds and his military enterprise, and was a servant of the emperor. He had been acquainted with Luther’s writings since late 1520. Sickingen had offered protection to Ulrich von Hutten, an ingenious humanistic poet of aristocratic origins who had fallen into ill favour with the pope; Hutten subsequently gave Sickingen’s castle, the Ebernburg, the stirring attribute ‘harbourage of justice’.64 Luther himself had declined Sickingen’s offer of asylum before the imperial diet at Worms. Sickingen would later shelter other prominent Reformers, including Martin Bucer, Johannes Oecolampadius, Caspar Aquila, and Johann Schwebel, who played important roles in the processes of Reformation in Strasbourg, Basel, Thuringia, and Zweibrücken. The writings of Bucer and Hutten during their time at Ebernburg can be considered very influential in the develop­ ment of Reformation publishing in southern Germany. Sickingen used convenient parts of Hutten’s ‘war on priests’ and Luther’s appeal To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation to lend an ideological foundation to his endeavours to expand his territorial rule at the cost of the church. But the processes of reform in the dominions of the imperial knight did not develop beyond the beginnings of an evangelical liturgy, which seems to have been oriented, in the matter of images among others, after the municipal ordinance of Wittenberg, available in print from 1522.

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In the summer of 1522, Sickingen led the founding of a confederation of knights of the upper Rhine, which was allied with another aristocratic association in Franconia. Like the confederations described in the con­tem­ por­ary literature, such as the Fifteen Confederates and the New Karsthans, the knights claimed to represent a community of Christians and promote the ‘common good’ and the ‘old’ common law. These lay confederations often had an anticlerical vein, aimed at the alleged selfishness of the clergy. Sickingen now began a feud against the archbishop of Trier, Richard von Greiffenklau, claiming to ‘redeem’ the archbishop’s subjects ‘from the heavy, un-­Christian yoke and law of the priesthood’ and to lead them ‘to evan­gel­ ic­al, light laws and Christian freedom’.65 His propaganda fostered the impression that the war was being fought for the sake of the gospel and that the knight’s rebellion was a direct conse­ quence of the Lutheran Reformation. Anti-­Reformation publications only reinforced that impression. After the siege of Trier had failed, Sickingen found himself opposed by a superior coalition of princes led by the Landgrave of Hesse, the Elector Palatine, and Greiffenklau. During their assault on Landstuhl Castle, Sickingen was fatally injured by a falling beam. According to the account of his brother-­in-­law, Philip von Flersheim, bishop of Speyer, the dying knight ‘confessed in his heart’ and asked his chaplain to ‘give him absolution and show him the sacrament’.66 Sickingen’s life and acts do not indicate any strong influence of a piety after Reformation principles. He was primarily interested in restoring the former glory of his knightly estate, which had been ground between the prospering urban bourgeoisie and the expanding territorial states of the higher nobility. Sickingen and his fellow knights had seen Luther’s appeal To the Christian Nobility as a glimmer of hope that they were needed and that the Reformation offered them an opportunity to earn new prestige. In spite of Sickingen’s defeat, a relatively stable evangelical church did become established in the territories of several imperial knights.

The Peasants’ War and Thomas Müntzer Like the knights, a large part of the peasantry found itself in a precarious position between the princes and the ecclesiastical institutions. Moreover, the peasants placed their hopes in the emperor who, ideally, would respect and restore their traditional rights.

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In theocratic-­utopian social models that flourished in the early sixteenth century, and were perpetuated and updated during the Reformation, the emperor and the noble, Christian knight formed a close community with the common peasant; urban merchants and territorial princes had no place in these political scenarios. Early Reformation literature, which was very open to the peasantry but largely critical of merchant capitalism, very prob­ ably contributed to the peasants’ view of Luther, Zwingli, and the other reformers as advocates of their cause. Cities were regularly and closely con­ nected with the countryside through markets and trade, itinerant trades­ men, and wandering priests and scholars; the boundaries between the urban and rural processes of reformation are fluid, and the relationships between the Reformation and the Peasants’ War are complex. The ‘Peasants’ War’ refers to a broad-­based, revolutionary rebellion by the ‘common man’ which began in the county of Stühlingen in the southern Black Forest, and swept large parts of southern, southwestern, and central Germany within a year.The armed uprisings against individual rulers, which were accompanied by attacks on the property of nobles, churches, and monasteries, were mainly aimed at forcing negotiations. In some regions, agreements were in fact made between the rebels and those against whom they revolted. The peasants were often supported in their negotiations by academically educated sympathizers. Some knights too, such as Götz von Berlichingen and Florian Geyer von Giebelstadt, lent the peasants the aid of their military expertise. In some mining regions—­Thuringia, Styria, and Tyrol—­miners rebelled in league with the peasants. Attempts to establish a political confederation beyond the individual regions by means of statutes and a peasants’ parliament and chancery attest to broader ideas of political reform in the empire, but such efforts remained episodic. The regional movements were in contact with and sometimes inspired by one another, and the Twelve Articles of the common peasantry of March 1525, broadly accepted as a manifesto, was one of the most-­printed pamph­ lets of the Reformation period, appearing in some two dozen editions. Hence the uprisings can, in spite of their strong regionally specific features, be seen generally as a ‘Peasants’ War’. The Twelve Articles were published anonymously. Their author was prob­ ably a layman, the furrier Sebastian Lotzer, secretary of a peasant army. The learned Memmingen priest Christoph Schappeler of St Gallen, who had been an active supporter of the Reformation since 1520, supported the

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rebellious peasants and probably contributed the preface. The peasants made no secret of their sympathies with the Reformation movement. The preface stating that the ‘foundation of all the peasants’ articles’ was ‘to hear the Gospel and live according to it’67 and the first article, calling for the free election of parish priests by the whole congregation, placed the peasants’ demands in the immediate context of what Luther and his supporters stood for. The free choice of parish priests, which had been an important demand of peasants in the late Middle Ages, and had also been included in Luther’s appeal To the Christian Nobility, was intended to restrict vicariates. Higher clergymen who held several offices—­in extreme cases, even dozens—­often appointed poorly trained vicars to exercise their functions in specific parishes, paying the vicars a pittance and keeping the lion’s share of their prebends. The Twelve Articles differ from pre-­Reformation catalogues of grievances in their appeal to the ‘Gospel’, which had become a buzzword of con­tem­ por­ary religious and social discourse only with Luther and the Reformation movement. In spite of certain sympathies, Luther did not want to be co-­ opted by the peasants’ movement. The Peasants’ War was at bottom a struggle for social, economic, and political interests which included the abolition of serfdom and the resulting hereditary claims of the feudal lords, which had become increasingly oppressive, especially in Upper Swabia. The argument for this demand was that universal redemption through Christ’s death implied freedom. A subsequent article conceded obedience to legitimate rule, however. Luther condemned the biblical derivation of political and ethical claims which conflicted substantially with the contemporary social order; he could not and would not accept the notion that the Twelve Articles owed anything to the reception of his Treatise on the Freedom of a Christian. The peasants’ specific demands included the following: the tithes in corn should be made a responsibility of the parish and administered communally; the lesser tithe should be abolished; hunting rights in forests and rivers, which the nobility claimed exclusively, should be free to all in accordance with common law; usurious rents should be replaced with fair terms set by independent appraisers. In some regions, the peasants’ rebellions led for a time to revolutionary changes in government. In the spring of 1525, the uprising spread to the central regions of Germany—­Franconia, Thuringia, the Palatinate, and Alsace. The increasing growth of this revolution of the common man

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strengthened the princes’ inclination to military cooperation—­in spite of differences in their positions on the Reformation—­ to restore order, sometimes by draconian punitive actions. In the spring and summer of 1525, the revolts were widely suppressed. In Thuringia, the peasants’ uprisings had only broken out in April, but came to a bloody end in the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525. Of some six thousand peasants, five thou­ sand are reported to have been killed. The victors hoped for a deterrent effect through the use of extreme force. Luther was involved in the events of the Peasants’ War as an observer and commentator. In a first literary phase, he examined the Twelve Articles, agree­ ing at least partially with some of the demands. However, he saw the peas­ ants’ appeal to the gospel as an illegitimate instrumentalization of scripture; the peasants should not mix religion and politics, he felt, and should refrain from using force. At the same time, Luther also admonished the princes to moderation and accommodation. In a similar spirit, Luther published an agreement that had been reached at Weingarten with his commentary: compromise seemed to him the best solution. Soon afterwards, however, Luther’s pamphlet Against the Murderous,Thieving Hordes of Peasants appeared, which concludes with a merciless appeal to the ruling authorities to massacre the rebellious peasants. What had changed Luther’s mind? While travelling in the zone of the rebellion in Thuringia, Luther had been confronted with the peasants’ violence, and had been one-­ sidedly informed by partisans of the Count of Mansfeld, who was preparing to suppress the rebellion. But the most important factor was probably that Luther considered the peasants to be wholly under the spell of his former student Thomas Müntzer and his apocalyptic theology. This was a grave mistake, as Müntzer and his colleague Heinrich Pfeiffer had no more than a certain influence among the peasants of Mühlhausen, where he had been a parish priest. Luther was highly influential in stylizing Müntzer as a furious agitator of the peasants’ rebellions, branding him as one of the key instiga­ tors of the Peasants’ War. Müntzer’s historical role does not live up to his reputation, however. Müntzer had failed in his attempt to influence the rebellious peasants during a journey to the southern German zone of revolt in February 1525. Hence the importance of his theology and the influence of his writings for the outbreak and progress of the Peasants’War should not be overestimated—­in spite of the long-­lived interpretation of Müntzer’s role begun by Luther and later continued, with a positive valu­ation, by Marxist historians.

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Luther’s harsh rejection of Thomas Müntzer was motivated by core e­ lem­ents of his theology. Müntzer’s rigorous pursuit of sanctity, deriving binding moral implications from the Gospel, seemed to Luther superhuman and coldly legalistic. Luther was disturbed by Müntzer’s willingness to sanction violence in the struggle against the symbols and representatives of ‘unbelief ’ and against feudal repression in the form of the requirement of tithing, for example; in the light of Luther’s own doctrine of justification, Müntzer seemed to him the epitome of a ‘works-­justified’ agitator. Supporters of Luther, such as Melanchthon, shared his rejection of Müntzer. As a result, persons who were in touch with Luther but did not share his position on non-­violence—­such as Karlstadt—­were inclined to be caught in a maelstrom of contempt. The execution of Müntzer, who had been captured fleeing after the Battle of Frankenhausen, on 27 May 1525 was considered justified by his former teacher.

Luther’s Repudiation of Karlstadt The complex relations between Karlstadt and Luther formed the nucleus of early schisms in the Reformation. In the early years of their common path, the career-­conscious secular priest and lawyer and the charismatic mendicant friar had worked together to develop an anti-­scholastic theology and raise the profile of Wittenberg as a refuge of true Augustinism. A first rift between the two had appeared in 1520 over the question of the biblical canon. The alacrity with which Luther was willing to drop the Epistle of James because of the doctrine of justification by works which it contained seemed irre­ sponsible to Karlstadt. In Luther’s understanding, scripture was defined by a theological criterion: it was what contained ‘Gospel’, what ‘conveys Christ’.68 Karlstadt’s Bible hermeneutics, on the other hand, were based on the formal validity of the whole of scripture, legitimized and approved by the Church Fathers, as the canonized foundation of doctrine. The theologian Karlstadt, born in Franconia, was an autonomous personality; it was out of the question for him to subordinate himself blindly to his generally revered, if not idolized, colleague Luther. Of the two Wittenberg theologians, Luther was the one who, during the years from 1517 to 1521, more brashly stepped forward, more impetuously exaggerated, more openly contended against the existing church, and unstintingly introduced new issues and themes of debate in controversial

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theology. No one was more radical than Luther in this early phase of the Reformation’s development. In the time of his ten-­month absence—­the journey to Worms and the sojourn at the Wartburg, from April 1521 to early March 1522—no direct contact between Luther and Karlstadt is docu­ mented. Luther’s letters to others from the Wartburg comment on news concerning Karlstadt mostly critically and distantly; thus there is every indi­ cation that their relationship was already damaged, if not destroyed, before the events associated with the ‘Wittenberg movement’. After Luther’s return from the Wartburg, Karlstadt was soon the only one to adhere to the municipal code of Wittenberg, the resolutions that had been passed, and the concept of Reformation by local governance. This made it easy for Luther to isolate him and represent him as the one actually responsible for the ‘seditious’ aspects of the religious reform. Later in 1522, Karlstadt’s position in Wittenberg was further complicated by censorship in the university which curtailed—­in fact, completely eliminated—­ his ability to publish. In this phase, he became more radical, repudiating his station as a priest and a scholar, including his academic degrees, wearing a grey peasants’ coat, going by the name ‘Brother Andres’—in short, associating himself with the ‘common man’, the ‘simple layman’ who, in his view, was closer to God and salvation than the ‘perverted scholars’.69 Karlstadt gradually withdrew from Wittenberg to his parish of Orlamünde in the upper valley of the Saale. As an archdeacon, canon, and professor of theology, Karlstadt had entrusted his parish, as higher clerics were wont to do, to a poorly paid vicar; now he felt called upon to take his pastoral duties in hand. The reforms carried out in consultation with the Council of Orlamünde were aligned in principle with those of the congregation-­ oriented urban reformation of Wittenberg; they included the removal of ‘idols’ from the church building. Karlstadt’s ideas emanating from Orlamünde, and those of a number of like-­minded writers, were influential throughout Thuringia and beyond. Luther seems from 1523/4 on to have considered them as dangerous com­ petitors to his own concept of a territorial reformation, and fought them accordingly. In the summer of 1524, in consultation with the Elector, Luther undertook a journey of preaching and visitation to Jena and the Saale valley, an opportunity for him better to estimate and oppose the influence of Karlstadt and Müntzer. After a sermon Luther preached in Jena on 22 August 1524, there was a confrontational meeting between Luther and his two former colleagues at

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the inn The Black Bear. Karlstadt felt attacked by Luther’s railing against the ‘spirit of Allstedt’, Müntzer’s parish, blaming it for ‘revolt and murder’ and the abolition of baptism—­no doubt in the sense of infant baptism—­and the ‘sacrament of the altar’,70 apparently creating the impression that people were violent in Karlstadt’s sphere of influence too. Karlstadt repudiated the connection to Müntzer and Allstedt. He responded to the reference to the Eucharist, however, that ‘no one . . . after the apostles’ had ‘written and taught’ about the Eucharist as he had.71 Karlstadt said he was ready to prove ‘with scriptures’ that Luther had ‘preached the Gospel wrongly’72 in relation to the Eucharist, had been unfaithful to his own teachings, and taught not ‘the crucified’ Christ, but ‘a Christ he himself has imagined’.73 The heated dispute that took place in public at the inn left no doubt that the two most important representatives of the early Wittenberg Reformation now stood in a deep-­rooted theological opposition to one another. Finally, Luther asked Karlstadt to bring his arguments publicly and in writing, underlining his challenge with a curious symbolic gesture: he handed Karlstadt a gold florin. Karlstadt, whose literary abilities were limit­ed, accepted it as a ‘sign’ that he was ‘empowered to write against Doctor Luther’.74 In the aftermath of this meeting, Karlstadt began a fren­ zied phase of publication. Soon, however, he received a ban from the elector ordering him to leave the Electorate of Saxony in late September 1524. Before Karlstadt left the territory, however, he sent his brother-­ in-­ law Gerhard Westerburg, a legal scholar of Cologne who had joined the cause of the ‘Zwickau prophets’, south to Zurich and Basel. In Basel, several tracts were printed, most importantly on the question of the Eucharist.They were the opening volley of the intra-­Reformation controversy over the Eucharist, which would ultimately destroy the unity of the Reformation movement.

The Controversy over the Eucharist From a theological viewpoint, Karlstadt objected to Luther’s conception of a bodily presence of Christ’s human nature in the elements of bread and wine. Karlstadt compared Luther’s position to Catholic notions, saying that Luther attributed a redemptive function to the Eucharist. This could not be, since it would curtail the exclusive soteriological function of Christ’s crucifixion. For his part, Karlstadt interpreted the words of institution as a self-­reference by Christ: that is, when Christ said, ‘This is my body (hoc est corpus meum) which is given for you’, he indicated his own body, announcing

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the impending crucifixion. Thus at bottom Karlstadt accused Luther of betraying the early Reformation theology of the Cross (theologia crucis) in favour of a sacramental theologia gloriae. In his interpretation of the words of institution, Luther insisted on the literal text: in late 1524, he wrote in answer to an inquiry from Strasbourg as to the position to be taken on the chal­ lenge of Karlstadt’s exegesis: ‘The text is too powerfully present, and will not allow itself to be torn from its meaning by mere verbiage’.75 For Luther, bowing to the literal text meant recognizing as indispensable dogma the presence of Christ as God and man undivided in the elements of the Eucharist which are given as a gift to the communicant. The Eucharist was extraordinarily important to Luther: Christ himself, the union of man and God, grants His indivisible presence in bread and wine in a way that is salu­ tary to the believer—­who partakes of Christ Himself. Almost all the leading reform theologians eventually took part in the public controversy over the Eucharist which began in the autumn of 1524; the issue dominated publishing for the next four years. The orthodox camp occasionally stoked the controversy by reprinting one of the polemics. What better proof that this heresy was untrue than its disintegration into new and different ‘sects’? The diversity of opinion among the ‘evangelicals’ on the question of the Eucharist seemed to reinforce the Catholic critics’ position that scripture alone was not sufficient to regulate all questions of doctrine—­in other words, that the guiding authority of the magisterium was necessary. While Luther insisted that hoc est corpus meum (this is my body) could only be understood as stating the identity of the bread and the body of Christ, Zwingli argued, following the interpretation of the Dutch lawyer Cornelis Hendrixzoen Hoen, which had been published in 1521/2, that the copula est is not to be read in the strict sense, but rather as meaning significat. Other reformers, such as Johannes Oecolampadius of Basel and Martin Bucer of Strasbourg, tended instead towards a third interpretation along these lines: ‘this sign, the bread, is a sign of my body’. Few among the ‘Evangelicals’ agreed with Karlstadt’s exegetic interpretation, although his theological motivation was widely shared in the incipient ‘reformed’ camp. It was in keeping with his theological tendencies that the Wittenberg dissident finally found new fields of activity as a pastor and professor in Zurich (from 1530) and Basel (1534–41). While the Wittenberg line was dominant in the territories of central and northern Germany which were already open to the Reformation, the battle

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for public opinion was marked by countless pamphlets in the controversy over the Eucharist, especially in southern Germany. Strategic appeals to leave off the dispute in order not to strengthen Catholicism were in vain, as were admonitions that unity among the ‘Evangelicals’ was politically too important at the imperial level to be endangered. The theological escalation is explained not only by the central im­port­ ance that the Eucharist had acquired in the medieval Latin church. The re-­ evaluation of the Eucharist also raised questions of scriptural interpretation, the interpretation of the person of Christ, and the church’s marketing of a religious rite commanded by the Bible. Hence, clarifications were undeni­ ably needed. At the urging of Landgrave Philip of Hesse, a religious debate was announced for late September to early October 1529 in Marburg which brought together more of the prominent Reformers of the first generation than ever before, and here the most important personalities of the two camps—­Zwingli and Luther—­met for the first and only time. The deep rifts could not be bridged. On the contrary, Luther refused to recognize his colleagues from Switzerland and Strasbourg as brothers after they had argued, sometimes subversively, in opposition to him during the preceding polemical campaigns.Where the attendees wanted to make a mutual profes­ sion of ‘Christian love’, Luther diluted it with the provision, ‘as far as each respective conscience allows’.76 In the end, there was nothing left to prevent continuing controversies between ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Reformed’ theologians over the question of the Eucharist. The theological culture of conflict that had its first outbreak here remained typical of the early modern Protestant churches, especially in Germany. Because there was no arbiter of doctrine, theological debates were seldom conclusive and were practically impossible to limit.The dissent was favoured by the territorial diversity of the empire, which made it easy for combative theologians to move when necessary and continue their polemics from a different territory.

The First Anabaptist Congregations In the autumn of 1524, Karlstadt sent his colleague Gerhard Westerburg, who proposed to get the Wittenberg dissident’s writings printed, to Zurich. The choice of the destination was very probably connected with the circle

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of ‘radicals’ there who had parted ways with Zwingli, and would later form the core of the Anabaptist congregation. The group was led by the scion of Zurich patricians Konrad Grebel and the humanistically educated canon’s son Felix Mantz, who would become the first Anabaptist to be executed by drowning in the Limmat on 5 January 1527. In the autumn of 1524, when Karlstadt had been banished from Saxony, the spin-­off group in Zurich sought contacts with the Saxon dissidents Müntzer and Karlstadt. A letter they wrote to Müntzer on 5 September 1524—like another addressed to Karlstadt which is not extant77—docu­ ments how closely the events in Saxony were followed in Switzerland, and that the ‘dissenters’ in the two major centres of the Reformation,Wittenberg and Zurich, who saw the authoritarian Reformation as a betrayal of the original ideals, sought contacts with one another very early on. Karlstadt and Müntzer were ‘respected as the purest proclaimers and preachers of the purest divine word’ among the Zurich group.78 The conception of baptism was particularly volatile among the doctrinal questions that concerned Grebel and his followers. They held Müntzer in high regard because, in his Protestation of 1524, he had described the customary practice of baptism as a farce (affenspiel), and objected to making ‘underage children into Christians’;79 they asked him, however, whether he had actually stopped baptizing chil­ dren in his own congregation. In Zurich, and especially in the surrounding countryside, parish priests of  similar opinions had begun to refuse infant baptism because it was ‘a senseless, blasphemous abomination against all scripture’.80 The theological ­reasons that Grebel and his comrades gave were based on the Bible and Reformation motives: Christ commanded that only the faithful be baptized; besides, underage children would certainly obtain salvation for Christ’s sake, and so needed no baptism of water. Only the inner baptism of faith, not that of water—­as Luther taught81—can consolidate the assurance of salvation to beatitude. Unlike his opponents within the Reformation, some of whom had been his followers, Zwingli approved of infant baptism. He interpreted it, by ana­logy with circumcision as a sign of the Old Testament covenant, as a unifying bond among all members of the community, laying a moral duty upon them, integrating the urban congregation, and obligating them to raise their children as Christians. Like Luther, Zwingli abhorred and rejected spiritual elitism and a resulting separatism which he perceived in his former

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followers. At the same time, he accused them of fundamentally defying Christian authority: what they were demanding amounted to a new church. Continuing its earlier policy, the Zurich city council convened another disputation on 17 January 1525 on the question of baptism. The disputation ultimately reinforced Zwingli’s position, and the next day the council issued an edict mandating that all unbaptized children be baptized within eight days. Furthermore, the council ordered disciplinary and expulsion proceed­ ings against some ‘radicals’, who held a last meeting on 25 January 1525 at the house of Felix Mantz. There they are said to have performed the first adult baptisms, or ‘­baptisms of faith’. The act became the most important characteristic of the Anabaptists, who have existed as a separate denomination and developed many variant forms since that time. The crystallization of an autonomous form of evangelical Christianity around baptism is probably linked to the fact that baptism—­like the Eucharist—­connects fundamental issues of Bible interpretation, the church, and salvation with the practical challenge of a biblically mandated ritual. The small Anabaptist communities which progressively arose from 1525 on were the first religious communities based on voluntary membership and faith, and were interconnected mainly by their itinerant apostles, like the early Christian congregations whose ideals they sought to imitate. In this way the Anabaptists created a new type of Christian institution: the ‘sect’. Although the medieval history of heresies had brought forth sects in an earlier form, they now became a permanently viable phenomenon in the continuing history of Christianity. The highly heterogeneous forms of Anabaptism, or the ‘radical Reformation’, were primarily united by their rejection of a magisterial Reformation.They were disappointed in the magisterial reformers who had not tried to change the obsolete social conditions in keeping with the gos­ pel, and whose reform of Christian doctrine brought with it no necessary consequences for real life. The radicals were divided from the magisterial Reformation primarily by the determination with which they made the moral consequences of the imitation of Christ the standard of their church’s visible form. Certain phenomena of the radical reformation were reminiscent of the age of the Apostles, such as the community of goods, non-­violence, refusal to swear oaths, religiously autonomous preaching by laymen without ordination or sacraments, and the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit.

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Nonetheless, the radical Reformation also drew on ideas that the early Luther had advocated, so that no absolute dividing line can be drawn between the radical and the magisterial Reformation. Some Anabaptist personalities appear to have been open to reformation under the auspices of both municipal and noble authorities, such as Balthasar Hubmaier of Waldshut, who had originally been a close follower of Luther and later advanced a reformation under the auspices of the territorial authority in Nikolsburg, Moravia. Some radical apocalyptic Anabaptist groups led by Hans Hut and Augustine Bader, successors to Thomas Müntzer, believing the end of history and the beginning of a thousand-­year kingdom of God was near, seemed to be seeking a collaboration with the hereditary enemies of Christendom, the Turks, as well as with Jews. This earned them grave mistrust on the part of Reformers and political au­thor­ ities, who soon considered the Anabaptists notorious agitators. In 1529, the second imperial diet of Speyer mandated the death penalty for ‘rebaptism’—a polemical term which disregarded the Anabaptists’ view that a prior infant baptism, performed without a confession of faith, did not deserve the name of ‘baptism’. The mandate became the legal basis of the persecutions of Anabaptists in the empire, which were most intense between 1527 and 1533; the vast majority of executions of Anabaptists took place in Catholic territories. The Anabaptists saw the persecution and martyrdom of their brothers in faith as proof of the truth of their teaching and of the Holy Spirit, which had permeated the church in the time of the Apostles—­in this respect, the Anabaptists were no different from the established reformers.

Luther’s Dispute with Erasmus In the mid-­1520s, the theological differences between Luther and Erasmus became definitive, and the other leading reformers substantially concurred in this division, regardless of their other intra-­Reformation disagreements. Deep differences in theology and religious politics had long been apparent between the two. As early as 1516, Luther’s correspondence attests to signifi­ cant difficulties with Erasmus’s conception of faith, seeing in it a great deal of human collaboration in redemption, and hence a ‘free will before God’. Because of the moderate support of Luther which Erasmus had shown especially in 1520/1, he had come under increasing pressure from the

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Fig. 17  The two-­sided handbill Crucifixion of 1528/9, with a text by Ludwig Hätzer and a woodcut by Hans Weyditz, printed in Strasbourg by Johannes Prüss the Younger, is the only known handbill from radical Reformation circles. The

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orthodoxy, had been suspected of Lutheranism, and had been requested to openly oppose Luther and the Reformation movement. In 1524, Erasmus finally confronted Luther’s theology with a treatise ‘On Free Will’ (De libero arbitrio). Luther responded with ‘On the Bondage of the Will’ (De servo arbitrio), which became one of his best-­known works: a key text on his conception of scripture, God, and history, considered the epitome of the true ‘Lutheran’ teaching by his ‘real’ followers. God acts paradoxically by His wrathful word of judgement, the law, and by His simul­ taneous merciful word of grace, the gospel. Contrasting the all-­determining, never resting mover, the God of fate ‘hidden in his majesty’ on the one hand, and on the other the God ‘clothed and set forth in his Word’,82—the hidden and revealed God (deus absconditus, revelatus)—this dramatic, radical theology denies all human contributions to redemption with irreconcilable harshness. This treatise of Luther’s, which divided its readers into two camps from the moment it was published, marks a turning point in Luther’s biography and in the history of the Reformation. The Luther of this treatise, who had just joined in matrimony with the renegade nun Katharina von Bora, ­broken with Karlstadt, declared war on the opponents of the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and cursed the rebellious peasants—­this Luther was no longer the incomparable hero of Worms, the admired preacher, the immensely successful literary consoler; he was an agitated, overtaxed theo­ lo­gian beset by conflicts, unable to master the spirits he had conjured; his influence was beginning to decline. The God of bitter experience, of wrath, of setbacks drove His prophet Luther all the more imperiously towards the God Who had set Himself limits in Christ. Since the mid-­1520s, Luther’s influence was less extensive than intensive; the print runs of his publications were smaller; he worked and taught in smaller contexts; he built theological walls between ‘true’ and

Fig. 17  cont. illustration shows the verso. The relations between text and images are complex: the picture probably represents the way of strictly following the Cross, and at the same time a rejection of the concept of Christ’s death as a sacrifice of atonement. In the centre of the illustration is the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God. Such a handbill may have been used in a congregation’s catechesis. Researchers are divided as to whether it indicates an interest in cabbalistic speculation in radical Reformation and Anabaptist circles.

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inauthentic followers, and so contributed to the denominational formation of a ‘Lutheran’ church.

3.9.  Political Decisions of Church and State Most of the theological debates and divisions took place in the public sphere—­that is, they were carried on in print or in disputations—­and each participant aimed to win more followers for his beliefs, or to weaken and isolate the opponents. The public sphere was also disputed because the question was being raised in many places what specific changes should be made in the church. In order to translate the liturgies of baptism and the Eucharist into the vernacular, for example, it was necessary to agree on an interpretation of those rituals. The theological debates on the sacraments and the urban and territorial processes of reformation were intertwined. The prevailing conditions in the political context in general were ­favourable to the visible changes to the ecclesiastical status quo—­in a word, to the official introduction of the Reformation—­that took place in many cities and, from 1525/6 on, in several territories of the empire. Charles V and his brother Ferdinand, king of Bohemia and Hungary and viceroy of the emperor since 1526/7, were involved in many different military conflicts with France, the Ottoman Empire, and Italian states. This limit­ed their capabilities in the struggle against the Reformation at the imperial level, forcing them to compromise with the evangelical estates, and kept the emperor personally busy away from the empire. In autumn of 1529, when the Turks besieged Vienna for several weeks, a wave of apocalyptic terror broke over the continent. The mutual accusations among the quarrelling Christians, who blamed now the papacy now Luther and his followers for the Ottoman military successes, revealed how closely the outward and inward histories of Europe—­ its military and its religious condition—­corresponded.

Denominational Camps in the Empire At the imperial diets of the 1520s, two denominational camps had regularly formed which were sometimes opposed to one another, but sometimes pursued common interests in opposition to the Habsburgs. This period saw the first military and political alliances formed along denominational

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boundaries: the League of Regensburg, uniting southern German Catholic princes under the leadership of the Habsburg and Bavarian crowns in 1524; the League of Dessau, formed in 1525 by central and northern German Catholics; and the League of Torgau, created in 1526 by evangelical estates of central and northern Germany, led by Hesse and the Electorate of Saxony. The religious question fuelled new political partnerships: the defensive Protestant leagues, first that of Torgau and later, in 1530/1, that of Schmalkalden, offered military and political security to the processes of reformation in the individual territories and cities through joint defence against the emperor, who represented a growing threat after the Augsburg diet of 1530. Repulsing the Turks was a particularly urgent problem for the Habsburgs: the Protestant estates were willing to cooperate in defending the empire—­by sending troops or by collecting the ‘Turkish tax’—in exchange for conces­ sions in regard to freedom of religion. During the so-­called first diet of Nuremberg (1522/3), an admission of guilt and promise of reform was read by the legate of the newly elected pope Adrian VI (r. 9 January 1522–14 September 1523). As a result, imperial politics in regard to religion came to centre on the general demand for the gospel and the admission that the Edict of Worms was not enforceable for the time being. The notion that a general or national council must be held to resolve the religious division steadily gained ground at the imperial level. This tendency towards defusing the religious conflict persisted during the first imperial diet of Speyer in 1526; the Reformation-­oriented estates of the empire saw it as a licence to change the existing organization of the church (ius reformandi). At the second diet of Speyer in 1529, the mood shifted, since the Catholic estates were now confronted by a growing group of Protestant territories and cities. The Catholic majority of the estates passed the resolution that those estates which had not enforced the Edict of Worms and had permitted innovations must reverse them before a Council would be held—­in practical terms, this meant a return to the previously suspended Edict of Worms. The consequence was a ‘protestation’ by the Electorate of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg-­Ansbach, Anhalt, Braunschweig-­Lüneburg, and fourteen cities, including Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Ulm, Constance, and Reutlingen. This event was later interpreted as the founding moment of Protestantism. That term, which gained currency mainly from the eighteenth century on as a positive, common self-­designation of Lutheran and Reformed churches,

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adopted and reshaped the older, negatively connoted Catholic term of ‘­protesters’ (protestantes). The protesting estates at the second Reformation diet of Speyer formed the core of the denominational group that subse­ quently came to the fore at the diet of Augsburg in 1530.

The Founding of Evangelical Churches The widespread territorial reformations that had begun in the second half of the 1520s were generally the result of complex constellations and lengthy processes. In some rural cities and towns, strong reform movements had had the power to effect changes in the church. The reformers’ criticism of ‘justification through works’ had led in many places to a significant decline in endowments and financial support, resulting in a supply crisis for  the clergy. Some towns in the Electorate of Saxony and elsewhere had followed proposals that Luther had developed for the small city of Leisnig. Because the texts had been available in print from 1523 on, they came to serve as models, like the Mass and baptismal liturgies disseminated from Wittenberg. According to the organization proposed for Leisnig, a body formed by the city council and the parish was to have sole supervision of church finances. All revenues from church endowments, prebends, tithes, and other levies were to be collected in a ‘common chest’ and subject to inspection by the municipality. The church’s financial obligations—­such as the salaries of priests, teachers, and sacristans, the care of the poor, stipends for students, loans to needy craftsmen—­would then be paid from this fund. Because the reforms effected were significantly different from one parish to another, and the church’s management structure above the parish level had practically collapsed, the secular authorities found it increasingly urgent to take action in order to establish ‘order’ and relatively uniform conditions within their territorial jurisdiction. Although the reforms in the territories often took place in response to emergencies occasioned by the collapse of the traditional structures of church law and authority, they were contingent upon a personal decision by the ruling princes in favour of the Reformation. Of course, such personal decisions must not be seen as driven by purely ‘religious’ motives: in add­ ition to personal salvation, princes were also concerned with the welfare of their dynasty, the political and social future of their country, the mood of their subjects, and the state finances, which could be expected to benefit from the secularization of monasteries. Among the many kinds of factors

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which influenced the princes’ decisions, they also had to take into account the customs of the lower nobility, for whom the clerical institutions assured the income of their younger sons. In the long term, seigniorial responsibility for the church, which Luther accepted as an unavoidable necessity but wanted to keep distinct from the actual ‘office’ of the ordo politicus, promoted and intensified the formation of the early modern state.The princes of ‘evangelical’ territories, as ‘emergency bishops’, now governed innumerable matters for which they had not been responsible before, with far-­reaching importance for the life and culture of their subjects. They ordered inspections by visitation committees, usually consisting of lawyers and theologians, whom they gave detailed instructions. Visitations had been among the traditional responsibilities of bishops since the Middle Ages, but had widely fallen into disuse. Now the local function­ aries were asked about local conditions; parish priests were questioned on their religious attitudes and conduct, disciplined where necessary, instructed to preach the gospel, urged to marry, and dismissed if they proved to be morally or doctrinally unsuitable; parishes were informed of their new religious obligations; financial situations were determined and organized; schools and hospitals were evaluated where they existed, and founded where they did not.The Wittenberg reformers were themselves among the leading participants in such visitations in the Electorate of Saxony, and their 1528 Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Pastors was a compendium which defined the ‘true teaching’ to be disseminated, prohibited the ‘fanatical’ doctrines of Karlstadt and Müntzer, and then drew the outlines of a religious orthopraxy based on the gospel. Because one objective in the course of the Reformation was a uniform church doctrine by means of state authority, the educational requirements now placed on the simplest village priests were significantly higher than what had been customary. The local pastor was no longer merely re­spon­sible for supplying his congregation with the basic sacraments; he was also expected to preach regularly on the basis of biblical texts, to distinguish between competing Reformation doctrines, and to instruct his flock in regard to the true teaching and the corresponding conduct of their lives. Naturally, in view of the training received by clergy in the late Middle Ages, the majority of existing parish priests were not equal to these requirements; nonetheless, most clergy remained in office. The process of raising the educational level of the evangelical pastors would be more or less completed only after two generations, when university studies had become more common.

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For the sake of popular education, Luther wrote a Small and a Large Catechism: one compact, for the use of all Christians; the other with deeper theological explications, aimed primarily at pastors. The two catechisms were an integral part of the introduction of the Reformation throughout the Electorate of Saxony, and also served to reinforce Christian identity in the face of the Ottoman menace. For centuries these texts, probably the most successful of Luther’s writings, formed the basis for the religious instruction of Lutherans all over the world. Like iron rations of Christianity, they were intended as a kind of study and prayer material that every Christian would always have on hand: the Ten Commandments, condensed into easily assimilated formulas (‘Thou shalt have no other gods. What does this mean? Answer:We should fear, love and trust in God above all things’);83 the Apostles’ Creed, which explained the Trinitarian God’s redeeming min­ istry ‘to me’; the Lord’s Prayer; preparatory instruction for baptism and the Eucharist; evening and morning prayers; and finally, a ‘table of duties’ with Bible quotations as maxims for Christian conduct which the ‘head of the family’ was to teach to the members of his household. Luther earnestly wanted every baptized Christian to have an elementary knowledge of what his Christianity meant. The Lutheran denominational culture also reinforced the patriarchal foundations of society, which included the subjects’ religious duty of obedience to secular lords. This intense Christianization of a society which had already been Christian for centuries was a novel phenomenon, and stimulated the orthodox camp to analogous efforts: the ‘nationalization’ of religion in the course of the Reformation was conducive to the Christianization of society. The administrative structures of the territorial princes’ church govern­ ance generally called for superintendents or consistories between the ruler as acting bishop and the parishes or individual pastors. The consistories, com­ posed of theologians and lawyers, dealt with doctrinal questions and ethical issues, most importantly those concerning matrimonial law. These bodies and institutions were intended to fill the vacuum left by the abolition of the episcopal courts. The model of a synod as an instrument for introducing the Reformation, which had been successful in Hesse, was not widely followed in the territorial states. The chief reason may be that local conditions varied widely at the time of the Reformation: this made visitations necessary in order to take suitable measures locally. The introduction of the Reformation through visitation was a slow process, but one which resulted in remarkably stable arrangements.

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Procedures for liturgical ordination were gradually developed, mostly after the model of the early church; here again, Wittenberg initially served as an example. From the 1530s on, evangelical parishes from various European countries sent their future pastors to the Saxon university town to have them ordained by Luther or by the pastor and superintendent Johannes Bugenhagen. The need to go to Wittenberg was gradually obvi­ ated as the new church developed its own organizational structures. The new structures were stipulated in Church Orders issued by the various territorial rulers. The princes anticipated the legal and political principle that would later be legitimated by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg and concisely expressed, from about 1600 on, in the formula cuius regio, eius religio: each ruler determined how religion was organized in his dominions. The rulers consulted with theological experts in their realms or called on foreign advisors. As a result, Reformation theologians of the first generation were very influential, including Johann Brenz, the Schwäbisch-­Hall pastor who advised the Duke of Württemberg; Martin Bucer, who reorganized the church in Strasbourg; and Johannes Bugenhagen. Bugenhagen also drafted church orders in Denmark and Norway about 1537/9. Little is known as to whether the treatment of Jews changed during the organizational changes of the early Reformation. In 1523, in a pioneering treatise titled ‘That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew’, Luther had advocated abandoning the existing practice of provisionally tolerating Jews in exchange for payments of protection money. Instead, Christians ‘ought to treat the Jews in a brotherly manner’,84 ‘deal gently with them and instruct them from scripture’,85 and allow them ‘to labour and do business and have . . . human fellowship with us’.86 Luther argued that the chances of converting Jews would thus be much greater than under the papacy; at an unspecified future date he proposed to return to the matter and ‘see what I have accomplished’.87 To what extent the municipal and territorial au­ thor­ ities adopting the Reformation followed these recommendations by Luther is also unknown. However, indications of an increasing exclusion of the Jews in the 1530s and 1540s permit the inference that the territories which were becoming evangelical from the early 1520s on had practised a more liberal policy towards the Jews, along the lines of Luther’s 1523 essay. The ageing reformer’s dramatic change of course in his later writings on the Jews can be better accounted for if we remember that he had earlier advocated tolerance as a means to encourage Jews to convert to Christianity. Although Protestant territories seem to have had significant Jewish populations, conversions were not numerous.

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Augsburg: Evangelical Confession and Imperial Ban In the course of 1529, the emperor’s political situation had undergone a radical if temporary change: in mid-­October, the Ottomans had lifted the siege of Vienna because of heavy rains, increasing difficulties in supplying their troops, and the impending onset of winter. The thrust of the Turkish offensive was weakened.The emperor had also achieved treaties with Francis I of France and Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–34). In signing the peace treaty, the French king had abandoned his Italian claims in Milan, Genoa, and Naples; meanwhile the Medici pope had accepted an offer of peace in return for territorial concessions in Italy and Charles V’s promise of military support against the republic of Florence. Charles V saw peace in Italy as the key to solving the religious conflict in the empire.The tensions between the emperor and the papacy had reached their sad climax in 1527, when im­per­ ial troops—­including not a few Protestants—­mutinied over unpaid wages and attacked Rome, then went murdering, looting, and burning through the city. The Sack of Rome made a rapprochement between pope and emperor possible. Clement VII’s refusal to annul the English king Henry VIII’s mar­ riage with Catherine of Aragon, an aunt of Charles V, was also propitious to the reconciliation between the two heads of Christian Europe. On 24 February 1530, Charles V’s thirtieth birthday, he was finally crowned emperor by the pope in Bologna.The place was chosen in consid­ eration of the recent destruction in Rome. The Habsburg emperor was dramatized in the imperial tradition of Rome by means of architectural mock-­ups, triumphal arches, and all kinds of allegorical imagery. The claim to universal power that Charles V had always associated with his imperial throne seemed closer than ever to reality. His religious policy, in keeping with his conception of imperial domination, was increasingly focused on convening a general council of Christianity. Under these political circumstances, Charles V ‘returned’ to the empire he had not seen since the diet of Worms. In the convocation of the diet of Augsburg, Charles had mentioned, besides the defence against the Turks, that he was particularly concerned as the head of Christendom with overcoming the ‘errors and disputes over the holy faith’.88 To this end, he wanted to hear and ‘deal with every opinion and view with love and favour’.89 This sounded like a situation of openness in which the emperor would act as a neutral referee between the parties in the religious dispute. But Saxon emissaries had already discovered that that was not the case during preparatory talks in

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Innsbruck before the opening of the imperial diet. And the emperor, imme­ diately upon arriving in Augsburg on 15 June 1530, requested the Protestants’ participation in the Corpus Christi procession the next day—­which they promptly refused. The evangelical camp by this time was definitively split, and the theo­lo­ gians of the various currents had begun the presentation of their doctrines and beliefs demanded in the imperial announcement of the diet in very different ways. The Strasbourg reformers Bucer and Capito, trying to find a middle way between Wittenberg and Zurich, between Luther and Zwingli, began only after their arrival in Augsburg to draft a creed for their city. Their document was adopted by three other southern Germany cities—­ Memmingen, Constance, and Lindau—­and therefore became known as the ‘Confession of Four Cities’ (Confessio Tetrapolitana). It maintained a distance from clearly Lutheran or Zwinglian extremes, especially in passages concerning the Eucharist. The Tetrapolitan Confession was presented to an imperial vice-­chancellor and did not develop any major historical signifi­ cance. The same is true of a personal confession by Zwingli which was sent to Augsburg in printed form: the Fidei Ratio, a concise summary of his teachings, was originally intended as a doctrinal foundation for the loosely allied cities of Zurich, Berne, Basel, Strasbourg, and Constance, which had formed a pact called the ‘christliches Burgrecht’ (‘Christian civil code’) in March of 1530. As events played out, however, Zwingli’s document had little effect, in part because of the Strasbourg confession. The Electorate of Saxony had been the first territory to make pre­par­ ations for a confession of its own. Even before their departure to Augsburg, several of the Wittenberg theologians had consulted together at Torgau, discussing in particular their ceremonial and liturgical differences with the Roman church. Melanchthon had compiled these differences in the Torgau Articles, some of which were later integrated in the second part of the Confessio Augustana, the definitive evangelical confession, which deals with liturgical issues. The Articles of Schwabach, a doctrinal confession which had been drafted in 1529 in preparation for the Marburg Colloquy, but not accepted as a basis for treaty negotiations between the Saxon electorate and Hesse, also came to the fore in Augsburg, since it had been printed with the misleading title Bekentnus Luthers auf dem itzigen Reichstag (‘Luther’s confession at the present imperial diet’), attaining no less than nine editions—­although it had no official status.

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In Augsburg, soon after the publication of Johann Eck’s 404 Articles, a  comprehensive attack on evangelical heresy, Philip Melanchthon began writing a moderately phrased, positive presentation of the Reformation doctrine. A correspondence with Luther, who had stayed behind for safety’s sake at Coburg Castle, the southernmost outpost of Wettin territory in Franconia, ensured his fundamental approval of the theological import of Melanchthon’s document, which served as an early draft of the Confessio Augustana. Luther’s famous statement that Melanchthon’s defence ‘pleases me very much. . . . I have nothing to improve or change in it . . . for I cannot tread so gently and quietly’,90 can be taken as an agreement and an honest admission of a fundamental difference in the theologians’ temperaments. In fact, Melanchthon presents the evangelical teaching in a form that emphasizes its points of agreement with the early church and the Roman tradition.The first part of his confession lays out the principal tenets, c­ entred on the doctrine of justification, with reference to the most important dogmatic decisions of the early church: the Trinity; the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures; original sin. In the tenth article, on the Eucharist, Melanchthon refrains from sharp rejections of both the Roman and the Zwinglian positions. In the seventh article, he develops the doctrine of the church entirely from its ritual acts, that is, teaching God’s word and admin­ istering the sacraments. Melanchthon stops short of repudiating the pope, the Roman doctrine of the sacraments, indulgence, etc. The second part then touches on the points on which there was ‘dispute’, including the Eucharist under both kinds, the marriage of priests, and the Mass. The subsequent influence of this most important evangelical confession was ensured by the signatures of the Hessian landgrave and the representa­ tives of numerous other imperial principalities and cities, including the Electorate of Saxony, Brandenburg-­Ansbach, the Duchy of Lüneburg, Anhalt, Nuremberg, Reutlingen, and later Windsheim, Heilbronn, Kempten, and Weissenburg. The German version of the Confessio Augustana was read by the Saxon chancellor Christian Beyer before the emperor and the diet on 25 June 1530, in a special hearing requested by the Protestants. A Latin and a German version, which had been drafted independently and were not entirely parallel texts, were then presented to the emperor. This formal presentation of an unpolemical, yet substantially evangelical confession amounted to the proclamation of a schism of the Latin European church. In the further course of the diet of Augsburg, however, the emperor revealed himself with growing clarity to advocate harsh opposition to the

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evangelical heretics: he lent his authority to the Roman theologians’ rebuttal to the Protestant confession, called the Confutatio Confessio Augustana, thus definitively abandoning the role of referee in the religious dispute. The emperor refused to provide the evangelical party with a copy of the Confutatio so that they could respond to it, and declared the matter closed. Finally, he put a stop to negotiations which had been conducted for several weeks—­and had achieved certain rapprochements—­between committees of the denominational factions. This marked the end of all efforts at com­ promise and reconciliation.The only course that Charles V would accept to restore the unity of the church in the empire was for the apostates to return to the true faith. The necessary reforms were to be adopted, based on the ‘old faith’, by means of a council—­which the pope refused to allow. In the end, the Augsburg diet prohibited all changes in the ritual practice of reli­ gion pending such a council, and reconfirmed the Edict of Worms. The evangelical estates of the empire were guilty of a breach of the peace and were subject to the execution of an imperial ban. The inevitable reaction to the emperor’s undisguised challenge was that the protestant estates of the empire joined together in a military and pol­it­ ical defensive alliance, the Schmalkaldic League. Until its defeat in the Schmalkaldic War in 1547, the League was the most important platform of political Protestantism in the empire, and for a time in Europe. Before it could become effective, however, the resistance of the Wittenberg theologians had to be overcome. They continued to demand obedience to the emperor, while Hessian and Saxon legal scholars argued that he was in violation of the imperial constitution. In the end, even Luther was persuaded that the princes who elected the emperor were entitled to revoke their obedience if he did not meet the obligations that followed from his election. Suppressing the gospel by force of arms and persecuting its followers could hardly be the office of the Christian emperor. After a decade of eruptive turmoil, the Augsburg diet had definitively made the Reformation and its survival into an inescapable political issue. The evangelical theologians knew it, and agreed. For God maintained the world and His church through the military estate of the secular authorities no less than through the influence of the status ecclesiasticus and the labouring estate of the peasants. ‘These are the three hierarchies ordained by God, and we need no more; indeed, we have enough and more than enough to do in living aright and resisting the devil in these three.’91

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4 Post-­Reformation Europe, 1530–1600 4.1.  Language, Education, Law: Religious Culture Reformed

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he century of the Reformation changed the face of Latin Europe. No longer could the historical and cultural region be defined as a united christianitas with its visible head, the pope, residing in the old imperial cap­ital Rome. Europe’s new character was clearly that of numerous individual countries. The Reformation did not create this Europe of nations, but it did encourage its development. The countries, cities, territories, and nations that joined the Reformation explicitly broke with the pope, destroying what was left of the fatherland of Christendom—­to paraphrase Pope Pius II’s dictum about Europe as patria1—and dissolving the spiritual and legal unity of the one Christian church. While old Europe was being challenged as the homeland of the Roman church, however, it was also conquering new continents. From the sixteenth century on, Latin European Christianity, with its denominational diversity, was a globally expanding religion. Nor had Christian Europe been a monolithic union of subjects of the Roman pontiff up to then: it had consisted of a great number of different units which had varying degrees of affinity with the curia. As early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the nation-­states had developed clear boundaries—­in Spain, France, and England for example—­and begun to pursue autonomous policies in their relations with the pope. Nonetheless, up to the Reformation, there had been a cultural common ground, and this was now dissolved, or subject to renegotiation. The Latin language lost its dominant position in matters of religion and scholarship. In the countries which adopted the Reformation, worship services were now generally held

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in the vernacular languages. The worship service was now centred on the sermon, the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist were so expounded that individual believers might appropriate them, and communal singing was considered an essential part of the congregation’s religious participation.Worship of this kind could only be conducted in the language used by ‘the mother at home, the children in the streets, the common man in the marketplace’—the people whose idiom Luther strove to emulate.2 The enhanced religious appreciation of the vernacular in the course of the Reformation gave rise to a great number of Bible translations in national languages—­first in Europe and progressively throughout the world—­and in time moved the Roman church as a whole to moderate its fixation on Latin and things Roman, and ultimately to abandon its religious defamation of the vernacular Bible. The unforeseeable cultural consequences included the emergence and growth of national literatures, and opportunities for education and participation which had been unknown in medieval Christendom. In processes of transformation which went on for centuries, the vernacular languages spread through all walks of society, invading even scholarship and science. Finally, the formation of national variants of Christianity as a result of the Reformation influenced, indeed accelerated, the political processes in which nation-­states were being formed. The transnational effects of the uniformly Latin culture which had shaped medieval Christianity slowly lost their universal validity, even in the European countries which remained predominantly Catholic. For the generation of the reformers and their immediate successors, Latin had been the common language of exchange, the lingua franca of scientific and transnational communication. Now, however, constant translation from the vernacular into Latin and back became a matter of course. Bilingualism became a fundamental cultural reality for all those who wrote or taught professionally. There was scarcely a European reformer who hadn’t published in at least one vernacular language as well as in Latin. In medieval Christianity, transnational structures of law and organization had been in effect which the reformation had opposed and which now became obsolete in those parts of Europe in which the reformation prevailed. The Europe of pilgrims suffered a decline in numbers, although one still met a remarkable number of travellers, including some from the Protestant countries, in Rome and in the Holy Land. The Europe of religious orders, which had profoundly shaped European scholarship, especially through the presence of the mendicants at the universities, existed henceforth

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only in the Catholic hemisphere. Analogous changes affected the scope of canon law, which had previously been in force—­ in theory at least—­ everywhere the pope was recognized as the head of the church. The Reformation irreparably damaged the European legal sphere of the ­premodern era. Even where Protestant church constitutions retained certain elements of the Roman tradition, such as metropolitan bishops in the Swedish church and archbishops in the English church—­even in some Lutheran churches of the Empire where parts of the Latin liturgy were maintained, forms of monastic life were recognized, and traditions of the canon law of marriage were revitalized—­this was done by the independent decisions of secular authorities or on the advice of their theological and legal experts.This selective incorporation of certain legal traditions of canon law depended, however, on the assumption that the secular authorities set themselves above papal jurisdictional authority as such, and no longer conceded a sovereign authority to canon law. Because canon law had regulated—­at least in principle—­all the elementary concerns in the life of every Christian, new provisions had to be defined and alternative solutions found within the competence of the given secular authority: for example, the obligation of annual confession and communion, pastoral attention ‘from the cradle to the grave’, the regulation of marital conflicts, the individual’s relationship to the parish, the recognition of vows. Because religion fell under the dynamic of nationalization, the Protestant Christian of Europe became ‘a subject’ in a much more complete sense than his predecessors had ever been. The contours of a Lutheran Europe took shape. Quite soon after the controversy over indulgences had broken out, and more so in the aftermath of the Leipzig Disputation, the number of students in Wittenberg increased dramatically. The percentage of foreigners also increased quickly: for a half century beginning in the 1520s, Wittenberg became the most frequented and, in terms of students and lecturers, the most international university in Germany, and it later vied with Leipzig for the greatest number of students. Between 1516 and 1520 the annual enrolment exploded, increasing by 400 to a total of 579.3 Other universities, such as Heidelberg, Cologne, Erfurt, Rostock, Greifswald, Ingolstadt, Freiburg, and Tübingen were forced to concede a massive loss in attendance and were temporarily threatened with closing. Students from France, England, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, and especially Scandinavia and the Baltic wanted to find the ‘true’ reformatory doctrine first-­hand in Wittenberg. Melanchthon was an especially popular

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lecturer. He taught the theological and philological tools of an evangelical expositor of scripture in a much more comprehensible manner than the brilliantly associative, charismatic exegete Luther. Although most students came because of Luther, once they met him they seem to have appreciated him more as a preacher than in his role as professor. The Genevan academy of John Calvin and Theodore Beza had, from 1559 on, a similar effect to that which Wittenberg had on evangelical Christendom, and later primarily on the Lutheran denominations of Europe. Geneva became as important for European Calvinism as Wittenberg was for European Lutheranism. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch universities, and especially the University of Leiden, exerted an inter­nation­al attraction, even across denominational borders. The majority of young academics, however, spent all of their student years at their own country’s university. The territorialization and nationalization of the universities, their dependence on the respective territorial authorities, received a powerful impetus from the Reformation. The Reformation also brought with it consequences for relations between the European territories and states. Political alliances and cooperation were often achieved on the basis of a shared confession—­or a shared opposition to a certain denomination. Thus Henry VIII of England sought contacts with the Schmalkaldic League in the empire after his break with Rome, for example, and the Reformed Palatine Electorate sought an alliance with the Calvinist provinces of the Netherlands. Likewise Francis I planned an anti-­ Habsburg coalition, as did later the Reformed king Henry of Navarre (until his conversion to Catholicism as King Henry IV of France). Danish and Swedish nobles sought dynastic links to Protestant families in the Holy Roman Empire. Some military interventions also followed from de­nom­in­ ation­al motives as a consequence of the Reformation. Political interaction and diplomatic connections in Europe—­ and also outside Europe, on account of colonial relations—­ had been radically changed by the Reformation. The Europe of merchants and traders had existed before the Reformation, of course. However, the attraction of fairs taking place in many places in Europe was determined in part by the religious culture of the given location’s surroundings—­such as the observance or abolition of the saints’ feast days, and the observance of certain religious rules in public places. Among the regions which traded with Europe, the Levant was largely dominated by non-­evangelical traders, and the economic region of the North Atlantic and

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the Baltic Sea by merchants of the Hansa League, who were supplanted by the Dutch and the English in the course of the sixteenth century. In Atlantic trade, which was directed mainly from Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, competition took place across multiple national and de­nom­in­ ation­al boundaries. In some parts of Europe, merchants played an important part in spreading the Reformation: they were mobile, and they carried printed texts and pictures with them. The denominational differences that arose in the course of the Reformation influenced the lives of merchants as well as those of more sedentary people, and they also affected people’s purchasing habits. Imagine, for example, the consequences of abolishing obligatory fasts and numerous holidays in the Protestant countries: they were felt directly in the form of increased ­production and prosperity. Although some reformers, and Luther not least, had criticized usurious interest rates, overseas trade, outward flows of money, luxury imports, and unrestrained profiteering—­that is, the basic traits of the early capitalist economic system—­the influence of their condemnations must not be overestimated. The merchants’ Europe, both before and after the Reformation, mainly followed motives of acquisitiveness.

4.2.  Early Reformation Movements outside the Empire Early decisions for or against Reformation developments were taken in vari­ous European countries even in the 1520s. In northern and eastern Europe, the spread of the Reformation was sometimes influenced by German population groups, often merchants. Established trade routes were one path by which Reformation literature reached its readers. The first groups outside Germany who began to take an interest in Luther and his supporters were his fellow members of the Order of Hermits of St Augustine, and the humanists. The University of Wittenberg also played an important part in the international dissemination of the Reformation as students came to Wittenberg from abroad to receive the teachings of the Reformation from the original source. Exules Christi too, that is, theologians who had been driven from their posts for ‘preaching the Gospel’, came to Saxony. They sought not only theological orientation, but also information on the extent of the Reformation movement and career opportunities as evan­gel­ ic­al preachers, announcements of which came to Wittenberg as nowhere

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else. For a time,Wittenberg was something of an international Reformation employment office. In other European countries besides the empire, German-­ speaking Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, some Baltic regions, and Denmark, the Reformation movements were probably not driven by many different social groups. As a rule, adoption of the Reformation in other countries was dependent on the interests of specific estates.

The Netherlands Two of Luther’s brother monks, Jacob Probst and Hendrik van Zutphen, began to agitate for reform in the Augustinian monastery of Antwerp. Dutch translations and reprints of Luther’s Latin works appeared in Antwerp and Leiden from 1520 on. We may surmise that the Augustinians, the humanists, and the merchants were also responsible for the production, translation, and distribution of the written works originating in Wittenberg. Luther was reprinted earlier and more often in Holland than in any other country; he was translated more often into Dutch than into any other ­language. No less than fifty-­three different texts appeared in sixty different Dutch editions up to the year of Luther’s death. Significantly fewer translations appeared in Danish (twenty texts in thirty-­ one editions), French ­(sixteen texts in twenty-­five editions), Czech (twenty-­one texts in twenty-­ two editions) and English (twelve texts in fourteen editions).4 Luther was translated into eleven different languages during his lifetime. The most important contributions to his dissemination in a variety of European languages ori­gin­ated in Antwerp, where printing was a major industry. Danish, English, French, and Spanish translations were produced there, in addition to Latin and Dutch. Translations into other European languages, mainly of Luther’s pastoral and edifying works, began to appear in the mid-­1520s. Readers who did not know German could discover Luther’s polemics only in Latin. Reprints of Luther’s Latin works, and those of Melanchthon and other Reformation authors, were produced in all the major printing centres of Europe. The first collections of theological disputations by Wittenberg authors were published in Leiden, Basel, and Paris, making the ‘Wittenberg school’ famous throughout Europe as a body of scholars who advocated the radical Augustinian theology of grace and opposed scholasticism. The activities of the Antwerp Augustinians drew repression from the Burgundian Habsburg government as early as 1522. The monastery was

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ordered closed, and a number of brothers who were not willing to recant were imprisoned and ultimately executed. The first martyrs of the Reformation, Hendrik Voes and Johann Esch, were burned at the stake in Brussels on 1 July 1523, and soon became the subject of a variety of literary treatments. This marked the beginning of the rapidly flourishing literary genre of martyrology, which produced best-­sellers in German, English, and French in the corresponding denominational and national milieus. Luther commented on the events in Brussels in a letter to the Christians in the Netherlands,5 explicitly referring to the executed Augustinians as ‘saints’.6 The great signs and wonders7 which God had wrought among the Dutch, Luther wrote, proved that the time8 was now come when ‘the kingdom of God is not in words but in power’.9 Luther saw the martyrdom of the two Augustinian Hermits as a visible proof of God’s grace: ‘For it is given to you for all the world not only to hear the Gospel and to recognize Christ, but also to be the first to suffer hurt and harm, fear and distress, prison and danger for Christ’s sake, and now become so fruitful and strong that you have borne witness and confirmed it with your own blood.’10 God’s granting martyrdom to the Dutch indicated that they had been especially chosen, Luther found, and hence they should ‘joyfully allow themselves to be slaughtered for the Lord’.11 Luther also expressed the basic idea of this martyrology in his hymn about ‘Two Christian Martyrs in Brussels, Burnt by the Sophists in Louvain’, which was the first Reformation hymn. In the death of the martyrs, ‘God’s saints’, the heavenly father proved His miraculous power, which primarily consisted in the fact that the persecuted monks ‘disdained such pain’ and accept their fate ‘with joy’ and ‘with praise of God and singing’.12 The circles of Dutch Christian humanists influenced by the devotio moderna also took note of Luther and his theology early on. The legal scholar Cornelis Hendrix Hoen was influenced by the Dutch pre-­Reformation reformist theologian Wessel Gansfort. The Wittenberg school soon dis­ covered Gansfort—­as they did Jan Hus and Savonarola—­as a precursor, and published his writings. In opposition to Luther’s treatise on sacramental theology, De captivitate Babylonica, Hoen had advocated an interpretation of the Eucharist as symbolic, similarly to Zwingli’s later interpretation. Luther seems to have received a manuscript in 1521 of an epistola by Hoen, which was distributed in a clandestine printing in 1525 by the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer. Hoen was arrested for his religious beliefs in 1523, and died a year later. His purpose had been to strike an especially heavy blow against

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the papacy by his attack on the real bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament. The letter was brought to Luther by Hinne Rode, a school rector from Utrecht. Rode publicized his countryman’s theory of the Eucharist among the reformers of Strasbourg, Basel, and Zurich, to great effect. Thus the intra-­Reformation controversy over the Eucharist shows the first feedback effects from Luther’s international reception. In the 1520s, supporters of the Reformation in the Netherlands—­scholars as well as laymen—­were repeatedly subjected to the pressure of official ­persecution. The anti-­reformation Habsburg regime arrested or banished Luther supporters, and provoked martyrdom and underground defiance. In urban milieus infiltrated by the Reformation, Anabaptism was clearly gaining ground. From the autumn of 1530 on, Melchior Hoffman, a Swabian lay preacher and a prophetic agitator of European stature, spread his influence from Emden to the northern Netherlands.A furrier by profession, Hoffmann had preached in the Baltic Sea region in 1525, especially in Tartu and Livonia, then in Stockholm, and later in Kiel, East Frisia, and Strasbourg. His sermons drew significant crowds; people of different social classes were baptized and prepared themselves at his instigation for the coming of Christ’s kingdom on Earth. After Hoffman’s return to Strasbourg, where he was imprisoned until his death, the apocalyptic Anabaptist community in the Netherlands developed a momentum of its own under the leadership of Jan Mathis, a prophetic baker from Haarlem. The migration to Münster (1534) and the establishment of that Westphalian city as the centre of Christ’s thousand-­year kingdom, the ‘new Zion’, is the most spectacular example of the eruptive force of change in Christianity in the early sixteenth century. The radicalization seen here can be understood in the context of the repressive anti-­Reformation policies of the Habsburg dominions in general and the northern Netherlands in particular.

France and England The first collected works of Luther, printed in Basel, are known to have been distributed in Paris as early as January 1519. They seem to have been read initially with approval even by professors at the Sorbonne.13 Young humanists studying in Paris in 1520 reported the brisk sales of Luther’s writings: one bookseller was said to have purchased 1,040 copies of Luther’s writings in a very short time—­more than of any other author.14 Paris was already a major platform of scholarly debate; its role in the spread of the

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Reformation is not to be underestimated. Some of those who contributed to the dissemination of Luther’s writings in France were no doubt students from the empire. One documented case is that of the printer’s son Bonifacius Amerbach, who studied in Avignon for a time, bought works by Luther from a bookseller in Lyon, and passed them on.15 François Lambert of Avignon, later the reformer of Hesse and the first professor of theology at the Reformation university founded in Marburg in 1527, had broken with the monastic life of his Franciscan abbey in Avignon after reading Luther and travelled via Zurich to Wittenberg. The example of the Dominican preacher Aimé Maigret, who popularized certain motifs from Luther’s critique of monastic life, De votis monasticis (1522), in Lyon and Grenoble in 1524, also attests to a very close connection between readings of Luther and the first Reformation activities in France. Guillaume Farel, from the south of France, was the most dedicated partisan of Reformation tenets in the French-­speaking world, and the key figure connecting the beginnings of the Reformation with its most important French protagonist, John Calvin. There is a significant connection between Farel’s turn towards the Reformation and the illustrious circle of reform-­ minded, Bible-­reading humanists centred on Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux: Farel’s teacher Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (Faber Stapulensis) was a leading member of that circle. The extent to which Faber anticipated theological positions of Luther’s, in relation to the doctrine of justification for example, as has been claimed in the literature especially with reference to his 1512 commentary on the Epistles of Paul, remains to be conclusively determined. Luther made use of Faber’s commentary on the Psalms in his own lecture on that book. Lefèvre had been accused of heresy by the Sorbonne and taken refuge with Briçonnet; in 1525 he had to flee to Strasbourg for a time. From 1530 on, the year of publication of his French Bible translation, he lived at the court of Marguerite de Navarre, a patron of Bible- and reform-­oriented clerics and humanists. She was also the sister of King Francis I, in whom many advocates of reform placed their hopes. Because Farel had stated that his teacher Lefèvre was responsible for his insight ‘that man is wholly dependent on God’s grace’,16 it was customary in Reformation his­tori­og­ raphy from the sixteenth century on to see Farel and the Meaux circle as an autonomous source of the Reformation, one which was independent of Luther. But Faber had also read and appreciated Luther’s works, so that different traditions and influences are interwoven here.

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Farel attained more permanent opportunities for action only outside of France, primarily in French-­speaking Switzerland. In preaching campaigns among Waldensians in Piedmont, in Metz and in Gap, a cooperation with these residual elements of pre-­Reformation heresy was taking shape which would later lead to a fusion of Waldensians and Reformed Protestantism. The former Knight of St John Anémond de Coct, whom Farel had won over to the Reformation, and who had studied in Wittenberg, advised Luther in 1523 to contact the Duke of Savoy, through whom he might ignite the ‘fire of Christ’ in ‘all France’.17 In England too, significant pre-­Reformation heretical influences were at work in the early development of the Reformation. Little continuity can be documented in the traditions of the Lollards—­the followers of the Oxford professor of theology John Wycliffe—­or in the reception of his theology from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. However, between 1520 and 1530 both currents were repeatedly set in a positive relation to the development of the Reformation, especially in works printed illegally on the continent. Wycliffe’s dialogues on the sacraments, printed anonymously in 1525 by the printing shop of Peter Schöffer in Worms, were recommended to the readership with the argument that the author was a predecessor of the reformers. Apparently there was an interest in linking the Reformation activities on the continent and in the empire with genuine traditions of English church history. The idea may have been that of the English humanist William Tyndale, who had gone to Wittenberg in 1524. Tyndale drafted an English translation of the New Testament, following the Greek text published by Erasmus and drawing on Luther’s 1522 German Bible. A first attempt to print Tyndale’s Bible in Cologne was foiled by the intervention of Luther’s bitter opponent Johann Cochlaeus and Hermann Rinck, a Cologne patrician very familiar with England. Cochlaeus visited the printing shop of Peter Quentel, invited the printer for a drink, and obtained from him the details of his large order. The project, sponsored by English merchants, involved three thousand copies of the English New Testament, which was on the scale of the first print run of Luther’s translation. Tyndale and his assistant William Roye escaped; Schöffer eventually printed six thousand copies of the English New Testament in Worms. The subversive merchandise was discovered on reaching England, however, and was destroyed. Since the conflicts over Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, an English Bible was as strongly desired by the devout as it was feared by those in power.

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For the time being, introducing Reformation writings into England was risky. In the later 1520s and early 1530s,Tyndale was able to distribute further editions of his translation from Antwerp, where he had settled in his exile. Some Reformation printed matter reached the English market via the trade mission of German merchants in London. Luther himself does not seem to have had a particular theological influence in any phase of the English history of the Reformation, however. The early Reformation events sketched here did have certain parallels in the reception and discussion of Luther’s texts in the English university towns, although knowledge of these processes is nebulous. In Oxford, the sale of Latin writings by the Wittenberg reformer is documented in 1520; in Cambridge, a pub named the White Horse was nicknamed ‘Germany’18 because Luther supporters met there. As in Antwerp and elsewhere, it was a brother Augustinian, Robert Barnes, who was imprisoned for preaching a sermon in Cambridge which closely followed texts by Luther. In 1528 he escaped to Wittenberg. The English king HenryVIII had taken a position against the Reformation and Luther earlier than other rulers. Luther’s writings were burnt in London as early as 12 May 1521; Bishop John Fisher, a prominent opponent of the German heretic in writing, preached against the heresy of Reformation. The following year, a treatise under the king’s name defending the seven sacraments, Assertio septem sacramentorum, was published in opposition to De captivitate Babylonica. By 1543 it had been printed in nine Latin editions; four German editions appeared in 1522/3. It was thus one of the most successful of all orthodox works—­and a religious-­political scheme on the part of Henry VIII. The pope thereupon gave the English king the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ (defensor fidei), and proclaimed an indulgence for those who read the book. Luther replied scathingly to the text by the ‘poisonous liar’19 Henry. The first phase of Reformation history in England was thus dom­in­ated by militant Catholic orthodoxy.

Scandinavia The early development of the Reformation in Scandinavia, on the other hand, was largely shaped by conflicts over sovereignty. At the same time, Reformation ideas were spread by individual students, preachers, or written works. Along the trade routes of the Hansa League, they probably reached German population groups first, such as those in Malmö, Stockholm, Bergen, and Copenhagen.

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Fig. 18  Title page of the 1525 book Iohannis VViclefi Viri Undiquaque piissimi: Dialogorum libri quattuor, the first of John Wycliffe’s writings to be printed. As with Jan Hus, Wessel Gansfort, and Girolamo Savonarola, the Reformation showed a great willingness to print the ideas and texts of pre-­Reformation critics of the church, presenting them as its precursors. This printing, by Peter Schöffer the younger in Worms, was more likely ordered by Otto Brunfels than by William Tyndale, who had gone with the support of London merchants to Wittenberg, where he was translating the New Testament into English.

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The Kalmar Union, which had united the Scandinavian kingdoms since 1397 under the primacy of the Danish crown, broke during the early Reformation period in 1523.That year would also prove critical for religious policy in northern Europe. Dissatisfied with the union, Sweden withdrew, aided by funds from Lübeck, electing Gustav IVasa king at a diet in Strängnäs. On the basis of resolutions of a diet inVästeras in 1527, the Swedish church—­ along with that of Finland, which Sweden had controlled since 1523—was brought under the authority of the crown; church property became the king’s. The visible church rituals and the church constitution remained largely unchanged; although the bishops lost political power, their legal authority was at first unaffected. New bishops were consecrated upon swearing loyalty to the king, but the consecration was performed by the bishop Peder Mansson of Strängnäs, anointed with papal approval: in this way, the Swedish episcopate was able to go on claiming apostolic succession. The most important communicators of Reformation beliefs in Sweden were the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri, who had studied in Wittenberg. One was a preacher in Stockholm and later chancellor to the king; the other succeeded the fugitive pro-­Danish metropolitan Gustav Trolle as archbishop of Uppsala. In 1526, Olaus Petri published a Swedish translation of the New Testament, and in the years that followed, he and Laurentius Andreae, who had also studied at German universities, made a name for themselves as the authors of a number of Reformation works. A substantive reformation of the Swedish church was achieved only through a long process. The Danish Reformation history was fundamentally different from the Swedish. King Christian II of Denmark (1513–23), a brother-­in-­law of Charles V, showed an interest in Wittenberg and Luther early on. A secretary to the king is supposed to have taken along a ‘crate full of Luther’s books’ on a journey in 1521.20 The king had recruited alumni of Wittenberg for his universities the year before. Martin Reinhard, later a parish priest in Jena and a familiar of Karlstadt, and Matthew Gabler, a student of Melanchthon’s, had answered that call in autumn of 1520; Gabler taught Greek for several years at the University of Copenhagen. Reinhard, who had no academic degree, was given a preacher’s position. Perhaps because of linguistic limitations and unfortunate use of gesticures, he became the laughingstock of the city, and the king sent him back to Wittenberg in spring of 1521. Reinhard travelled to the imperial diet of Worms as an emissary of the Danish king to ask Elector Frederick to release Luther and Karlstadt to the University of Copenhagen.

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Karlstadt thereupon travelled to Copenhagen at the end of May for two weeks; as a scholar of canon law he seems to have collaborated there in drafting a ‘spiritual law’. This law required that clerics be better educated, especially in scripture; allowed priests to marry; restricted the jurisdiction of bishops to matrimonial matters; restricted begging and alms-­collecting; and promoted preaching. To what extent individual passages of these very early Reformation regulations were directly influenced by Karlstadt has not been unambiguously determined to date. In early summer the king ordered the university to ignore the bull Exsurge Domine, which threatened Luther with excommunication, and prohibited writings in opposition to Luther. As early as 1522/3, however, the Danish nobility rebelled against Christian II. He went into exile in the Netherlands, and also spent a good deal of time in Wittenberg in 1524 and 1526. There he personally met Luther, whom he seems to have sincerely admired. During his first sojourn in Wittenberg, a Danish translation of the New Testament was made by Hans Mikkelsen, one of the king’s company. The preface of the book, which was smuggled to Denmark, agitated on behalf of the exiled monarch. Barely ten years later, in 1531/2, Christian II attempted to reconquer Denmark and Norway; he was captured and died in prison twenty-­seven years later. Although the traditional church was at first stabilized to some degree under the new Danish king Frederick I, Reformation ideas continued to spread—­as in the empire—­on various levels. Reformation-­oriented notions and texts penetrated to eastern Denmark primarily through Malmö’s and Copenhagen’s contacts with the German cities of the Hansa League. Reformation developments in the region were initiated essentially by the city assemblies, the Bürgerschaften. In the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and in Jutland, the Reformation advanced on a broad front from the mid-­1520s on, especially in the cities. The last monk of the Order of St John to enrol in Wittenberg, Hans Tausen, began preaching Reformation sermons in 1525 in Viborg, the most important city in Northern Jutland. When he was expelled from the order and charged by the bishop, the city council stood by him. They obtained a writ of protection from the king, who appointed him a ‘royal chaplain’, thus extracting him from the bishop’s jurisdiction. Tausen attracted a group of like-­minded preachers who gradually obtained access to the major preaching locations—­the churches of the mendicant orders and the cathedral—­partly with royal support, partly by force. Similar processes took place in some other cities. By 1530, the majority of the Danish cities had been gripped by

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the Reformation movement: sermons were preached and Masses celebrated in the vernacular. In the Haderslev district, Duke Christian of Schleswig, the eldest son of King Frederick and later King Christian III of Denmark, began a territorial Reformation in 1526 which showed clear parallels with the Reformation events in the empire. He summoned Reformation consultants from Germany who established a ‘preachers’ school’ to train the clergy in Reformation theology and practice. A similar institution was also created in Viborg. The duke issued an evangelical church ordinance and secularized the church’s property. Thus even before the official introduction of the Reformation throughout the kingdom of Denmark in 1536, various types of reformations, urban and territorial, had prevailed, in a similarly explosive development to that in the empire. As in the Lutheran territories of the empire, the arising Danish church relied on clergy who, with a solid education from the University of Copenhagen, were present everywhere under the state-­controlled church organization.

Italy and Spain The letter written to Luther by the Basel printer Johannes Froben on 14 February 1519 attests that the first anthology of Luther’s writings was shipped to Brabant, England, and France, and from Paris to Spain, and had been distributed to ‘all the cities of Italy’ by the Italian printer and bookseller Franciscus Iulius Calvus.21 We can infer from censorship mandates in Venice, Bologna, Naples, Turin, and Milan that there was a brisk trade in Reformation publications in those cities in the early 1520s. Because they frequently visited Italian universities, it is plausible that German students played an important part in disseminating Reformation ideas and texts. The dissemination of Reformation ideas in Italy and Spain appears to be to a special degree a matter of their reception by an intellectual elite. It is inseparably linked to the influence of Erasmus in specific religious movements found among the Italian and Spanish humanists. The new ideas were referred in Italy as Evangelismo; in Spain, as the movement of the Alumbrados. This evangelism, drawing on Erasmus, rejected a dogmatic Christianity, emphasized the emulation of Christ, and aimed less at reforming the church than at improving individuals by internalizing piety and the Christian ethic. Some of the religious themes of this ‘Evangelism’ converged with Reformation concepts.Among the fifty-­four Italian translations of Reformation texts which are documented up to 156622—distributed underground and

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hunted by the Inquisition—­are fourteen texts by Luther. Like the translations in other European vernaculars, they included primarily his edifying and pastoral works rather than his polemics and critiques of the church.Texts by Luther were occasionally published in Italy as works of Erasmus, indicating a primary interest in the issues common to the Reformation and Evangelism. Prominent representatives of a theology drawing on Luther were increasingly found among the monastic clergy in Italy, including Girolamo Zanchi, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Bernardino Ochino, and Pier Paolo Vergerio. Persecution by the Inquisition made them religious refugees, but they found a home in the reformed camp. The Spanish movement of the Alumbrados, the ‘illuminists’, is thought to have arisen among Franciscans and allied lay circles through their reading of the Imitatio Christi, and was certainly influenced by works of Erasmus. The movement can be interpreted as a kind parallel phenomenon to the devotio moderna. The ‘enlightened’ sought a life conducive to salvation, as well as mystical experiences. The Spanish Inquisition combatted them from the mid-­1520s on. Their relation to Reformation literature, which had been brought to Spain in the early 1520s by merchants and members of Charles V’s court, is uncertain, however. Reformation influences are also unclear in the anonymously published Dialogue on Christian Doctrine (1529), compiled by the Spanish humanist and theologian Juan de Valdés, the brother of a secretary of Charles V. It is difficult to determine whether the theological motifs, based on a compilation of passages from Luther, Oecolampadius, and Melanchthon,23 which the Dialogue shares with the Reformation go beyond the scope of an Erasmian reform Catholicism: the emphasis on personal faith, the priesthood of all believers, the diminished institutional and sacramental importance of the church, justification by faith, and the insistence on the authority of the Bible—­these ideas do not necessarily point directly to Wittenberg. The Spanish Inquisition, which drove Valdés into exile in Italy, prevented the admission of Reformation literature by controlling the ports and the trade routes, and imposed the most effective book censorship anywhere in Europe. Spain is thus an exceptional case which further highlights the importance of the printed word for the spread of the Reformation.

Eastern Europe In the east of Latin Europe too, the Reformation was able to make initial progress in the decade between 1520 and 1530. As in most other parts of the continent, it was students and university teachers, humanists, merchants, and

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monks who distributed the texts and ideas of the Reformation. As in Scandinavia, the spread of the Reformation in the east was closely linked to the German language, and to an acceptance of change. A unique case is that of Prussia, which in fact is where the earliest successful Reformation of a territory took place. The Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albert of Brandenburg, had been won over to the idea of reform in 1522 by the preaching of the Nuremberg pastor Andreas Osiander, and consulted with Luther in Wittenberg in late 1523.24 Following Luther’s recommendation, Albert abandoned the rule of the Order, married, and transformed Prussia into a secular state.25 A treaty with the Polish crown stipulated in April 1525 that Prussia would be a secular duchy under Polish suzerainty. Since the bishop of Samland in eastern Prussia, George of Polentz, also joined the Reformation, married, recommended reading Luther, used Luther’s translation of the New Testament in church, and undertook the most significant liturgical changes, including baptism in the vernacular and the Eucharist under both kinds, the Reformation in Prussia was completed almost without conflict. Practically, however, this was probably the case primarily in those cities whose population was mainly German. The Teutonic Order had not undertaken extensive missionary activities, and hence the rural areas of Prussia saw direct interaction between evangelical Christianity and pre-­Christian Prussian heathens in the decades that followed—­a situation found nowhere else except in the territories of the Sami in the far north. Livonia, Courland, and Estonia were governed by six princes spiritual: the archbishop of Riga, the bishops of Reval, Ösel-­Wiek, Courland, and Dorpat, and Wolter von Plettenberg, the Master of the Livonian Order. The flourishing cities of Riga, Reval, and Dorpat, whose language, culture, and politics were largely influenced by German merchants of the Hansa League, owed their prosperity to the transit of trade goods between East and West. Poland-­ Lithuania and Sweden, and in particular Russia, were covetous, seeing the profits of the Hansa as a drain on their own economies. The development of the Reformation in the region was shaped by the cities’ very early aspirations to transform Livonia, Courland, and Estonia into secular duchies, as was done in Prussia. Thus the Reformation would serve to end the rule of the princes spiritual and to realize the division of secular and clerical governance, in conformance with scripture.26 The cities’ attempts to ally with the nobility against the bishops eventually failed, however. In Riga, the question of images was debated as early as 1522, and the council

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appointed Reformation preachers over the objections of the bishop and canon. In this phase, Riga seems for the most part to have followed the Wittenberg ordinance of 1522. Conflicts with the archbishop escalated between 1524 and 1526, leading to dramatic waves of iconoclasm in various cities. Fearing that the stimulus of the Reformation could lead to a peasant revolt, the largely German nobility did not support the Reformation ­tendencies in the cities. After Riga, other cities too appointed evangelical pastors. In the course of the year 1524, Luther responded to a request of the mayor and councilmen of Riga and sent them a printed interpretation of a psalm.27 In June 1525, at the request of the city council of Dorpat, Luther and his colleague Johannes Bugenhagen issued a certificate of orthodoxy to the apocalyptic lay preacher Melchior Hoffman, who had been active in Wolmar, Dorpat, Riga, and Reval since 1523. Hoffman had travelled to Wittenberg expressly to obtain the document. He had been the cause of a bloody skirmish in January 1525 between citizens of Dorpat, who defended him, and mercenaries of the archbishop who wanted to render him harmless. The conflict had ended in the most extensive iconoclastic revolt in all Livonia. Hoffman’s appeal, which was printed together with open letters by Luther and Bugenhagen, was in part devoted to his apocalyptic message, which would continue to direct his activity and influence—­up to the Anabaptist rebellion of Münster. Apparently, the Wittenberg theologians did not object to his announcement that the second coming of Christ ‘is nearer to us than we think’;28 on the contrary, in view of the Peasants’ War, they shared this markedly apocalyptic expectation. Hoffman’s exile from Livonia in 1526 was not primarily the result of his apocalyptic preaching, however: a greater offence was his ac­cus­ation that the mayor of Dorpat had embezzled secularized church property. In 1525, von Plettenberg was forced to permit evangelical worship in the city of Riga. Luther’s student Johann Briesmann subsequently began preaching in the cathedral, and in 1530 the city adopted a church ordinance. The evangelical cities of Dorpat, Riga, and Reval cooperated from then on, but the region did not establish any uniform church governance that would unite cities and countryside. On the contrary, the Reformation in Livonia, Estonia, and Courland may have aggravated the deep-­seated cultural and political differences between urban and rural milieus. In Poland too, it was students and merchants who brought Reformation ideas and texts with them from Germany. A royal import prohibition on

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Luther’s books dated July 1520 indicates that such literature had arrived by ordinary trade routes and was proving influential. Reformist and humanistic attitudes among professors and students at the University of Cracow are documented in the early 1520s. In Posen, Gdansk, and the three largely German-­dominated West Prussian cities of Toruń, Elblag, and Malbork, early Reformation movements emerged which were analogous to those in many parts of Europe—­in the empire and also in Livonia and Denmark: preachers spread evangelical ideas, and assaults on abbey properties led to  more radical attitudes, which in turn moved city councils to adopt initial pro-­Reformation resolutions. In Poland, however, King Sigismund I (1506–48) resolutely opposed all aspirations towards Reformation. He prevented a political upheaval in Gdansk in 1526 involving motives of church reform. Nonetheless, the Reformation gradually gained support not only among German burghers and in academic circles, but also among aristocrats, who saw the new religious alternative as an opportunity to increase their political influence with the crown at the expense of the clergy. Strong roots in the nobility became a Reformation feature specific to Poland. Because of the existing Hussite tradition, the Reformation message was also particularly fruitful in Bohemia.The Bohemian Reformation was marked by Luther’s early and especially close contacts with the Utraquists, and at the same time with the pacifistic, radical group known as the Bohemian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum). Czech translations of Luther’s writings date as far back as 1520, and were especially numerous in the early years. Ten different editions had been printed by 1523,29 after which interest ebbed for more than a decade. The continuously growing numbers of Czech students in Wittenberg in the 1520s stimulated interaction.The Wittenberg Reformation maintained closer contacts with Bohemia than with any other foreign country. After the Leipzig Disputation, there was no lack of mutual professions of solidarity and theological agreement.Thomas Müntzer’s journey to Prague in 1521 and his influential epistle (sometimes called the Prague Manifesto), in which he proclaimed that God’s miracles of the end of days, including the ‘new church’ of the ‘elect’,30 would begin in Bohemia, had no significant positive resonance, but relations between Wittenberg and the Bohemians did not suffer for it. In response to news from the Utraquists, Luther wrote an open letter to the estates of Bohemia in July 1522, hoping to influence their debates on a projected reconciliation with Rome. Since Christ had revealed to him that the pope was the Antichrist, Luther had unstintingly praised the Bohemians’

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disobedience towards the pope and now hoped to strengthen their resolve.31 In the year that followed, Luther explained to the Utraquists that they must avoid any legitimation of their ordination by the pope; bishops authorized by election could just as well perform ordination.32 In the summer of 1522, Luther had learned of articles of doctrine of the Bohemian Brethren from the evangelical preacher Paul Speratus, who had preached for a time in Jihlava, Moravia, and who would later become one of the reformers of Prussia as the court preacher of Königsberg. In a subsequent correspondence with representatives of the Brethren, Luther saw that there were deep-­ seated theological discrepancies between his teaching and theirs.33 The Brethren’s senior, Luke of Prague, wrote two letters to Luther in which he explained his view of their converging theologies in regard to the doctrine of justification. The difficulties were insurmountable, however, in the field of political ethics, since Luther’s belief that waging war could be a Christian work was incompatible with the pacifism of the Brethren. Yet the contacts between Germans and Bohemians continued. Among the urban German population in northern and northwestern Bohemia, who up to now had been a bulwark of Catholicism, there was a partial opening towards the Wittenberg theology. Ultimately, however, the notorious tensions between Czechs and Germans were not propitious to any leanings towards the Reformation theology from Germany. In aristocratic circles too, there were sympathies with the Wittenberg doctrine.The counts von Schlick, whose dominions included the Bohemian mining region along the Saxon border, supported the Wittenberg Reformation early on. Luther dedicated the Latin version of his pamphlet against Henry VIII to Sebastian von Schlick on 15 July 1522, the same date that appeared on his open letter to the Bohemian estates. Through von Schlick he hoped to gain access to the whole country.34 Karlstadt similarly dedicated his 1522 treatise on images to a Count von Schlick—­in this case Wolfgang—­ and maintained intensive contacts with the Bürgerschaft of Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov), which lay in the Schlicks’ dominions. The counts regularly sent their sons to Wittenberg to university. The hopes of a sweeping success in Bohemia which the counts’ early orientation towards the Reformation raised in Wittenberg were not fulfilled. The former Dominican friar Dominicus Beyer had preached the Reformation since 1522 in Děčín (Tetschen), in the northern Bohemian dominions of Hans von Salhausen. Johann Zack, administrator of the archdiocese of Prague, charged Salhausen before King Louis of Bohemia with

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spreading false teachings in Děčín, presenting forty articles of dogma as evidence. A pamphlet printed in Wittenberg publicized the affair, comparing the judgement of the Bohemian clergy with the anti-­Reformation opinions of the universities at Paris, Louvain, and Cologne. In July 1522, the council of Jihlava, Moravia, had to expel the evangelical preacher Paul Speratus after a mandate issued by King Louis II of Bohemia and Hungary. A year later, the king combatted Reformation tendencies in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) in Transylvania. In both cases, the local assemblies and magistracies can be assumed to have been largely sympathetic to the Reformation. As early as the 1520s, German city legislatures introduced the Reformation in Sopron (Ödenburg) and Levoča (Leutschau). In op­pos­ition to her husband’s sharply anti-­Reformation policy, Queen Mary of Hungary, a sister of Charles V, favoured the evangelical camp, and tried unsuccessfully to engage Speratus as a chaplain at court. Arrested in Olomouc (Olmütz) and sentenced to death, Speratus was released three months later and went to Wittenberg. Title page of a text edited by Mathis Blochinger, printed in Wittenberg in 1523 by Nikel Schirlentz, Complaint to His Royal Majesty of Hungary and Bohemia against a Lutheran monk and preacher concerning forty art­ icles preached by him at Děčín in Bohemia. The death of King Louis in the 1526 Battle of Mohács and the pressure of the Ottoman superpower gave the nobility greater latitude. In 1526, the estates of the margraviate of Moravia, which was united with the crown of Bohemia, recognized Ferdinand of Austria as king on the condition that he granted them religious freedom. That became the foundation of a coexistence between the denominations which would have been unthinkable elsewhere. In Mikulov (Nikolsburg) in southern Moravia, the Anabaptist leader Balthasar Hubmaier, having fled the empire, carried out an Anabaptist urban and territorial Reformation with the support of the ruler Leonhard of Liechtenstein. Nowhere else, except for the Münster rebellion, did a whole community convert to Anabaptism. Some Liechtenstein dissidents who rejected war levies and conscription allied with Anabaptists who had been living since 1528 in Slavkov (Austerlitz), Moravia, where they held all their property communally. The community flourished under the influx of fellow Anabaptists fleeing persecution in Tyrol. Jakob Hutter was the or­gan­iza­ tion­al head of this group, who were later called Hutterian Brethren, or Hutterites, after him. Although occasionally persecuted, they were mainly protected by the Moravian nobility.

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The early development of the Reformation in Hungary has some simi­lar­ities to events in other countries. For one, humanism played a key role here too, favouring the acceptance of Reformation ideas. Young scholars such as Simon Grynaeus, Conrad Cordatus, and Veit Oertel of Winsheim, who were active as priests and teachers in the capital, Buda, maintained a friendly correspondence with Melanchthon and a positive attitude towards Luther. When the Hungarian diet pronounced a death sentence for Luther supporters in May 1523, these humanists left Hungary and went to Wittenberg, where thirty Hungarians studied between 1522 and 1530. Luther dedicated a consolatory text to Mary of Hungary, who seemed to sympathize with the Reformation, probably at the instigation of the Danish king in exile Christian II, her brother-­in-­law.35 Nothing is known of any answer from Hungary, however. After the Battle of Mohács, Transylvania fell to the Ottomans, while the Habsburgs retained Upper Hungary. Sultan Suleiman I appointed the Hungarian magnate Johann Zápolya as administrator. The Turkish victory strengthened the position of the nobility in relation to the crown, which was favourable to the spread of the Reformation in many different forms. To sum up: in the eventful decade between 1520 and 1530, the Reformation movement originating in the empire had penetrated large parts of Latin Europe to varying degrees. In all regions, the cities had played a pioneering role. The most important actors in this complex process of pan-­European communication were those groups who were especially mobile: urban merchants, students, and mendicant monks. It was they, hindered but not halted by censorship edicts, who distributed the printed matter that moved people. Vernacular translations of the New Testament often marked the beginning of a country’s own production of printed Reformation texts. Never before had Latin European Christendom so intensely and controversially revisited fundamental issues of the Christian faith in such a short time as in the ten years from 1520 to 1530. It is a fitting and indeed inescapable conclusion to call this historic growth of the Reformation, driven by media and communication, a modern development.

4.3.  John Calvin and the Reformed International In the later 1520s and early 1530s, the Reformation movement gradually but continuously spread in France too. In the cities of Normandy, the

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Reformation had already made the transition from the scholarly milieu to that of tradesmen and merchant burghers in the 1520s.The principal opposing forces were the theological faculty of the Sorbonne, the courts—­called ‘parlements’—and, increasingly, the crown. In contrast to the empire, where the most numerous and most important ‘reformers’ came from the clerical estate, French Protestantism had especially strong support among the laity. Francis I was captured by his arch-­r ival Charles V after the Battle of Pavia on 24 February 1525, and the French queen mother Louise became regent. The old theological and legal elites prevailed upon her to prohibit vernacular Bibles. In 1528, there were iconoclastic incidents in Paris; Reformation activists destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.The defenders of the old faith, with the support of the crown, held marches to agitate against the Protestants. The night of the 17th to the 18th of October, 1534, is considered the final turning point towards the anti-­Protestant religious policy of Francis I: pos­ ters measuring 37 by 25 cm sharply attacking the ‘blasphemy’ of the Mass and its celebrants in the name of heavenly truth were put up in the streets of Paris, Amboise, Blois, Tours, and Orléans.36 The posters were printed at the shop of Pierre de Vingle in Neuchâtel, just over the Swiss border—­the same printing shop which would produce the first French Bible of the Reformation a year later, translated by Pierre-­Robert Olivétan, a relative of Calvin’s, at the instigation of Farel and the Waldensians. The incendiary poster was the work of the French ‘réfugié’ circle which included Guillaume Farel, Pierre Marcourt, and Antoine Marcourt, who was probably the author. The poster’s distribution extended as far as the door of the royal bedchamber at Amboise Castle, and even under the cup in which the king was wont to put his handkerchief. The poster incident, l’Affaire des placards, showed Francis I how strong the Reformation had already grown, and how dangerously close it was able to come to him personally. He responded by a number of executions, whereupon intellectuals who had been won over to the Reformation, most of them young, left the country. There was some equivocation yet in the king’s religious policy: he invited Melanchthon to Paris, for example;37 he was in touch, out of anti-­Habsburg motives, with the Schmalkaldic ‘axis powers’ Saxony and Hesse, which exhorted the king to take an interest in the fate of the French religious refugees in Germany;38 he pardoned some opponents of the Mass. Nonetheless, the fundamental anti-­Reformation tendency of French policy remained unchanged from the mid-­1530s.

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Calvin’s Intellectual Background John Calvin, born in 1509 in Noyon in northern France, was one of the young French intellectuals who, having enjoyed a humanistic education, embraced the Reformation and subsequently found themselves forced into exile. Calvin’s father, a lawyer employed as an episcopal secretary who had been excommunicated as the result of a legal battle over the inheritances of two priests, had envisaged a clerical position for his son. John Calvin did not become a priest, but he did become the most influential theologian of the second generation of reformers. The theology and the church organization of Reformed Protestantism gained their lasting form and international image from the life’s work of this brilliant thinker. The solidarity between his organization centred in Geneva and the Zurich Reformation represented by Heinrich Bullinger ensured the lasting consolidation and European influence of the Reformed church. A number of clerical prebends which Calvin’s father had obtained for him, and which were exercised by vicars, allowed him from 1523 on to obtain a solid education in the basic arts and languages at the University of Paris. He spent part of his studies at the Collège de Montaigu, an institution that was infamous for its miserable hygienic conditions and its strict dis­cip­ line, where Erasmus and Rabelais had lived before Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola would probably live after him. Calvin’s interest in humanism and in Reformation theological literature from Germany began during his first course of study in Paris. Calvin never tried to use German texts, however, but depended on Latin and French editions. After completing his studies of liberal arts, Calvin began studying law in Orléans, in obedience to his father’s wishes and in spite of his strong propensity for theology. He also spent some time in Bourges, where the Reformation movement had already gained the upper hand. In 1531, after the death of his father, Calvin returned to Paris to study philology at the humanistic Collège royal recently founded by Francis I. The knowledge of Greek and Hebrew that he gained here, and later expanded mainly in Basel under Sebastian Münster, was to enable him to perform his later work of scriptural exegesis. In a 1532 commentary on Seneca’s ethical treatise On Mercy (De clementia), Calvin documented his broad knowledge of classical and early Christian literature and demonstrated his skills in grammatical analysis, historical philology, and philosophical interpretation.

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In the scholarly milieu of Paris, with its humanistic and Reformation influences, Calvin seems to have experienced a ‘sudden conversion’ ­(subita conversio)39 in 1533/4, a turn towards the ‘true, pure teaching of the Gospel’, which he felt, in analogy to the vocation of the Apostle Paul, to be a mandate to serve the word of God—­both as a preacher and as an interpreter of scripture—­ and staunchly to defend the truth of the Reformation. The earliest certain source documenting Calvin’s theological affinity with the Reformation is considered to be the speech given on 1 November 1533 by Nicolas Cop, rector of the Sorbonne, which Calvin had collaborated in writing. Apparently the speech made use of a pericope for the feast of All Saints (Matthew 5:1–12) with an interpretation proposed by Luther in his postil. Calvin knew the postille as translated by the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer. The fact that this man became the first reformer from the empire with whom Calvin corresponded, and  with whom he found refuge for a while in Strasbourg, speaks to the  ­ outstanding work of transmission which the Alsatian reformer ­performed for Reformation literature, especially in respect of France and Western Europe. Even Calvin’s earliest theological texts promised salvation to those who suffered for God’s sake. This emphasis was appropriate to the duress to which the French Protestants had been increasingly subjected since the affaire des placards. From January 1535, Calvin is documented as a religious refugee in Basel, which had been open to the Reformation since 1525 and had definitively introduced it in 1529. As a flourishing centre of humanistic publishing, Basel was a major destination of Protestant dissidents from all parts of Europe, especially the Romance countries. A great deal of information about developments in Calvin’s native France, which he followed closely all his life, also converged in Basel. In a foreword to the 1535 Olivétan Bible attributed to Calvin, he expounded his belief that God had shaped His relation to the world since the Fall by His ‘promise’ or His ‘testament’. The terminology closely follows that of Luther’s De captivitate Babylonica and Luther’s treatise, likewise published in Latin, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew.40 ‘Such promises . . . have been the comfort and consolation of the children and elect of God, who have nourished, supported, and sustained their hope in these promises, waiting upon the will of the Lord to show forth what he had promised.’41 The promises of the Bible, including the foretelling of Jesus as Messiah in the Old Testament, were the basis for the assurance of salvation and the consolation of the brothers in faith persecuted in France.

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The first edition of what would soon be Calvin’s most famous book, the Institutes of the Christian Religion (Christianae religionis institutio), appeared in March 1536. This initial, strongly catechetical version of what would later become a voluminous work of dogmatic theology shows clearly the influence of Luther’s Latin writings, including the Small Catechism, the Treatise on the Freedom of a Christian, De captivitate Babylonica, the Church Postil, and many more. Indeed, it was characteristic of Calvin’s early theology and early reception of Luther that he was hardly aware, or took little notice, of the controversies over the Eucharist between Luther and the theologians of Zurich, Basel, and Strasbourg—­conflicts which had thoroughly ploughed up the theological field in the empire. Those debates, which had been conducted primarily in German, were received after a significant delay, and sometimes in abridged form, in other European countries. One substantial reason for Calvin’s lifelong appreciation of Luther—­ which did not prevent him from recognizing the German reformer’s human limitations—­is the lasting influence of the ‘young’ Luther and his early Reformation writings, which had been rapidly disseminated in France as elsewhere. Moreover, Calvin’s most important correspondent in Wittenberg, Philipp Melanchthon, stood for a humanistically moderate, unpolemical style of theological teaching similar to Calvin’s, emphasizing common Reformation positions. After various voyages undertaken to stabilize the Reformation movement in France, Calvin, who had rapidly become well known for his Institutio, met Guillaume Farel in May 1536 during an overnight stop in Geneva, where the Reformation was just being introduced. Farel, the pastor of the city, persuaded the young scholar to stay by ‘command, which had the power of God’s hand laid violently upon me from heaven’.42 Geneva and Vaud had recently been conquered by Berne, but Geneva retained a high degree of political independence. Because personnel was urgently needed to organize a reformed church, Farel had seen fit to phrase Calvin’s appointment as an incontrovertible divine vocation: if he did not follow it, he would find no rest in all eternity. Beginning in August 1536, Calvin interpreted the epistles of St Paul as reader at St Peter’s Cathedral; by the end of the year he had begun preaching as well. He never received an official ordination.

Church Ordinance and Congregational Discipline During Calvin’s first Geneva period (1536–8), the proud city which had recently freed itself from its bishop and from the Duke of Savoy, failed in an

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initial attempt to introduce a Protestant church regime commanding great authority.With his legal training, Calvin played a leading role in drafting the pertinent regulations, the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques of 1537.These ordinances called for strict discipline, especially in connection with the planned monthly celebration of the Eucharist, which was to be supervised by an elder. Each inhabitant was to sign a pledge to the confession; the liturgical forms and the children’s catechesis were set out in detail. When some citizens refused to sign the confession of faith and doubts arose in the city council as to whether the proposed moral discipline was appropriate, the reformation project stalled. Like Bucer in Strasbourg and Oecolampadius in Basel, and in contrast to the organizational structures of the Reformation churches in Zurich, Schaffhausen, and Berne, Calvin staunchly propounded his belief that public morals were the responsibility of the church, not the civil government. Under the pressure of pro-­Berne forces, and after minor conflicts with city council, Farel and Calvin were banished from Geneva shortly after Easter of 1538. Farel settled permanently in Neuchâtel, where he realized his and Calvin’s vision of a church organized in conformance with scripture. After several months in Basel, Calvin accepted Bucer’s invitation to minister to the French exile community in Strasbourg. In addition to his work in the parish, Calvin lectured on the New Testament at the Gymnasium. Since the mid-­1520s, the Strasbourg Protestants had been developing a university-­like institution, similar to the Prophezei in Zurich, which not only taught the liberal arts to students, but also offered Bible exegesis for interested citizens. Calvin would continue to combine scholarly and pastoral work in later life as well. In the small French community, which was largely free of political pressures, he was able to try out his notions of evangelical church organization. He adapted many liturgical elements of the Strasbourg church for his congregation of French exiles. His Eucharistic discipline took the form of individual talks with the communicants. Calvin’s time in Strasbourg also saw the publication of the first revised edition of his Institutio in 1539, which had developed from a catechism to a comprehensive compendium of doctrine, and would continue to grow until its last revision in 1559. Each new edition was soon followed by a French translation, which was critical for Calvin’s influence on French-­ speaking Protestantism. Calvin’s 1540 commentary on the Epistle to the Romans also brought him prominence as a learned exegete versed in humanistic philology. The Strasbourg period was crucial in shaping his

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personality as a reformer overall: mainly, he was close to Martin Bucer and received significant inspiration from him in regard to the doctrine of predestination, his conception of the Eucharist, the doctrine of the church and the Spirit, and covenant theology. In Strasbourg Calvin also established contacts with important pro­tag­on­ists of Protestantism in the empire. Conferences between evangelical and Roman Catholic theologians in Frankfurt, Worms, and Regensburg d­ eepened his knowledge of the empire’s religious diplomacy and laid the foundations of a twenty-­ year friendship with Melanchthon, the ‘number two’ of the Wittenberg Reformation, whom he met at such talks. Calvin also hoped to influence the religious policy of Francis I through contacts with the ­rulers of evangelical territories in the empire. He was unstintingly concerned with the fate of evangelical Christianity in his native France. Calvin’s second

Fig. 19  René Boyvin, Portrait of John Calvin at the age of fifty-­three, c.1562; coloured copper engraving.

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Geneva period (1541–64), which set the course for the remainder of his career, signalled its approach from the autumn of 1540 on, once his and Farel’s followers had gained influence in the city and invited him to return. After long hesitation, Calvin answered their call in September 1541, and on his arrival he proposed to the council a church ordinance based on Bucer’s ideas. He had adapted them to Genevan conditions while striving to ensure the church the greatest possible freedom from political authorities. After long negotiations, stipulations were adopted that diverged from Calvin’s proposals in regard to church appointments, Eucharistic communion four times a year (the customary frequency in Berne too), and the role of the city council in excommunication. These rules became a lasting source of ­disputes. Nonetheless, the council’s influence on church governance was restricted somewhat by the 1561 Ordonnances ecclésiastiques.43 The theological basis of church organization, according to Calvin, was the doctrine of the four offices derived from the New Testament, which were subordinate to the Word of God as inalienable functions of the one church. The office of pastors was to proclaim and administer the sacraments, and converged in matters of teaching and morals with the offices of doctors and elders. The core responsibility of doctors was exegesis or catechesis—­or, more concretely, school-­teaching. The deacons were responsible for feeding the needy and administering alms. The elders were supposed to be respectable wardens of individual quarters and districts. Together with the pastors, they formed the consistory and ensured discipline in the church. Calvin thought of these ‘presbyters’ primarily as experienced men with sound knowledge of the Bible. The consistory was supposed to be an ecclesiastical authority acting solely in accordance with the word of God.The city council of Geneva, fearful of dominance by the church, saw the elders primarily as representatives of secular authority, and gave preference in appointing them to members of the city’s political and administrative bodies. In the council elections of 1554 and 1555, the majority shifted towards followers of Calvin: the influence of the clergy in the consistory increased, which allowed it to act more autonomously. In this period, Geneva developed into a strait-­laced, God-­fearing republic of virtue, regulating and monitoring many kinds of individual behaviour—­an image which earned the city admiration in the early modern period, but suspicion beginning with the Enlightenment. Among punishable acts in Calvin’s Geneva were the following: absence from worship services; extramarital sex; cursing and blasphemy;

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violence or vehement disputes between spouses; begging, indolence, all kinds of time-­wasting, and incitement thereto; alcohol abuse; dancing and singing ‘indecent’ songs; all games of chance; magical practices; possession of Catholic books and the use of orthodox devotionals; all worship of ‘idols’. The extent of the consistory’s social control in the daily lives of Geneva’s natives and mostly French immigrants is indicated by the fact that, from about 1560, one in eight of the city’s 20,000 inhabitants was cited at least once a year and questioned about certain objections to his conduct. On average, some two hundred persons per year were excommunicated from the Eucharist. The gradual disciplinary success of the Geneva clergy’s moral propaganda can be discerned in the disappearance of the offences of ­blasphemy and Catholic superstitions. Citations for dancing, gambling, and the like also declined sharply. Saints’ names also became more rare as most children were named after figures from the New Testament or, increasingly, from the Old Testament, and the proportion of births out of wedlock fell between 1560 and 1570 to 0.12 per cent.The vast majority of the dis­cip­lin­ary cases concerned domestic or public disputes. From 1566 on, adultery was a capital offence, and those who remained unmarried were eventually called before the consistory and asked why.The goal of this ‘participatory observation’ by the consistory was to encourage responsibility for the whole community in each of its members, and to deflect God’s punishing wrath from the city. Because Geneva’s pastors—­in contrast to the double standards of the ancien régime—­submitted themselves to the same moral standards which they applied to their congregation, they led a virtuous, scholarly, disciplined life of inner-­worldly asceticism. Thus they represented a new, bourgeois type of model Christian, no doubt in a higher degree than their Lutheran colleagues, who were less averse to worldly joys. Calvin, who claimed no special privileges, unstintingly served his church as preacher and theological doctor until his death in 1564, and refused any kind of funerary monument, is the epitome of this type of learned bourgeois reformed Christian.

The Fiery Death of Michael Servetus Calvin’s name is also associated with a spectacular trial which ended with a heretic burnt at the stake in Geneva. Calvin was sharply criticized during his lifetime, most of all by the scholar Sebastian Castellio of Basel whom he

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had prevented from being admitted to the ministry. Since the times of Pietism and the Enlightenment, the execution of Michael Servetus for denying the Trinity has been held up as an example of denominational fanaticism, while Castellio’s treatise on the persecution of heretics (De haereticis an sint persequendi), published pseudonymously in 1554, is considered a manifesto of modern tolerance. Citing orthodox and contemporary authorities, Sebastian Franck, Johannes Brenz, Erasmus, and, most of all, Luther, the Savoyard Castellio rejected the killing of heretics. The modern reception generally fails to mention, however, that Castellio, in a subsequent literary debate with Calvin, admitted he had not read Servetus and declared that his execution was justified if the accusation of blasphemy was correct. In so­ci­ eties of all denominations and in all legal codes of the time, including the Corpus iuris civilis, on the basis of which Servetus was convicted, and the Constitutio criminalis carolina, there was a broad, unquestioned consensus that blasphemy was a capital crime. And that was the core of the charges against Servetus: he had called the Trinity a ‘three-­headed monster’.44 Even the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who was generally appreciated as a kind man, opined that Servetus ‘deserves to be disembowelled alive’.45 In the educated, humanistic milieus of early Anabaptism, doubts about the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity had been raised as early as the mid-­1520s. In the 1516 first edition of his Greek New Testament, Erasmus of Rotterdam had deleted a gloss, known as the ‘Johannine Comma’, from the first Epistle of John (5:7b–8a) on the grounds that it was an interpolation in the original text. The passage in question had been a traditional reference for the Trinitarian dogma in the Nicene-­Constantinopolitan Creed of 381.46 A number of impatient young minds, including the Nuremberg school­ master Hans Denck and the Swiss ex-­priest Ludwig Hätzer, pursued this path further. Besides the dogma of one God in three persons, the Christological doctrine of the dual natures of Christ also appeared doubtful to them in view of the presentation of Jesus in the New Testament, and was a fundamental obstacle to an ethics of the imitation of Christ. The Spanish-­born Michael Servetus, who had begun his studies in 1528 in Toulouse and visited Basel and Strasbourg in the early 1530s, expressed radical doubts about the orthodox dogmas in two works published in 1531 and 1532: the one God had revealed Himself under various names and mani­fest­ations in the books of the Old and New Testaments, he wrote; the one God appeared in the New Testament as the Son and the Spirit, but was

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not an intrinsically differentiated being, as the doctrine of the Trinity claimed. In 1553, Servetus, by this time working as a physician and an editor in Lyons andVienne, anonymously published his chief work, the Christianismi Restitutio. In it he returned to the teachings of his youth, but refined them into a dualistic philosophy of religion in which the history of the world is conceived as a struggle between God and Satan. He combined this doctrine with his anatomical observations on the circulatory system: in his vision, human beings absorb the grace of the one God with the air, and progress on the path towards divinity through sublimation. All Creation participates in the divine essence; Christ and the salvation history of the New Testament are merely symbolic modulations of God’s universal relation to the world. No more fundamental challenge to Christianity as a religion of redemption was written in the sixteenth century. Calvin was acquainted with these ideas long before 1553, not least from Servetus’s letters. He considered them extremely dangerous: if they were to spread, they would do irreparable harm. Calvin played a part in Servetus’s arrest in Vienne, providing the Inquisitor General with incriminating handwritten material, apparently in the certain expectation of a capital sentence. But Servetus was able to escape from prison and flee to Geneva. There he attended a worship service held by Calvin, who recognized him and promptly informed the civil authorities. The prosecution accused Servetus of denying and blaspheming against the Trinity, denying the divine nature of Christ, and challenging infant baptism. In the course of the trial, the impression was created that Servetus had adopted Jewish and Muslim objections to Christian dogma. Before the sentence was carried out, various Protestant cities in Switzerland were asked for their opinions: all of them approved the death sentence, including Melanchthon. In the mentality of the time, it was important to protect the community against objectionable and subversive teachings—­for the sake of the people’s souls as well as in the interests of the authorities. In this regard, Europe was unanimous across denominational boundaries. The islands of tolerance towards anti-­Trinitarians that would arise temporarily in Hungary and Poland during the sixteenth century did not yet exist at the time of Servetus’s public burning at the stake on 27 October 1553. Luther’s thesis that burning heretics went against the Holy Spirit47 was disregarded by the civil government of Geneva—­in spite of Calvin’s attempts to obtain for Servetus a ‘milder’ form of execution.

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Closing Ranks with Heinrich Bullinger and the Zurich Reformation Calvin’s correspondence with numerous European congregations and individuals, and the founding of the Geneva Academy as a Calvinist training institution, had great importance for the further development of inter­ nation­al Reformed Protestantism. His theological agreement with Zurich and Heinrich Bullinger was also influential: in Vaud, which was subordinate to Berne, Calvin had a number of committed followers, such as Pierre Viret in Lausanne. They emphasized ecclesiastical independence, in contrast to the state-­sanctioned church advocated by Zwingli, which was dominant in Berne. There were significant differences between Calvin’s and Zwingli’s teachings in a number of other matters as well, including church discipline and the Eucharist. For that reason, and also because the support of Zurich would advance Geneva’s further political prospects, Calvin found it a good idea to seek a compromise with the Zurich church leader Heinrich Bullinger, who was highly respected in Berne. He corresponded with Bullinger before for two years reaching an agreement on the question of the Eucharist—­a pos­ ition known in the history of theology as the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. In his Brief Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament of 1544,48 Luther had definitively abrogated all ecclesiastical community with his theological opponents on the issue—­in particular those of Zurich—­and the chances of a broad intra-­Reformation reconciliation were worse than ever. Seeking broad strategic perspectives on a European scale, Calvin may also have hoped that a theological agreement with Zurich on the sacrament would pave the way for a rapprochement with the Lutherans in the empire. In the event, however, the opposite occurred.Theologically, the core statements on the sacraments in the Consensus Tigurinus formed a compromise rather than a coherent doctrine: the sacraments, as Zwingli had taught, were signs of Christian confession through which (per ea)49 God assures us of His grace, according to Calvin’s position, and reveals to us the image of His sacrifice and suffering—­in other words, they are a means which God uses; nonetheless, salvation cannot be ascribed to them, but only to God or His spirit.This formulation was a synthesis of the Zurich and the Geneva doctrines of the Eucharist, and demonstrated the congregations’ will to cooperate,50 but it could not resolve their theological tensions. The Consensus was unambiguous mainly in its rejection of the Roman and Lutheran doctrines of the

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Eucharist. In that regard, it was a decisive contribution to the formation of the Reformed denomination. The form of theological entente first practised here—­recognizing a common church affiliation without dispelling dogmatic differences in detail—­ would also prove characteristic of confessions developed in Reformed Protestantism. Even deep-­seated differences, such as that between Calvin’s doctrine of twofold divine predestination (gemina praedestinatio)—to salvation and to damnation—­and Bullinger’s rejection of this sort of speculation, were for a long time no insurmountable obstacle to the cohesion of Reformed churches. In relation to the Lutherans, however, the Consensus Tigurinus occasioned a long-­lasting theological controversy, known as the second Eucharistic controversy, in which Calvin played a central part. In fact, the theological accord between Zurich and Geneva exacerbated the denominational difference between Luther and the Reformed churches, resulting in endless polemics during the century that followed.

The Internationalization of Reformed Protestantism Over the course of the 1540s and 1550s, Reformed Protestantism expanded internationally in all directions. Bullinger’s and Calvin’s correspondence spanned large parts of Europe, as did the prefaces of their published works, which were dedicated primarily to political figures. These writings were concerned with issues of theological doctrine, church governance, and political orientation, as well as with the initiation of reforms. Among the German reformers, only Bucer and Melanchthon achieved correspondence networks of comparable breadth and density. Another important factor favouring the internationalization of the Geneva Reformation in particular was the Academy, founded in 1559, which rapidly developed an international influence, especially by training young theologians in Reformed doctrine. The seven-­ year preliminary school (schola privata) taught the basics of the liberal arts and Greek. As in the universities of the time, including those of other denominations, the pertinent works of Aristotle continued to be the standard reference; pagan classical antiquity remained an indispensable part of the curriculum in Geneva too. The subsequent upper school (schola publica) consisted at first of the four faculties of theology, Hebrew, Greek, and the liberal arts. A faculty of law was added later. The number of students is estimated to have been about 1,500 in the year 1564; 300 of them were enrolled in the upper school.

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Of the 160 students named in the extant fragments of the first four years’ rolls, only three were originally from Switzerland, while thirteen came from Italy (mainly Piedmont), ten from Germany and ten from the Netherlands, and 114 from France. Most of the instructors of the first generation were recruited from the staff of the Academy of Lausanne in Vaud, which was enduring repression by the Berne government.Among them was the French professor of Greek Theodore Beza, the first rector of the upper school of the Geneva Academy, who briefly filled the professorship jointly with Calvin. From 1560 to 1563, Beza had served as theological advisor to the political leaders of French Protestantism, Louis de Condé and Gaspar de Coligny. Beza became one of the leading theologians of Reformed Protestantism. In spite of the Berne magistracy’s prohibition, he had prominently expounded Calvin’s version of the doctrine of predestination since 1555. Four years after he became a citizen of Geneva, Calvin died. Beza had already succeeded him as moderator of the Geneva pastors, and he was on hand to close Calvin’s eyes at his death on 28 May 1564. Some reserve is in order towards the common use of ‘Calvinism’ as a term for that Reformed Protestantism which took its most important influences from John Calvin.The term ‘Calvinism’, a polemical epithet advanced by the Lutherans, was not in keeping with either Calvin’s or his followers’ self-­image. They saw themselves as interpreters of biblical truth in the context of the ‘church reformed in accordance with God’s word’. They found any cult of personality strange, even abhorrent—­unlike the Lutherans, who had been using the term ‘Lutherdom’ as a positive self-­designation since the 1560s. Furthermore, Calvin’s influence in the Netherlands, England, Poland, Hungary, and certain territories of the empire such as Anhalt, the Palatine electorate, Bremen, and Emden was all but inseparably intertwined with influences of Zwingli, Bucer, Bullinger, Melanchthon, and other reformed theologians and internationally known confessional documents, such as the Second Helvetic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism.To take Calvin’s teaching as the sole standard of Reformed theology would hardly do justice to the intradenominational plurality and the relative breadth of that theo­ logic­al current, especially in the sixteenth century. The numerous exile congregations too played a part in the inter­nation­ alization of Protestantism. Reformed congregations arose among refugees in London and in various German cities—­ primarily Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Emden, Wesel and Aix-­la-­Chapelle—­most of which had several hundred or even a thousand members, and were in correspondence with

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one another and with underground Protestantism in their home countries. They fared differently in their host societies: their fates ranged from integration as economically agile immigrants to open conflict with their Lutheran or Catholic surroundings—­which in some cases feared their economic influence—­to expulsion.With their high potential for activity, the Reformed churches were seldom mere victims. Certain preachers and leaders played an important role as nodes of communication within and between the congregations: the cosmopolitan, humanistically educated Polish secular priest and nobleman Jan Łaski (Johannes a Lasco), for example, who was increasingly influenced by Calvin, served as superintendent of the evangelical refugee congregations in London and as a pastor in Emden, before finally trying to strengthen the Reformation movement in his native country. The Scottish priest John Knox supervised English exiles in Frankfurt am Main for a time, and later studied in Geneva. The Wallonian glass-­blower Guy de Brès, after fleeing to London, organizing a subversive preaching and missionary activity in Lille, and studying theology in Calvin’s Geneva, organized the Reformed Protestant de­nom­in­ ation in Wallonia. His Confessio Belgica of 1561 was oriented after the Confessio Gallicana.The Flemish Carmelite monk Pieter Datheen, a notorious vagrant and itinerant denominational missionary, led exile congregations first in London, then in Frankfurt, then in Frankenthal, and later worked as a preacher and pastor of the ‘Calvinist international’ in the Palatinate, which had meanwhile transitioned to Reformed Protestantism, as well as in Husum, Stade, Gdansk, and Elblag. Denominational forced migration, which in certain phases displaced followers of the Reformed tradition in the Netherlands, France, and England under Mary I, was propitious to the internationalization of the Reformed churches and enhanced the theological attraction of its exiled dogmatician John Calvin.

From the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre to the Edict of Nantes Calvin achieved his most immediate influence in reforming church governance and theology in the ‘church under the cross’ in France. Although an exile, he maintained a connection to his native France throughout his life. In spite of persecution by Francis I, who in 1539 had authorized the civil courts to prosecute the Protestants and had promised in a further treaty with Charles V in 1544 to stamp out the heresy, Protestantism gradually

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grew and matured in his kingdom. Small groups gathered at first in secret, usually at night. Itinerant preachers or certain ‘presbyters’ interpreted the Bible for them; printed matter was imported illegally, usually from Geneva or Vaud, and distributed underground. Soon the églises plantées developed into organized congregations, the églises dressées, such as those in Meaux, founded in 1541, and in Paris, founded in 1555. In spite of severe repression and numerous executions ordered by Henry II (1547–59), the Reformed church attracted increasing numbers of followers. In its broad outlines, the organizational structure of the evangelical congregations in France followed the model of the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques of the city-­state of Geneva. In addition, a system of regional and national ­synods was established in France with the purpose of making joint decisions on doctrine and governance, regulating the recruitment of pastors, and combining local autonomy with elements of broader uniformity. The first national synod of the French Huguenots51 met in the St-­Germain-­des-­Prés quarter in Paris in May of 1559, with some seventy delegates from forty congregations. For the first time in the history of the Reformed church, a joint confession was adopted, the Confession de foy or Confessio Gallicana. The text is extant in a number of versions, and it is not certain whether Calvin was involved in drafting it. The confession is prefaced with an article on the word of God and a thorough treatise on church doctrine.52 Characteristic elements of the church constitution, such as church dis­cip­ line and the structure of the four offices, were now part of the confession, alongside articles of faith. The prevailing conditions of persecution helped to solidify the conception that the Reformed church’s form was intrinsically connected with the faith which its members confessed in spite of the danger of death. After the death of Henry II, his successors on the French throne were his sons Francis II (1559–60), crowned at the age of fifteen, and Charles IX (1560–74), who was only ten. The regent was their mother, Catherine de’ Medici.The resolutely Catholic dukes of Guise, a cadet branch of the house of Lorraine, attained great influence with the royal family during this period. In alliance with Spain and Rome, they sought to repulse the growth of Protestantism in France, which was increasingly influential, as elsewhere, among scholarly and aristocratic elites. The weakness of the crown and the rivalry between noble factions forming along denominational lines, led by the Catholic house of Guise on the one hand and the Reformed rulers of Navarre and Admiral Gaspard de

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Coligny on the other, set the stage for the conflicts of the latter half of the sixteenth century. Although an edict of tolerance negotiated in 1562 between the Protestant faction and Catherine de’ Medici provided for a conditional coexistence of the two Christian denominations, it was not recognized by the Duke of Guise, and was sabotaged by acts of violence against evangelical congregations, including massacres of worshippers in Vassy (in present-­day Haute-­Marne) and other places in the spring of 1562. A Protestant military resistance subsequently formed under the leadership of Louis de Condé and Coligny. Eight wars of religion ravaged the country between 1562 and 1598, interrupted by fragile truces. At stake was not only the freedom of confession and worship, but also the securing of the French crown for the dynasty of Navarre. From 1571 on, Coligny had attained political influence over Charles IX, and the marriage of Henry of Navarre with Margaret of Valois, sister of Charles IX, seemed to augur a reconciliation. The Protestant nobility came to Paris for the wedding. Catherine de’ Medici seized the opportunity to order the assassination of Coligny and other leading Protestants in the early hours of 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572.Three thousand Protestants in Paris and tens of thousands throughout France are said to have died in the massacre. The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, also called the Blood Wedding of Paris, became a byword for the bloody denominational fanaticism of the age. The dukes of Guise pursued a royal dynasty for themselves. The war against Henry of Navarre also occasioned a military alliance with Spain which opened a particularly bloody phase of the wars of religion in 1584. After the last French king of the house of Valois, Henry III (1574–89), was assassinated by the fanatical Guise supporter Jacques Clément, the French crown fell to the Bourbon king Henry III of Navarre, now Henry IV of France (1589–1610). It would be several years before he could impose his rule, however. Paris did not admit him until March 1594, after his conversion to Catholicism, which was bitter indeed to many Protestants, and his coronation in Chartres in July 1593. This laid the foundation for a more permanent religious peace in the French nation, which had been worn down by decades of denominational hatred and bloody hostilities. The Edict of Nantes, promulgated by Henry IV on 13 April 1598, introduced a political solution which would prove viable for several decades, and assured the Protestants of basic rights. Specifically, these included a guarantee of personal freedom of belief; the toleration of

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public Reformed worship services at numerous defined places, except at court, in Paris, and in several diocesan cities; permission to build places of worship (‘temples’) and separate cemeteries; access to welfare institutions—­ with consideration for certain Catholic feast days—­and to civil service posts or offices in public administration, the military, the judiciary, etc.; the release of Protestant galley convicts; and, finally, the right to establish schools and four academies, to hold synods with the king’s approval, and to maintain 150 militarily equipped safe havens for eight years. The remarkable fact about the Edict of Nantes was that it permitted two different religious confessions in the territory of a single state, in an ordinance conceived as permanent and irrevocable. In this respect, it was a framework for the ensuing rapid cultural development of the Reformed denomination. In Montauban, Saumur, and Sedan, theological schools of different orien­ ta­tions were founded which acquired high international prestige.They propounded the strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination or developed it further to converge with notions of universal salvation, and set standards in scriptural exegesis and biblical philology. Church-­building flourished wherever it was permitted.The simple architecture was oriented towards hearing the Word: no towers, no baptisteries, no crucifixes or images distracted the churchgoer from spiritual worship. The only ornamentation consisted of tablets with the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and other Bible verses. There were no organs and no singing except for psalms; these, however, were sung in many melodic and polyphonic variations. The Eucharist was celebrated only four times a year, at Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and in autumn. Only a catechism examination was required to partake. Before taking communion, the participants had to give an elder a coin-­like token called a méreau or maille as a sign of their membership of the congregation and their moral worthiness. Ministry by the deaconate was a central element of the life of the congregation. Burials were conducted without a pastor present. Domestic piety was actively cultivated, and included singing psalms, Bible readings, and studying catechism. The congregation was led by the consistory, which consisted of some dozen elders and was presided over by the ­pastor. The elders were supposed to be respected community members of unimpeachable morals. This was verifiable thanks to a robust system of mutual social control. Matters which exceeded the competence of the parish were dealt with in colloquia of delegates from ten to twelve congregations.

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Elders and pastors also played equally important roles in provincial ­synods, which governed the ordinations, examinations, and assignments of pastors. Each of the sixteen provincial synods delegated two pastors and two elders to the national synod, the supreme governing body of the Reformed churches of France, which met on the approval of the king and was attended by a royal commissioner. The presbyterian-­synodal organizational model of French Protestantism offered a unique combination of local autonomy and nationwide church structures. For over a half century, the Edict of Nantes issued by their former brother in faith Henry of Navarre allowed the Reformed Protestants to advance in French society as useful, loyal subjects—­as industrious artisans, productive entrepreneurs, successful financiers, and brilliant scholars.

Political Liberation in the Netherlands In other European countries too, the Reformed confession after Calvin took on an eminently political force in the second half of the sixteenth century. This was initially the case in the Netherlands under the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs.There the Reformation influences were at first de­cided­ly heterogeneous: Alongside those of the devotio moderna, humanism, Luther, Zwingli, Karlstadt, and Anabaptism, currents influenced primarily by Calvin and Geneva entered the country through the French-­speaking southern region of Wallonia from the 1550s on. Charles V and his son Philip II (1556–98), who wanted to shape the Netherlands into a thoroughly Spanish, dependent state, pursued a strictly anti-­Reformation religious policy in their territory. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Calvin’s ideas became influential in the struggle against the Habsburgs’ foreign rule. His theology, which drew on the concept of the legitimate resistance of a people led by clerical officers against a tyrant opposed to the Gospel, supplied motivation for a liberation struggle. The nobility, whose political rights had been curtailed, and the mercantile bourgeoisie, oppressed by taxation, increasingly resisted. William of Orange, the stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland, and originally a centrist keeping clear of the denominational and political extremes, tried to maintain a general tolerance among the various denominations. But in 1566, relations decayed dramatically: a militant Calvinism entered the northern provinces from the south; iconoclastic unrest and rebellion broke out in many places, and the following year Philip II sent his major-­domo Fernando, Duke of Alba, to

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suppress them by a draconian reign of terror. A special tribunal popularly known as the ‘Court of Blood’ condemned thousands of ‘heretics’ of all kinds; massive persecution and countless executions were the order of the day. Oppressive taxation exacerbated distress and poverty, and further kindled the spirit of resistance. William of Orange sought political contact with the Reformed churches of the Palatine Electorate, and with France and England, and opened the country to Calvinism. In 1572, the provinces of Zeeland and Holland under his leadership successfully resisted the Spanish repression. In the south, meanwhile, Philip II was able to stabilize his influence: the Spanish crown conceded certain freedoms to the estates in the Union of Arras while prohibiting all deviation from Roman Catholicism. In the same year, the northern provinces joined together in the anti-­ Spanish Union of Utrecht. Protestant refugees from the strictly Catholic southern provinces contributed significantly to economic growth in the Netherlands. In 1581, the seven United Provinces of the north, led by William of Orange and acting as the States General, declared themselves free of all allegiance to Spain. The war of independence would go on—­interrupted by a twelve-­year truce from 1609 to 1621—until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.The northern provinces progressively repelled the Spanish troops, winning political, administrative, and denominational independence. A  process of ecclesiastical consolidation went on alongside that of the state: a synod in Antwerp in 1566/7 introduced the Confessio Belgica, and  the church took on a presbyterian-­synodal organization after the Genevan model. Calvinism, politically privileged by the new Dutch Republic, was the only publicly practised religion, and was continually strengthened by the immigration of religious exiles. Catholicism was prohibited in individual provinces, but tolerated in private, as were Anabaptists, Lutheran immigrants from Germany, Puritans from England, and Sephardic Jews. In practice, the Netherlands became the most multi-­denominational society in early modern Europe. Calvinism exercised its influence on the society—­in contrast to the denominational territories in the empire—­not by the instruments of the state, but by those of the church. The national synod had only intermittent importance. The specific social position of the reformed public church in the Netherlands was based on the principle of personal obligation to conscience, which met with the people’s approval; they associated Calvinism with the elementary experience of their political emancipation.

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Fig. 20  Francis Hogenberg, The Beeldersturm in Antwerp on 20 August 1566, copper engraving, 1570. Followers of the ‘Calvinish religion’ smash stained-­glass windows and topple statues of saints from the capitals of pillars.

John Knox and the Scottish Reformation The Reformed denomination in Scotland took on a political influence that was in some respects comparable with that in the Netherlands.The Scottish Reformation had its roots in the nobility’s military and political opposition to the legitimate monarch. The international political constellation played a critical role inasmuch as the traditional anti-­English orientation of Scottish politics had led to close dynastic ties with France. On the death of the Scottish king James V in 1542, his daughter Mary Stuart, just a few days old, became queen of Scotland. James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, a relative of the Stuarts, initially acted as regent, following a pro-­English and Protestant course. In 1543, he permitted the distribution of an English Bible translation; negotiations for a dynastic marriage between the two kingdoms—­that is, between Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Prince of Wales, Edward—­were also pursued. Then the Earl of Arran was replaced as regent by the queen’s mother, Mary of Guise, who, with the support of bishops and nobles, resumed the country’s pro-­French political course. Mary, Queen of Scots,

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was married to the young French dauphin Francis, and grew up in France. In 1561, after his death, the young queen returned to her unfamiliar kingdom. There were strong reservations against the crown’s and the episcopate’s French orientation among the Scottish nobility.The position of the aristocracy drew closer to the theological concepts of John Calvin, influenced not least by the return of the charismatic preacher John Knox, who is con­ sidered a key reformer of Scotland. Knox had been influenced by the Scottish preacher George Wishart, who was sentenced to death as a heretic in 1546 by Cardinal David Beaton, archbishop of St Andrews. Knox subsequently joined with rebels who had assassinated the cardinal and seized St Andrews Castle. When St Andrews was recaptured by French troops, Knox was taken prisoner and sent to the galleys. After his liberation, with English help, Knox agitated for Protestantism in northern England, near the Scottish border. As a result of the succession of the English queen Mary Tudor (1554), who initiated a bloody restoration of Catholicism in the kingdom, Knox fled to the continent—­ first to Frankfurt am Main, then to Geneva (April 1555 to May 1559), where he was deeply influenced by the theology of John Calvin. The change in religious policy introduced with Elizabeth’s accession to the throne drew Knox, and other Marian exiles, back home. In Scotland he joined a confederation of nobles who saw the chance to return to a pro-­ English religious policy. Under their pressure, the cities were joining the cause. The resistance of the nobility was in part motivated by Calvinistic ideas of self-­defence against the crown—­or against the regent Mary of Guise. After the death of the Queen Mother in June of 1560, the opposing nobles redoubled their efforts to establish an evangelical church and rebelled openly. Attacks on church property and on religious images ensued. For the first time, apparently, the ‘common man’ becomes discernible here as a ­protagonist of changes in religious policy, although the most important ­pro­pon­ents of the Reformation in Scottish society were members of the nobility. The parliament adopted an evangelical confession—­the Confessio Scotica of 1560—which showed Calvinist traits, such as the rejection of the real bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist and an emphasis on predestination. Soon afterward, in 1561, the nobility approved the First Book of Discipline which called for a church organization founded entirely on the offices of pastors and elders. The liturgy introduced in 1564, heavily influenced by Knox, was based on that of the English exile congregation in Geneva.

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Mary Stuart’s return to Scotland did not give rise to a Catholic backlash. On the contrary, the queen ordered that nothing should be changed in regard to religion. She had to abdicate only six years later, however: she had failed to punish the murder of her second husband and the father of her son, the future James VI—­in fact, she had provoked a civil war by marrying his assassin, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. She managed to save her life for almost two decades by fleeing to the dominions of her cousin Elizabeth. She was kept in prison there, however, and was ultimately executed in 1587 on suspicion of plotting to overthrow Elizabeth and claim the English crown. The regents for the Protestant heir to the Scottish throne, James VI, continued Mary’s Reformation policy, although questions of church governance remained controversial. Presbyterian, congregationalist notions in the Geneva tradition competed with the tendency towards an Episcopalian state church, which was favoured by the king. The impassioned debates on church governance, whose repercussions were felt in England, ultimately turned on the rights of the estates. Unlike the development in England, the Scottish Reformation was achieved against the will of the crown. Alliances between nobility and Reformed Christianity similar to that in Scotland would also become characteristic of developments in the Netherlands, France, Bohemia, Poland-­ Lithuania, Transylvania, the Palatine Electorate, and other territories in the empire. The commonly held opinion that ‘Calvinism’ had an affinity primarily with the bourgeoisie hardly accounts for the complex social and political mechanisms by which its influence spread in the second half of the century of the Reformation. Only in the Netherlands was it possible in the long term to replace the monarchy with a republic with the support of Reformed churchgoers. In Poland-­Lithuania and Bohemia, the Reformed confession was for a time an influential stimulus to aristocratic-­republican aspirations to emancipation: theological concepts of Calvin and Bullinger supported particular, small-­scale church structures. However, Catholicism won the advantage on a broad front with the re­inforce­ment of the monarchies in Eastern Central Europe in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century. The multi-­denominational conditions which existed for several decades in Poland-­Lithuania and Bohemia, and longer in Hungarian Transylvania, and which spared these countries the bloody wars of religion that afflicted Central and Western Europe, were ultimately possible only because the existing power relations did not allow

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the imposition of a uniform religion. At the state level, the Europe of the Reformation period was not concerned with tolerance or accepting others on principle, much less with affirming diversity. Nonetheless, in the little face-­to-­face worlds of many European cities and marketplaces, many kinds of international, interdenominational, and interfaith encounters were a reality, not least between travellers, migrants, and religious refugees.

4.4. The Royal Reformations in Scandinavia and England There are some similarities between the Lutheran-­oriented processes of reformation in Scandinavia—­that is, Denmark, the kingdom of Norway, which was united with Denmark and included Iceland, and Sweden including Finland—­and the Reformation in England, which was oriented after the ‘Reformed’ doctrine: the decisive steps to introduce and carry out the Reformation were initiated by the monarchs, who used them to achieve or reinforce a position of sovereignty over the church, to consolidate their rule, and to improve the state’s financial position. Questions of theological doctrine remained in the background compared with issues of church governance and liturgy—­in contrast to the Holy Roman Empire, which was notoriously agitated by theological controversy. Certain old institutional and legal forms were much more faithfully conserved than in the Central, Western, and Eastern European Reformations. Because the church as a whole was subjected to the reforms from above, neither schisms nor domestic military conflicts over religion occurred.The Lutheran and the Anglican state churches gave the societies of Scandinavia and England a national denominational culture which had an indirect, but deep and permanent influence on each country’s mentality, customs, arts and literature, science, and education.

Lutheran Northern Europe Among the royal reformations, that in Denmark shows the greatest similarity with the processes of reformation in the empire. A Reformation movement spreading among the cities, in close connection with humanistic circles, was cautiously favoured by King Frederick I (1523–33), who abolished the legal dependency on Rome for the appointment of bishops as

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early as 1526/7. Frederick’s successor Christian III (1534–59), who had to impose his claim to the crown by force of arms even though he been elected by the council of the Danish kingdom, used the systematic introduction of the Reformation to consolidate his authority. Seizing church property and dividing it between the crown, the cities, and the nobility was an effective means to that end.The abbeys and the cathedrals remained in place, but had to profess the Gospel; only the mendicant orders were banned. To realize these reforms, the king relieved the bishops of their authority and replaced them—­in analogy with the church structures in the evangelical territories of the empire—­with superintendents. By means of a church ordinance drafted by Johannes Bugenhagen, the Wittenberg expert in Reformation and church governance, Christian III reorganized the church throughout his dominions, including the University of Copenhagen. The reorganization was essentially completed between 1536 and 1539. The progressive reshaping of religious culture which then began was aimed at giving Danes a comprehensive Lutheran education. Theologians supported by the king—­ first the reformers Hans Tausen, Christiern Pedersen, Peder, and Niels Palladius; later the Copenhagen professor of the­ ology Niels Hemmingsen, a student of Melanchthon—­published fundamental works in Danish: the New Testament; a hymnal; a visitation almanac, a complete Danish Bible, a liturgically rather conservative missal, all kinds of edifying, catechetical, and homiletic literature, and theological textbooks which expounded the ‘true doctrine’ in a useful way for the canon schools and the universities. The Lutheran denominational culture was generally expressed, and propa­gated, in large part through books: this can be observed once again in the history of the Danish Reformation. Even in Iceland, where the Reformation was also decreed from above over the resistance of the local episcopate, translations of the Bible and a postil by the Lower Saxon reformer Anton Corvinus were key vehicles of the movement. A dense network of pastors was out of the question on the sparsely populated island: Lutheran Christianity lived and grew here primarily through a domestic culture of reading. Norway was a different case: the fact that no Norwegian Bible translation dates from the time of the Reformation is a remarkable exception among countries on the way to Lutheranism.The introduction of the Reformation in Norway had the traits of colonial coercion as the inhabitants were required to worship in Danish. Activities which would make evangelical

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Christianity popular among rural people in particular did not begin until almost a century after the adoption of the Danish church ordinance (1539). In the early decades after the introduction of the Reformation, the mother­ land of the Danish empire was predominantly oriented after Wittenberg—­where the clerical and administrative elites were educated—­ although Rostock, which was geographically closer, gradually gained in importance. For the Danish Reformation as a whole, Melanchthon was no less im­port­ant and influential than Luther. The Confessio Augustana of 1530 and Luther’s Small Catechism were the standard doctrinal reference works, and defined the Danish confession, yet the polarization between Luther’s and Melanchthon’s theologies which had fuelled the intra-­Reformation controversies in the empire and in Prussia since the late 1540s had no significant resonance in Denmark.The king had no interest in controversial theology, which would unsettle a society and threaten to divide it. The Reformation in Sweden is unusual in that it was introduced very early, was realized only with significant delays, and ultimately took on particularly conservative forms. The decision in favour of the Reformation was taken very shortly after Sweden’s independence from Denmark (1523). King Gustav Vasa broke with Rome because the fugitive archbishop of Uppsala, Gustav Trolle, was loyal to Denmark. In 1531 the king appointed a new archbishop: the Wittenberg-­educated theologian Laurentius Petri. Petri headed the Swedish church until his death in 1573; he was the author of the church ordinance of 1571. As early as 1527, the diet of Västeras authorized the king to confiscate church property.This fiscal operation was crucial to the development of the independent Swedish state. Some fundamental Reformation texts—­the translation of the New Testament and later the whole Bible, vernacular missals, several edifying works—­were published as early as the 1520s and 1530s. Their influence hardly extended beyond the cities. The fact that the veneration of the saints, pilgrimages, and votive masses were only abolished by the diet in 1544 indicates that elementary religious practices had not really changed even some twenty years after the decision in favour of the Reformation. At that time, the Swedish church did not yet have a Reformation confession. A change in religious policy in the context of a matrimonial alliance between King John III and the Polish crown determined the country’s denominational course in the last third of the sixteenth century. In view of Sweden’s Catholic nobility, the king apparently envisioned a reformed Catholicism in which there would still be married priests and Communion

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under both kinds, but orthodox forms would otherwise be conserved or restored in a liturgy introduced in 1576. King John also maintained contacts with the Jesuits, the most important protagonists of the Counter-­ Reformation, which had been successful in Poland: this illustrates the precarious state of the Sweden’s internally unstable Protestant church. Under John’s Catholic son Sigismund, who was king of Poland and Sweden in personal union, the danger of a return to Catholicism came to a head. Sweden’s bishops therefore sought support from the king’s uncle Charles, Duke of Södermanland, the brother of John III. Together with the council of the kingdom, the duke convened a national synod in Uppsala in 1593, which would play a central part in Sweden’s religious history. The synod rejected the new liturgy, approved the church ordinance of 1571, and decried ‘papists’, ‘Anabaptists’, and ‘Calvinists’. For the first time in the history of the Swedish Reformation, the Confessio Augustana was declared the doctrinal foundation of the Swedish church alongside the three creeds of the old church, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene-­ Constantinopolitan Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.An assembly of the estates in Söderköping in 1595 resolved that apostasy from the evangelical doctrine should be punished by banishment. In 1599, the estates deposed Sigismund and elected the duke King Charles IX of Sweden (1599–1611). From 1604 on, Catholics were forbidden to live in Sweden. The long journey to the establishment of a Lutheran state church had been accelerated as a process of national identification by the challenge of Catholicism and the competition with Poland; theological debates for the sake of clarification had played little part in it.

The Anglican Church and the Puritans The prime example of a close connection between a dynastic change and changes in religious policy is found in the history of the English Reformation. Few examples illustrate as clearly the problem with the principle Cuius regio, eius religio (whoever rules the country determines its religion), first mentioned about 1600, as the sudden changes in religious policy between Henry VIII (1509–47), Edward VI (1547–53), Mary Tudor (1553–8), and Elizabeth (1558–1603). One reason may be that the motives which seemed to favour the introduction of the Reformation were never as personal as in the case of the Tudor king Henry VIII, who had once been honoured by Pope Leo X as the ‘Defender of the Faith’ (Defensor Fidei).

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Henry had played the part of a faithful supporter of the Roman church in his defence of the seven sacraments against Luther’s treatise De captivitate Babylonica. Henry deeply despised the heretic Luther, and he was unsurpassed by any other of Europe’s crowned heads in combatting and suppressing Luther’s teaching as it reached his insular kingdom in the form of printed matter smuggled from the continent. Henry was troubled by a personal misfortune, however, and in view of his situation, a certain anxious propriety on his part is undeniable, although that may seem surprising in the light of his later immoral and extravagant behaviour. Soon after his coronation in 1509, Henry had, with the help of a papal dispensation, married Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s window and an aunt of Charles V. The marriage was an act of foreign policy, intended to solidify England’s coalition with Spain against France. The marriage failed to produce a male heir, and Henry saw this as a divine punishment, since it was written, ‘And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless’ (Leviticus 20:21). Henry demanded that the pope annul the marriage, which he now considered illegitimate and displeasing to God, and the entire English episcopate supported his demand—­with the exception of the anti-­Reformation bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, who paid for his resistance in Henry’s matrimonial affairs with his life, as the great scholar and lord chancellor Thomas More would later do. A contemporary commentator wrote: ‘It is not certain that Henry’s affection for any other lady was the origin of these proceedings; but whatever be the determination of this point, it is certain that about this time he gave free scope to his affections towards Anne Boleyn.’53 Rome delayed its decision for a long time and finally refused to annul the marriage, politically motivated by consideration for the emperor and the house of Habsburg. Henry VIII responded by seeking another solution from learned advisors, including Thomas Cromwell, who was partial to the evangelical ideas from the continent. They found an answer in the legitimation of England as an empire immediately subordinate to God, subject to no other power, whether pope or emperor, owing obedience only to her king. Thus the king was the head of the English church; loyalty to the pope, a foreign power, meant treason against the king. In May of 1533, the newly anointed primate of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, promulgated the judgement of an ec­cle­si­as­ tic­al court that the marriage of Henry and Catherine was invalid. Their daughter Mary was illegitimate and not entitled to inherit.

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In the spring of 1534, the English clergy rejected papal authority; the church submitted to the crown voluntarily. In the Act of Supremacy of November of the same year, Parliament declared the king of England should be ‘taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia’.54 Canon law was thus abrogated in England: even if some of its provisions remained in effect, England was defined as a unified legal zone, and the independence of its national church from Rome was final. Henry VIII at first retained all the central doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic tradition. Lutherans continued to be prosecuted and burnt as heretics. The victims included William Tyndale, the creator of the English New Testament, which is thought to have been distributed secretly in more than 15,000 copies by the mid-­ 1530s. Under the influence of Thomas Cromwell, however, and with Cranmer’s support, measures were gradually adopted in pursuit of a ‘purification’ of the existing church: the number of feast days in the year was drastically reduced from the previous hundred to about twenty-­five; pilgrimages, images, relics, and belief in miracles were forbidden; every parish was required to obtain a Bible in the English language. In 1539, an officially sanctioned Bible was published, but four years later, parliament ordered, at the king’s urging, that only higher-­ranking persons were allowed to read it. Apparently Henry feared that a broad reception of the Bible among society at large could lead to unrest. Nor did the king spare the abbeys. Between 1536 and 1540 he gradually abolished monasticism, transferring the monasteries’ property, along with many endowments, to the state. Celibacy, the doctrine of transubstantiation, masses for the souls of the dead, and auricular confession—­all common targets of reformers’ criticism—­ were initially conserved by the royally ordained church doctrine. Securing the dynasty was thought of as the only way to save entire England from the chaos of internal strife that had ended the rule of the Tudors. But Anne Boleyn bore only a daughter, Elizabeth. The king lost interest in his second wife, had her convicted of multiple adultery and executed, and married a third time. Jane Seymour bore the long-­awaited heir Edward in October of 1537, and died shortly thereafter. Three further marriages, also calculated as politically advantageous alliances, followed: the marriage to Anne of Cleves ended in divorce; Catherine Howard was executed; Catherine Parr outlived the king and later bore a daughter. An act of parliament in 1543 defined the order of succession of Henry’s three

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children: Edward, Mary, Elizabeth. When Henry VIII died in 1547, his son was nine years old and receiving a Protestant education. The brief reign of Edward VI (1547–53) saw the beginning of a theologically considered, practically thorough reform of the Church of England. This reform would be completely reversed, however, by Mary Tudor’s (1553–8) brutal restoration of Catholicism, and would achieve permanent effects only with the accession of Elizabeth in 1558. Protestant tendencies were dominant in the sixteen-­member Privy Council, led by the king’s uncle Edward Seymour as Lord Protector, which governed in the name of the child King Edward. When parliament rescinded prohibitions against Protestant texts, not only Lutheran, but more and more Reformed and especially Calvinist writings came into circulation. Requiem masses were stopped by an act of parliament, and endowments made to support them were confiscated. Paraphernalia of precious metals were systematically collected on visitations to the parishes and turned over to the crown. The English state increased its power by plundering the church. Occasional surges of resistance came mainly from those who—­in contrast to the gentry and the nobility—­were not among the beneficiaries of the development and had little influence. The Act of Uniformity of 1549 made the Book of Common Prayer by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in its first version a mandatory liturgical form for the Church of England. An English Mass now supplanted the Latin.The Eucharist was relieved of its sacrificial character while the concept of transubstantiation was maintained; the faithful partook of bread and wine. The priest continued to officiate in traditional vestments. Only three years later, however, in a revised Book of Common Prayer published in 1552 and likewise mandated by law, Cranmer presented an agenda which showed strong Reformed traits.The new edition reflected the ideas of the Italian Reformed pastor Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had been invited to take a post in Oxford in 1547, and the reformer Martin Bucer, who had fled the emperor’s religious policy and become a professor in Cambridge.The concept of transubstantiation was now abandoned; the altar was replaced by a wooden table in the nave of the church, as was customary in Reformed churches; priestly vestments were abolished. The archbishop of Canterbury had also drafted a confession corresponding to the Protestant rite called the Forty-­Two Articles. Its introduction was prevented by Edward’s death in the summer of 1553, and the Marian Counter-­reformation which immediately ensued claimed Cranmer among its victims. However, his Forty-­Two Articles later formed the basis for the Thirty-­Nine Articles of Faith which were introduced as the

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Anglican confession in 1563 and confirmed by parliament and published in 1571. The doctrine of the Eucharist that was thus adopted clearly followed Bucer and Calvin, rejecting Luther. Faith was the medium by which the communicant spiritually receives the pneumatically present Body of Christ.55 The reign of the Catholic Mary, who died childless in 1558, was little more than an interlude. Her name is associated with the remembrance of a great number of Protestant martyrs, however, which was popularized and perpetuated mainly by John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The number of martyrs during her reign was probably about three hundred, including not just leading clerics but mostly ‘little people’, and a few of the political elites who had governed the previously Protestant state. Some eight hundred evangelical believers chose exile, emigrating mainly to Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Geneva. No restitution was made during Mary’s reign for the significant gains which the nobility had made by the secularization of church property under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Mary integrated even leading politicians from the previous government. With the support of parliament, the queen’s goal was the status quo ante of the end of her father Henry VIII’s reign: the sacrificial mass, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the seven sacraments were restored; Eucharistic wine for the laity was abolished; married priests were discharged. Her political course was otherwise resolutely pro-­Spanish, and supported by the papacy. Upon Mary’s marriage to Philip of Burgundy, the son of Charles V, who had ruled a world empire since 1556 as King Philip II of Spain, it was agreed that her husband would acquire no royal rights in England, and that the succession stipulated in 1543 would remain valid if she died without issue. In the event, she was succeeded in 1558 by her half-­sister Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who finished the aborted Reformation. During Elizabeth’s long reign (1558–1603)—the period called Elizabethan—­England completed its transition to a Protestant nation.These changes were accompanied by England’s rise, after the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, to become a leading power in Europe and in the world, and by the radical reshaping of English society into a community which was centred on the Protestant work ethic, demanded industry instead of alms, and encouraged practical coping with life. The subjugation and instrumentalization of the church was an important means to that end: the Tudor arms adorned every parish church; all subjects had a duty to attend

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Fig. 21  Title page of John Foxe’s book Acts and Monuments . . . Touching . . . Great Persecutions . . . , printed in London in 1563 by John Day. The woodcut illustrates the fates of Protestants and Catholics on Earth and in Heaven. The Protestants

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worship, and failure to do so was a punishable offence; religious options which deviated from the Church of England were met with sanctions and suppression. The virgin queen, who played the part of a Mother of the Nation and a second Mary, headed the Church of England as ‘the only Supreme Governor of the realm’.56 She claimed to be restoring, through parliament, the position ordained by God for the English crown. Practically, however, Elizabeth personally symbolized as no other that the ‘nationalization’ of religion in the course of the Reformation amounted to a fundamental and dramatic revolution of religious culture. For now a woman stood at the head of the church. As queen in parliament, she had the authority of a secular legislature; she drew no legitimation from the Roman church or any autonomous clerical power. The superiority of the Protestant religion was strikingly displayed, and the queen proclaimed as the earthly instrument of divine providence at certain moments in the Elizabethan monarchic cult—­in worship services on the anniversary of her coronation, in celebrations of her birthday and her victories, etc. The young ruler had received a Protestant upbringing at the court of the widowed queen consort Catherine Parr; she was thoroughly educated and extraordinarily judicious. From 1558 on, she introduced religious policies that reinstated the regulations of her Protestant predecessors, ending Mary’s Counter-­Reformation. In doing so, the queen took advantage of her councillor William Cecil and his ‘Cambridge connection’, a network of humanistically educated Protestants who were also in touch with the Marian exiles. Returning home in numbers after Elizabeth’s succession, many of these exiles had been deeply impressed by the evangelically ‘pure’ Reformed churches on the continent, which were shaped strictly according to Calvin’s ethical and theo­logic­al rules, and they brought to the English church a radical, puritan element. These Puritans observed the Sabbath strictly, met for group religious readings, eschewed secular amusements of all kinds, and agitated for a religious life in England regulated after the Genevan fashion. Tensions soon arose between the Puritan notions and the quasi-­Catholic character that the Fig. 21  cont. (in the middle and top left panels) are burnt on Earth, but triumph in Heaven, while the Catholics (in the middle and top right panels) celebrate a triumphalist Eucharistic rite on Earth, but suffer eternal torments in the afterlife. The bottom panels show, at left, Protestants holding books, hearing the Gospel, and receiving the Holy Spirit, and at right Catholics holding rosaries and following a procession.

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Anglican state church had retained in regard to liturgy, vestments, Eucharistic bread, and church music. Although the majority of parliament was Catholic at the time of Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, her Act of Supremacy was adopted. The principal reason may be that the nobility, having profited from the secu­lar­iza­tion of church property under Henry VIII and Edward VI, hoped to avoid restitution claims by definitively excluding any legal action by the pope. The queen thereupon required an oath of loyalty, which included the recognition of the queen as head of the Church of England, from every clerical and secular official, and from all doctores graduated by the universities. For a time, pastors had to declare their loyalty to the queen by signing a confessional statement twice yearly. Seventeen of the eighteen bishops appointed by Mary Tudor refused to take the oath, and were deposed; some of their replacements were recruited from among the Marian exiles. The Act of Uniformity passed in 1559 introduced Cranmer’s second Book of Common Prayer of 1552, which was less strictly Reformed in regard to the Eucharist, as a mandatory liturgical norm. It also made church absenteeism punishable by a fine. The same religious policy was practised in the English colony of Ireland, although Catholicism retained its vitality among the Gaelic-­speaking rural population and the Anglo-­Norman minority—­in part as an element of resistance against the English occupiers. In other words, only the English immigrants in Ireland were Protestant. The Thirty-­Nine Articles of Faith, approved by the Church of England in 1563 and enacted by the state in 1571, contained a decidedly moderate Reformed doctrine. The Thirty-­Nine Articles dispensed with the asperity of a dual eternal predestination of the chosen and the damned; the doctrine of the Eucharist excluded unbelievers from the reception of the true body of Christ (manducatio impiorum)—which was the crux of the Lutheran pos­ition.57 Elizabeth the Supreme Governor is said to have prevented this confession from being printed as long as she planned alliances with German Lutheran princes: thus its ambiguity was not the result of negligence. In general, it was aimed at avoiding theological controversies like those which flourished in Germany, religious zeal of the kind expressed in iconoclastic fury, and extremism of all kinds in dealing with the venerable ecclesiastical traditions. Elizabeth was forming an integralistic Anglican church, one which was conscious of its traditions yet eschewed sharp dogmatic divisions, in which even subjects of Catholic sensibilities, but with reservations towards Rome, would find a spiritual home. It generally went without

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saying, to Elizabeth and to her contemporaries, that she reigned by the grace of God and that only a uniform religion would stabilize the nation. From the 1570s on, conflicts intensified with the Puritans on the one hand and with the Catholics on the other. The former had come to believe that ‘the church’ was in essence the congregation, the local assembly of the chosen, who elected from among their number the ecclesiastical office-­ holders—­ pastors, deacons, and elders. As a result, the Elizabethan state church with its episcopalian structure was viewed critically by the Puritans, or Presbyterians or Congregationalists, who followed authentic traditions of Calvinism. Several congregations broke away; synods assembled; efforts were made even in parliament to legitimize this path. But Elizabeth saw all such strivings for alternative church organizations as nothing but in­sub­or­din­ ation, and she took the wind out of their sails by imprisonments. Thus she drove the Puritans into the underground. After the pope had excommunicated the English queen in 1570, and released her subjects from their oath of loyalty, Elizabeth found herself subjected to a growing threat from the Catholic world, particularly Spain. Real or imagined conspiracies and intrigues blossomed on every hand; they ­centred on Mary Stuart until her execution on 8 February 1587. From the late 1560s on, a Catholic seminary existed in Douai where priests were trained for England, and from 1574 they were secretly smuggled to the country’s long coastline. From 1578 on, Jesuits too arrived from an English college that had been founded in Rome. By about 1580, a hundred Catholic priests had reached England; by 1600, there were over six hundred. They worked subversively in private homes, finding support especially among some of the nobility. Over half of them were imprisoned at some time; one in four died a martyr’s death. The severe response of the crown, which meted out draconian punishments to those who did not attend Anglican worship or who supported Catholic priests, and to captured clerics themselves, was aimed at intimidating sympathizers and discrediting all forms of religious dissidence as political treason. Elizabeth’s royal Reformation placed the extreme potential of the religious revolution on display: the release from canon law put church property within the crown’s grasp, and founded new loyalties between the ruling dynasty and the rewarded nobility, thus reinforcing the growth of state authority. The ‘common man’ was faced with a single, divinely justified, indeed metaphysically transcendent authority in the dual forms of church and state, and was thus more at its mercy than his ancestors had been.

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The church had no independent function vis-­à-­vis the state—­on the contrary, the reach of royal power now extended into the regulation of doctrine and liturgy—­much farther than that of medieval rulers. The model of the authoritarian uniform confession was structurally a continuation of the religious culture of medieval Latin Europe. Alternatives to the official church were in constant danger, and existed only in spaces that were inaccessible to state power.

4.5. The Pacified, Restive Empire In contrast to almost all the other Latin European countries—­with the exception of Switzerland—­the development of religious policy and culture in Germany was shaped by the fact that the followers of the new teaching and the defenders of the old dogma were about equal in numbers, and hence a balance of power existed between the two confessions.That was the result of the development, in any case, although for a time it looked as if ‘Catholic Germany’ would end up in the minority. For in the 1530s, three large territories had gone over to the Reformation: Brandenburg, Albertine Saxony, and Württemberg. In the early 1540s, the Principality of Brunswick-­ Wolfenbüttel and the Electorate of Cologne under Archbishop-­Elector Hermann of Wied seemed to be on the brink of definitively embracing the Reformation, and a reformation process began in the Palatine Electorate as well with the accession of Frederick III.The Catholic majority in the elect­ or­al college, and hence the Catholic character of the empire, hung in the balance. The emperor’s policy was still guided by the principles of the 1521 Edict of Worms. Charles V very persistently pursued the goal of a Council which would restore the unity of the church by bringing the Protestants back into the fold, and would manage the introduction of a process of substantial reform within the Roman church. But the popes temporized again and again, or insisted that the Council must take place in a city within their sphere of power. Among the curia, the fear of a strengthened conciliarism was for a long time stronger than the insight that reform was necessary. The Protestants meanwhile made their participation in a council conditional upon the freedom of such an assembly: in other words, the council must not be subject to papal prerogatives, but obligated only to the word of God. Such demands were unacceptable to the Romans. In 1537, three years after

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his investiture, Pope Paul III announced a council in Mantua, which was boycotted not only the by Protestants in the empire, but also by the French king: the council did not take place. In the early 1540s, the emperor undertook an initiative in religious diplomacy within the empire: the religious colloquies of Hagenau, Worms, and Regensburg (1540/1) brought together theologians and politicians of both denominational blocs to discuss their theological differences. The basis for the discussions was initially the Confessio Augustana in a new revision (called the Variata) submitted by Melanchthon, and later a document drafted by a secret commission, in which Martin Bucer participated, summarizing the theological consensus on central questions of justification, original sin, the relation between scripture and tradition, the Eucharist, and the ceremonies. Although these colloquies on religion, in spite of the emperor’s hopes, ul­tim­ate­ly proved fruitless, they nonetheless made it clear that some of the theological positions were still surprisingly flexible, and that the hardening of the fronts was not a matter of theological doctrine alone, but also the result of political circumstances. If Charles V was searching for a compromise with the Protestant estates in the empire in the early 1540s, it was because the overall military and political situation—­that is, the wars with France and the Ottoman Empire—­ left him no alternative. Since the imperial diet of Regensburg in 1531, the Protestants had pressed for the rescission or suspension of the recess of the Augsburg diet of 1530.They made no secret that their acceptance of military and financial sacrifices for the empire’s defence against the Turks depended on the tolerance of their religion. The limited religious truces that were adopted in Nuremberg (1532) and Frankfurt (1539) included both the estates that were already evangelical and those that might adopt the Reformation in future, and suspended the pending restitution proceedings concerning confiscated church property. These temporary peace agreements, in which the emperor did not appear as a direct party to treaties with the ‘heretics’, allowed the Reformation to continue spreading widely for a good decade.

The Schmalkaldic League and the Schmalkaldic War The Protestants’ military and political alliance, the Schmalkaldic League, led by the axis of Hesse and the Electorate of Saxony, became a central factor in the power relations of the empire and Europe. While negotiations with the French and English crowns proved fruitless, a treaty on mutual military

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aid was achieved between the Danish king Christian III and most of the members of the Schmalkaldic League. Within Germany, the Schmalkaldic League was an important factor favouring the spread of the Reformation. Troops of the Schmalkaldic League led by Landgrave Philip of Hesse took part in the reconquest of Württemberg. Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, who had been driven out of the country by military means in 1519 after attacking the imperial city of Reutlingen, and had spent a part of his exile in Kassel, began introducing the Reformation in his dominion on his res­ tor­ation in 1534.Württemberg became an important outpost of Protestantism in the South—­much to the chagrin of Bavaria and the Habsburgs. The Schmalkaldic League grew steadily in strength until the late 1530s. A number of cities joined the League, including Brunswick, Goslar, Einbeck, Esslingen, Göttingen, Hanover, Augsburg, Hamburg, Kempten, Minden, Heilbronn, and Schwäbisch-­ Hall, as did several principalities, among them Anhalt-­Dessau, Pomerania, Württemberg, Nassau-­Saarbrücken, Schwarzenburg-­Arnstadt, Albertine Saxony, and Brandenburg-­Küstrin. The Schmalkaldic League was significantly weakened by an affair involving one of its principal leaders, Philip of Hesse. Philip was smitten with the lady-­in-­waiting Margarete von der Saale, but at her mother’s insistence, she would have nothing to do with him except in matrimony. Philip was already married, however, to a daughter of Duke George of Saxony. In March of 1540, the Hessian landgrave entered into a bigamous marriage which several theologians in his milieu tried to justify by reference to the polygamy of the Old Testament patriarchs. The Wittenberg theologians and Martin Bucer approved of this second marriage for pastoral reasons, since the landgrave’s extramarital affairs were notorious. Their approval was accompanied by the dubious recommendation to keep the second marriage secret—­that is, to let Margarete pass for a concubine, which was more customary. In view of the original reformers’ struggle against the double standard of clerical con­cu­ bin­age two decades earlier, the recommendation amounted to an ethical and theological capitulation. Under the imperial criminal code introduced in 1532, the Constitutio criminalis Carolina, Philip had committed a capital offence. The Hessian captain of the Schmalkaldic League had made himself susceptible to blackmail. Emperor Charles V offered Philip amnesty on certain conditions. One was that he undertake to oppose the expansion of the Schmalkaldic League—­by the admission of England or France for instance. The doctrinal basis of the Schmalkaldic League was the Confessio Augustana. The Schmalkaldic Articles originally drafted by Luther for this

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purpose, which contained an especially sharp-­contoured summary of his teaching, were not approved by some members of the alliance, especially the southern German states. The differences on the question of the Eucharist were defused in 1536 by the Wittenberg Concord, in which the Wittenberg scholars confirmed that the interpretation proposed by several southern German theologians was within the League’s binding doctrine.The tenet in question was that the body and blood of Christ was present ‘with the bread and wine’ (cum pane et vino).58 No closer causal or instrumental relation between the two realities, the earthly and the celestial, was stipulated. This theological compromise would hardly have been possible without the political pressure exercised by the Schmalkaldic League. At the same time, however, it cemented the theological division from the Swiss. From the early 1540s, the Schmalkaldic League’s relations with the emperor were exacerbated as the empire’s foreign relations broadened the emperor’s opportunities for action: a new peace treaty in 1544 obliged France to support the emperor’s plans for a church council; the war of succession for Guelders ended with a Habsburg victory in 1543; a truce was reached with the Ottomans in 1545; and a 1546 military alliance with the pope, who was willing to support the fight against the heretics—­all of these events freed the emperor to carry out the military stroke against the Protestants which he had been planning for years. The outward pretext for the operation came with the Schmalkaldic League’s intervention in the Duke of Brunswick’s lands in Brunswick-­Wolfenbüttel, which was a northern outpost of Catholicism under Duke Henry the Younger. The Protestant cities of Brunswick and Goslar, which had been members of the Schmalkaldic League since 1531/2, were repeatedly subjected to attacks and invasions by Duke Henry, who was irritated by the autonomy and prosperity of the cities that were constantly spreading the ‘Lutheran poison’ into his territory. In 1539, a war of words broke out between Brunswick and the Schmalkaldic League’s axis powers, the Saxon Electorate and Hesse. The aging Luther was also happy to intervene in the polemics with a pamphlet Against Hans Wurst—­as he called Henry of Brunswick—­ which made him feel ‘young and vigorous, strong and gay’ again.59 The literary skirmishes were soon accompanied by military ones, and the Schmalkaldic faction blamed Henry the Younger for arson attacks against cities in the region of Thuringia and Saxony. In 1540, the imperial ban was pronounced against Goslar, and the Duke of Brunswick was charged with executing it. Henry attacked Goslar and Brunswick even though the

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emperor suspended the ban at the last minute. The Schmalkaldic alliance saw itself bound to defend its member cities. In the summer of 1542, the League conducted a successful campaign against Brunswick, conquered the territory, drove the duke into exile, and launched the process of Protestant reform. In 1545, Henry was captured during an attempt to retake his duchy, and was imprisoned in Hesse. In the summer of 1546, this ‘Brunswick War’ offered Charles V a pretext to ban the captains of the Schmalkaldic League, John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse, for breach of the peace and to take up arms against them. The resulting war has gone down in history as the Schmalkaldic War. Charles V’s primary aim was to weaken Protestantism in order to slow the further progress of the Reformation. For the sake of this goal, he declined to wage his struggle as a war of religion, although it had the pope’s blessing in the form of grants of indulgence, like those which had supported the Crusades. Charles’s strategy was rather to win Protestant allies to his cause. One of these was Maurice, the Protestant duke of Albertine Saxony, who sought to fulfil the ambition held by generations of his dynasty to gain the Electorate held by the Ernestine branch of Saxon dukes. The situation in the empire overall, however, was less than enthusiastic: the emperor received little support for his campaigns in the north even from the Catholic estates. In spite of their denominational differences, the estates were motivated by common interests to oppose the Habsburg crown, which was threatening to grow too strong. The military victory over the Schmalkaldic League was achieved on 24 April 1547, on the Elbe near Mühlberg, and cemented in a subsequent battle on Lochau Heath.The pope had lent Charles 12,500 soldiers for the period of four months, but as he too had no desire to see the Habsburg emperor become unduly powerful, he withdrew them again during the campaign. The Council of Trent, having taken up its work in 1545—starting, against the emperor’s wishes, with questions of doctrine, not reform—­also sought to weaken Charles V by relocating in the spring of 1547 from imperial territory to the papal city of Bologna. Neither in the empire nor in Rome, nor in any other European capital or residence, was there any sympathy for the emperor’s ambition of establishing a universal religion in the empire. After his triumph over the German heretics, however, Charles V felt closer than ever to achieving it. The captains of the Schmalkaldic League, John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse, were captured by imperial forces and subjected to demeaning

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treatment, a circumstance which gradually swayed Maurice of Saxony—­ who had meanwhile gained the Electorate—­against the emperor. Although Charles V had behaved in a circumspect and statesmanlike manner during his visit to the ‘nest of heresy’ at Wittenberg, and to Luther’s tomb in Wittenberg Castle Church—­ leaving the liturgy and Luther’s body untouched—­but he was haughty and triumphant towards the two leaders of the Schmalkaldic League. The imperial diet held in Augsburg from 1 September 1547 to 30 June 1548, called the ‘armed diet’, was surrounded by Spanish troops as a demonstration of Charles V’s power. Nonetheless, one reason for the failure of the ambitious goals that Charles V had pursued in the political reorganization of the empire—­its reordering as a federation under the sole leadership of the emperor, the strengthening of the Imperial Chamber of Justice after its sabotage by the Protestants, the elimination of guilds’ rights of participation—­was certainly the fact that the estates feared nothing so much as a despotic Habsburg rule.

The Augsburg Interim and the Vacuum Left by Luther The religious question was at the top of the political agenda in the empire. Because the Council in Bologna was out of reach of imperial politics in 1547 and 1548, Charles tried to achieve his principal goal, the restoration of religious unity, through a political strategy operating on the empire alone. A  commission of theologians, which included a Protestant member—­ although a very controversial one, the court preacher of Brandenburg, Johann Agricola—­drafted a document which stipulated the form of r­eligion to be recognized in the empire until the conclusion of the Council. Because of its provisional nature, this document came to be called the Augsburg Interim. Opinions on the legal text were divided: it gave rise to deep divisions in German Protestantism, which were expressed in the most vigorous polemics seen since the beginnings of the Reformation. The doctrinal substance of the Interim was fairly Catholic. In its presentation of the doctrine of justification, the core identifying tenet of Wittenberg theology, emphasis was on the ‘infused’ divine grace (gratia infusa) which stimulates ‘good works’, that is, gives rise to those actions which in Luther’s interpretation undermined the believer’s relation to God. In the doctrine of the church, great importance was given to the Roman hierarchy and hence the system of canon law which stabilized it. Clearly Protestant positions were reflected only in a certain reserve towards private Masses and in the

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recognition of marriage for priests and communion under two kinds. Against significant resistance from both Catholics and Protestants, the emperor set this insufficiently legitimated document in the imperial recess, declaring it a binding law on religion for the Protestant estates of the empire. The emperor’s claim to have decided the religious question out of his own plenitude of power could not fail to provoke anyone who valued ‘German liberty’. In a way, Charles V’s Interim dealt with the empire in the same way that the acts of the Protestant territorial rulers or those of the Scandinavian and the English monarchs dealt with their dominions: that is, he presumed to rule absolutely. Although the Interim was only supposed to apply to the Protestant estates of the empire, the very fact of a representative of the ordo politicus promulgating an ordinance to regulate the church was a flagrant violation of canon law. The fact that the pope lent the Interim a semblance of legality by offering dispensations for the clauses which were in­com­pat­ ible with canon law, in particular communion under both kinds and the abolishment of the obligation of celibacy, did little to improve matters in the eyes of those contemporaries who took legal issues seriously. In any case, the Interim failed to produce the intended unity on religion. Open and clandestine resistance, which the emperor attacked along a broad front, indicated that he had gone too far and underestimated the interdenominational persistence of the estates. Ultimately, he was unable to translate the military victory of Mühlberg into a permanent stabilization of his sovereignty. In several Protestant territories and cities—­Württemberg, most of the southern German imperial cities,the Palatinate,Nuremberg,and Brandenburg—­ the imperial Interim was enforced to a large extent, or at least an appearance of enforcement was achieved. Refugee pastors, path­et­ic­al­ly called ‘exiles of Christ’ (exules Christi), became a more common phenomenon. Major destinations were Prussia, which lay outside the empire, and especially its capital Königsberg; England, which was just beginning to accept the Reformation under Edward VI; Switzerland, and the recalcitrant city of Magdeburg. A particular centre of conflict arose in the Electorate of Saxony.The new Protestant elector Maurice was not willing to carry out the restoration of Catholicism demanded by the Interim in his territory of Albertine Saxony, yet at the same time he did not feel able to answer the emperor’s urging with open, radical resistance. In order to alleviate internal pressure, he involved the estates of Saxony in the decision-­making process on a more

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moderate form of the imperial religious decree. The Saxon version was polemically called the Leipzig Interim. Melanchthon, who had become the leading theology professor of the University of Wittenberg after Luther’s death on 18 February 1546, prominently participated in drafting the document. In the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War, he had remained loyal to his long-­time home, and entered the service of the new ruler, Duke Maurice. However, it became apparent in the literary battles and theological debates that accompanied the Schmalkaldic War and the disputed Interim that it was no simple matter to fill the vacuum left by the death of the authority Luther. Having shaken the dominance of the ‘anti-­Christian’ papacy as no other, Luther was irreplaceable in his role as a prophetic interpreter of scripture. Only he was revered, in the Lutheran territories, as a uniquely gifted, ‘chosen witness’ of God, and only he was excused for his polemical extremes, which he had displayed before his death against the ‘renegades’ in Switzerland, against the papacy, and most of all against the Jews. The embittered old warhorse remained uncontested only because of the exalting esteem he had won as a young, ground-­breaking Bible interpreter and revolutionary church reformer in the early 1520s. At the last, Luther had been marked by age, illness, and depression, and his Wittenberg milieu, including Melanchthon and other colleagues, had refrained from questioning him directly on his obsessions and shielded him from certain information out of consideration for his personal sorrows—­his 13-­year-­old daughter Magdalena had died in 1542—and out of fear of his violent temper. And although the old Luther had been little more than a monument of his former self, the ‘saint’s’60 death left a gap that nothing and no one could fill. Nor was there anything analogous in the other denominations to the authoritative position he possessed in German Lutheranism. Melanchthon, although far less charismatic, had grown to be a central leader of the University of Wittenberg and advisor to the princes even long before Luther’s death. A scholar and a widely respected teacher without whom Protestantism would hardly have proved academically viable in the long term, Melanchthon nonetheless never came close to commanding the personal authority that Luther had. In his Historia Lutheri, an extensive tribute to the colleague under whom he had occasionally suffered, published as a preface to the second volume of Luther’s Latin works, Melanchthon reinforced the narrative of Luther as salvation history in which God had ‘restored to us the light of the Gospel’61 through Luther. At the same time, Melanchthon emphasized, closely following Luther’s own self-­image, that it

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was most importantly ‘his teaching’ which ‘must be remembered and disseminated’.62 Thus the cornerstones were laid for the eventual in­ter­pret­ ation and reception of Luther in denominations which followed him: he was God’s messenger; he had restored the true doctrine. The Leipzig Interim was an attempt to achieve a compromise: it contained a clearly Protestant doctrine of justification, while making concessions to Catholic-­style practice in the outward ceremonies, called adiaphora: things on which salvation did not depend and which therefore could be treated one way or another. Several of Melanchthon’s closest students, in particular Matthias Flacius Illyricus and Nicolaus Gallus, saw this as a betrayal of the authentic Wittenberg tradition and of Luther’s legacy. It is no coincidence that these critics of the Interim and Melanchthon’s ‘compromising’ course, who settled primarily in Magdeburg, made a name for themselves primarily by inserting assiduously collected texts and quotations by Luther in the contemporary discourse. In this way, they stylized Luther as the most im­port­ant contender in the burning disputes of the time. Anthologies of Luther quotations were a rising new literary genre in which many of Luther’s writings, sermons, and letters were reprinted and some were published for the first time. Only posthumously was Luther promoted to a quasi-­infallible source of truth. These intra-­denominational debates of the late 1540s and early 1550s were a substantial factor in the emergence of a Lutheran orthodoxy.

Magdeburg Resists As in the printed matter dating from the Schmalkaldic War, an interest developed during this time in Luther’s theories of resistance: Luther had ascribed to the ‘lower magistrates’ a right of self-­defence in case the emperor, spurred by the anti-­Christian pope, should attack the Gospel. In Magdeburg, the theologians and the city council, seeing themselves as such a ‘lower magistracy’, eagerly adopted this concept of legitimate resistance. Positive references to this Magdeburg tradition are documented both in Geneva and among the English Protestants. In this light, the thesis that Lutheranism was fundamentally and unconditionally authoritarian is incompatible with the historical record. The Reformation had been introduced in Magdeburg in 1524, closely following Wittenberg, by the superintendent Nicolaus von Amsdorf, an associate of Luther’s, and its influence had been felt in Northern Germany.

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In its repeated opposition to its lord, Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg, the city had found support in Ernestine Saxony. During the Schmalkaldic War, the well-­armed and fortified city had defied imperial troops, and wherever possible had confiscated properties of the archbishop and the predominantly orthodox chapter of the cathedral. Magdeburg troops had participated in  breaking the imperial army’s siege of Bremen after that city—­ like Magdeburg—­had rejected the Augsburg Interim. Thus Charles V had sufficient reasons for pronouncing the imperial ban against the city in July 1547. In 1549 and 1550, a productive group of Lutheran writers formed in Magdeburg who are known in Protestant history by their self-­designation ‘God’s Chancellery’ [Herrgotts Kanzlei]. One of most important members of this group was the former superintendent Nicolaus von Amsdorf, who had been bishop of Naumburg from 1542 to 1547—one of the few attempts, all of which failed, to establish an evangelical bishopric in early modern Lutheranism. After he was deposed, Amsdorf returned to his former home at Magdeburg, where the resistance against the Interim soon crystallized around him. As a close friend of Luther’s and a loyal supporter of the Ernestine dynasty, Amsdorf was considered a special authority in the in­ter­ pret­ation of Luther’s heritage. In addition to Nicolaus von Amsdorf and Luther’s student Erasmus Alberus, who had fled to Magdeburg because of the Interim, the younger theologians Nicolaus Gallus and Matthias Flacius also played an important part in the literary battle of ‘God’s Chancellery’. The Magdeburg writers worked at times in close coordination with the city’s magistracy and supported its aspirations towards independence of the archbishop and his government. In view of the persecution to which Magdeburg was subjected, they stylized the city as chosen, as the home of the last true confessors to remain unbowed before the diabolical Interim. Magdeburg was identified by etymological arguments with the biblical city that resisted the Assyrians, Bethulia (the Hebrew betulah meaning maid, German Magd), or—­more boldly—­with Armageddon, the site of the last apocalyptic battle in Revelation 16:16. In the critical time of the Interim, Magdeburg was the only place from which uninhibited criticism could be aimed at imperial religious policy and the papal Antichrist. Numerous authors from other places also sent their works to Magdeburg. ‘God’s Chancellery’ issued some 450 publications in the years between 1548 and 1552, ensuring that their struggle was noticed throughout Europe. Under growing military and political pressure, the theological positions became more radical. Any compromise between the truth of the Magdeburg

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teachings and the ‘watered-­down’ doctrine of the ‘adiaphorists’—that is, the theologians of Wittenberg, Dresden, and Leipzig who, following Melanchthon, thought concessions possible in regard to ritual practices—­seemed to the Magdeburg propagandists a betrayal of the Gospel and the authentic heritage of Wittenberg. In their circles, both speech and text were dominated by dualistic tropes demanding a choice between light and darkness, Christ and Belial, the true congregation of the Lord and the cohorts of the Antichrist. The Reformation seemed to them in existential peril: to save it, they waged a war of text and images like that which had been fought a generation earlier, in the early 1520s. In the autumn of 1550, Elector Maurice of Saxony began to carry out the imperial ban against Magdeburg by laying siege to the city. As early as February of the same year, however, Protestant princes had formed an alliance with the intention of resisting the emperor’s religious policy. Maurice sought contacts.Through Hesse, he established diplomatic connections with France. While his troops camped before Magdeburg and fought occasional skirmishes at the emperors’ orders and expense, he orchestrated a coalition against the emperor. The participation of France, ruled by King Henry II since 1547, was regulated by the Treaty of Chambord, signed in January. Maurice’s willingness to offer, without no authorization, Cambrai and the cathedral cities of Lorraine—­ Metz, Toul, and Verdun—­ was no doubt intended to weaken the Habsburgs rather than the empire: the transfer created a barrier, under the administration of the French king as imperial vicar, between the southern German and the Dutch territories of the house of Habsburg. Furthermore, Maurice and his co-­conspirators resisted Charles’s plans to secure his son Philip’s succession to Emperor Ferdinand. Such a ‘Spanish succession’ would have undermined the Electors’ prerogatives, turning the empire into a hereditary monarchy. Finally, in seeing Charles rather than Ferdinand as their opponent, the conspirators kept a diplomatic option open which might permit a definitive resolution of the religious issue. While continuing the siege of Magdeburg, Maurice secretly negotiated conditions of surrender with the city council. He approached the rebellious Protestants as one of their own, and assured them he would maintain the religious status quo if they recognized him as their hereditary lord. Although the theologians categorically rejected a pact with the ‘Judas of Meissen’, whom they blamed for the Leipzig Interim, Magdeburg’s lawyers and politicians were more interested in the welfare of the city and its inhabitants, and their cool pragmatism ultimately carried the day.

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The ‘Princes’ War’ began in the spring of 1552 and was soon concluded: the armies of the Protestant princes advanced south without encountering significant resistance from the Catholic countries. The latter were likewise averse to the Spanish emperor’s claims and his notions in regard to the succession. Charles V was in Innsbruck; Maurice’s declared objective was to set him under military and political pressure. When troops invaded Tyrol, the emperor had to flee in a sedan chair over the Brenner Pass to Villach. It was the worst humiliation he had suffered in his thirty-­five years of im­per­ ial rule.

The Peace of Augsburg The negotiations which now ensued between the Protestants and King Ferdinand on religious law and policy took place in Passau. Charles was not willing to give up his ideas of religious unity and agree to the unavoidable permanent peace settlement with the ‘heretics’ in the empire. In the aftermath of the Schmalkaldic War and the ‘Princes’ War’, the need to ensure a lasting peace had grown among the estates of both denominations. A treaty of 15 August 1552, ratified by the emperor at Ferdinand’s urging, stipulated the release of Landgrave Philip and placed the final negotiation of a per­ man­ent settlement of the religious question in the hands of an imperial diet to be convened shortly. Until then, both parties would return to the provisional conditions of truce, thus ending the paradigm shift in religious policy that had come about with the Schmalkaldic War and the Interim. After a failed attempt to reconquer Lorraine with the help of Spanish and Italian troops, Charles V retreated first to the Netherlands and later to Spain. Although the dynastic connection with the house of Tudor established by the marriage of Charles’s son Philip II to Mary I of England awakened new hopes for the realization of Charles’s imperial fantasies, it was too late in the empire for a religious unity of the kind Mary and Philip were pursuing by a bloody campaign in England. Charles V had tried as long as possible to prevent a religious peace in the empire; even abdication was not too high a price to pay. But his brother Ferdinand pursued the option of peace, and suppressed the news of Charles’s abdication when it arrived just an hour before the end of the imperial diet. Recognizing the constitutional reality of the empire, Ferdinand abandoned the medieval ideal of the emperor’s power. The imperial recess of 25 September 1555, which contained the provisions known as the Peace of

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Augsburg, was promulgated under the authority of that emperor who had opposed it by every means at his disposal. Among the legal and political settlements of the religious question in Europe, the Peace of Augsburg is a special case, in keeping with the specific constitutional structure of the empire. It combined general peace conditions for the empire, perpetuating the concept of a united imperial church, with a right of self-­determination for the estates in the matter of religion. Thus it put an end to the attempts to dictate a uniform religion in the empire, which had culminated in the Edict of Worms, the Catholic res­tor­ ation agenda of the Interim, and the emperor’s Council strategy. The Peace of Augsburg reflected the existing balance of power between the two denominational camps. It was the result, not of an attitude of tolerance—­ that is, a fundamental recognition of the other—­but rather a pragmatic admission that neither side was able to force its will upon the other. It arose from the shared interests of the estates, regardless of their respective de­nom­ in­ations, which were articulated in the appeal to ‘German liberty’ and in agitation against ‘Spanish servitude’ and imperial absolutism. The Peace of Augsburg recognized the Protestant religion, alongside Catholicism, in the theological form that had been defined by the Confessio Augustana. Christian confessions which deviated from that, such as those of the Reformed churches, were not included—­not to mention other religions. The Peace of Augsburg forbade the emperor or anyone else to use force against an estate of the empire belonging to the religion of the Confessio Augustana or against an existing Protestant church. From this point forward, a ‘contested religion’ must ‘be brought to unanimous, Christian reason and compromise not otherwise than through Christian, friendly, peaceful means and ways’.63 This delegitimized religiously motivated aggression among the estates of the empire. The Peace of Augsburg sanctioned the secularization of clerical institutions and suspended the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts in Protestant territories and cities for as long as the schism lasted. Subjects who wished to emigrate from a territory for religious reasons were given the right to sell their possessions. However, the clerical estates of the empire were effectively prevented from joining the Reformation by the reservatum ecclesiasticum—­a provision which the Protestants had fought to the end—­since the Catholic nature of the accompanying benefice was declared immutable. The legal structure of religion that existed in Germany from this point on was based on the principle that civil authorities had the right to regulate

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religious matters (ius reformandi). This principle was condensed in the legal literature of the period around 1600 to the formula Cuius regio, eius religio: whoever possesses the territory chooses its religion.The territorial lord—­or, in the case of the imperial cities, the magistracy—­had the sole right to determine which religion was practised in his dominions—­the Catholic faith or the Confessio Augustana. Thus the principle of a uniform religion, although it was now suspended in regard to the empire, continued in force at the level of the territory or city. Certain imperial cities recognized both denominations, however: there, equality was mandated. The Peace was designed to remain in force indefinitely, but it was understood to be valid until the churches should be reunited. It was unimaginable at the time that two competing churches, with mutually exclusive claims to propound the true form of Christian life and faith, should coexist for all time. The ius reformandi of imperial knights and cities in the Catholic territories remained controversial: the Protestant estates demanded it; the Catholic estates opposed it. Ferdinand granted that right in an edict which was not included in the imperial recess, the Declaratio Ferdinandea. Whether this declaration was binding remained equally controversial, and it gave rise to a variety of conflicts. The Peace of Augsburg was soon euphorically recognized by the Lutheran theologians, while its legitimacy was contested by most representatives of the papal church. On the whole, however, it brought with it a significant stabilization of the empire as a political system. With cool objectivity, this treaty suspended all religious claims to divine truth. The power it held ul­tim­ate­ly became apparent when, almost a century later, after thirty bloody years of war with their devastating consequences for individuals, society, and civilization, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) made it the foundation of a new European order.The long-­term political and cultural influence of the Peace of Augsburg as part of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire can hardly be overestimated: it resonates even in the German religious law of the Weimar, Bonn, and Berlin republics. It sets limitations on religion and at the same time grants it freedom to develop within those limits. Luther had no doubt wanted more—­a complete victory of the Gospel over the papal church, which he considered moribund in any case. And Emperor Charles, for his part, would have conceded far less: to him, granting permanent recognition to a legally condemned heresy was out of the question. But compromise had proved inevitable, and was here to stay.

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Lutheran Theological Disputes The system of the Peace of Augsburg regulated outward relations between the two major denominational blocs. In the decades to follow, the Confessio Augustana, which formed the basis of the recognition of Protestantism in imperial law, would be repeatedly claimed by Reformed estates of the empire too as the foundation of their right to coexist. They appealed primarily to the 1540 version, the Confessio Augustana variata, in which Melanchthon had found a way to formulate the doctrine of the Eucharist64 which was also acceptable to critics of a real physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This only worsened relations between the Reformed and Lutheran theologians, however, as the Lutherans in particular contested the Reformed churches’ right to appeal to ‘their’ confession. The ambivalent political and legal function which the Confessio Augustana took on in the system of the Peace of Augsburg led to intensive efforts by Lutheran theo­ lo­gians to clarify its theological import. As several estates of the empire gradually turned towards Reformed Protestantism, beginning with the Palatine Electorate in 1566 (followed by Nassau, 1586; Anhalt, 1596; Baden-­ Durlach, 1599; Lippe, 1602; Hesse-­Kassel, 1605; and Brandenburg, 1613), a marked increase in Lutheran–­Reformed controversial theology ensued.The outward political peace made possible by the Augsburg imperial recess of 1555 was accompanied by a growing absence of inward peace: the question of religious truth still smouldered in the territories and cities. Polemics between the theologians of all three denominations formed a kind of cantus firmus of the age, although the Lutherans were particularly loud, feeling themselves under pressure from the progress of the Reformed Protestants and the Catholics. Theological strife flourished in the empire as nowhere else in Europe. The intra-­Lutheran battles of the Interim and the adiaphora, known as the Adiaphoristic Controversies, had been concerned with questions of church governance, which had no binding dogmatic significance. The fronts in those conflicts changed incessantly; hardly any of the participants agreed with any other on all the issues under discussion. The new generation of theologians now blew up theological points on which Luther and Melanchthon had differed, but which they had collegially downplayed out of friendship and shared responsibility for the Protestant church. Overall, however, the discussion revolved around central questions of the Reformation’s conception of faith. This lent the disputes an explosive force.

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Because the ‘true teaching’ had been so terribly important to Luther and his successors—­as a part of their inward identity and as a critical mark of outward distinction from the spiritualists or ‘Schwärmer’, the Anabaptists, the Catholics, and the Reformed Protestants or ‘sacramentarians’—the intra-­ Lutheran controversies too were very influential in church and society. To name several examples: The Majoristic Controversy, named after the Wittenberg professor of theology Georg Major, a close associate of Melanchthon’s, returned to an issue from the beginnings of the Reformation, as it were: do good works, as the fruits of justification, necessarily accompany salvation? This was Major’s thesis, motivated by concern for the moral earnestness of the Reformation conception of faith. Or do good works imply a relapse into the Catholic notion that man contributes to his own redemption? That was the position of Nicolaus von Amsdorf, who went so far as to argue that good works are detrimental to salvation. A similar question was later debated, under different circumstances, in regard to the concept of human nature.The Synergistic Controversy, revisiting the debate between Erasmus and Luther on free will, was concerned at bottom with the question whether, after the Fall, man retains any vestige of the original goodness of Creation, or whether—­as Flacius opined—­sin had become the ‘substance’ of man. Thus the image of God would have been perverted into an image of Satan, and in the matter of his redemption, the sinner must be as passive as a block of wood under the carpenter’s axe. Other skirmishes too were accompanied each by its flood of pamphlets, mostly in the vernacular, and were received far beyond the small circle of learned theologians. One issue, for example, was the function and validity of law in regard to the sinner’s redemption. Was the use of law limited to convicting the sinner of his sin (usus elenchticus seu theologicus legis) and normalizing his outward conduct (usus politicus), or should the law also be attributed a positive meaning in the moral conduct of a justified man, which would be a ‘third use’ (tertius usus legis)? This question, disputed even during Luther’s lifetime, is known in the history of theology as the Antinominian Controversy, and was anything but irrelevant to preaching and the religious education. At issue was the fundamental problem of Christian conduct on the basis of faith. Early Lutheranism—­ in the absence of integrating, conflict-­ limiting organizational structures—­had been worn down by political tensions, competition, and internal changes in its articles of faith, and it was not until the

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1570s that its doctrinal form became consolidated. This was made possible when the Duke August, Elector of Saxony (1553–86), began after 1574 to support a policy, propagated by Brunswick-­Wolfenbüttel and Württemberg, of intra-­Lutheran rapprochement. The theology professor Jakob Andreae of Tübingen and the superintendent Martin Chemnitz of Brunswick had begun a collaboration in introducing the Reformation in Brunswick-­ Wolfenbüttel, and worked towards reconciliation in the intra-­ Lutheran doctrinal debates that had been going on since 1548. The process was complicated: first, a Swabian-­Saxon concord was achieved which contained all the essential issues of the later Formula of Concord, namely justification, original sin, good works, free will, adiaphora, law and Gospel, the third use of law, Christology, and the Eucharist. The project of seeking consensus among Lutherans gained momentum in 1576, when Brandenburg and the Saxon Electorate joined in these efforts. Finally, in May of 1577, a commission of six theologians, Chemnitz, Andreae, Nicolaus Selnecker, David Chytraeus, Andreas Musculus, and Christoph Cornerus, meeting at the abbey of Berge near Magdeburg, were able to agree on a final version, called the Solida Declaratio or the ‘Bergic Book’. This was the main part of the Formula of Concord, to which Andreae added the Epitome, a concise summary of the critical doctrines. Once the Formula Concordiae had been accepted by numerous territories and cities, and signed by some eight thousand pastors and schoolmasters, it was published in 1580, the fiftieth anniversary of the Confessio Augustana, as part of the Book of Concord, a collection of received Lutheran doctrine. The aim of the Formula of Concord is to offer a summary of the Confessio Augustana with reference to the controversial doctrinal questions which had arisen since. In that regard, it was not intended as a new confession—­and this was a necessary position in view of the legal significance which the Confessio had taken on in imperial law. The doctrinal tendency of the Formula was integrative; it excluded extreme positions. Luther came very much to the fore as the most important authority, while Melanchthon, to whom the Reformed churches too appealed, was subjected to damnatio memoriae. Flacius’s dramatization of human sin was rejected, as was the relativization of sin by Melanchthon’s followers, called ‘Philippists’. In Christology, the Formula stressed the simultaneous divine and human natures of the single person of Christ as the basis of salvation—­a doctrine proper to the teaching and faith of Luther and the Württemberg reformer Johann Brenz, and henceforth a central motif of Lutheran identity. In regard

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to the relation between biblical and ecclesiastical teaching too, the Formula set a new standard: the Bible alone was the ‘ruling rule’ (norma normans), while the confessions—­ those of the orthodox church and of the Reformation—­were ‘ruled rules’ (normae normatae). In the early modern period, the Formula Concordiae had little influence outside Germany, except in Sweden, where it was introduced in the late sixteenth century. The intra-­Lutheran controversies overall met with little attention or understanding outside the borders of the old empire. Members of opposing denominations identified them as proof of the incoherence and untruth of Lutheranism. Within Germany too, several signers soon withdrew (including the Palatinate and Brunswick-­Wolfenbüttel); other ter­ri­ tor­ies and cities never adopted the Formula (including Hesse, Pomerania, Silesia, Holstein, Anhalt, Lippe, Magdeburg, and Nuremberg). Lutheranism remained, unlike the other denominations, a polycentric, polymorphous unity filled with internal tension. The coexistence of three denominations in the empire, often in adjacent territories, has profoundly and lastingly shaped German history. It promoted a mentality of dissociation from the ‘others’, a striving to preserve and advance one’s own aspirations while restricting the aspirations of others. The heterogeneous empire was outwardly pacified, yet internally, its homogeneous components stood in strident religious opposition with one another.The potential conflict inherent in this structure could be actualized at any time. The denominational division of Germany favoured the tendency towards identification with small regional or territorial spaces; national matters in the early modern empire frequently arose in de­nom­in­ ation­ally specific forms. In comparison with the ‘internationalist’ Calvinists and the globally orient­ed Catholics, the Lutherans took on a special identification as the custodians of the German nation. In this regard, they contributed to the politicization of Luther which became a characteristic of subsequent German history: analogous phenomena are rare in the Lutheran Scandinavian countries.

4.6. The Transformation of Roman Catholicism The developments within Roman Catholicism in the age of the Reformation, as we have conceived it here, are traditionally designated as

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‘­Counter-­Reformation and Catholic reform’. These is term subsumes both the force of resistance against the perceived threat of the Reformation movement and a force of innovation driven by older traditions within the Catholic orthodoxy. Both of these deserve attention. About the 1530s, Roman Catholicism entered a process of transformation which lasted several decades, leading to the Roman Catholic denomination in its early modern form.This church had resolved a number of ambiguities in essential questions of theological doctrine and internal discipline, established stricter rules, and acquired a normative profile which distinguished it from the more pluralistic papal church of the Middle Ages. These changes had been driven both by forces acting within the church and by the challenges of the Reformation.The Roman church that put into effect the resolutions of the Council of Trent (1546–63) was thus different in several respects from the church against which Luther had rebelled. The path to effective measures of Catholic reform was more difficult than taking defensive measures against the Reformation. In territories ruled by staunchly Catholic princes—­ such as the Habsburgs in Austria, the Netherlands and Spain, and the Bavarian and the Albertine Saxon dukes in their respective countries—­the rulers strove to subdue the stirrings of the Reformation. But the customary instruments for fighting heresy were hardly functional: the Inquisition had fallen out of fashion; the practices of bishops’ visitations and synodal courts too. Censorship, whether at the territorial or the imperial level, was largely ineffective because the empire was lacking in executive power, and because it was subverted by princes and cities favouring the Reformation. Efforts were made, sometimes with the support of secular Catholic authorities, to rebut Reformation publications with suitable Counter-­Reformation texts—­such as those printed in Dresden by Emser in the service of George of Saxony—­but the demand for ‘orthodox’ literature remained low wherever the Reformation reached.The demographic situation was not propitious to Catholic reform, since it was mostly the young, mentally agile intellectuals with a humanistic education, in all European countries—­ at least for a time—­ who sympathized with the Reformation. Moreover, some practices, such as the granting of prebends and the recruitment of clerical functionaries in the various countries and the cardinals of the curia in Rome, were so entrenched that even a willing pope would hardly have been able to change them. The popes of the 1520s to the 1540s, Adrian VI, Clement VII, and Paul III, all of whom were deeply entwined in structures of nepotism and clientelism, had little comprehension

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for calls to reform the church. It was only laboriously and half-­heartedly that the Holy See conceded to the emperor’s demand for a general church council.

The Council of Trent The notorious mutual distrust that united and divided the two heads of Latin Christendom, the pope and the emperor, had a paralyzing effect on the Council. The emperor mainly wanted a Council that would restore the unity of the church and resolutely advance reforms. And he wanted the Council to be convened somewhere in the empire where he could exert influence on it if necessary. The more time passed before a Council was convened, the more unrealistic the goal became of regaining the ground lost to the Reformation. The pope, meanwhile, no longer seemed to expect a restoration of Latin Christendom’s pre-­Reformation unity. To him it was essential that the papacy stood above the Council, setting its agenda and choosing the venue in order to retain the prerogative of intervention. To the Protestants themselves, finally, the only acceptable council would be one that was free of papal regulation; general, including both the clergy and the laity, and in particular the princes, as equal participants; and Christian, that is, based on biblical norms alone. Since they believed they had ‘redis­ covered’ the true Christian teaching, a Council of the kind outlined would have been a forum of their denomination. The Council that convened on 13 December 1545 in Trent, near the papal dominions, to deal first with doctrine and only afterwards with church reforms, was compatible neither with the emperor’s notions nor with the Protestants’ demands: it was a papal Council, and would remain so.Thus the pontiff placed himself at the head of the Catholic church’s process of renewal. The consultations of the Council of Trent went on for eighteen years, divided into three periods: 1545–7, 1551–2, and 1562–3. In March of 1547, most of the Council’s Italian participants moved to the papal city of Bologna. Charles V protested, and the Council was suspended. After the emperor’s victory in the Schmalkaldic War, he wanted to compel the Protestants to participate actively in the Council, and they were so obligated by an im­per­ ial recess of February 1551.The second period of the Council was convened under Pope Julius III (1550–5), and adjourned in 1552 on account of the ‘Princes’ War’ and the victory of Maurice of Saxony.

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The last period of the Council was overshadowed by the European wars of religion: conflicts with the Calvinists were already raging in France. Emperor Ferdinand wanted to use the Council to negotiate a compromise with the Protestants in the empire. Both the pope and the emperor therefore advocated treating the upcoming assembly not as a continuation of the first two periods of the Council of Trent, but as the beginning of a new and open round of consultations. Spain insisted, however, that the resolutions already taken must not be debated again. In the final phase of the Council, tensions surfaced between curial and episcopal tendencies in the Roman conception of the church. Although a reform of the episcopal office was begun, with renewed emphasis on the duties of residence and visitation, obligatory diocesan synods, and the conduct of worship services, measures to reform the curia were not adopted. The Council of Trent adopted its most important resolutions on doctrine during the first period. In doctrinal decrees on the relation between scripture and tradition and on sin and justification, the council of the Roman Catholic church drew a strict division between its dogma and the Reformation position. At the same time, it rejected the legitimacy of the humanistic, irenic currents which were attributed to ‘Evangelism’, and which had their supporters even in the highest circles of the church, such as the cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini and the Vicar General of the Capuchin order, Bernardino Ochino. Although these theologians could hardly advocate Protestant ideas, they did—­often citing Augustine—­ascribe such importance to grace that all human works paled beside it. Thus the Council of Trent’s binding definition of ‘Catholicism’ involved the definitive exclusion of teachings, attitudes, and devotional practices which had previously had their legitimate place within the Roman church. As early as the fourth session, on 8 April 1546, the Council made an important decision in regard to the foundations of the faith. It determined that divine truth and doctrine are contained both ‘in the written books, and the unwritten traditions’, and that traditions should be recognized ‘with equal affection of piety, and reverence’65 as biblical scripture itself. No one should dare to ‘[wrest] the sacred Scripture to his own senses’ and interpret it in a sense contrary to that held by the Holy Mother Church. It is the responsibility of the church, the Council decreed, not of any individual, ‘to judge of the true sense and interpretation of Holy Scriptures’.66 This was a pointed expression of the Roman church’s supremacy over the Bible, and the Council supplemented it with a complete table of canonical texts,

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p­ ronouncing all other canons anathema, and declared the Latin Vulgate the authoritative version of the Bible. This was to prevent individual passages of the Vulgate from being questioned by reference to the Hebrew and Greek texts, which had received new attention thanks to humanism and the Reformation. The Catholic church also pushed aside vernacular Bibles, which by this time were flourishing throughout Europe, as unacceptable for public use. In regard to the doctrines of sin and justification, the Council of Trent finally eliminated those dogmatic ambiguities that had made it necessary and possible for Luther to contradict the teachings of his church in the first place. The Council responded to the Luther’s radical conception of sin as active hostility against God by resorting to the scholastic concept that Adam’s transgression had cost humanity the original sanctity and justice with which he had been created. Furthermore, ‘all that which has the true and proper nature of sin’ is taken away by baptism.67 The Council rejected the Reformation concept that, after baptism, sin still exists but is not counted. There is nothing God hates in those who are ‘born again’ through baptism, the Council decreed. The residual ‘concupiscence, or an incentive’ to sin (concupiscentiam vel fomitem)68 in the baptized person is not sin in the proper sense, but only an inclination to sin, which a person can resist.The power of the sacrament, in the Council’s view, overcomes any blemish produced by the power of sin. The particularly thorough article on justification, issued by the sixth session after a six-­month phase of consultations, finally eliminated the ambiguities that existed on this point of doctrine. The decree describes human beings’ path of salvation as beginning with God’s ‘preventing’ or ‘prevenient grace’ (that is, God’s grace precedes human action), mediated by Christ: ‘through His quickening and assisting grace’, human beings can ‘turn themselves unto their own justification, by freely assenting to’ that grace.69 Thus God’s grace and free will work together and to renew the person who accepts that grace and actively cooperates with it. Unlike Luther’s doctrine of justification, the Council of Trent decree emphasized the idea that a person is truly justified, substantially transformed, in the eyes of God. According to the Reformation concept, a person is granted justification because of faith alone (sola fide), not because of any quality the person has. To the Roman church, the reformers’ foundation of salvation on faith alone implied an unacceptable one-­sided relation to God, and the Tridentine decree on justification condemned it.

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The Council’s concept of justification was closely tied to the doctrine of the sacraments. The sacraments, not faith, are the means by which the justification of the individual in the eyes of God begins and increases. Drawing on medieval tradition, the Council of Trent reaffirmed that not only baptism and the Eucharist—­the two sacraments recognized by the reformers—­ but also penance, confirmation, extreme unction, the ordination of priests, and marriage are sacramental acts, and they achieve their effects by the simple fact of their performance (ex opere operato).The thesis propounded by Luther and others that the sacraments work by ‘nourishing faith’ was ex­pli­ cit­ly rejected.70 In regard to the Eucharist, the Council affirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation—­that the substance of the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ by the force of the words of consecration. Communion under both kinds (communio sub utraque specie), that is, the partaking of both bread and wine, was also rejected. The doctrine of the sacrificial Mass, according to which Christ sacrifices Himself anew by the priest’s liturgical celebration of the Eucharist, was reaffirmed.The Council’s ecclesiology was most concisely expressed in its decrees on the sacraments: through its keeping of the sacraments, the Roman church alone administered the mystery of Christian redemption and guaranteed safety from the evil of old and new heresies. The council also reaffirmed as a good Catholic custom the veneration of the saints and their relics, which had been outlawed in the course of the Reformation. In certain matters, however, the Council did make moderate attempts to reform and restrict excessive devotional practices: in regard to the veneration of images, the Council decreed that worshipping, kissing, kneeling and baring the head must refer to the saints represented, the ‘prototypes’71 of the images, not the material representations themselves. Bishops must abolish any superstitious abuses that arise in the treatment of relics. The Tridentine position on the doctrine of indulgences was similar: while upholding the existing practice in principle, the council urged ‘moderation’ and abolished ‘all evil gains’72 in connection with the granting of indulgences. The Council had set itself the twin objectives of ‘the extirpating of heresies, and the reforming of manners’.73 The first objective was served by the decrees on doctrine of the first, second, and third periods of the Council. Among the specific reforms, the finding that the bishops’ duty of residence in their dioceses was divine law was an important issue. A number of individual rules were aimed at improving the bishops’ and priests’ exercise of

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clerical offices: the cumulation of benefices was prohibited; a decree on the establishment of seminaries laid the foundation for standardizing the education of the Catholic clergy. Although it was a long time before the Council of Trent’s decrees were universally implemented, depending on the varying attitudes of individual bishops, their importance can only be assessed as epoch-­ making. The foundations of the modern Catholic church are Tridentine: in other words, in all phases of its modern history, the church has referred to the theological and pastoral norms of the Council of Trent. The process of consolidation that was forced on the Roman church from the 1550s on by the powerful heresy of the Reformation gradually enabled it to start on a path of globalization and become a world church. The decrees of Trent were made law by a bull of ratification issued by Pope Pius IV.There was no doubt about the hierarchy of authority between the papacy and the Council. The speed with which the Council’s decrees were enforced varied widely in Europe—­some were not universally implemented until the eighteenth century. In missions outside Europe, however, their effect was more immediate. The reform of the curia was ensured by the election of three more reformist popes after Pius IV: Pius V (1566–72), Gregory XIII (1572–85), and Sixtus V (1585–90). For church officials and university teachers, a mandatory confessional oath was introduced, the professio fidei Tridentina, which contained the old Nicene-­Constantinopolitan creed, a concise summary of the Council’s decrees, and an oath of ‘true obedience’ to the pope as the successor of St Peter and vicar of Christ. This and other actions of Rome made it plain that the pope was the crit­ ­ ic­ al force behind a centralized, hierarchical reform of the church. Preaching and catechesis at the parish level were to be standardized after the  Tridentine doctrines by means of a binding catechism for the entire Roman church throughout the world, the Catechismus Romanus (1566). A uniform prayerbook; a mandatory formulary of the Mass; a Rituale Romanum describing every act of the officiating priest; new editions of the central corpus of canon law, the Decretum Gratiani, and the Roman Martyrology; and a revised edition of the Vulgate: all of these expressed the Roman urge to standardize church tradition by reference to key texts. A Tridentine list of forbidden books (Index librorum prohibitorum, 1564) extended the lists collated during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. An Index congregation was established in the curia in 1571 to oversee all literature produced and ensure compatibility with the Roman church’s articles of faith.

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Not  only printing and distribution, but also the mere possession of indexed works was prohibited. The curial administration under the reform popes who succeeded Pius IV showed characteristics of the concentration of state power.The Holy See had a standing army, collected taxes, and was building a network of diplomatic representation in the form of nunciatures; it was increasing administrative centralization by assigning portfolios to specific congregations of cardinals. In the process, it was consolidating the position of the absolutist monarch who ruled over the church and its state. The full extent of the papacy’s ambitions after its regeneration by the Tridentine reforms became apparent in 1582, when the pope, in carrying out the Gregorian calendar reform, in effect declared himself the ruler over time itself. The problem was to compensate for the difference between the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, and the slightly shorter solar year.The difference amounted to a whole day every 128 years, and had added up to ten days since the Julian calendar was instituted. The first day of spring, from which the date of Easter is calculated, had advanced to the 11th of March. The papal solution to this weighty problem was to skip the dates between the 5th and the 14th of October 1582, and from then on to drop three days from the calendar every four hundred years. This would offset most of the difference between the solar year and the calendar year. The Protestant territories refused to introduce the papal calendar—­until 1700 in parts of Germany; until the mid-­eighteenth century in England and Sweden. In some culturally orthodox countries, the Julian calendar remained in use even in the twentieth century. In multidenominational cities such as Augsburg, society was divided between two calendars, which placed great strain on the public peace, the festival culture, and the economy. As late as the eighteenth century, it was customary to use two dates, divided by a slash or another punctuation mark.

New Orders, New Ordinances A significant feature of the inner reform of Catholicism was the organization of the monastic orders. This was in keeping with the power of spiritual and cultural innovation that monasticism had repeatedly brought to bear on the church as a whole over the course of more than a thousand years. In the countries where the Reformation had triumphed, monasticism had been abolished. Several orders—­the Augustinian Hermits, to which Luther had belonged, the Benedictines, and the Franciscan Friars Conventual—­had

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suffered sometimes disastrous losses throughout Europe, while the Dominican order, the most important protagonist of the Inquisition and an intellectual guarantor of church orthodoxy during the troubled period of the Reformation, had proved remarkably stable. There are supposed to have been 130 Dominicans among the theologians and bishops of the Council of Trent. The Counter-­Reformation vitalized the old orders, and created a number of new ones, for monks and nuns and for clerics regular. The critical stimulus came from the Romance countries where the Reformation had penetrated least: Italy and Spain. A new intensity of attention to pastoral work was characteristic of the new orders. The most important of them, apart from the Jesuits (Societas Jesu) and the Capuchins, were the Theatines, most of whom worked as parish priests spreading the Tridentine catechism; the Barnabites, originating in Milan, who gave special attention to preaching and hearing confessions; the Somascans, who devoted themselves to the pastoral care of orphans and youth; and the Lazarites, who dedicated themselves to popular missions in Europe and missions to spread the faith abroad. Important female orders included the Congregation of Jesus, the Ursulines, the Visitation Sisters, and the Angelic Sisters. Common to all of them was a charitable devotion to the poor and downtrodden. They also shared a strict, strident loyalty to the papacy and the orthodox tradition of the church, a clear division between the sacred and profane spheres, a revulsion for all heresy, and the will to renew and strengthen ‘their’ church. Roman Catholicism now sprouted new blossoms in all the fields of devout activity in which the late medieval church had been fruitful: pilgrimage and penitence, tantalizingly sensual fine arts, church architecture, mystical literature. The two most important of the new orders bear a closer examination. The Capuchins, who split off from the Franciscan Observants, may be seen as a particularly important force of Catholic reform. The name comes from the Italian word capuccini, as the hooded hermits were called, and reflects the way of life of those brothers who turned away from the lax observance of the urban Franciscan monasteries to seek a more austere life in the wilds of Calabria and Ancona. As itinerant, mendicant friars they preached penitence, and with the support of noble patrons they received papal recognition in 1528. Following the radical example of St Francis, the Capuchins lived in strict poverty, sheltered in hermitages, cared for the sick and the poor, preached the Gospel of the imitation of Christ, and practised mystical contemplation. The most fervent and noble elements of late

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medieval piety came to new life in these and the other new orders. The Capuchins suffered a shock in 1542 when the vicar general of their order, Bernardino Ochino, summoned before the Inquisition in Rome on suspicion of Protestantism, fled to Geneva and broke off his monastic way of life. In the long term, however, that did not prevent the success of the Capuchins, whose numbers grew tremendously between 1580 and 1650. They attracted members from all social classes. In Italy, they earned a reputation by tending the sick during a plague under the bishop Carlo Borromeo, and in France they were prominent preachers against the Reformation. In various Protestant countries of Europe, they performed subversive, clandestine work for the Catholic church. Without a doubt the best-­known and most successful of the new orders was the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. The character and spiritual orientation of the order has its roots in the religious zeal of its founder, the Basque knight Iñigo (later Ignatius) de Oñaz y Loyola. Born in 1491, Loyola was of the generation of the reformers. After a courtly, chivalrous upbringing, he served in the army of the viceroy of Navarre, and experienced a conversion during a long convalescence from a severe wound. Loyola was influenced by his reading of the lives of the saints and the Vita Christi by the late medieval monastic writer Ludolph of Saxony, a gospel commentary and manual for the imitation of Christ. Loyola’s path led him further to a shrine of the Virgin Mary at Montserrat, where he laid down his weapons and changed his fine nobleman’s clothes for a coarse pilgrim’s robe. In nearby Manresa, he was taken with a high fever in 1522/3. While reading the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis, Loyola had a vision which revealed a new plan for his life and the central ideas of his ‘Spiritual Exercises’: he resolved from then on to serve Christ actively in the world, saving souls for the Redeemer. After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Loyola began studying in Spain in 1524. His mystical disposition and his affinity for the Alumbrados brought him into contact with the Inquisition. From 1528 on, he continued his studies in Paris. In 1534, six Spanish fellow students vowed to follow the charismatic Loyola, and they were ordained priests together in 1537 in Venice. In the same year, they founded an order in Rome called Societas Jesu, the Society of Jesus, which received papal recognition in 1540. The order’s vow included not simply obedience to the pope, but the promise ‘without any delay or excuse . . . immediately to do everything that the . . . pope commands for the benefit of souls and the spreading of the faith’ (ad profectum animarum et fidei propagationem).74 Wherever the pope might send the Jesuits—­whether to the

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Turks, the Indians, the heretics or the schismatics—­the Holy Father’s most loyal militia was ready to go. Mobility and influence in communities—­in schools, hospitals, prisons, and in the street—­became characteristic of the Society of Jesus. They did not wear monastic habits, and in that regard worked inconspicuously. In contrast to the stationary nature (stabilitas loci) of the older orders, the Jesuits were not defined by the liturgical community life of an abbey.The religious culture of the order was characterized by the individual practice of ‘spiritual exercises’, and by the shared reverence for Loyola—­even after his death.The leadership structure of the community, headed by a ‘superior general’ in Rome—­initially Loyola himself—­was centralized, but also flexible enough to permit adaptation to local conditions. The superior general appointed the provincial superiors and the rectors of the Society’s individual houses. The brothers, who were soon active worldwide, remained in constant contact with the leadership of their order through correspondence and extensive reporting. Among the small band of original brothers was Francis Xavier, who in 1540 became the first Jesuit missionary to depart for India. For a time the order had very successful missions in Japan; Jesuits also found their way into the imperial court of China. Adapting to local customs and ways of life, they worked among the scholarly elites of the host countries. In Latin America, the Jesuits espoused the interests of the indigenous population and tried to protect them from gratuitous exploitation. Wherever they worked, they took pains to learn the language and culture of those they were trying to win over to the faith, and also studied the natural history of their foreign surroundings. Although the Lutherans in the empire feared the Jesuits and unstintingly opposed them in their publications, even they had to admit that they were expanding the kingdom of Christ as the Apostles commanded. In founding schools and churches, the Jesuits outside Europe were behaving, in the words of the Hamburg pastor Philipp Nicolai, ‘without a doubt’ in such a way that ‘the Spaniards would take them for Lutherans and hardly let them escape the fire: for they do not start right in with the authority of the Roman church, with the laws of man, with the Mass, Purgatory, good works and the Roman indulgence business; but they start by preaching simply of the Fall of our first ancestors, and eternal damnation . . . then of the grace of Man’s redemption from death and eternal perdition, accomplished by Christ, whom we must accept in faith, and for which we must be baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity.’75 In Europe, the Jesuits were active not

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only as catechists and pastors in the rural regions of Italy and France, but also as schoolmasters, controversial theologians, professors, and subversive agitators for the faith. They ministered to the scattered Catholics in Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, northern Germany, and the British Isles. Gradually they gained footholds in various universities, and in 1551, with the founding of the Collegium Romanum in Rome, they established what would become a model school. The Society also founded in Rome a special training centre to prepare priests for pastoral work in Protestant countries, the Collegium Germanicum. With time, the Jesuits took the leading role in the fight against the Reformation in all European countries.The fear of the Society of Jesus which Protestants expressed in fantastic tales of horror also reflects no doubt a secret admiration for their skill and their tenacity. The Jesuit colleges, where the humanistic legacy was cultivated and a Christian ethic of virtue and service was taught—­at no cost to students—­ enjoyed popularity throughout Europe and among all estates. Thirty-­five such colleges existed in the year of Loyola’s death, 1556; by 1579, there were as many as 144. Education was soon central to the order’s European ac­tiv­ ities. In the multi-­denominational imperial cities, this competition placed pressure on Protestant secondary schools. Through their educational work, the Jesuits also gained significant influence on political elites: Jesuits were in demand as confessors at all the Catholic courts of Europe. The suspicion—­ and the hostility—­with which the Jesuits met, first from Protestants, but soon in certain Catholic countries, had its roots in the unmistakable influence among the ruling elites which these most loyal and most learned champions of the papacy possessed—­champions who were not afraid to incite the subjects of ‘heretical’ rulers to rebellion. In the history of women’s religious orders, the Council of Trent represents a turning point: the council decreed that all nuns must be cloistered. The normative rule, aimed at totally separating the sacred, monastic space from the secular world, found its exemplary realization in the work of Teresa of Ávila, the reformer of the Carmelite order. With her mystical visions as legitimation, she imposed on the order a life of absolute claustration, poverty, and strict asceticism, including weekly flagellation. Supported by the superior general of the Carmelites, Teresa founded eighteen new convents of Discalced Carmelites. Her influence was carried over to the male branch of the order by the mystic John of the Cross. ‘Devotion of the Heart’ was to her a means of union with God; as a part

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of her reform of the life of the convent, it involved zealous introspection and contemplation of God’s grace. Similarly, the Angelic Sisters, founded in the 1530s in Milan, were at first a non-­cloistered order, but were gradually placed under a male administration and secluded behind walls and bars. Unlike the other orders, the Ursuline Sisters, followers of St Ursula, recruited their novices from the lower classes. They devoted themselves to poor, orphaned girls in danger of prostitution; they operated orphanages and hospitals; they too offered education. The Ursulines were able to escape the claustration decree. In the seventeenth century, they spread in France as well. Quickly adopting the Jesuit tradition, they offered free educational programmes for girls. Mary Ward, a Catholic refugee from England, followed a similar concept, establishing a non-­cloistered community for the higher education of Catholic Englishwomen who had fled to the continent—­modelled after the Jesuits, and vigorously opposed by the Society of Jesus. Schools of the ‘Congregation of Jesus’, oriented after the standards of the Jesuit colleges and with papal approval, gradually arose all over Europe. Because she was not allowed to found a female Jesuit order, Mary Ward focused on providing women and girls with education for a secular life. The tension between the decreed cloistered lifestyle and the de facto established non-­ cloistered lifestyle was an expression of early modern Catholicism’s relation to the world. While Protestants knew no religious service except in society at large, Tridentine Catholicism renewed the distinction between ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’, between the monastic world of religion and the secular life world, but at the same time intensified the monks’ and nuns’ attention to serving the laity—­ by works of charity and nurture. Simultaneously with its specific national and regional features, Catholicism since the early modern period has borne a deeply Roman character.

4.7.  Dissenters and Nonconformists A significant motive of those who broke with the papal church, but also rejected, openly or covertly, the arising Lutheran and Reformed churches, was disappointment and misgivings about the fact that the renewal of the ‘Christian teaching’ did not generally bring with it an improvement of the ‘Christian life’. Those who earnestly wanted to live as Christians felt it was unacceptable that the members of the major evangelical churches were not

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significantly different in the moral conduct of their lives from the followers of the orthodoxy, and that the secular authorities played an important part in church governance. Thus the desire grew to leave the ‘church of the many’ and form a devout, observant community. The radicals on the ‘left’ wing of the Reformation (a term which has become customary in analogy with the seating of modern parliaments, but which is not without problems) were the first to take issue with Protestantism’s notorious involvement with the state. They preferred small communities of faith, and associated the word ‘change’ with positive expectations. For reformers such as Luther, however, ‘change’ had connotations of unrest: the restitution of the church that they strove for did not involve questioning the existing social order. Most of the radicals took a different view. The most striking characteristic common to all those who did not find a home in any of the institutionalized denominations, and instead sought alternative forms of religious and social life, was their nonconformity, their dissent from the majority. For this reason, they have been grouped in much recent literature under the term ‘dissenters’ or ‘non-­conformists’. These terms too are imperfect inasmuch as they define the minority currents by reference to an external attribute, and at the same time mask their heterogeneity.The denominational societies did not tolerate open nonconformity. Anabaptists and Antitrinitarians were officially or pragmatically tolerated for a time in parts of Eastern Europe and the Netherlands, but were subject to prosecution everywhere else. It is not entirely clear how widespread the phenomenon of nonconformism actually was in the post-­Reformation societies of the early modern period. On the European scale too, its proportions are only now becoming visible. Documents exist in some cases indicating where separate Anabaptist congregations formed. But as long as people with deviant religious beliefs lived in outward conformity with the denominational churches, had their children baptized, attended worship services regularly, took part in the Mass and the Eucharist, perhaps even acted as sponsors at baptisms—­as dissembling ‘heretics’ had done in the Middle Ages—­they are hardly imperceptible as ‘dissenters’. The question of nonconformists is thus an important part of understanding the religious life of premodern societies as a whole. Outwardly, these societies have usually been defined as religiously homogeneous, yet they did not possess the instruments and strategies with which modern totalitarian societies have been able to comprehensively monitor their members.

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For this reason, dissembling, ambiguity, and different degrees of i­ dentification with the doctrines and rituals of the ‘public religion’ of a given community are a defining feature of the religious culture of this era. Indeed, we can assume that a certain amount of publicly unexpressed nonconformity was an integral part of these social structures. What the age did not tolerate was the public questioning of religious truth as accepted in the given city or territory.

The Anabaptists and the Münster Experiment After the Peasants’War and the 1529 diet of Speyer, which made Anabaptism a capital offence, the Anabaptists faced severe persecution which influenced their identity and their strategies: to escape the danger, they now tried to make themselves invisible; they dissembled; they coexisted with and outwardly adapted to the major denominations; and they suspended their practice of adult baptism. The term ‘Anabaptists’, equivalent to the German Wiedertäufer, meaning ‘re-­baptizers’, has been rejected by some academics, but is documented in the sources. It ascribes to the people so designated a conception which was not theirs: in their view, those who had been baptized as newborns were not yet baptized at all. The German designation of the movement which has now become customary, Täufer, meaning simply ‘baptists’ or ‘baptizers’, is no closer to their self-­identification. Initially, they called themselves ‘brothers in Christ’. The criticism of infant baptism, and the alternative practice of baptizing members at the age of consent, was not central. Most important to them was the sanctification of the community, ensured by the communal enforcement of a strict moral discipline, to which the members voluntarily submitted. The issue of baptism was important element, but by no means the only one, of their conception of a community oriented after the complex ideals of community found in the New Testament.The similarities between Anabaptist communities and Reformed churches in regard to strict church discipline are plain to see. What divided them from the church of Zwingli and Bullinger church, and from that of Bucer and Calvin, was primarily the Reformed Protestants’ universalist character and affinity with the state. Anabaptism underwent a dramatic transformation and a thoroughgoing pluralization in the years that followed the Peasants’ War. The movement was divided on the question of violence and on compromising with the secular authorities. After the first execution of an Anabaptist—­that of Felix

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Mantz, on 5 January 1527, in Zurich, by drowning—­death sentences were repeatedly pronounced in Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed countries and cities. Eighty per cent of all Anabaptist martyrs died in the late 1520s and early 1530s, the vast majority of them (85 per cent) in Catholic territories. Eight hundred and forty-­ five executions are documented in the region of Switzerland and southern Germany alone. Among the established reformers, opinions differed as to whether the Anabaptists should be executed, in accordance with the current law of the empire, or ‘merely’ banished. The persecution of the Anabaptists and other dissidents was largely a function of their image as insurrectionists. And in fact, several lay pro­tag­on­ ists of a persistent apocalyptic persuasion, influenced by Thomas Müntzer and the experience of the Peasants’ War, such as the Frankish accountant Hans Hut and the Thuringian furrier Hans Römer, who anticipated the Parousia, or second coming of Christ, advocated military collaboration with the Ottoman Empire, or pursued millenarian notions and very real subversive plans—­such as Römer’s plot to seize power in the city of Erfurt. Augustin Bader of Augsburg, also a furrier, gathered a small group of followers who sought connections to individual Jews and the esoteric science of the Kabbalah. They expected the Messiah to appear among their own number, and anticipated his kingdom by symbolic attire. Theocratic and utopian hopes which had gone unfulfilled for centuries, in which angelic popes and apocalyptic emperors of peace would gather all humanity and lead them to Christ, fell on fertile ground in the nonconformist margins of Christian religious culture. Initially, however, Anabaptism did not develop leaders in the sense of chief members in dominant, ­hier­arch­ic­al positions. In the early days of the movement, under the pressure of persecution and martyrdom, former clerics and intellectuals did play prom­in­ent parts, including the Nuremberg schoolmaster Hans Denck, the former priest Ludwig Hätzer, the humanistically educated scion of a patrician family Conrad Grebel, and the doctor of theology Balthasar Hubmaier. Several southern German Anabaptists, such as Michael Sattler and his fellow signers of the Schleitheim Confession (1527) rejected all violence and sought to live in small, close-­knit communities as the ‘quiet in the land’ in imitation of Christ and in anticipation of the imminent end of the world. They were later stylized as the figureheads of a modern, pacifistic Anabaptism, in opposition to the openly revolutionary tendencies that culminated in the

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Münster rebellion. In the village of Schleitheim, near Schaffhausen, a ‘­fraternal union’ under the leadership of the former Benedictine priest Michael Sattler set out a confession which propounded separation from the unrighteous world, the rejection of oaths, the renunciation of all violence, and a strict biblically oriented imitation of Christ. Some themes of this self-­sacrificing Anabaptism later survived among the Swiss Brethren and the Hutterites. Another consequence of strict adherence to the Bible is the ­phenomenon of Moravian Sabbatarianism, which emerged from apocalyptic Anabaptism and propounded the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day, Saturday, as a religious obligation. From the late 1520s, when the Central European societies were particularly affected by apocalyptic ideas—­the Turks reached the gates of Vienna in the early autumn of 1529—wandering missionaries from the original Zurich congregation of Anabaptists, such as the former priests George Blaurock and Wilhelm Reublin, carried Anabaptist ideas to various Swiss and southern German territories, and to the Habsburgs’ Tyrol. At times the proclamations of the non-­violent Swiss Anabaptists stood in opposition to the rather successful mission of Hans Hut, who continued to spread Thomas Müntzer’s concepts in the South, and who projected the end of the world in 1528. Hut’s radicalism was also opposed by the Anabaptist reformer Balthasar Hubmaier too, who had fled Waldshut and for a time enjoyed the support of the nobility in Nikolsburg in Moravia. In the longer term, the tendencies towards ‘desecularization’ in the history of Anabaptism proved stronger—­that is, most of the movement abandoned the notion of imposing its conception of a proper Christian lifestyle by force. Those groups which rejected the imminent eschatological ex­pect­ ations advocated by Hut or Hoffman particularly emphasized this detachment from the world. The experiment of an Anabaptist government in Münster marked a sort of turning point in the history of the movement. Its beginnings are in­sep­ ar­ably linked with the agitation of Melchior Hoffman. Preaching and baptizing in East Frisia in the early 1530s, Hoffmann had acquired a number of followers who accepted and developed his notion of the impending final triumph of the true faith over ‘Babylon’. Hoffman prophesied that the eschatological events would begin in the imperial city of Strasbourg, and that the New Jerusalem would be revealed in 1533. With this hope, he returned to the Alsace, where he was condemned by a synod and im­prisoned until his death in 1543.

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Meanwhile, however, his ideas remained influential among his followers, called Melchiorites, in the northwest of the empire, primarily in Amsterdam. In early 1534, the leader of the Amsterdam congregation, the baker Jan Matthijs, sent messengers to the Westphalian cathedral city of Münster, where the Reformation had just been adopted, mainly through the work of the Augustinian chaplain of St Maurice, Bernhard Rothmann, in close collaboration with a Lutheran majority in the city council. In the spring of 1533 they had been able to safeguard the Münster Reformation by treaties with the prince-­bishop of the city, Franz von Waldeck. For a time it looked as if Münster was carrying out an orderly transition to the Lutheran Reformation, like those completed in the 1530s in numerous cities of the Hansa League in northern and northwestern Germany—­a phase shift with respect to developments in the south. However, under the influence of the Dutch Melchiorites and evangelical preachers who had fled to Münster from the Jülich region, Rothmann was open to more radical views. Polarization within the Westphalian city grew intense, in part because the city was threatened militarily by Franz von Waldeck and his allies. In council elections on 23 February 1534, the Anabaptists were victorious, and at the end of that month the ‘prophet’ Jan Matthijs arrived in Münster in person. Now a complex process of reorganizing the city into an apocalyptic theocracy based on notions of Old Testament communities began. Inhabitants could either join by confessing and being baptized or leave, abandoning their property.The old church structures were more thoroughly and uncompromisingly dismantled in Münster than was usually the case, especially in Lutheran cities. After Matthijs’s death in a military action before the gates of Münster, the charismatic tailor Jan Beukelszoon, called John of Leiden, took over as leader of the city, and transformed it from a prophetic-­presbyterian republic headed by twelve elders into a kingdom. The changes incorporated elem­ ents of political compromise between the Dutch immigrants and the old Münster elites, however, and the second in command after the ‘king’ was the mayor, Bernhard Knipperdolling. Courtly ceremonies were introduced; Anabaptist apostles were sent as missionaries into the surrounding countryside; because 70 per cent of the population was female, polygamy was introduced in order to make mandatory marriage enforceable; money and precious metals were confiscated; a communal distribution system was developed; food supplies were organized among the whole community under the increasingly uncertain conditions of siege.

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After less than a year, John of Leiden’s popularity was declining; his prophesy that the siege of Münster would be broken at Easter of 1535 went unfulfilled. His appeals to his Dutch brothers in faith to shake off the Habsburgs’ rule and come to Münster were also ineffective. When the city, in a state of complete prostration, finally fell to the besieging forces in June of 1535, it was by betrayal. To the interdenominational coalition of princes which had formed to combat the Anabaptist kingdom, and to the established reformers, the events in Münster were the epitome of revolutionary upheaval. The Anabaptists’ contempt for traditional power relations had catapulted them into a sphere which could only be called ‘diabolical’ or demonic. The victors exulted, publishing horror stories of the deluded king and his ensnared, starved and oppressed subjects who had been reduced to eating cats, dogs, and mice.The bodies of the Anabaptist leaders were hung to rot in cages attached to the belfry of St Lambert’s Church as a widely visible symbol of an ancien régime’s reconquest of the future. During and after the siege, the Anabaptist project in Münster of 1534/5 elicited a literary furore among scandalized authors of all denominations, illustrating that the dominant forces of the time had little sympathy for religious experiments and alternative concepts. The consequences of the Münster experiment were diverse. The small, radical group of Batenburgers—­named for the illegitimate son of a noble family, Jan van Batenburg—­decried the king of Münster as a false prophet, and proclaimed that the age of baptism had come to an end. However, the terrorist practices they used—­ murder, arson, robbery—­ were abhorred among Anabaptists. The most influential forces of Melchiorite Anabaptism were unanimously non-­violent, including the followers of the glass painter David Joris and the pacifist group of Dutch Melchiorites led by the former priest Menno Simons. David Joris acted as a mediator among the Melchiorites, who were divided on the questions of justified violence and polygamy. He urged greater emphasis on points of agreement: Hofmann’s monophysite Christology, which posited that Jesus’s human and divine natures both had celestial origins, the believer’s baptism, and—­a return to Hoffman’s original teaching—­the renunciation of violence in view of the imminent Second Coming. Through a vocation he received in December of 1536, in connection with ecstatic visions, Joris felt himself to be a successor of Jesus, a third David of the end times. Such immediate experiences of the spirit were understood in Anabaptist circles to be an indispensable source of knowledge

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in the confusion of the last days. Some of the more Bible-­ oriented Melchiorites in Strasbourg were sceptical, criticising the lack of biblical justification for his teachings. Nonetheless, Joris produced a rich literary work in Antwerp and later in exile in Basel. He did not practise Anabaptism publicly; he ceased administering the believer’s baptism; he encouraged his followers to submit outwardly to the church of their local denomination. This was in sharp opposition to Menno Simons, who developed a visible church organization, felt that baptism was an indispensable act of witness, discouraged spiritualistic tendencies, and held church discipline to be indispensable in a righteous community. Simons broke definitively with the apocalyptic anticipation of Hoffman and the Münster community.Through his extensive travels, Menno Simons helped significantly to consolidate the Anabaptist movement. Nevertheless, questions of the believer’s relation to the world, the acceptance of ‘unbelieving’ spouses, and the intensity of church discipline among the Mennonites were debated endlessly, and repeatedly gave rise to schisms. With time, the Mennonites, who spread to the northern Netherlands, northwestern Germany, the Baltic region, Poland, and Russia, were tolerated and even appreciated by secular authorities. After all, they lived a practical Christianity, kept away from war and violence, and were often economically successful thanks to their industry and modest expectations. The Mennonites were the most prosperous group of Anabaptists to emerge from the Reformation.

Mystics and Spiritualists It is impossible to draw an absolute distinction between Anabaptists and Spiritualists. The latter sometimes tended towards idiosyncratic concepts which were not conducive to the formation of stable congregations.Where such religious individualism did not find literary expression or come into conflict with denominational discipline, it remained altogether invisible. In general, in contexts of mystical devotion, the formation of religious communities with one’s fellow man was less important than community with God.This had been the case in the mystical literature of the late Middle Ages. The interest in the writings of Johannes Tauler, stimulated by the printing press; the study of the anonymous Theologia deutsch, at first encouraged by Luther; and certain motifs from the devotio moderna are all indications that an individualized, non-­institutional devotional style was very popular around 1500. This current influenced the generation of the reformers—­indeed, it

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Fig. 22  The rise and fall of the kingdom of Münster and Anabaptism: the bloody deeds and the end on Saturday after St Sebastian’s Day: A memorable history. This anonymous, undated pamphlet of 1536 reported on the executions of three leaders, including John of Leiden and Bernhard Knipperdolling, and the ex­pos­ition of their bodies in iron cages. The illustration shows the three cages which were suspended below the spire of the church tower of St Lambert’s in Münster.

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marked them profoundly in the case of Müntzer and Karlstadt. Spiritualists of the early Reformation who had had some tem­por­ary involvement with Anabaptism, such as Hans Denck, Ludwig Hätzer, Hans Bünderlein, and Christian Entfelder, continued to show the influence of mystical traditions and neglected community-­forming devotional practices. The physical danger that went hand in hand with the deviant practice of baptism from the 1520s on also contributed to a diminished interest in outward ­manifestations of religion. One important proponent of a radical religious individualism was Sebastian Franck, a former priest who, after a brief engagement as a Reformation preacher in the principality of Ansbach, despaired of achieving a ‘new’, evangelical church. Faced with the futility of his preaching in regard to the moral behaviour of his congregation, he concluded that all outward social forms of Christianity were meaningless. Franck became a printer, but also worked in other trades, such as soap-­making. Strongly influenced by Erasmus, he believed that true faith must be reflected in a corresponding lifestyle. Franck set new standards as a historian in his Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtbibel, first published in 1531 in Strasbourg. He strove for objectivity in his representation of the ‘Roman heretics’, in which he included numerous contemporaries. His criticism of all institutional manifestations of the church, guided by the ideal of individual piety and the sole authority of scripture, also made Franck appear a subversive, and the book led to his banishment from Strasbourg. Although he was condemned by the theo­lo­ gians of the Schmalkaldic League in 1540, Franck was able to live in Basel as a printer and writer. The broad, international reception of Franck’s works—­he is one of the few German writers to have been translated into other European languages in the sixteenth century—­indicates that his work played a prominent role in the history of early modern conceptions of tolerance. Another advocate of a spiritualistic way of thinking was the religious writer Caspar Schwenckfeld, a Silesian of the lesser nobility who abandoned his position as a councillor to Duke Frederick of Liegnitz after a mystical experience influenced by his readings of reformers and mystics. Schwenckfeld too was deeply uncomfortable with the Reformation churches that were coalescing: he felt they neglected earnest moral improvement. He hoped to alleviate the looming conflicts between denominations with his concept of a via media, a middle way. Schwenckfeld’s thought was strongly dualistic: human nature belongs to both the secular and the spiritual sphere, and can

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therefore transcend from body to spirit. In contrast to the traditional church doctrine of the dual natures of Christ—­a divine and a human nature—­ Schwenckfeld taught that Christ is a true God, who took on human flesh only to deify it. In that regard, Christ is the archetypal realization of our human destiny: to become one with God. That unity, he wrote, is realized not by sacramental mediation or by the external Word—­whether spoken or written—­but only immediately by the Holy Spirit. Schwenckfeld lived in exile from 1528 on, and was supported by a large following in the southwest of the empire. Hard of hearing, he wrote and published prolifically and maintained a large network of correspondents. Schwenckfeld was a self-­taught theologian and served as an epistolary minister to religious women in particular. He did not found a congregation in any organizational sense, deeming that the true Christians are invisible and scattered among all churches and throughout the world. This belief led him to keep aloof of all social forms of Christianity, while at the same time he was willing to tolerate them. Accordingly, Schwenckfelders lived in, with, and among the organized churches; their invisible existence makes it nearly impossible to estimate their historic importance. However, the interde­ nom­in­ation­al influences of Schwenckfeldian spiritualists most likely contributed—­as did analogous humanistic currents—­to the rise of modern concepts of tolerance.

Antitrinitarians Humanistic influences were also at work in the Reformation critiques of Catholic church dogma, including the Nicene-­Constantinopolitan doctrine of the Trinity (381), the Chalcedonian doctrine of the dual nature of Christ (451), and the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. Both Ludwig Haetzer and Johann Campanus, the two earliest representatives of an antitrinitarian theology, were such humanist critics, although no complete texts of theirs are extant, but only indirect documents. The Spanish physician Michael Servetus, working alone, contested the church doctrine of the Trinity both with biblical arguments and on grounds of religious strategy: the confused teaching of one God in three persons, Servetus maintained, was the reason Jews and Muslims did not accept Christianity. It was only thanks to the work of several humanists who had fled Italy and gathered mainly in Basel that Antitrinitarianism finally gave rise to congregations and influential organizations. Particularly prominent among

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these Italian exiles was Lelio Sozzini of Siena, who tried to refute the trad­ ition­al dogmatic concepts of the incarnation, the dual nature of Christ, and the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of the New Testament.The designation ‘son of God’, he wrote, merely expresses Jesus’s exemplary humanity. He also rejected the ideas of pre-­existence and the resurrection of the flesh. Lelio’s nephew Fausto Sozzini pursued his ideas further, attacking the traditional doctrine of satisfaction, that is, the concept of atonement to the Father by the Son’s suffering on the Cross. Contesting the need for human beings to atone, however, was tantamount to questioning the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, which had been largely conserved or restored in the course of the Reformation.The deeply humanistic Socinians resorted here to a modern understanding of human nature as being essentially good yet in need of, and capable of, being perfected by nurture and education. The Socinians placed Jesus as a preacher and a moral paragon at the centre of a unitarian theology, one which recognizes a single, undifferentiated God. In some respects, they anticipated the Enlightenment critique of dogma. Through the support of several Polish nobles, the Reformed pastor Gregory Paul, a convert to Unitarianism, was able to found a church of the opponents of the Trinity who had gathered around Raków in Lesser Poland. In Transylvania, Socinianism was supported by noble patrons and was established for a time as a separate denomination. In Cluj a college was founded to train young theologians, and the confessional basis of the Unitarian church was fixed in the Racovian Catechism (1605 in Polish; 1608 in German; 1609 in Latin). Like all of the church organizations arising from the Reformation, the Unitarians were not free of doctrinal controversies: they were stirred up by the conflict between theologians who found it appropriate to worship Jesus—­called the adorantists—­and those who did not.The Counter-­Reformation in Poland subjected the Socinians to bloody and efficient persecution. To theologians of the Lutheran orthodoxy, they were a particularly despicable and at the same time, because of their attraction for the educated classes, a particularly feared and fiercely combatted heresy. Socinianism remained present as a potential for the critique of Christian dogma, not least because of the countless pamphlets published against the movement. While the major denominations shared the centre, dissenters and nonconformists settled on the margins of Latin Europe’s religious culture. They subsisted under conditions which changed with many circumstances, and depended ultimately on their ability to live inconspicuously, invisibly,

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constantly migrating between territories and countries, or under the temporary protection of individual rulers. In some respects, the dissenters’ fate was thus similar to that of the Jews. Then, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the northern Netherlands became a haven of tolerance and a kind of laboratory of religious pluralism. In the dissenters’ extraordinarily diverse milieus, concepts of religious tolerance were articulated earlier and more emphatically than anywhere else. Elements of criticism of the Bible, tradition, and dogma occurred among dissenters in a time when the three major denominations were erecting citadels of doctrine and orthodoxy and the powers of church and state were collaborating to implement strategies of religious social discipline intended to prevent any erosion of the publicly accepted true dogma. Although it would not be apt to stylize all dissenters as standard-­bearers of modern freedom of conscience, they do represent on the whole a reservoir of religious, cultural, and intellectual alternatives which would take on importance—­as a provocation and as a force of transformation—­in the further development of Latin Europe.The influence and historical significance of the dissenters goes beyond the marginal role they were given and were able to play in the century of the Reformation.

4.8.  Latin Europe after the Reformation It has become customary to use the generic term ‘Protestantism’ for the varieties of Latin European Christianity which emerged from the Reformation. The single word includes all those churches and other or­gan­ iza­tion­al forms of non-­Catholic Latin Christianity that have come into being since the sixteenth century as a consequence of the Reformation. In the early modern period, European colonization accelerated the global influence of Protestantism. Where Protestant nations—­primarily England and the Netherlands—­ prevailed in the fields of colonial action, they deployed their religions. They did so both by implanting colonists and by day-­to-­day contacts with the original inhabitants. The development of an educational system was often an important factor in Christianization, which was carried out in the spirit of a certain Latin European denomination. Strategic missionary operations like those carried out by the Roman church’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith or the monastic orders were not a basic feature of early modern Protestantism. Such activities were

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undertaken in later centuries, however, by the mission societies, which were largely independent of state protagonists. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the spread of Reformation variants of Latin European Christianity was determined in its nature and extent by those individual persons and small groups who left Europe during the wars of religion and waves of religious persecution. The forty-­one Puritan settlers who emigrated to North America via Holland to found the Plymouth colony after their separation from the established Church of England were acting in pursuit of their own objectives—­this was also reflected in their conciliatory approach to dealing with the existing inhabitants. In the long term, the emigration of Europe’s persecuted religious minorities gave North America a lasting Protestant character, just as Portuguese and Spanish colonization had made South America a Catholic continent. The diversification of the Reformation variants of Christianity continued outside Europe, usually with greater intensity, since the European regulating mechanisms of the states and religious laws were initially, and in some cases permanently, of no importance. Outside Europe, none of the ‘medieval’ qualities that Latin European Protestantism brought with it were present by tradition: the unity of political and ecclesiastical communities; membership of a congregation by birth or baptism; the organization of urban and rural settlements around a church building, usually the oldest building present; the congregation members’ regulated obligation to support their church or their pastor with certain financial contributions; the legal character of the relation between the church and its members; an academic, rational the­ ology honed by denominational polemics—­outside Europe, all of these existed only where they were intentionally imported, not as a heritage and a burden. The basic form of Latin European Christianity after the Reformation was still denominational uniformity within a given political unit—­city, territory, or nation. The ancient Roman, Constantine belief that religion is an indispensable bond integrating the state and the society was still widely held at the time of the Reformation and in the period that followed, the age of confessions. Only the dissenters challenged the principle. Overall, the Reformation did not bring a significant change in relations with the Jews. The legal forms of state-­guaranteed tolerance which had emerged in the late Middle Ages—­limited to a few years and conditional on the payment of protection money—­ generally remained intact. Luther’s

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Fig. 23  The European reformers are gathered around a lit candle. Pictures of this type, aimed at reinforcing a common ‘Protestant’ feeling of community, spread from the Netherlands especially in the early seventeenth century. Luther and Calvin, sitting side by side, are in the centre; other recognizable figures are Jan Hus, Johannes Oecolampadius, Ulrich Zwingli, Philipp Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, Johann Brenz, Martin Bucer, and John Wycliffe. In the foreground are the horrified representatives of the papal church. Copper engraving, early seventeenth century.

early appeal of 1523 for tolerance of the Jews, and for friendly proselytism among them for the born Jew Jesus Christ, which he expected would result in significant numbers of converts and an advantage over Rome, was supplanted in his later years by a coarse demand that Protestant polities drive out the Jews and destroy the basis of their subsistence. Among other arguments, Luther alleged that the Jews were incessantly plotting the destruction of Christian communities and blasphemy against the one true God. In his way, Luther had thus reinstated the model of a monoreligious society, a closed corpus Christianum, in miniature. The irrational fears of the ‘evil Jews’, which Luther both shared and shamelessly incited, were based on the widespread belief, characteristic of the age, that a society required a uniform religion and that foreign elements must be excluded on pain of incurring

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the wrath of God. Luther stands out from the tenor of his time not in his contempt for the Jews per se, but in the extremism of his polemics, the malice of his language, and the ruthlessness of his anti-­Jewish policies. Tolerance of the Islamic religion, the faith of Christendom’s ‘arch-­ enemies’, was beyond anything that would have been conceivable in Reformation Europe. In the territories occupied by the Ottomans, meanwhile, Christianity and Judaism, the two ‘peoples of the book’, generally continued to exist as dhimmi, or non-­Muslim subjects. Because the millet system offered the followers of non-­Islamic religions the legal protection of the Sultan in exchange for special taxes, the Reformation was able to pene­ trate even within the dominions of the Turkish superpower. Attempts by several Reformation theologians to develop intensive contacts with Greek Orthodox Christians living under the crescent moon, and to solicit support for their own doctrines by disseminating catechisms and confessions, were no more than episodic. The Reformation did little to bridge the division between Latin European Christendom and the Eastern churches. Although there were multi-­denominational situations in Reformation Europe, they arose as a rule not out of a principled respect for the other—­ the customary conception of tolerance today—­but only where political constellations made them unavoidable. This was the case in all of the legal and political truces of the period whose terms admitted more than one denomination. Such treaties and decrees suspended the given de­nom­in­ ations’ claims to religious truth and created neutral legal platforms, usually modelling the stalemate situations of power politics. Within its legally and politically balanced sphere of action, however, each denomination maintained its claim to religious truth. In the era of the Reformation, there could be no social consensus behind a position granting the denominations equal validity in the matter of religious truth. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) moderated the denominational stalemate in the empire in order to circumvent the threat of a permanent political blockade of the imperial institutions. The bi-­confessional order sanctioned by imperial law became the basis for the organization of mono-­confessional societies in the territories and cities. In those imperial cities where two denominations coexisted, their respective rights were carefully defined. Rather than promoting understanding and tolerance, this tended to contribute to an atmosphere of scrutiny and exaggerated alertness as each group strove to avoid being disadvantaged. With the increasing power of the French king Henry IV, the Edict of Nantes (1598) reflected the power relations between the confessional blocs

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and ended the bloody wars of religion which had gone on for several decades. Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was an expression of the absolutism which the French monarchy had attained by that time. In the Warsaw Confederation (1573), the Polish nobility, alarmed by the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, forced the Polish crown to concede tolerance of all confessions, including the Bohemian Brethren and the Socinians. In 1570, Polish magnates had urged the declaration of a community of churches in the Consensus of Sendomir, adopted by the Lutheran and Reformed churches and the Bohemian Brethren—­against the Antitrinitarians. As the Polish monarchy consolidated its power in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the country’s multi-­confessional character gave way under Jesuit influences to a Counter-­Reformation Catholicism. The multi-­confessional situation in Transylvania was likewise temporary. The independence from Habsburg rule which Transylvania had gained after the Battle of Mohács permitted the formation of a republic of estates. The system established by the Transylvanian diet of 1557 gave legal recognition to four Christian denominations—­ Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, and Unitarian—­in keeping with the balance of political power between the nobility and the cities. This system lasted until the Habsburgs were able to reassert their rule in Counter-­Reformation Hungary. Although it seems logical to us under present-­day conditions to assess the bi-­confessional and multi-­confessional societies described here as exemplary and pioneering, religious uniformity remained a cultural characteristic of territories in Latin Europe well into the modern period. In a long-­term perspective, the religious homogeneity of the Middle Ages continued to exist in the form of parallel mono-­confessional societies. In the seventeenth century, political and cultural elites increasingly came to believe that a stable state order could make it possible for people of different religions to coexistence in peace. Perhaps the fact that the Peace of Westphalia (1648) had formalistically assigned whole countries to one confession or another based on their status as of 1 January 1624—the annus normalis stipulated by the treaty—­was a factor; the experience of a viable multi-­ confessional society in the Netherlands may have been another; migrations motivated by economic conditions certainly were, mixing together religious groups in many urban communities. Events such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the expulsion of Protestants from Salzburg (1728–32) were sharply criticized by Europe’s Protestant governments, but at the same time they indicate that confessional homogeneity was considered a reliable instrument of domination up to the threshold of

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the modern era. As an ideological resource it still has currency today, for that matter, in the form of appeals to the ‘Christian West’. The universal freedom of religion which became a pillar of many European constitutions in the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the American and the French revolutions, and which gradually came to include Judaism and religions which up to then had not been represented in Europe, depends on the state’s guarantee of such a permanent legal system. Protestants, having done away with canon law, no longer had an autonomous legal system to appeal to, and have for the most part wholeheartedly welcomed this modern development, while Roman Catholics have been sceptical. In the early modern period, it was mostly theologians who did the work of developing denominational identities.Their task was to explain why their respective confession was the only saving faith. The geographical proximity to competing denominations, in the empire at least, often exacerbated the need to distinguish their own by means of intense polemics. Except in dissenter milieus, the notion that a community could tolerate several religions was very unusual. Georg Frölich, a Nuremberg clerk, was among the few who believed it. Referring to Luther’s distinction between two regimes or kingdoms, he expounded to Lazarus Spengler, an associate of Luther and the city clerk of Nuremberg, the thesis that a secular authority could tolerate diverse ‘groups or sects’ of ‘Christians, Jews, Anabaptists, etc.’76 and accord them freedom to teach and worship accordingly, in their own buildings of course. This idea was unheard of at the time; it did not meet with approval. Frölich cited an older example, however: the Kingdom of Bohemia, where, in addition to Jews, ‘three different faiths’77—those of the Catholics, the Utraquists, and the Bohemian Brethren—­had been permitted, ‘and yet had preserved their king’s outward peace and prevented rebellion on grounds of religion’.78 Frölich’s proposal briefly highlighted the potential of Luther’s ‘two kingdoms’ doctrine, which advocated a strict division between the religious and secular spheres, opposed the conflation of earthly prosperity and celestial salvation, and sought to prevent both the metaphysical elevation of the state and the abuse of religion as an instrument of domination. The full potential of this doctrine was not actualized during the Reformation, however.

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5 The Modern Reception of the Reformation 5.1.  Reformation Jubilees: 1617 to 2017

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n the history of jubilees, which form an indispensable part of the European continent’s memorial culture and have become a global phenomenon, the Reformation takes a special place, since it was commemorated in the first such ‘jubilee’ in the modern sense of the term. The centenary celebrations of the year 1617—one hundred years after the beginning of the Reformation—­became a model for commemoration in the form of recollections situated in the public sphere, in the space of the body politic. This has become characteristic of commemorative culture in the modern period. The term and the concept of the ‘jubilee’ recall another tradition, however: that of the yobel year mandated in the Old Testament. By biblical commandment, particularly Leviticus 25:10–13, the inhabitants of the country who were indebted or indentured must be freed every forty-­nine or fifty years and restored to their homes or possessions, that is, to that property which they had lost in the course of their financial ruin. These regularly repeated acts of remission and restitution—­although it is not known today whether they were ever practised in ancient Israel, or whether they are a literary fiction—­were the model for a Christian adaptation, the jubilee year. Pope Boniface VIII declared a special indulgence at the close of the thirteenth century: all those who came from afar as pilgrims and penitents to confess at the churches of the apostles Peter and Paul in Rome, and spent fifteen days in devout activities, and Romans who spent thirty days in devotions, would be granted ‘not only the full and more abundant, but the fullest forgiveness of their sins’.1 The first papal jubilee year, 1300, was thus the occasion of a plenary indulgence, something which up to then had been

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reserved for participation in the Crusades or substantial support for Crusaders. In a way, the initiative of 1300 amounted to a novel generalization, a democratization so to speak, of the plenary indulgence. The more often and the more reverently a devout pilgrim visited the churches of the apostles in Rome, the more effective the indulgence would be, Pope Boniface emphasized. In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen­tur­ies, his successors shortened the intervals between the extraordinary papal jubilees until they reached a period of just twenty-­five years. Every Christian was to have the opportunity at least once in his life to obtain a plenary indulgence, that is, the full remission of sins (plena remissio peccatorum), by a making ­pilgrimage to the holiest city in Christendom. Because the jubilee was thus historically associated with indulgences, it made sense, apparently, to celebrate the beginning of the battle against indulgences as a ‘jubilee’ as well. The first Reformation jubilee in 1617 thus seems to have adopted the idea of a noteworthy interval of a hundred years from the Roman competition, but then measured the century from a certain historic event: the publication of the Ninety-­Five Theses against Indulgences by the Augustinian monk Martin Luther of Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. The only jubilees which had referred to historic events up to then were celebrations of the founding of certain Protestant universities: these had been observed since the 1570s. Thus in 1577/8, the founding of the University of Tübingen a hundred years previously was commemorated; in 1587, the University of Heidelberg celebrated its bicentennial; the University of Wittenberg celebrated its first century in 1602 and the University of Leipzig its second in 1609; in 1619 the University of Rostock observed two cen­tur­ies since its founding. The Reformation jubilee of 1617 was the first historic jubilee to concern the general public, that is, the first such commemoration outside the sphere of the universities. Thus it was the first celebration in a commemorative jubilee tradition which continues even today, and which was widespread, and even satirized, by the end of the eighteenth century.2 The tradition gradually found its way into many different areas of life and society: silver, golden, iron, and diamond wedding and company anniversaries, an­ni­ver­ sar­ies of all kinds of examinations and graduations, crown jubilees, golden confirmation celebrations, etc. The first Reformation jubilee in 1617, which marked the beginning of a very influential tradition, was not a chance occurrence. The remembrance of the reformer was omnipresent in countless media of Lutheran

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d­ e­nom­in­ation­al culture, series of sermons on Luther’s life, illustrated pamphlets, p­ ortraits hung in churches, and all kinds of printed matter. The occasion to which the date referred, the posting of the Ninety-­Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on day before All Souls’ Day of 1517, had not been an outstanding point of reference in commemorative culture up to then, since it was not originally a pathetic or symbolic act: it was simply the regular form of publication for official academic notices. Although it is undisputed among researchers today that Luther himself recalled the 31st of October, 1517, as the beginning of his struggle for the renewal of the church and his ultimate rebellion against the pope, and observed the date in his personal circle,3 the first unambiguous references to his posting the theses is dated after his death—­in the Historia Lutheri, a biographical speech by his colleague and close associate Philipp Melanchthon. There we read: ‘Because Luther was outraged about his [that is, Johannes Tetzel’s] godless and nefarious sermons, he published, in his ardent striving for piety, the Theses on Indulgences. . . . He posted them publicly on the day before the feast of All Souls’, 1517, on the church adjoining Wittenberg Castle.’4 The second source for Luther’s posting of the Theses is an undated note by George Rörer, Luther’s assistant and executor, and a chronicler of the Wittenberg Reformation: Rörer mentions a publication of the Theses on Indulgences ‘on the doors of the churches’ (in valvis templorum) in accordance with the statutes of the University of Wittenberg.5 These and the few other sixteenth-­century allusions to the 31st of October and the posting of the Theses did not give rise to a commemorative occasion or anniversary celebration of the ‘Reformation’—a ‘Reformation Day’—until the cen­ten­ ary jubilee in 1617. The Reformation jubilee of 1617 was initially conceived and observed as a unique event and an extraordinary celebration—­like the papal jubilees before it. Once the jubilee plans became known, Pope Paul V declared the year 1617 a ‘holy year’ (a similar declaration was made in 1983, the year of Luther’s 500th birthday) and offered the traditional plenary indulgences for devout activities, indicating how highly competitive the denominations were in their symbolic acts during the ‘age of confessions’. There are no indications that regular days of commemoration of the beginning of Luther’s struggle against Rome were observed between 1617 and 1667, the 150th anniversary of the Reformation. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a tradition arose of commemorating Luther, his

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biography, and his teaching on St Martin’s Day—­Luther had been baptized on 11 November—­and it is possible that this tradition still survived in some places in the seventeenth century. Reformation Day was not fixed in the Lutheran church calendar until 1668, when the Saxon Elector John George II issued an ordinance to that effect for his dominions. Other major Protestant territories—­Ernestine Saxony and Hesse-­Darmstadt—­did not adopt the annual feast day until 1717. Denmark and Sweden also celebrated Reformation jubilees in 1617. In 1717, the celebration in the united kingdom of Denmark and Norway, with the Danish parts of northern Germany, is said to have been more elaborate than anywhere else. After the Elector of Saxony had converted to Catholicism, the Danish monarch saw himself as a mainstay of Lutheranism. In Sweden, however, no official Reformation jubilee was observed in 1717. The fact that Denmark, unlike Germany, chose 1836 rather than 1817 for its next centenary celebration—­the tercentennial of the official introduction of the Reformation in Denmark—­ indicates how politically sensitive the commemoration of the Reformation had become in the context of European nationalisms. As a rule, the Reformation jubilees were generally ordered, planned, and regulated by decree of the princes, in keeping with the governance of the churches created in the Reformation—­by the territorial ruler or a ‘provisional episcopate’. The highly political character of these anniversaries mani­fests itself to us who have come after in its ambivalence and subtlety, especially in the celebrations of 1817 and 1917, which took place under the shadow of German nationalism and the First World War. The Reformation jubilee of 1617 only gradually developed into a major event. It was initially proposed by the theological faculty in Wittenberg. In the spring of 1617, the faculty petitioned first the supreme consistory in Dresden and then the Elector to be allowed to observe the last day of October as the ‘first Lutheran jubilee’ (primus jubilaeus lutheranus).6 Apparently, the initial idea was to hold a local commemorative event analogous to the university’s jubilee observation of 1602. Wittenberg claimed a leading role among the Protestant and especially the Lutheran universities of the time, considering itself the Zion of the true faith: after all, it was the place where ‘Luther’s teaching-­desk’ (cathedra Lutheri) had stood. Perhaps the constant competition with the University of Leipzig, which also lay in Albertine Saxony, made the Wittenberg scholars keener to cultivate their reputation.

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Fig. 24  ‘Christo Soteri veritatis vindici, lucis evangelicae restitutori’ [To Christ the saviour, defender of the truth, restorer of the light of the Gospels], Nuremberg, 1617: illustrated handbill on the Reformation jubilee, showing Luther and Melanchthon (on either side of the Cross) and the Reformation princes Frederick ‘the Wise’ of Saxony (left), and Elector John George, the host of the jubilee.

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It was political circumstances that ultimately made the Reformation jubilee into a state occasion. By the time the Wittenberg professors took action, the Reformed Elector of the Palatinate, Frederick V—­head of the Protestant Union opposing the Catholic League, and thus the opponent of the Saxon Elector, who sought a compromise with the emperor—­had begun to agitate for a joint celebration of the Reformation jubilee by the Lutheran and Reformed estates of the empire. This inter-­Protestant competition may have been the reason why the Reformation jubilee was ultimately celebrated on a scale corresponding to the principal feasts of the liturgical year: that is, over three days, from 31 October to 2 November 1617. The Albertine Elector John George I followed in the footsteps of his Ernestine predecessor, the first Protestant duke of Saxony, Frederick III, called ‘the Wise’. The governing dynasty used the Reformation jubilee politically to underscore their historic legitimacy. Dr Martin Luther’s Miracle, 1618: Luther as a hovering angel of the Apocalypse rocks the papal throne, while Jesuits and clerics of other orders prop it up. Rather than adopting the Palatine policy [of a pan-­Protestant jubilee], the Lutherans in the Protestant Union followed the Saxon lead, which in many respects became the model for the next three centenary celebrations. Instructions for a uniform observation of the centenary throughout the country, including prayers of thanksgiving, model sermons, detailed specifications for bell-­r inging, church decorations and vestments, etiquette for the subjects—­ who were prohibited from ‘feasting, drinking, gambling, nocturnal disturbances’7—were communicated to the individual parishes through the superintendents. The documented organization attests to the efficiency and disciplinary force of the early modern denominational state. Literary, musical, and graphical works of art dramatized the Reformation jubilee as a triumphal manifestation of Lutheran identity. In the context of the impending Thirty Years’ War, which broke out the following year, the function of the jubilee as an instrument to enhance popular willingness to fight and sacrifice for the Lutheran confession must not be underestimated. The 1599 Nuremberg confession painting by Andreas Herneisen is considered the first of the many confession paintings that portray the presentation of the Confessio Augustana at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. The image is centred on the preacher in the pulpit; the Eucharist descends from Christ crucified. Thus the theological core of the Lutheran confession is inserted in the historical scene of the ‘princes’ confession’ of 1530.

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In view of the unprecedented publishing activity undertaken in 1617, the jubilee must have had significant long-­term influence on the image of Luther and his ‘Reformation’. Luther was celebrated as a prophet sent by God to bring light to the Church in the darkness of its subjection to the papacy and to lead it back to the truth. His work, inspired by the Holy Spirit, was acclaimed as a definitive triumph over the papacy, whose demise was expected imminently, as promised by an oft-­quoted saying of Luther’s: ‘While alive, I was your plague; dead, I’ll be your death, O pope!’8 The enthusiasm for King Gustav Adolf of Sweden some fifteen years later stemmed not least from the hope that he would become the executor of this legacy of Luther’s. Luther’s image took on dimensions of salvation history: as an apocalyptic angel of God (Revelation 14:6 f.) he brought down the papal throne, which was precariously supported by a few monks, mainly Jesuits. The hero from Wittenberg had made the papacy into an ‘impossible possibility’, to use Karl Barth’s phrase. The commemoration of the Reformation was profoundly and permanently characterized by a fundamental anti-­Catholic quality which was at bottom anti-papal. Luther’s jubilant church saw the completed century of existence as proof of its truth: God had stood by it against rigours of all kinds, and chosen it as a witness of the only saving faith. Paintings celebrating the Lutheran confession, the Bekenntnisbild or Konfessionsbild genre which originated in Franconia in the late 1590s, similarly portrayed the new church as the institution which would lead its members to salvation. The customary depiction of the Confessio Augustana (1530) being presented to Emperor Charles V was a statement of legal and political legitimacy. The centre of the Reformation jubilee of 1617 was dominated by Luther personally with his act of ‘emancipation’. Besides the Saxon Reformation princes and their successors, no one else was personally commemorated except perhaps Philipp Melanchthon. ‘Magister Philippus’ was highly regarded as a learned, humanistic counterpoint to the fervent religious genius Luther, especially among those Lutherans who had rejected the last and most detailed of the Lutheran confessions, the Formula of Concord (1577). Like state portraits intended to project the power of an earlier ruler onto his successors, the portraits of the Wittenberg reformers served to legitimate the succession of Lutheran officeholders. In some churches, portraits of the leading clerics and preachers since the Reformation were hung in series to represent the historical continuity of an institutional Lutheran church and the official succession of the confession’s truth. On the whole, the

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Reformation jubilee probably contributed substantially to the cultural establishment of the Lutheran denomination in the empire. The Saxon territories—­that is, the core countries of the Reformation in central Germany—­were the principal initiators and shapers of the commemoration of the Reformation in the seventeenth century. After the Saxon Elector Frederick August I had converted to Catholicism, the Reformation was no longer a legitimating reference for the Albertine dynasty in connection with the second centenary in 1717. The rival Ernestine territory of Saxony-­Gotha-­Altenburg subsequently presented itself demonstratively and explicitly as the guardian of the Lutheran heri­tage. An anti-­Catholic tone also lived on in Ernestine Saxony which was avoided in Frederick August’s Dresden. In other respects, the 1717 jubilee reflected the internal processes of plur­ ­ al­ iza­ tion which Protestantism had undergone in the meantime. Representatives of Pietism, who emphasized an authentic inner assimilation of faith, polemicized against the so-­called orthodox Lutheran church and its orientation towards doctrinal conformity and baroque ostentation. Radical pietistic and early Enlightenment protagonists objected to the cult of personality centred on Luther, advocating freedom of belief and conscience. Occasionally, polemics against the celebrations argued that Protestantism owed its cultural superiority and economic prosperity to the abolition of the Catholic holidays. The increasingly visible ‘Protestant’ tendencies were unmistakable in the bicentennial celebrations—­ that is, the tendencies towards integration of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions which had gained ground since the 1660s, not least because of the customary political cooperation of the estates professing the two ‘evangelical’ denominations in the imperial diet. A central role in the tercentennial jubilee of 1817 was played by the Protestant Union between Lutherans and Reformed churches, which had been advanced essentially by the Prussian monarchs. The commemoration was used to overcome a division of the ‘evangelical’ movement which was seen by many as no longer timely or appropriate. At the same time, the 1817 celebration was characterized by an awakening of the German nation. Luther appeared as the standard-­bearer of a political freedom from Roman oppression like that which had just been won in the Napoleonic Wars. The national cause placed a spotlight on Luther generally: his Bible translation, which demonstrated the power of the German language; his appeal to the ‘dear Germans’; his animosity towards all things foreign. The hymn ‘A mighty

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Fig. 25  ‘A mighty fortress is our God’: at the outbreak of the First World War, postcards urged steadfast support for the emperor and the empire.

fortress is our God/A goodly shield and weapon’ [Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, ein gute Wehr und Waffen] became the Marseillaise of all those who were mentally mobilizing and looking westward in wrath, supplanting the favourite Lutheran anthem of the early modern period, ‘Lord, keep us in thy word and work / Restrain the murderous Pope and Turk’ [Erhalt uns Herr bei deinem Wort und steure Papst und Türken Mord]. During the renovation of the Castle Church in Wittenberg under Emperor William, the line ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ was inscribed around the bell tower, where it still appears today, just below the spire reminiscent of a Prussian spiked helmet. During the First World War, ‘A Mighty Fortress’ continued to be a popular battle hymn as well as a hymn of consolation. During the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich too, Germans continued to look to the Wittenberg reformer and his hymns.

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Anti-­Semitic tones were occasionally heard as early as 1817, and increased at first gradually, along with the Jews’ emancipation, then dramatically towards the end of the nineteenth century. German nationalism saw the Reformation as a native concept of modernization which was felt to be superior to the path trodden by the French Revolution. Some features of the 1817 jubilee recurred in the Reformation celebrations of 1917, in the midst of the First World War. In the historical narrative of the German Empire under William I, Luther had been stylized as the epitome of Germanness, and had conquered the country’s market squares in the form of bronze statues over the course of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Year of Luther in 1883, the quadricentennial of his birth. By 1917 he was considered the German initiator of the world’s transition to the modern era. In the midst of war, the highly industrialized German Empire claimed a leading role in modernity and in world politics, holding up the Wittenberg reformer as an icon of its cultural superiority over the ‘civilization’ to the West and the ‘barbarianism’ to the East. In addition to the major centenary celebrations, it was customary from the seventeenth century on to hold unique or recurring commemorations of individual events in the history of the Reformation, such as the presentation of the Confessio Augustana (1530), the Peace of Augsburg (which gave the Protestants lasting assurance of their continued existence in the empire, 1555), and the adoption of the Reformation in specific cities and countries. As a rule, the commemoration of the Reformation in other Protestant countries did not attract public attention or take on political significance comparable to that in Germany. Instead, the anniversaries of individual reformers or influential decisions were observed, such as the date of the introduction of the Reformation in the respective country. Furthermore, the form of commemoration was often ecclesiastical rather than public and political. Each centenary celebration of the Reformation was a reflection of the times, and the five-­hundredth anniversary in 2017 could not be otherwise.

5.2.  Interpretation and Debate The perception of the Reformation changed continuously from the eighteenth century on. A historic presentation of the Reformation should, indeed must, be accompanied by a thorough reflection on the history of its

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interpretation and scholarly appreciation. Only in this way can we take stock of the national, denominational, and ideological biases which have attended the Reformation as an object of historic study and which have become bound up with it as preconceptions by long tradition. It is only natural that the German and especially the German Protestant history of interpretation and research plays a prominent role in that history. In no other country has so much been written about the Reformation, so many controversial judgements made, so many authors’ own thoughts, desires, and beliefs em­phat­ic­al­ly identified with Luther’s person and projected on the event of the Reformation. The colourful and highly ambivalent reception history of Luther leaves little doubt: there has hardly been a more ‘German’ figure than he.

The Biographical Orientation In early systematic treatments of the history of the Reformation, a wholesale orientation after Luther’s biography was predominant. The Histoire du Lutheranisme (1680) by the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg drew a response from the Lutheran statesman and scholar Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff in the form of a three-­volume Commentarius historicus et apologeticus de Lutheranismo (1688–92; a German edition was published in 1714). In spite of their op­pos­ ite judgements, both books framed the entire era from the perspective of Luther’s biography. The negative character of the Wittenberg theologian, the subjectivism with which he flouted the tradition of the church and its teaching, and the dubious morality of his actions were to Maimbourg, as to his predecessor of Luther’s time and generation, Johann Cochlaeus (Historia Martini Lutheri, 1549), concrete evidence that the Reformation was diabolical. While the Catholic historians of the Reformation saw the pathological origins of the Reformation heresy’s schism from the Roman church in Luther, Seckendorff found that the ‘healing work of the Reformation’9 had ended with the death of God’s instrument Martin Luther. He barely mentions the beginning of the Council of Trent, which in his view had nothing to do with ‘reformation’. Seckendorff brought broad interests to Luther’s biography, and drew on little-­known manuscript material in his presentation. Thus he laid the foundations for a stronger emphasis on Luther’s personality as opposed to his teaching, and Pietists and Enlightenment authors subsequently portrayed specific phases and aspects of Luther’s life and work, particularly his early years, as the actual core of the Reformation.

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The partisan denominational historiography which—­largely following Cochlaeus—­remained dominant for centuries in the Catholic regions10 was increasingly decried among Pietists and Enlightenment figures in the Protestant camp, although they continued to draw on the Catholic literature of controversial theology, and on Seckendorff ’s Commentarius and history of Lutheranism. The radical Pietist church historian Gottfried Arnold in particular became influential in several different currents. He unreservedly condemned the ‘Lutheran orthodoxy’, meaning the denomination’s forms of doctrine, governance, and life of the late sixteenth and seventeenth cen­ tur­ ies. Categorically rejecting the late Luther’s acerbity and doctrinal in­transi­gence towards papists, spiritualists, and Jews, Arnold blamed him for the rigidity of the institutional Christianity of the orthodox Lutheran church. In essential questions, the Reformation had stopped halfway, he wrote: a grave defect of the Lutheran church which Luther himself had recognized, but not corrected, was ‘that an appropriate and necessary sep­ ar­ation of the evil and the devout was not done, but the rough heap left to go along together, to be taught, absolved, given communion, and to participate in all privileges together with the true Christians’.11 Because the true and the false, the lukewarm and the resolute Christians existed in one church side by side, laxity and moral decay had set in among all the estates. In fact, Arnold wrote, the preachers of the Lutheran church had reintroduced as much papacy as had been abolished, ‘and, instead of one pope, canonized many little popes’.12 Thus Arnold saw the Reformation as failure in important respects. To him, it was a lapse that Melanchthon had reintroduced the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the central philosophical authority of medieval scholastic theology, whom Luther had banished from church doctrine. The ‘young’ Luther on the other hand, the reformer of the period before the Peasants’ War (1524/5), supplied Arnold with arguments for the urgently needed renewal of the church in his own time after the standards of the early apostolic church. This strategy of critical rejection of the ‘old’ Luther and an appeal to the ‘young’ Luther, or to particularly appreciated traits of Luther, was to become characteristic of the modern treatment of Luther’s legacy.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolution The Enlightenment brought Luther the liberator, the moral teacher, the jovial, gregarious patron and paterfamilias to the foreground. By attributing

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to him such verses as ‘Who loves not wine, woman and song, remains a fool his whole life long’,13 Luther was adapted to the sensibilities of the time, and stylized as the apostle of an industrious, life-­ affirming bourgeois ­worldliness. During the Enlightenment Luther also became an advocate of the freedom of research, science, and conscience, an advocate of human rights, and an unerring campaigner against all reactionary clerical forces. The fact that the Reformation tradition, especially under the influence of Melanchthon and Zwingli, had accorded an inherent value to the use of innate philosophical reason was now seen as a positive quality—­in op­pos­ ition to the Pietists and in an indirect acknowledgement of the orthodoxy. The reformers’ efforts towards universal public education and catechism were seen as a parallel with the Enlightenment ideals. The positive appreciation of the Reformation during the Enlightenment was followed by considerable criticism by the Romantic movement which arose around 1800. The rational and literal, philological character of the Reformation as modernized in the Enlightenment was seen by Romantics such as Novalis, Eichendorff, Wackenroder, and Schlegel as the decisive reason for the anti-­religious sentiment which had erupted in the ‘soulless’ French Revolution. Some Romantics found redemption and happiness in the rejection of Protestantism, which they blamed for all the negative developments of the dawning ‘modern world’, and in the return to the Catholic church. Since the days of the Romantics, it has been customary in a part of the Catholic tradition to see certain deplorable developments of the modern age—­up to and including global warming in our day14—as consequences of the Reformation. Likewise Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, pastor’s son, erstwhile theology student, librarian in Wolfenbüttel, and writer, was influenced by deep Lutheran roots together with a constructive independence from Luther and the Reformation tradition, a combination which would become characteristic of the Enlightenment in Germany in some respects. In a private letter, Lessing confessed that he was especially glad of Luther’s ‘minor defects’, as he perceived a danger otherwise of ‘idolizing him. The traces of humanity that I find in him are as precious to me as the most blinding of his perfections. They are even more instructive to me than all those perfections together’.15 After Lessing had published a rationalistic critique of the Bible by the late grammar school teacher Hermann Samuel Reimarus, it was sharply countered by the senior pastor of Hamburg, Johann Melchior Goeze, a representative of the later Lutheran orthodoxy. The ensuing

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c­ ontroversy between Lessing and Goeze has been repeatedly stylized as a model literary battle during the social penetration of the Enlightenment. Lessing, the man of letters, appealed to Luther to pass judgement: ‘O, that he could do it, he whom I should most desire to have as my judge!—Thou, Luther!—Great man, ill understood! And by none less understood, than by the short-­sighted wrong-­heads, who, with your slippers in their hand, and an affected noisy zeal, saunter along the road macadamized by you!’16 The true Lutheran, in Lessing’s sense, would not be bound by the mere letter of Luther’s writings, but would follow his spirit. Thus he would advocate such a Christianity as the reformer himself would teach today. Lessing saw an absolute freedom of thought, which would not permit hindering anyone from ‘advancing in the knowledge of the truth, according to his own ­judgement’,17 as a lasting influence of Luther. The French Revolution, which held unforeseeable political and cultural consequences for all of European history, also marked a turning point in regard to the interpretation of the Reformation. The French intellectual Charles de Villers,18 who had fled to Germany, addressed the public in an assessment of the Reformation which was first published in 1804, and which remained influential for several decades in a number of European languages. De Villers emphasized more strongly than the German Enlightenment authors before him the political consequences of the religious emancipation which had begun with the Reformation. He saw the liberal political structures in the German states, the state’s guarantee of personal freedoms, and the principle of religious tolerance as historic legacies of the Reformation. Human dignity and the ideals of the French Revolution—­freedom, equality, and brotherhood—­ seemed to have their real historic roots in the Reformation. The generally envied modernization of the German society, de Villers wrote, was traceable to the Reformation. The Germans needed no such revolutionary spectacle as their French neighbours were putting on. From the early nineteenth century, it became customary among idealist philosophers in particular to see the Reformation and especially Luther as representing those political and cultural principles and ideals that were needed in the present. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte associated the Enlightenment motifs of liberty and national education with an increasingly nationalized interpretation of the Reformation, which was seen as their source. In his Addresses to the German Nation, an important influence for the mobilization of German national sentiment, Fichte called the Reformation the ‘last great, and in a certain sense complete, world-­historical

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deed of the German people’.19 Fichte associated the triumph of the Reformation primarily with the fact that Luther the religious genius had been motivated not by earthly purposes, but had aspired to the redemption of his people and of all mankind as a expression ‘of German earnestness and soul’.20 Fichte saw in Luther the realization of a ‘basic feature of the German spirit’21 which rewarded his zeal ‘with more than he sought’, taking him far beyond his own teaching. Fichte’s contemporary transformation of Luther’s doctrine of justification revealed a truth which had been intimated in the theological doctrine, but which became explicit only in the mode of its philosophical metamorphosis:‘Every person, without exception, by the fact of his birth as a human being, is capable of entering the kingdom of Heaven: God is willing to imbue him with life and soul; for that is the only purpose for which every person exists, and only under this condition are we human.’22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel likewise saw Luther as the model and predecessor of the intellectual movement in which he situated himself, and which he aspired to lead to unknown heights. Thanks to Luther, self-­ determination (Eigensinn) had become ‘the distinctive principle of Protestantism’;23 the philosopher’s conceptual thinking brought to maturity what Luther the theologian had manifested as faith. Luther had inaugurated the freedom of the mind. The Reformation had brought to religion the principle of subjectivity, of the free spiritual worship of God in the human conscience. It was through the vernacular Bible that the ‘principle of subjectivity has . . . become a moment in religion itself ’;24 the Reformation marked the ‘great revolution’25 in the history of human culture. According to Hegel, the Reformation opened up an immediate access to God—­one not mediated by any church—­which is the foundation of all freedom of the mind and of the corresponding form of civil and state order. But this ‘great revolution’ in Germany was carried out, not ‘through a mass impulse’26 as in the French Revolution, but by judicious authorities. In the course of the German Campaign against Napoleon and the Wartburg Festival of German students in 1817, the portrayal of Luther as a hero of national liberation and a figurehead of liberal civil and political reforms found broad acceptance.

Beginnings of Scientific Historiography The scientific historiography of the Reformation began with Leopold von Ranke’s masterpiece, History of the Reformation in Germany [Deutsche

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Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation] (1839–47). Although he drew on older traditions of historiography from the sixteenth century to his day, and ­especially on Johann Sleidan’s epoch-­making work De statu religionis et reipublicae Carolo Quinto Caesare commentarii (1556), Ranke inaugurated the chronological concept which has since become practically canonical in the depiction of German history. In this chronology, the ‘age of the Reformation’ extends from the controversy over indulgences, beginning with Luther’s posting of the Ninety-­Five Theses in 1517, to the legal recognition of the ‘Evangelicals’, or the denominations grouped under the Confessio Augustana, in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The age which followed has been designated the ‘Counter-­Reformation’ since Johann Gustav Droysen, a student of Ranke’s—­a basically unproductive, retarding era which led Protestantism itself into a reactionary, anti-­Catholic dogmatism. Ranke brought the political importance of the Reformation, especially the close connection between the policies of the empire and its territories under Charles V’s reign and the policies of Europe’s monarchs, to an equal rank with the religious and theological themes and principles of the age. This conception of the age of the Reformation as an epoch of national history stands in an irreconcilable contrast to the Reformation as an event in European history. Ranke, the son of a pastor, was inspired by his independent, thorough reading of Luther’s writings and influenced by Fichte and the Romantic notion of an absolute and autonomous religion. About the time of the Reformation jubilee of 1817, he developed ideas of universal history according to which the divine is revealed in the high points of history and in its ‘great men’. In his History of the Reformation in Germany, based entirely on documentary sources, Ranke restrained his sometimes-­effusive enthusiasm for Luther, yet he highlighted better than any previous author the moments of human interest in Luther’s biography: the spiritual crises, personal conflicts, and theological insights. To Ranke, the unity of the empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was represented essentially by the imperial diet’s processes of communication and decision-­making. The Thirty Years’ War had left Germany subject to foreign powers; the Reformation, as a work of the ‘German spirit’, an awakening of the nation to unity and greatness, was only realized, ‘to some extent’,27 in the age of Frederick the Great, the mid-­eighteenth century. Ranke shares the basic tendencies of modern interpretations of the Reformation since Pietism in emphasizing that the Reformation called for a continuation and a renewal, and that substantial

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aspects of it only came to fruition in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The ideological consolidation which the notion of Luther as a figure of national identification underwent in the historical narrative of Wilhelmine Germany would hardly have been possible without Ranke. Ranke’s epoch-­making scholarly achievement, however, was not so much his interpretative frame of national history as the broad foundation of arch­ ival sources on which he based his presentation of the Reformation as the ‘most important event of the history of my country’,28 thus preparing the ground for the work of later historians. Another important ‘History of the German Reformation’ was the nineteenth-­century Geschichte der deutschen Reformation by Friedrich von Bezold. Bezold adopted Ranke’s chronological concept and offered a detailed description of the social and cultural conditions of the age. Moreover, he underscored the revolutionary impulses of the Reformation movement and its original connection with Luther’s early activity. In keeping with a more or less nationalistic trait of the time, Bezold perceived Luther’s unshakable religious conviction as ‘the boldest incarnation of Germanic i­ ndividualism’.29 ‘The figure of Luther’, the historian prophesied, ‘will always find sympathy with Germans’. While ‘small minds’ sought Luther’s ‘ugly traits’ in order to discredit ‘the mightiest of our nation’, Bezold wrote, Luther could no more be tarnished by them than by his apologists’ ‘embellishment’. Luther’s ­‘historic greatness’ consisted at bottom in destroying ‘the absolute rule of the Roman church in the West’.30

German Appropriation The outlines of this image of Luther fit well with the founding of the German Empire in 1870/1, as secularization in Germany was mainly opposed by the Catholic church, and with the quadricentennial of Luther’s birth in 1883. A mainstream culture of German Protestantism emerged, and transalpine Catholicism was increasingly distrusted as unpatriotic. In a speech on the occasion of the Luther jubilee, Heinrich von Treitschke, Ranke’s successor at the University of Berlin, drew together the various interpretative traditions on the Reformation and Luther which had emerged in the nineteenth century into a revising act of identification and assimilation. Only the ‘historical science of our century’, Treitschke said, had made it possible ‘to understand the whole Luther, the central person in whose soul almost all the new ideas of a rich century mightily resonated’.31 Luther’s

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‘Germanness’ proved to be the binding element: the ‘German mind’s’ com­ bin­ation of ‘hearty pleasure in the world’ and ‘earnest contemplation’32 made Luther’s act of liberation, born ‘of the struggles of the honest German conscience’,33 coherent and captivating to Germans. ‘German defiance, an untamed force of nature,’ boiled in Luther’s ‘veins’;34 at the same time, Luther the poet and Bible translator embodied the ‘pensiveness’35 and the ‘deep feeling of historic piety’ that is proper to ‘all true Germans’.36 Their nationality gave Germans an immediate bond with the reformer which was not accessible to others, Treitschke said. Because of the ‘wondrous contradictions’ in Luther’s soul—‘this violence of crushing wrath, and this ardour of devout faith’, ‘so much profound mysticism and so much pleasure in life’—which must be incomprehensible to a ‘foreigner’,37 Treitschke concludes, ‘we Germans find nothing enigmatic in all this; we simply say: this is blood of our blood. Out of the deep eyes of this unspoiled German peasant’s son flashed the heroic courage of the Germans, courage which does not flee the world, but seeks to rule it by the power of moral will.’38 It went without saying that outsiders such as Jews had no place in Treitschke’s symbiotic bond between the Germans and their Luther.39 In 1879, a few years before the Luther jubilee, Professor Treitschke had publicly attacked the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz for having criticized and polemicized against ‘the purest and mightiest representatives of Germanic nature, from Luther down to Goethe and Fichte’40 because of their attitude towards Judaism. Treitschke’s publication sparked the ‘Berlin Anti-­ Semitism Controversy’. The archaic-­sounding appeal to Germanic qualities, and to Luther as their putative epitome, served as ideological glue for the German Empire’s industrial growth society, destabilized by modernization and its social consequences. As for the political significance of the Reformation, Treitschke believed that it had fulfilled its purpose only in the founding of the ‘new’ German Empire under Prussia’s leadership. The Reformation had ‘sped the decay of the old Empire, which had long since begun’, and at the same time Protestantism had been the source from which the ‘decrepit Empire’ drew ‘the elixir of youth’.41 The imperial monumental architecture of the Wittenberg Castle Church, which was reconsecrated after renovation on 31 October 1892, is an analogous expression of the historical attitude of the times. From Pietism and the Enlightenment until the late nineteenth century, an ‘ugly ditch’ had been perceived between the sixteenth century and the present. The nationalization of Luther and the Reformation in the

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Wilhelmine empire leapt the ditch by constructing a common ethnic-­ national identity, insinuating an immediate relevance and validity of the Luther in particular in the present. This was the cultural background of the Third Reich’s perspective on Reformation history, which was primarily focussed on Luther and the construction of a succession ‘from Luther to Hitler’, as found in scattered indications in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.42

Relegation to the Middle Ages and the Luther Renaissance As the appropriation of Luther and the Reformation for purposes of national politics had come to be universal and taken for granted in the German Empire, their radical historicization by the Heidelberg theologian Ernst Troeltsch was highly provocative. In his lecture on the significance of Protestantism in the rise of the modern world, which he held as a substitute speaker for his friend and colleague Max Weber at the German historians’ conference in Stuttgart in 1906, Troeltsch broke with the notion that the present could be considered as flowing in an unbroken historic current from the Reformation. His own understanding was based on a more complex historic model: modern Protestantism, in which historical and critical Bible exegesis, the promotion of religious tolerance, and the recognition of individual religious beliefs were uncontroversial, owed its existence not to the ‘old-­time Protestantism’ of Zwingli, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and their successors who represented the Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxies of the ‘age of confessions’. Rather, twentieth-­century Protestantism was a part of the modern world which had come about through the ‘mutual ­attrition’43 of the three denominations, Roman Catholicism, the Reformed churches, and Lutheranism. The evangelical Christianity of the present was a neo-­Protestantism, the result of a transformation, which had begun during the Enlightenment, in which older traditions and themes of earlier centuries had also played a part. According to Troeltsch, a central motif which the paleo-­Protestant Lutheran and Reformed churches had shared with the medieval form of the Catholic church, and which was obsolete in the modern era, was their retention of ‘the old principle of a thoroughly authoritative, purely divine institution of ­salvation’44 to which one must belong in order to gain eternal salvation. The old Protestantism also shared with Catholicism its decidedly ascetic attitude towards the world—­although its realization was no longer oriented towards

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the detached sphere of worship or the monastery, but towards an ‘ascetic inner world’. Drawing on older typologies of Protestant confessions, Ernst Troeltsch ascribed significantly more world-­shaping, modernizing force to Calvinism than to Lutheranism, which he considered deeply conservative. Out of his friendly talks with Max Weber, Troeltsch developed the thesis that the ­cap­it­al­ist economic ethic had arisen on the basis of Reformed, Calvinistic traditions of doctrine and devotion. Calvinism, because of its traditions of synodal church governance, had formed stronger affinities with democracy, while Lutheranism had found its political home in the paternalistic, au­thori­ tar­ian state. In conceiving their image of Calvinism and the modernizing potential of Protestantism, Troeltsch and Weber had in mind primarily the influence of the Reformed church in the Netherlands, the British dissenters who had emigrated to North America, and the Anabaptists and Spiritualists of continental Europe. Although Troeltsch’s and Weber’s theses met with well-­founded objections, the social, political, and economic consequences of religious beliefs have remained a central topic in the sociology of religion since then. Thus the question as to the role of Protestantism in the evolution of the modern world has drawn a nuanced and critical answer—­in contrast to the Prussian-­Protestant conception. A general premise which Troeltsch and Weber did not fundamentally question was the belief that Catholicism was culturally outdated. Troeltsch saw Luther’s historic importance for the constitution of the modern era as limited mainly to indirect influences: although the decay of the uniform ecclesiastical culture which Luther had set in motion was the indirect cause of many different cultural processes of pluralization—­in legal, political, moral, and other fields—­paleo-­Protestantism could not be the actual creator of the modern world. Nonetheless, because of its looser institutional church structure in comparison with Catholicism, it did result in liberalization. In addition to Troeltsch, other leading intellectuals of the German Empire also helped to relativize the importance of Luther and the Reformation. The church historian Adolf von Harnack pointed out features of Luther’s theology which were unacceptable for a modern reception: the ‘massiveness of his medieval superstition’, the ‘contradictions in his theology’, the ‘strange logic of his arguments’, the ‘errors in his exegesis’, and the ‘barbarity of his polemics’.45 The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey saw the anthropocentric and

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pantheistic concepts and the intellectual traditions of humanistic philo­ sophers as a much more direct path to the modern age than the reformers’ pessimistic conceptions of man, God, and the world, characterized by ori­ gin­al sin and the need for redemption. Among the reformers, the one Dilthey found most apt to advance towards modernism was Zwingli, influenced as he was by the Platonic Academy of Florence, especially Pico della Mirandola.46 Similar tones had already been audible in Renaissance research, which flourished from the nineteenth century in the context of New Humanism in Germany. The people of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, having outgrown the traditional moral bonds of ecclesiastical Christianity—­ robustly shaping the world, fascinated by the pagans of classical antiquity, striving after concrete political interests, blithely individualistic—­the people portrayed practically as contemporaries by the Basel cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt in his 1860 masterpiece The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy—­ made Luther and his allies look almost like pitifully backward-­ looking antimodernists in their the religious fervour. ‘And who knows what would have been in store for the papacy then, if the Reformation had not saved it.’47 This jibe by the witty agnostic of Reformed roots completely reversed the traditional Protestant notion in which the papacy and Roman Catholicism were seen as vanquished or obsolescent manifestations of Christianity. In relativizing the immediate dominance of the Reformation in the present, Troeltsch was abreast of scholarly debate. His own footing was a problem, however: he did not have sufficient objective historic research to stand on. His attack struck at the identity of the Wilhelmine society which had enshrined Luther as the image of its own era—­controversy was thus to be expected. Vigorous objections to Troeltsch’s Janus-­headed Luther and the menace of the Reformation’s historic relegation to the Middle Ages were raised by theologians as well as historians. The Leipzig church historian Theodor Brieger, for example, felt that the foundation of contemporary ethics—­a synthesis of a bourgeois work ethic and evangelical faith—­was shaken by the thesis of an ‘asceticism of the inner world’. In response, he qualified the ‘gigantic task’ placed on Luther of ‘holding two eras on his lap’48 as a monumental and transhistoric one. Brieger’s 1914 portrayal of German Reformation history renewed Ranke’s view that the Reformation marked Germany’s entrance into world history. The book began with a direct

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riposte against Troeltsch: ‘The modern era begins with Luther.’49 The church historian Heinrich Hermelink, meanwhile, responded to Troeltsch’s challenge by researching in ever deeper historical detail, uncovering the medieval traits of humanism and of sixteenth-­century Spiritualism, rooted in mysticism. It was Luther, Hermelink found, not Erasmus, who had redressed a religious error by concentrating his scriptural hermeneutics on the question of biblical criticism, on which salvation might hinge.50 The economic and constitutional historian Georg von Below, building on Ranke, insisted that the Reformation had played an important part, which Troeltsch underestimated, in the formation of the modern states. Modern notions of tolerance, too, had their origins in Wittenberg and Geneva. Luther’s act had shaken the ‘cultural uniformity’ of the Middle Ages; overturning the Middle Ages had been his entire vocation. Lutheran piety, von Below wrote, continued to unfold its influence even in Bismarck’s social welfare policy. Yet the ‘modernity’ which von Below ascribed to Luther was not the westward path that Troeltsch affirmed—­the path to the liberal, demo­crat­ic model of society of the Anglo-­American period. It was an al­together German, authoritarian, Prussian-­Gothic modernism which von Below legitimized by reference to Luther.51 Another Leipzig church historian, Heinrich Boehmer, accused Troeltsch of having underestimated the momentous historic consequences of Luther’s radical attack on the Roman sacramental church. The new understanding of faith and justification which Luther had developed between 1512 and 1516 challenged any tangible, sacramental mediation of salvation. In that regard, the Wittenberg reformer had developed a new conception of religion as an inner disposition: religion had been interiorized, decatholicized, dematerialized, and personalized. Boehmer also tried to show that the economic achievements of Lutheranism, in North America for example, were no less imposing than those of the Reformed churches.52 The Old Lutheran theologian Werner Elert also refuted Troeltsch’s interpretation of the Reformation as the birth of modern subjectivity. In his monumental rebuttal to Troeltsch published in the 1930s, The Structure of Lutheranism,53 he attempts to demonstrate that productive social influences of Lutheranism arose from Luther’s religious experience. Luther did not appeal to the roving individual personality; he sought a reconnection to early Christianity. Elert and other anti-­historic minds of the late German Empire and the Weimar Republic who opposed the modern rationalism

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rooted in Enlightenment, and found their guiding intellectual star in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, saw Luther as one of their own.54 The most durable influence among Troeltsch’s critics was attained by the Berlin church historian Karl Holl. The Luther Renaissance which is primarily associated with his name gave rise to an overall theological conception orient­ed after the young Luther, which would remain dominant well into the twentieth century—­both among general historians, such as Gerhard Ritter, Paul Joachimsen, and Erich Hassinger, and in the church historiography of both confessions. Holl’s refutation of Troeltsch was for the most part implicit: he offered his own portrayal in contrast to Troeltsch’s idea of a Reformation rooted in and hence perpetuating the Middle Ages. The central—­and in a certain regard the only—­figure dominating his portrayal was that of Luther. Holl’s Luther was a theologian marked by experiences of contestation; Holl kept his distance from the figure of Luther the political reformer, which was once again being patriotically instrumentalized in the period around the First World War. All the positive influences which Holl ascribed to Protestantism in the modern era were connected with Luther personally. Holl sincerely shared the Pietists’ scepticism towards Melanchthon and the theological scholasticism of the ‘paleo-­Protestant orthodoxy’. As a rule, Holl saw the productive developments that rang in the modern age in the fields of education and research as inaugurated by Luther alone. He identified the doctrine of justification as the core theological topic of Luther and of the Reformation as a whole. Holl was the first to bring the reformer’s early lectures, which had just been discovered and edited, into the focus of research. Whole generations of Protestant church historians, and some Catholics as well, have since perused these texts—­which were of little influence outside the lecture hall in their day—­watching over Luther’s shoulder as he ‘develops into a reformer’ and reaches his ‘turning point as a reformer’. For Holl, and for most scholars who followed this highly influential teacher, one thing was ultimately certain: it was his struggle with the doctrine of justification that had given rise to the historic transformation associated with the Reformation and caused all the social, political, and cultural changes of the age.55 As a consequence of the Luther Renaissance, and of the dialectical the­ ology which it influenced, it became customary in church history to make the doctrine of justification the central issue in the interpretation of the

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Reformation. Thus the same theological issue which was given the primary importance for the contemporary understanding of the Christian faith—­ the gratuitous justification of human beings in the eyes of God by virtue of faith alone—­was considered to have been the spark of Luther’s Reformation. In the German Lutheran church and theology, this view of the Reformation is still very popular.56

Anglo-­American Perspectives Under Holl’s influence, a theologized interpretation of the Reformation which had been developed in defence against Troeltsch’s position became dominant in the German discourse, and remained so into the 1960s. In the English-­speaking academic world, an early interest in Troeltsch arose as a result of a text of his on the importance of Protestantism, which was published in English translation as early as 1912 under the suggestive title Protestantism and Progress.57 The interest sparked by Troeltsch’s text was a formative influence on subsequent discourse. This was certainly in part because the Heidelberg theologian had highlighted the modernizing influence of the Reformed tradition, whose influence was foremost in Great Britain and the United States. After Luther had been celebrated in his jubilee year 1883 as the father of intellectual, religious, political, and scientific freedom, American historians were repulsed in the early twentieth century by the German nationalist Luther cult; Luther became more and more a primarily German figure in the historic consciousness of Americans. And the more German Luther became in the historical narrative of the German Empire, the less reception he found among non-­Germans. The framework that Troeltsch offered made these tendencies comprehensible. His appreciation of the Anabaptists and ‘Dissenters’ fell on fertile ground in North America, where the descendants of these groups formed part of the population. The sharp opposition between dominant interpretations of the Reformation in the two countries was analogous to the history of military and political conflicts between the United States and the German Empire since World War I. Real or alleged differences were exaggerated and elaborated by contrastive stereotypes to construct irreconcilable differences between Western civilization, society, and rationality on the one hand and German culture, community, and temper on the other. The different reception histories of Troeltsch in Germany and in the English-­speaking world is a reflection of cultural and political sensitivities in interpretations of Luther and the Reformation.

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During and immediately after the Second World War, a ‘from Luther to Hitler’ literature joined the struggle against the Third Reich and its partial co-­optation of Luther. The Wittenberg reformer was caught in the crossfire of a polemics which cast him as the ‘Fürstenknecht’, the ‘princes’ lackey’, the forefather of the authoritarian German state and the subject mentality which had led to the disaster of Nazism. In the first two decades of postwar East Germany, this interpretative tradition continued in a Marxist variation which drew on Friedrich Engels’s 1850 study of the Peasants’ War. Late in the Second World War and in the postwar period, it became apparent that Luther’s ‘dear Germans’ were not about to give him up, as the history of an apocryphal saying of Luther’s illustrates. The oldest known source is a typewritten newsletter of October 1944 by the Hersfeld pastor Karl Lotz, directed to members of the Confessing Church in Kurhessen-­ Waldeck, a group which resisted the introduction of Nazi church governance in the Protestant church. The document concludes: ‘Please do not let my letter vex you in view of the strained situation of our nation. We must take Luther’s saying to heart: “Even if the world should end tomorrow, we shall plant our little apple tree today.” ’58 The initial and primary function of the saying was that of consolation; it was a call for perseverance in a collapsing society. It rapidly metamorphosed, however, into a message of encouragement to the activists of the reconstruction and the postwar boom. Later still, it mutated into a slogan of hope in the peace movement, serving to unsettle the East German party leadership, and a motto of commitment of the ecological movement. It would seem as though Luther was almost always a good fit, even during the period of the two Germanys. It was only thanks to his incomparable authority that his name held such a broad influence throughout the society. And yet the saying is not originally Luther’s at all; in fact, it runs counter to his longing for the ‘dear Day of Judgement’, the promise of which makes all human action obsolete. Evidently, that was no obstacle even to the high churchmen who made use of it. A number of apple trees were planted in reference to the saying in the run-­up to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. The apple tree saying would seem to be the most recent example illustrating the Germans’ propensity to identify with a Luther quotation—­even a counterfeit one.

Reformation History in East and West Germany before 1990 The scholarly discourse on the history of the Reformation took very different paths in the two German states. In East Germany, the apocalyptic

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preacher Thomas Müntzer, who had been recognized by nineteenth-­ century research on the Peasants’ War and by Marxist intellectuals such as Ernst Bloch, was brought to the fore and stylized as a revolutionary. In 1948, the Russian historian Moses Mendelevich Smirin’s book on ‘the popu­lar Reformation of Thomas Müntzer and the Great Peasants’ War’ [Die Volksreformation des Thomas Müntzer und der grosse Bauernkrieg] was published in German59 and was awarded the ‘Stalin Prize second class’ by the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. The book delimited the in­ter­pret­ ative framework in which Müntzer would be considered from then on in the German Democratic Republic: the Thuringian reformer was portrayed primarily in his role as a peasants’ leader and as the propagandist of a ‘people’s Reformation’. He was held to have advanced the revolutionary cause by a productive transformation of ‘progressive’ traditions of medieval spiritualism, such as Tauler’s mysticism and Joachim of Fiore’s historical the­or­ ies. At the same time, he was considered a visionary whose political ideas were far ahead of his time, and were therefore—­from the point of view of historic materialism—­inevitably doomed to failure. East German party officials, in an apparent demonstration of loyalty towards the Soviet brother country, made a personal gift to Joseph Stalin of Thomas Müntzer’s letter case, which had been confiscated from him on his capture after the Battle of Frankenhausen. In the 1950s and 1960s, Müntzer served as the namesake of a number of public institutions in the German Democratic Republic, and a portrait of him (of dubious authenticity) adorned the East German five-­ mark note. Luther’s image in the early GDR, based on Engels’s analysis, was at first decidedly negative: a slaughterer to the peasants, a lackey to the princes, he dug the grave of German freedom. Alexander Abusch, later East German minister of culture, wrote in his 1946 book on ‘a nation astray’ (Der Irrweg einer Nation) that ‘the defeat of German freedom in the Great Peasants’ War’ had shrouded ‘three centuries of German history in reactionary ­darkness’.60 And Wolfram von Hanstein took up the interpretative line ‘from Luther to Hitler’ from a Marxist perspective: all of German history from the sixteenth century on, in his view, amounted to one great ordeal leading to the disaster of the Third Reich.61 Thomas Müntzer presented an opportunity to install a positive figure of reference for a liberal tradition in the German history of past centuries. East German church historians opposed the thesis, well founded in the Marxist conception of history, that the Reformation as a popular movement had

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ended with the Peasants’ War and that the princes had dominated from that point on. They showed that processes of reformation were carried on as late as the 1530s by the ‘common man’ in the Hansa League’s region of influence. The Protestant theologians of East Germany dedicated themselves to Müntzer scholarship too, and their research findings earned them the respect of their Marxist colleagues. They contributed to the growing general interest in the theologian Müntzer, and to the gradual lowering of the ideo­logic­al barriers in the interpretation of the Reformation. From the early 1960s on, the image of the Reformation in East German historiography began to change. The interpretative model of the ‘early bourgeois revolution’ developed by the Leipzig historian Max Steinmetz amounted to a paradigm shift with respect to the earlier Marxist perspective. Steinmetz saw the Reformation and the Peasants’ War as a dialectically connected—­and in that sense unified—­national movement: only in com­ bin­ation did the Reformation and the Peasants’War put an end to the decadent, crisis-­plagued ecclesiastical and social system of feudalism, and thus open up new avenues in world history. The concept of the ‘early bourgeois revolution’ made Luther historically indispensable. The historic consequences that Steinmetz associated with the Reformation were the destruction of the church’s unity in Latin Europe, the resulting formation of national and territorial churches, a merit-­based work ethic, and the emergence of independent, secular educational concepts and of autonomous fields of cultural activity which were no longer bound together by an ob­liga­tory church culture. Numerous elements of the traditional Protestant interpretation of the Reformation since Ranke were unmistakable in Steinmetz’s assessment. The gradual enhancement of Martin Luther’s image in the East German historic narrative, which had become noticeable as early as the Reformation jubilee of 1967, reached a new and final climax during the era of Erich Honecker with the ‘Luther Year’ of 1983. In the context of discussions of the socialist nation-­state’s heritage and tradition, the reformer was increasingly construed as a figure of identification. As the chairman of the Luther Committee which was convened early on to begin preparing for the Luther Year in the GDR, Honecker praised the Wittenberg theologian as a one of the ‘greatest sons of the German people’. The GDR recognized his historic service to ‘social progress and world culture’, which he had achieved ‘by his introduction of the Reformation, which amounted to a bourgeois revolution’.62 In comparison with the earlier interpretation of Luther and the

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Reformation in East Germany, the ‘15 Theses on the Reformation’ which were propagated from 1981 on under the auspices of the Party’s central committee reveal some particularities. Even the post-­1522 Luther—­that is, after his break with Karlstadt and the radicals—­was now counted among the progressive forces of history. Luther’s theology, which up to now had been accorded secondary importance as a ‘superstructure’ phenomenon in relation to the society’s material base, was now recognized as historic influence in its own right. A more positive value was also attributed to the territorial princes: Luther’s obedience to his temporal lord was no longer repulsive to the East German leadership, who appreciated well-­behaved citizens. Overall, the Reformation was understood as the beginning of a modern liberal history. Meanwhile the maintenance of the historic sites of Reformation events and their development for Western visitors as a source of hard currency had become an important objective of the socialist state. In the late GDR, the unblemished and successful—­indeed heroic—­figure of Luther served, in the critical assessment of Rudolf von Thadden, to ‘pour a bit more cement in the foundations of the separate state in an effort to define its identity more clearly’.63 In view of East Germany’s church-­based peace and reform movement of the 1980s, which in its turn appealed to Luther and the tradition of the Reformation, it may seem in retrospect as if the regime had conjured a spirit it could not control in stylizing Luther as representing the state’s principles. In post-­war West Germany, the scholarly discourse on Luther and the Reformation was at first continuous with the discussions and interpretative traditions that had begun in the late German Empire and the Weimar period. The church historians in particular painstakingly researched the beginnings of Luther’s theological development. To some extent, polarities that had arisen during the Nazi period continued in regard to the impassioned debates on the date of Luther’s ‘turn to Reformation’ and the related material evidence. Supporters of Karl Barth’s theology and partisans of the Confessing Church, such as Ernst Wolf and Ernst Bizer, repeatedly took opposing positions to members of the Holl school, especially Heinrich Bornkamm and Hanns Rückert, who held significant influence in the field into the 1960s. Both camps had a primarily theological approach to the Reformation, however. The first major scholarly history of the Reformation by a Catholic church historian, Josef Lortz, was likewise theologically oriented. Lortz’s book, The Reformation in Germany,64 first published during the Third Reich and

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reprinted many times after the war, analyses Luther in relation to his nuanced criticism of scholasticism, bringing to light the legitimate concerns of the homo religiosus who, opposing an indolent papal Church from an excessively subjectivist position, finds it unmovable. The Catholic church historian then casts doubt upon the model, canonical since Ranke and Droysen, which defines the Counter-­ Reformation as a period directly ­following the Reformation (1517–55). Weren’t there forces of reform within the pluralistic Catholicism of about 1500 which had some effect before, during, and in spite of the Reformation? And if there were such forces, isn’t it oversimplifying the matter to understand the Counter-­Reformation as a purely reactive phenomenon? For this reason, the great historian of the Council of Trent, Hubert Jedin, has advocated replacing the designation ‘Counter-­Reformation’ with the two terms ‘Catholic reform and Counter-­ Reformation’, and his suggestion has been widely adopted. After the Second World War, the search for the causes of the ‘German catastrophe’ occupied the foreground of historians’ attention. It seemed as though the history of the Reformation had little to offer on that topic; hence this circumstance can be blamed for the low degree of interest in the Reformation in general historic scholarship in postwar Germany. Historians’ lack of interest indirectly contributed to more theological explanations of the Reformation.65 In the 1960s, the nuanced picture of late medieval culture that had been achieved by historical research was gradually received in church history—­by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga for example, and by the generations of German medievalists influenced by Hermann Heimpel, Gerd Tellenbach, and Gerhard Ritter. The awareness that the negative image of the late Middle Ages as a decadent period was problematic, indeed untenable, progressively gained acceptance. The Catholic historian Johannes Janssen, who took a stand against the marginalization of Catholicism in the Kulturkampf, the German debate on secularization of the 1870s, wrote an imposing, thoroughly researched, eight-­volume History of the German People after the Close of the Middle Ages which contributed significantly to changing the image of the prehistory of the Reformation among historians. So too did the scholarly and provocative works of the Austrian church historians Henry Denifle and Hartmann Grisar, who interpreted Luther in the light of a nuanced view of the late scholastic currents of theology. The Dutch church historian Heiko Augustinus Oberman66 subsequently studied the theological prehistory of the Reformation more closely than

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had been done before. Moreover, his perspective on Luther and the other reformers also saw them in relation to the Renaissance. In contrast to the traditions of German scholarship in which research on Renaissance and the Reformation had mainly placed them in competition as to which had contributed more to the modern era, Oberman made productive use of the English-­language literature on Renaissance humanism, some of whose most prominent authors were refugees from the Third Reich. Oberman brought together research on scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation to lay the foundations for an integrative view of the era. He went on to interweave the interest in the devotio moderna, the late medieval movement of piety and reform, with interest in the Nominalist current of scholasticism, the via moderna. This shed new light on Luther too, who had been educated in the ways of the via moderna at the University of Erfurt. Oberman’s Luther was a man with deep roots in medieval tradition. Although his approach has drawn some objections—­from the Tübingen school of Hanns Rückert and Gerhard Ebeling, for example—­Oberman made a crucial contribution to embedding Luther in the devotional and theological context of his time. Another significant innovative thrust of Reformation history in the 1960s, that of Bernd Moeller,67 was likewise grounded in a re-­evaluation of the late Middle Ages, but referred less to theology than to cultural and legal phenomena, especially urban ones: the bourgeois self-­image of the urban protagonists and the social regulations. Moeller made observations on the religious vitality of urban societies in the late Middle Ages, with their rich endowments and pilgrimage sites and an abundance of devout practices. The fact that the cities were the first to adopt the Reformation was now seen as closely connected with the cooperative attitudes of the late medieval urban societies, which were interpreted as corpora christiana on a microscopic scale. This rang in a period of productive and controversial research activity during which social history perspectives were introduced into the history of the Reformation. Research gradually moved from the urban sphere to the rural society, where similar correlations were found between communitarian mentalities and the adoption of the Reformation. There was intensified interest in the broader social influence of Reformation literature—­that is, the vernacular handbills and pamphlets. The opening of Reformation research to social history and the attention to mass publications directed at the ‘common man’ provoked and stimulated scholarly exchange between church and other historians in East and West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.

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The work of Robert Scribner68 yielded highly productive ideas on early modern publishing and on the role of images in communication processes during the Reformation: an interest in the symbolic world and the economics of salvation of the age as the context in which the reformers’ actions must be interpreted; greater attention to the role of sensual modes of perceptions during the establishment of the Reformation; the significance of physicality, rituals, surviving magical practices, deviant concepts of social interaction which were unable to effect change in the sixteenth century—­ all of these are topics and questions for a history from multiple perspectives which have thwarted the traditional focus on the Reformation as a history of progress and success, and many questions are still unanswered. Historical research on the Reformation was particularly affected by the end of the Cold War and the Fall of the Iron Curtain, since a German-­ German competition in interpreting the Reformation had fuelled scholarly work on that era. The ‘Luther Year’ of 1983 gave another strong boost to public interest in the sixteenth century. In the East, it was celebrated as a state occasion of the separate socialist Germany; in the West, it was observed with the admonitory remembrance of a common German history, and linked—­in view of the instrumentalizations of Luther in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—­to a commitment to historic awareness. In retrospect, the unveiling of the world’s largest oil painting—­Werner Tübke’s monumental panorama of the Peasants’ War in Frankenhausen—­in the Müntzer Year 1989, which was celebrated as a pompous occasion only in East Germany, seems like the handwriting on the wall presaging the demise of the East German state a few months later.

Current Research Challenges If we are to summarize the debates and research trends on the history of the Reformation since the fall of the Soviet bloc—­in the last three decades, that is—­we must begin by stating that they have been more disparate, showing less thematic coherence and methodological concentration, than earlier discussions. Moreover, research on the Reformation has taken on an inter­ nation­al character, and the chronological context has changed markedly. Issues concerning the theological history have remained central primarily to church historians of all countries. For general historians, however, the history of religion, as opposed to the history of a given church, has become a field of intense activity. Microhistory and cultural anthropology have

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g­ enerally been important approaches to this field; macrohistoric perspectives and questions, such as the significance of the Reformation for the history of nation-­states, the evolution of education, and the emergence of tolerance, have rarely been involved in such research. The research concept of confessionalization shifted the focus onto the later sixteenth and the seventeenth century, which had been notoriously neglected by traditional Reformation research, and became the dominant framework of interpretation after the German reunification. The historians Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard69 found that the early modern territorial states in which the officially recognized variety of Christian religion—­Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism, or Roman Catholicism—­ served as a social bond and an obligatory regulator of the subjects’ lives, played a longer-­lasting and more permanent role in shaping the modern era than the relatively brief revolutionary phase of the early Reformation. This research current, which was very influential for a time, made the Reformation itself subordinate in historic significance to the ‘age of confessions’, which brought forth comparable structures and instruments of education, social discipline, and religious orientation in all three denominations. For about two decades, the concept of confessionalization remained dominant primarily in the German research discourse, and brought with it a reorganization of the boundaries between historic periods. The changes in this regard reflected trends which were already common outside Germany. The age of the Reformation, firmly established in German his­torio­graph­ ic­al tradition since Ranke, was now qualified by insertion in an early modern period, which was situated between the Middle Ages and the modern era. Consequently, the Reformation and the age of confessions were interpreted as two stages in this extended, transitional early modern period. In comparison with the older Protestant tradition, Luther and the Reformation were thus relieved of the task of inaugurating the modern era. A decline in the importance of the Reformation was thus inevitable in relation to the field of history as a whole. In British and American research too, the period concepts of European history gradually took priority from the 1980s on, situating the Reformation in a broader band of time between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century—­more precisely, between the late Middle Ages and the Thirty Years’ War. This development was caused in part by the strong influence that Oberman had in the United States. His insistence on the outstanding importance of the late Middle Ages for the interpretation of the Reformation

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made it seem unreasonable to characterize the Reformation as a historic turning point. At the same time, the emphasis on historic periods was in keeping with a non-­denominational—­or transdenominational—­approach to the age which was natural in the context of religious culture in the United States. In an era lasting from 1400 to about 1650, the many different innovations and upheavals in Catholicism and in Protestantism could be treated as autonomous transformations of Latin Christianity, thus as individual reformations. The confessions thus accounted for could include the numerous Reformed, Lutheran, radical-­Reformation, Anabaptist, and non-­ denominational varieties of evangelical Christianity. At the same time, the concept of the long reformations permitted a study of very different, microhistorically analysed phenomena in the European history of religion which were no longer determined by the master narrative of a uniform starting point and certain canonical objects, issues and protagonists. A disadvantage of this approach, especially in the German-­ speaking countries, was that it went against the cultural and his­torio­graph­ ic­ al expectations associated with the concept of the Reformation. A religious and cultural history of Europe from 1400 to 1800 can certainly form the background and the frame of a history of the Reformation—­but it cannot replace the history of the Reformation. Thus the changes in the political map since 1989 have had great effects on the history of the Reformation.70 In many respects, the picture of the Reformation is now less uniform, more diffuse, and more open than ever. The continuing internationalization of research, accompanied by an Anglicization of published findings, has led overall to a dissolution of ‘the’ Reformation as a relatively uniform, historically coherent topic. In the internationally very successful book by the English church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, the title The Reformation refers to a broad-­based religious and cultural history of Europe between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries.71 Since 1989, the Marxist interpretative concept of the ‘early bourgeois revolution’ has been relegated to the archives as an object of the history of scholarship. At the same time, research on the history of the Reformation has gained in intensity in various Eastern European countries, especially Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia. Older traditions of national history have been evaluated, and processes of political, cultural and religious interaction in the multi-­denominational societies of the sixteenth century have been analysed. Scandinavian church historians have laid the Luther

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Renaissance to rest and, in analogy with or in a continuation of confessionalization studies, have investigated the importance of rulers and the development of dominion for the various processes of reformation. In northern and Eastern Europe, the reconstruction of the historic identities and spaces of movement which had become invisible behind the Iron Curtain, especially in the Baltic region, have become a prominent issue in research on the cultural and religious developments of the early modern period. Recent research in Italy on the Reformation—­the opening of the Vatican archives having made new sources accessible—­has encouraged interest in the Inquisition tribunals and their relations with the Holy Office in add­ ition to the interest in the heretics. In the Spanish historiography of the Reformation, the study of Spain’s politically successful state Catholicism has been supplanted by the study of popular religion and of the relation between clergy and laity. Regional differences in the influence of the Spanish Inquisition have also been revealed. Overall, ‘Catholic Spain’ appears less monolithic today than before. Reformation research on France has also intensively addressed popular piety, the political consequences of the Reformation for individual cities, and the effects of the Reformation on women, families, and specific social groups. The wars of religion, traditionally an important issue, have remained so; French research has been rather hesitant to associate the interest in religion stimulated by cultural anthropology with questions of its political dimensions. Research on the Reformation in the Netherlands and Belgium too has been dominated recently by a perspective focused on local particularities which hardly permits a uniform historical narrative of ‘the’ Reformation. In contrast to the older portrayals of the history of the Reformation in Great Britain, which pivoted mainly on the actions of the monarch and parliament, placing the protagonists’ political considerations in the foreground, the newer research has tended to emphasize the intrinsic im­port­ ance of religion. The same tendency can be seen in studies on Catholicism in different European processes of reformation. It seems that religion has returned as a fundamental and centrally important, autonomous force in, with, and among many different political, social, economic, and cultural factors not only in the society of our age, but also in the historiography of the Reformation.

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6 The Reformation and the Present An Appraisal

6.1. Time Accelerated: A Change or an Apocalypse?

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he syndrome of events which we call the Reformation was evaluated in very different ways by those who lived through it. The high point in the intensity and concentration of the events in the 1520s is related to the dizzy­ing pace of the changes and the acuity of the conflicts in which the people had been caught up. In Protestant histories, these experiences of change are often placed in the context of a salvation history by phrasings such as the following: ‘But when the Almighty Merciful God by singular gracious provi­dence saved our common Fatherland from the treacherous darkness of the papacy by the splendour of His divine word, rekindled by him and shining brightly in Germany. . . . ’1 Similarly, the historiographical concept of the Reformation as a historic period sui generis, a concept current in German Lutheranism since the late sixteenth century, is at bottom a consequence of the salvation history in which God brought about a radical turning point in the history of the church by means of Luther and his successors and followers. More than a few contemporaries of the reformers had the feeling of ­living in a world of accelerating change. Luther himself, for example, found that he had begun ‘demolishing Heaven and consuming the earth with fire’ with his criticism of indulgence.2 Johann Cochlaeus, Luther’s sinister biographer, driven by deep-­seated enmity but exceptionally knowledgeable on

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his subject, shaped the Catholic image of Luther for centuries to come by writing in the late 1540s that by Luther’s ‘rebellious and seditious urging so many thousands of people have perished eternally, in both body and soul’, and that through him ‘all Germany was confused and disturbed’.3 According to Cochlaeus, the Holy Roman Empire was in utter disarray and shrank back even from the idea of an ecumenical council which would eliminate discord. The Wittenberg theologians had caused ‘heresy and crime almost in all of Saxony, Pomerania, Denmark, Sweden and Norway’.4 ‘Abbeys, endowments, churches and even cathedrals (after the Mass and the ca­non­ ic­al prayers have been not only abandoned, but also hindered and prohibited by public violence)’5 were destroyed, emptied, debased; the sacred buildings no longer rang with venerable rites and ancient celebrations. Even at the beginning of the Reformation movement, followers and opponents agreed that they were witnessing a prodigious, fully unprecedented revolution. To Hieronymus Emser, the court theologian of George the Bearded at Dresden, Luther was the most nefarious heretic the church had seen in a thousand years. The Alsatian Franciscan friar and man of letters Thomas Murner saw Luther as nothing but an agitator comparable to Catiline, the conspirator defeated by Cicero’s rhetoric. Meanwhile Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich and Katharina Zell in Strasbourg praised Luther as the greatest scriptural exegete in thousand years—­that is, since the era of the Church Fathers. And when Albrecht Dürer heard of Luther’s abduction soon after the Diet of Worms, he wrote in his journal: ‘And if we lose this man, who has written more clearly than anyone in a hundred and forty years, and to whom Thou hast given such an evangelic spirit, we pray Thee, O Heavenly Father, that Thou give again Thy spirit to another’.6 Similarly fundamental sentiments moved the anonymous supporter of the Reformation who in 1524 sent a request to a citizen of Constance to compile ‘a chronicle of these curious events occurring in our times, changing almost everything on earth, ­particularly doctrine and worship, which are well worth writing for our posterity’.7 For the people who experienced the Reformation, who suffered and fought for it, there was no doubt that the most fundamental changes had taken place, and ‘almost a new age’ (fere novum saeculum)8 had begun. For most contemporaries, however, the awareness that they were ­witnessing rapid change implied not the beginning of a new time, but the end of time. The wave of desertion of the monasteries which began in 1522

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seemed to many followers of the ‘old faith’ to be the fulfilment of an apocalyptic prophecy from the New Testament: ‘He who was a wolf now becomes [on leaving the monastery] a dragon spitting infernal fire . . . as God spake in the Gospel, grievous wolves shall enter in among you (Acts 20:29) . . . and all things are turned upside down in the new faith. Therefore we pray God and Mary mother of God and all God’s saints that they not let us die then in the holy Christian faith.’9 The Bible’s apocalyptic view of the world was ubiquitous in the media of the late Middle Ages—­in painted and printed images, in spoken and printed sermons—­as a menacing stimulus to zealous strategies of securing redemption, such as endowments, pilgrimages, and indulgences. For Christ had taught his followers to watch the ‘signs of the times’ (Matthew 16:3) and announced that a time would come when there would ‘not be left here one stone upon another’ (Matthew 24:2). Was this not what was happening now, in their own present day, as priests broke their vows and married, Jews converted to the Christian faith, monks abandoned their abbeys, women prophesied publicly, young men and old had dreams and visions (Joel 2:28–32; Acts 2:17–21)? As the ‘common man’ rebelled, the clergy, far from being indispensable, was deposed and trodden in the dust, and the Holy Father in Rome was revealed an Antichrist sitting in the temple of God (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4; Daniel 11:36); as cosmological anomalies appeared, proclaimed in burgeoning astrological publications, and the eschatological powers of chaos, Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38–9), swept across Europe like a scourge of God in the form of murdering and burning Ottomans? This blaze of apocalyptic interpretations of world events was fanned most of all by the new means of communication, which stirred up people’s thoughts and feelings, and no doubt gradually changed them. Never before had so many reports from distant parts of the globe crowded into the perception of Europeans as in the early sixteenth century. They read about newly discovered lands populated by monstrous creatures, conquests of the indefatigable and invincible Turks, man-­eaters, mysterious Jewish armies setting out for Palestine, birth defects, tempests, plagues, hordes of locusts, comets, and all kinds of events ‘reported’ in handbills and pamphlets, ­disseminated and marketed as threatening signs of a wrathful God, often couched in admonitions to repent. Although there were no doubt few literate people outside the cities, people were exposed to infinitely more information in the age of the printing press, a revolutionary technology for mass-­producing books, pamphlets and ‘newspapers’.

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The apocalyptic view of the world and history, deeply entrenched in the Christian tradition, presented one way for people to channel the oppressive and disturbing flood of information and to assimilate it meaningfully in relation to their own lives. The task at hand, in view of all the ‘signs of the times’ by which God was presaging the impending end, was for each Christian to repent and be ready when his or her time should come. The Roman church’s tremendous offer of salvation had served this purpose; so too did the faith now taught by the reformers. The Reformation was able to prevail only because it offered plausible relief for the people’s cares and wants in the end times. The Reformation was the first religious movement since the invention of the printing press to make full and unreserved use of the new medium. And Luther was the first condemned heretic who owed his survival to the printed word. The fundamental fact that prohibited ideas, once they had been printed, could not be removed from the world, and were able to change it—­all attempts at repression notwithstanding—­was amply demonstrated in the Reformation. Without Gutenberg’s invention, Luther would not have been possible, but without Luther’s rhetorical force, the history-­making potential of the printing press would not have been discovered so soon. Thus the Reformation’s ‘modernity’ was at bottom the experience of two generations’ continuous use of the print medium. The most important achievement of book publishing in the early Reformation was its enormous acceleration; this was accompanied by the growing rate of image production in the Cranachs’ workshop. In the course of a year—­the year of the papal judgement of heresy, 1520—the Wittenberg reformers achieved increases in the amounts of books produced and in the speed with which they were published. This not only increased the printers’ profits and potential investments, but also the range of distribution of printed texts. These innovations created the logistical conditions for the publication of  the first Wittenberg Bible in 1522. The pluck, adventurousness, and increasing virtuosity with which primarily Luther, but also the other reformers exploited the potential of printing ensured their success. In contrast to the representatives of the Roman church, who had reservations about discussing theo­logic­al questions in front of a lay audience and in the vernacular, the reformers were willing to include all Christians in their teachings and their disputes. The intense phase of reformation processes in the individual cities and countries generally began with a rapid pace of events. The reformers intended

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to show their supporters as well as their opponents that a fundamental change was taking place. And since the ‘souls’ salvation’ was at stake—­which, it was generally believed, would be endangered by the ‘wrong’ worship—­a cautious, adaptive behaviour was out of the question for all those who took religion seriously. However, certain changes that occurred early in the Reformation process, some of which were revolutionary in character, were reversed again as the secular authorities and their theological associates, the reformers, dom­ in­ated the field. Lay protagonists, including women preachers who may have played a part in the initial phases of the urban reformation processes in particular, were pushed back into the background. The patriarchal gender order, having been enthusiastically challenged with reference to Galatians 3:26–8, was restored. Spontaneous attacks on church ornaments and symbols of clerical rule were now unwelcome; undisciplined printing was brought under control by censorship measures. The freedoms granted to the Jews seem to have been rapidly restricted and reverted to the status quo ante. The years of upheaval were followed—­in the empire, after the Peasants’ War if not earlier—­by a phase of establishment in which church ordinances were drafted, institutions founded, and mechanisms of control by the secular authorities, mediated by pastors and parishes, were created and implemented. Parts of canon law, which Luther had demonstratively burnt, were reinstated. As the Reformation was adopted by the states, it became a force of restoration. After a phase of accelerated change, the pace slowed; order soon became dominant once again.

6.2. Impact on the Modern West In regard to the long-­term consequences of the Reformation in world history, it is helpful to distinguish between direct and indirect or primary and secondary consequences. The classical Protestant master narrative of a modern age born of the Reformation does not do justice to the complexity of the processes of transformation from the sixteenth century on, nor to the dynamics of the late Middle Ages. Numerous cultural, social, political, philo­logic­al, economic, scientific, and even climatic factors allowed the Europe of nation states to develop out of the Latin European corpus Christianum, a unity of diverse national Catholicisms with its own inherent tensions which had been gathered under the Roman pope and integrated

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by canon law. The Reformation has unfolded its direct and the indirect consequences in a var­iety of processes, some of them extending over long periods. In this way the Reformation has made its contribution to the rise of that civilization commonly designated as the modern West.

Confessional Cultures and the Role of the Laity A primary consequence of the Reformation was the formation of Protestant confessional cultures: that is, relatively uniform structures of doctrine, confession, organizational structure, forms of worship, and lifestyles motivated by and integrated with religion, in the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican communities respectively. The confessional cultures did not shape all areas of life with the same intensity or totality. Science, law, art, and literature were able to develop in relative independence of religion in the Protestant parts of Europe. However, in education and teaching, the work ethic, and marriage and family life, the Protestant confessional cultures transported a conservatively norming image of society and the individual which was orient­ed after the Bible and the given catechism. For the Lutherans, the traditional structure of the society of estates (secular rulers, clergy, labourers) reflected the order of biblical Creation. For the most part, the Protestant confessional cultures stabilized the locally established political order; yet in the Reformed tradition, among the French republicans and the radical Puritans in the British Isles, the confessional forces also unfolded potentials for political defiance. As a media event, the Reformation had certain consequences with unforeseeable ramifications, since it stimulated vernacular text production and printing in every European country it reached. In some national languages, the first texts ever printed were biblical or catechism texts written or translated in the course of the Reformation. Examples include the Finnish translations by Mikael Agricola, the Slovenian translations by Primož Trubar, and the Croatian translations by Matthias Flacius. The ability to read the Bible, or hear it read, in one’s own native ­language, to take an interest in the individual liturgical acts thanks to vernacular ­worship services, and in Christian teaching through vernacular sermons, and the more intense emotional participation and communal connection through singing in the local language changed first Protestant Europe, then indirectly, gradually, all of Latin Europe. For now the people were able, eager, and expected to understand what was contained in the sacred traditions of

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Christianity. Participation made religious subjects of the people who had previously been mere objects of sacramental pastoring. The religious increase in the value of vernacular languages was also a significant force driving the rise of national literatures. The Europe of linguistic diversity is also a consequence of the Reformation. In all confessions there were soon intensive efforts to communicate the authentic core tenets of the Christian faith in the form of catechism. The competition was good for business. The numerous Reformation catechisms that were written from the 1520s on had a stimulating effect. As the vernacular languages—­ ­ driven by the Reformation—­ became usable for ­religious matters, the promotion of literacy and primary and secondary schooling also took on a religious importance. The educational growth of Protestant Europe which was thus induced—­and which began to make itself felt in the second half of the sixteenth century, provoking counter-­ measures by the Catholic orders—­contributed significantly to the idea that everyone should be expected to have a minimum of education, not only scholarly, administrative, and religious elites as in Eastern Europe or in other world cultures. The fact that the central doctrines and traditions of Christianity, in the form of compact, confession-­specific compendia, became mandatory curriculum throughout Europe also brought with it the possibility of dis­soci­ ation and rejection of Christianity—­of criticizing religion, a development which seems to have few parallels in other cultures. The criticism of religion had its roots in the scholarly scepticism of certain Renaissance humanists, and was rapidly suppressed by Inquisitional and disciplinary means, but continued to grow stronger in the course of the seventeenth century. One pioneering critic was Baruch de Spinoza. In the age of the Enlightenment, criticism of religion and the Bible broke out at all levels of society. Since then, they have been an integral part of the history of religion in the West. Compared with the church tradition, the Reformation brought with it a significant potential for conflict. Drawing on the historic and philological methods of humanism, supporters of the Reformation made many efforts to elucidate the textual foundations of theological judgement; they learned the original languages of the Bible in order to study not only the biblical texts, but also other sources of Jewish, Christian, and pagan tradition. Hence the Reformation itself contains the beginnings of a historic, critical approach to some traditional texts. Luther himself was able to opine candidly on texts which had little theological importance to him. The Reformation

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camp encompassed a broad spectrum of biblical her­men­eut­ics, and has ­continued to do so. Because the Reformation made the Bible the only authority recognized as infallible, the burden of importance attached to its interpretation were great. Keen minds such as Sebastian Franck berated the ‘bibliocracy’, the rule of the ‘paper pope’, and called attention to the ambivalence inherent in the Reformation principle of the primacy of scripture. For as effective as the scripture principle may have been in refuting ‘unbiblical’ dogmas of the Roman church, it was difficult to wield in view of diverging interpretations. In contrast to the reformers’ intent and practice, the scriptural principle had the effect of relativizing exegetically grounded claims to religious truth: this might encourage indifference or tolerance, doubt or broad-­mindedness. Such developments towards aloofness or even apostasy were of course unintended; the reformers’ aim was a renewal and a consolidation of Christianity. Thus it was not the Reformation as such but the concomitant pluralization of Latin European Christianity and competition between confessions which encouraged secularist, laicist, and atheistic tendencies. The present-­day image of Latin Europe’s religious culture, which appears extraordinarily secular in comparison with the rest of the world, is in part the result of long-­term developments set in motion by the Reformation. The use of vernacular languages brought with it the ability and the duty to participate in religious knowledge, and in the history of Protestantism this has led repeatedly to lay people—­Christians who hold no clerical office—­taking on active roles in their church and community. In some church ordinances in Lutheran cities, the participation of the lay political officials in the selection and appointment of pastors was obligatory. Reformed Protestantism provided for a very strong element of lay participation in the office of elders and in the synods. The English Puritans tried autonomous models of leadership in which congregations were independent of higher church authorities. The phenomenon of lay prophecy, which was a right acknowledged in principle by learned theologians, was widespread in Lutheranism during the age of confessions. From the mid-­seventeenth century on, the religious movement of Pietism had striven for intensive participation of the laity in Lutheranism in direct reference to the Reformation. Pietism offered women and members of the lower estates opportunities for expression which they would never have had outside protected religious spaces. It is reasonable to see in all of these phenomena an emancipatory potential with long-­term effects on social history.

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In his pamphlet To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in the s­ummer of 1520, Luther had undertaken a revolutionary suspension of the religious and political differences between the clergy and the laity. That did not imply that there should no longer be any authoritative office to proclaim the Word and administer the sacraments. However, the qualification for that office was not a consecration; its holder was not ‘untouchable’ or set above and apart from the social life-­world of the congregation. As a husband and father, an evangelical pastor had an elementary involvement in the same experiences that shaped the lives of his ‘flock’. Protestantism, in its many different forms, broke definitively with Roman Catholic sexual morality. As the hierarchical distinction between clergy and laity became obsolete, so too did the model of a two-­tiered ethics in which the celibacy of priests and nuns was the higher form. By his married lifestyle, the Protestant pastor acknowledged sexuality as a part of his nature as God’s creation, to be ordered through the God-­given institution of marriage. Extramarital sex was strictly condemned for centuries in Protestantism as well. But because marriage was not considered a sacrament, divorce was simpler, in principle, in Protestantism than in the Roman Catholic world. Theological insights made it self-­evident that it was possible for a human life project to fail. The pastor’s wife held a quasi-­official position in the public sphere. She managed the household and the exemplary Christian lifestyle of the pastor’s usually numerous family. More than in other bourgeois professions, the pastor’s wife participated in her husband’s calling, teaching girls or leading community circles. To that extent, she was an early embodiment of the professional woman under the conditions of the patriarchal order. The parsonage maintained by the pastor’s wife became a nucleus of bourgeois culture and higher education in Protestant Europe. The great number of leading scholars, artists, scientists, and politicians who were raised in such houses bears witness that the stimulations as well as the challenges of life in the pastor’s family were productive—­both in emulation and in rebellion. In regard to the fine arts, we may wonder whether the Reformation did not contribute indirectly to their autonomy. The fact that images could no longer be objects of veneration, no longer had any liturgical function, made it possible to contemplate them for their own sake. The rapid development of art and the art market in the Reformed Netherlands was aimed primarily at satisfying a very private, aesthetic joy in works of art

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without any religious context. This may have been one of the unintended effects of the Reformation. The protagonists of the Lutheran Reformation had a different relation to images than the Reformed churches. From about the 1660s on—­after a cautious transitional phase during which images were often removed from churches in the Lutheran regions as well—­pictures came to be understood primarily as a medium for visualizing the biblical Word. Lutheranism therefore proved particularly productive not only in the field of Bible illustrations in printed books, but also in altar retables (often bearing paintings of the Last Supper) and on the parapets of church galleries, which served as mnemonic aids to the Sunday Gospel passages. In several Lutheran territories, however, the traditional church imagery was retained. No other confession in Germany has conserved as much medieval art as the Lutheran churches. At the same time, Lutheranism was open to baroque aesthetic enjoyment, and updated church interiors in many places. The Lutheran confessional culture became a home to many artists, although it was on the whole more verbally than pictorially oriented, and brought forth its most mature artistic fruits in the religious poetry of Paul Gerhardt and in the cantata com­pos­ itions of Johann Sebastian Bach. Each of the two major Protestant confessions fostered the arts in its own way, and probably contributed to their independence from religion.

Economics and Law It is not easy to identify the consequences the Reformation in regard to economic development. The question raised by Max Weber whether there is a causal connection between the religious mentality of Reformed Protestantism (Calvinism) and a capitalistic economic disposition rarely draws a positive answer any more from the pertinent research. One reason is because the Reformed churches are understood as a phenomenon which developed differently in different historical contexts. Moreover, Weber probably overestimated the importance of the doctrine of predestination, or the believer’s assurance of salvation on the grounds of his success in life and business—­the syllogismus practicus. Furthermore, there was a certain consensus among the reformers of both Protestant confessions that property implied a social responsibility. An unbridled accumulation of capital for its own sake can hardly be justified by appealing to the reformers’ economic notions. Luther’s sceptical attitude towards the mercantile capitalism of his

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time had a lasting influence in some Lutheran contexts. The urban bourgeois character of the Reformed societies of Switzerland and the Netherlands was probably more amenable on the whole to the development of a capitalist economy. One direct economic consequence of the Reformation was simply the result of the drastic reduction in holidays: in the Reformed churches, the saints’ feast days were discarded altogether; in Lutheranism, only the apostles’ and the evangelists’ feast days were retained, but observed as a rule on the following Sunday rather than constituting an additional holiday. Furthermore, because the fundamental distinction between the clerical and secular estates had been abolished, work in secular occupations took on a higher value: activity in one’s worldly profession was now regarded as a ‘vocation’, as the one place where one could prove one’s worth and prac­ tic­al­ly serve God. In Reformed territories, monasteries in the traditional sense were completely dissolved. In Lutheranism, a number of women’s convents were conserved as Protestant ladies’ endowments, or a kind of pension institution of the lower nobility. They were generally headed by well-­born Protestant abbesses. Although some of these institutions adapted vows or other elem­ ents of the monastic tradition, and placed value on education, they differed from medieval convents in that they were not strictly cloistered and it was possible to leave them. Since they were no more than a marginal phenomenon, they cannot serve as an indication that monastic contemplation continued to have prestige in Protestantism. On the whole, not meditation, but work in a secular occupation was considered the duty of a Christian. It is possible that the resulting mentality may have contributed more to industry and restlessness, acquisitiveness and entrepreneurial thinking than a religious culture modelled after the image of the meditative monk and the enraptured nun would have done. The Protestant concept of law was a secular one, founded on rational criteria, and hence universally applicable. By burning the codex of canon law, Luther had rejected the idea of a separate clerical division of law: his central distinction between law and Gospel was conducive to the development of an autonomous secular law, free of religious obligations. Nonetheless, leaving aside the question of a genetic relationship, connections can be traced between Protestant themes and modern legal concepts. For example, it is central to the Lutheran doctrine of justification that a person is defined not by his works, but by his relation to God, called ‘faith’. It would not be

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unreasonable to see an analogy between this and the idea of an unalienable human dignity which is independent of quality and merit. While Luther in his concept of two kingdoms propounded the belief that the truly faithful needs no law in the scope of Christ’s kingdom, and that the worldly kingdom is to be ruled by coercive means, Melanchthon, drawing on the Aristotelian theory of natural law, held the Ten Commandments, as a revealed divine law, to be equivalent to ius naturae or natural law. Hence ­ethics and law were closely linked. The responsibility of the secular authorities was to enforce moral behaviour and the observance of religious duties—­in accordance with the first five Commandments. These legal notions determined the structure of the Protestant territorial state. The potentials of Luther’s two-­kingdoms doctrine—­as a foundation for freedoms of belief and conscience, for example—­were realized rather by the Dissenters than by members of the paleo-­Protestant orthodoxy. The legal scholar Georg Jellinek also ascribed great importance in the articulation of human rights to representatives of the ‘left wing’ of the Reformation who were marginalized and persecuted in Europe. The earliest codifications of such rights in seventeenth-­century English legal texts, and in the constitution of the State of Virginia of 1776, are embedded in a context indirectly influenced by the Reformation.

Rationalism and Individualism It is a commonplace in the interpretation of the relationship between the Reformation and the modern world that the idea of rationalism and the consciousness of individuality are inherent and fundamental in Protestantism. By limiting the number and the significance of the sacraments, Protestantism took the magic out of the world, according to Max Weber’s thesis, suppressing magical practices and hence contributing to greater rationalism in the perception of the world, and indirectly to secularization in the sense of a general decline in religious approaches to its interpretation. This position claims for Protestantism a particular modernity, and yet is based on a one-­ dimensional conception of Protestantism. Lutheranism in particular carries in it a wealth of ‘irrational’ impulses: soothsaying angels, miraculous fountains, ‘blood bibles’ as holy talismans, visionaries, and prophets filled with the Spirit, devotional practices connected with the material remains—­ relics—­of Luther, archaic, pre-­Christian rituals such as the burial of living things to protect the dikes, unbridled belief in witchcraft and demons,

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and more. To consider the irrational, magical, and superstitious an exclusive preserve of Catholicism mainly reproduces a denominational stereotype of the Protestant Enlightenment. If scholars in Protestant countries found more freedom for research and publication, credit must be given mainly to the secular authorities, since the Protestant churches had no censorship privileges. Although the sacraments had been reduced to baptism and the Eucharist, the religious world of the Protestants was by no means ‘desacramentalized’. The Eucharist was celebrated more seldom—­only four times a year as a rule in the Reformed territories—­but then it was combined with discipline and preparations for worthy reception which tended to lead to a more elaborate celebration and more conscientious sanctification. Baptism too was taken very seriously by both Protestant confessions. Unworthy godparents were subjected to severe disciplinary measures. Magical notions may have existed in connection with infant baptism in particular, but its central purpose was to communicate the divine affirmation of redemption and the human assurance of community. Lutherans and Reformed Protestants alike no doubt believed there was some connection between God’s action and the effect of  the sacraments. There was an aura of magic about the sacrament for Protestants no less than for Catholics. We will hardly be able to say definitively to what extent the roots of modern individualism reach back to the Reformation. It is clear, however, that both Pietists and philosophers of subjectivity, such as Fichte and Hegel, drew connections to the Reformation, hence situating themselves in the reception history of Luther in particular. Nor can we deny that centring the relationship with God on personal, immediate faith compromises the absolute importance of the church as the redeeming institution. Once scripture, or the preached and written word, had become the critical medium of the encounter with God, only a secondary importance could be ascribed to the Church with its sacraments and its outward ritual. Luther himself did not draw these conclusions; in fact, he fought them. Nevertheless, they followed from his theological approach. Because salvation depends, for Protestant Christians, on the word and faith, the congregation itself is less important. The notion that it is possible to be a Christian all alone, so to speak, or in a small group, and that no ecclesiastical institution is necessary; that a person can just as well be close to God in the forest; that a person can be true to Christianity and at the same time aloof from the church—­a notion disseminated in Protestantism

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from the seventeenth century on—­ has been fostered in part by the devotional writings of Johann Arndt (1555–1621) and by a number of ­ Pietists. In the Roman Catholicism of the time, too, there were active forms of highly individualized, sometimes mystically inspired piety. Some Protestants were still more radical in following this concept, however. The individualization of religious culture—­the weakened ties to the institution of the church as a characteristic of the modern Western world—­is another of the unintended effects of the Reformation. In sum, the Reformation in its multifarious manifestations influenced, encouraged, and accelerated the developments leading to what is now called the modern West in many different ways. Nevertheless, the Reformation did not produce modern Western civilization, neither by itself nor as a major influence, any more than any other factor. The Western modern world is the result of a very complex process of transformation—­certainly one which would have taken a different course if the Reformation had not happened.

6.3. Global Protestantism From the sixteenth century on, Protestantism spread to the world beyond Europe. The Reformation today is therefore a topic which concerns more than Europe and the United States, where much of the population have a Protestant background as a result of complex migration processes. The Reformation is part of the process of historic self-­understanding of numerous Protestant churches and congregations in a globally growing, increasingly pluralistic Protestant religious culture. This culture encompasses an enormous diversity of confessions and denominations, and a vast spectrum of organizational forms: from the Danish state church to the Episcopalianism of the Anglican High Church to the spiritual immediacy of Quakerism; from congregations which practise the ordination of women to those which condemn it. The spectrum of approaches to Bible hermeneutics too—­from historic criticism to verbal inspiration—­is very broad, as is the range of political beliefs—­from the legitimation of repressive regimes by the ideology of dominion to revolutionary options of liberation theology. Diversified in incalculable ways, global Protestantism10 has roots, however broken or indirect they may be, in the history of Latin European Christianity and the conflicts concerning the Augustinian monk Martin Luther of Wittenberg.

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Nonetheless, to think of the historic connection with the Reformation as normative would do justice neither to Protestantism per se nor to its many different manifestations. In many Protestant churches around the world, the recognized confessional texts are descended from the Swiss, Dutch, or German history of the Reformation, and the major denominations—­ such as the Lutheran World Federation and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches—­represent doctrinal positions which are, for the most part, mutually accepted by their member churches. Yet it is part of the nature of Protestantism to interpret the concrete meaning of a doctrinal statement in regard to the current situation, and thus to continue transforming the heritage of the Reformation in appropriate, contemporary ways. There are no supreme doctrinal authorities which could expound the significance to be ascribed today to the Reformation or to specific Reformation doctrines. Protestants are as a rule unanimous in rejecting the principle of such a magisterium—­that is, in rejecting a church comparable to the Roman Catholic model. Moreover, certain influences of the tradition of the reformers can be discerned, cum grano salis, in very many and perhaps even all of the Protestant churches on all continents. Wherever Protestant congregations or church have formed, they use the Bible in the local languages. It has remained an ambition of Protestantism down to the present to translate the Bible into the languages of all countries on earth. Countless Bible translations have been achieved in the context of Protestant missions—­and many of them have been the first written text in the given language—­and have gone hand in hand with the intention that they proselytized peoples use them: that is, that they learn to read and write. In the global perspective, Protestant Christianity has retained its characteristic inclination to use educational institutions—­creating them where necessary—­to propagate elementary cultural skills and enable people to read the Bible and basic catechistic texts of the Christian faith. The propensity to make higher education possible is also the product of a ‘Calvinistic’ drive—­the oldest and most renowned universities in the United States, Harvard, Princeton, andYale, are Reformed institutions. Arguments which appeal to the Bible have authority in themselves in Protestant communities, regardless of who advances them; in that regard, Protestant biblical Christianity has an egalitarian trait. In addition to the Bible, Protestant Christians all over the world have also drawn orientation in their faith from more concise summaries of Christian doctrine—­ Lutherans from Luther’s Catechism; Reformed Protestants from the Heidelberg

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Catechism. Christians of practically all Protestant congregations find it only natural to sing religious hymns in their native language. Baptism and the Eucharist, with bread and wine for all communicants in keeping with Christ’s institution, are the only sacred acts practised, although the theological understanding of these ritual practices is various and indeed controversial among Protestants. Another shared focal point of the worship service is the sermon or religious lecture, generally held by one or more baptized members of the given Protestant congregation. Protestants are likewise unanimous throughout the world in rejecting religious practices such as indulgences, extreme unction, the veneration of relics, and pilgrimages to the tombs of saints. Although some quasi-­monastic forms of community have been conserved or reactivated in evangelical Christianity, they do not involve binding, lifelong vows. The various ecclesiastical and congregational forms of global Protestantism are the result of long-­term processes of transformation which have also affected attitudes towards Reformation traditions. Interestingly, the role played by denominational differences in the mission field was different than in Europe. European power struggles were sometimes reproduced in conflicts between missions: in the Cape region towards the end of the eighteenth century, for example, a Calvinistic church was displaced by the Church of England as Dutch colonial rule was supplanted by the British. The stream of emigrants landing in America from the early seventeenth century on—­English Puritans, German and Dutch Reformed Protestants, French Huguenots, Scottish Presbyterians, Scandinavian and German Lutherans—­all brought their own national and denominational traditions with them, but entered a wholly different context, completely untouched by the structures of the Middle Ages and the age of confessions. This was generally propitious to mutual tolerance and the awareness of a common Christian responsibility. The non-­state missions of the nineteenth century were often based on an interdenominational concept of Christianity which nonetheless appealed or referred to the Reformation. Moreover, communities and congregations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa which had been founded originally by missionaries from European or US churches or societies assimilated Reformation traditions in autonomous and creative ways in the process of indigenizing their churches. In the debates on the African Independent Churches and in the conflict over apartheid in South Africa, the reformers Luther and Calvin

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were cited by Lutheran and Reformed Christians both as enemies and as propagandists of racism. The German chorales translated into local languages in the course of the German Lutheran missions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are very popular in the independent churches. African and Asian ‘contextual’ theologians have drawn on Luther’s theological concept of freedom. His ‘theology of the Cross’ (theologia crucis), opposed to the ‘theology of glory’ (theologia gloriae) which exalts visible, earthly success,11 developed into specific assimilations and emphases in Japan, as in Africa and Latin America, and serves there as a theological argumentation against a Christianity of ambition and success such as that proclaimed by the Pentecostal movement. Many Lutheran churches in Africa and Asia also continue to use Luther’s Small Catechism, which has been retired as a teaching aid almost everywhere in the Reformation’s German homeland. The indigenous Reformed churches founded in the early twentieth century in Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe voluntarily adopted the orthodox Dutch Reformed Church’s three ‘Formulae of Unity’: the Belgian Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort. Lutheran traditions which have remained vital in the former mission territory of North America exert an influence on the European old country, now perceived as needing missionary attention itself. In fact, secularized Europe has been discovered as a mission field by many young Protestant churches Asia and Africa. In Africa too, the Reformation sometimes serves as a source of pro­duct­ ive and surprising appropriations. Lutheran Christians in Kenya employ an interpretation of Luther’s plague sermon in the fight against the stigmatization of HIV-­positive people. In the liberation movements of the global South, Martin Luther’s name means a great deal. One reason may be that the Black American Baptist preacher Martin King, after a trip to Europe in 1934, was moved by deep religious belief to take Martin Luther’s name as his own—­and that of his son, Martin Luther King, Jr. The new and unforeseen honour which Martin Luther King, Jr, brought to the reformer’s name as a courageous fighter for civil and human rights is one of the most moving aspects of the Reformation’s continuing reception history. Translations of Luther’s and Calvin’s works into many Asian and African languages are a source of new and surprising assimilations and explorations of Reformation traditions. Even in China, the Reformation has a firm place in official textbooks on European history. The Christian mission of

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North American Protestant churches in South Korea, which is not associated with colonialist tendencies and practices, has kindled an unprejudiced, non-­denominational interest in the reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, which has caused much surprise in Europe. The Free Churches too see the Reformation and the central writings of the reformers as their essential points of reference, including the Mennonites, an offshoot of the Anabaptists of the century of the Reformation, the Adventists and Baptists, and the Methodists, whose founder John Wesley was converted by his reading of Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans.12 In the German Free Churches, Luther is revered as a doctor of theology, a Bible translator and an advocate of religious freedom of conscience. In the theological training institutions of global Protestantism, studies of Luther and Calvin are de rigueur—­with growing intensity and increasing self-­confidence. In recent times, numerous Lutheran churches around the world have examined Luther’s abysmal anti-­Semitism and the dire history of its reception, especially in the Third Reich. Sharp denunciations of the theological and ideological premises which led Luther to his condemnation of the Jews have become customary. Luther has long ceased to be an infallible doctor of the church, even in the churches that bear his name. The jubilee traditions of world Protestantism are multifarious: over and above the still state-­dominated commemorative culture of old Europe and especially Germany, the initiative of individual churches brings forth jubilee celebrations of the Reformation, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. The quincentennial of the Reformation in 2017 was celebrated as an oecumenical Christian jubilee of global Protestantism.

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Endnotes

WA = Weimarer Ausgabe CO = Calvini Opera TRE = Theologische Realenzyklopädie CR = Corpus Reformatorum (Melanchthon, Calvin, Zwingli). Zwingli’s complete works (Sämtliche Werke) are vols 88 to 101, and sometimes numbered vol. 1 to n under that title. LW (Luther’s Works) = Helmut T. Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan (eds), Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols. Philadelphia and St. Louis, 1955–86. Holman = Henry Eyster Jacobs (ed.). Philadelphia 1915 (6 vols). DS = Denzinger-­Schönmetzer (ed.), Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. Freiburg, Basel, Rome, and Vienna: Herder, 1997.

Chapter 1 1. WA.TR 2, no. 2800b, p. 669, 12. 2. WA.B 1, no. 146, pp. 331–3. 3. Anselm Schubert, Täufertum und Kabbalah: Augustin Bader und die Grenzen der Radikalen Reformation [QFRG 81], Gütersloh 2008, p. 83. 4. Friedrich Myconius, Geschichte der Reformation, ed. Otto Clemen [Voigtländers Quellenbücher 68], n.d., Leipzig, p. 22; on the following statements, see pp. 30, 38, 43, 50 ff., 56, 60, 63ff. 5. See Nicolas Cop’s inaugural speech as rector of the University of Paris in Calvin-­Studienausgabe, vol. 1: Reformatorische Anfänge (1533–1541) [Beginnings of the Reformation, 1533–1541], part 1/1, ed. Eberhard Busch et al., Neukirchen-­Vluyn 1994, pp. 1–26. 6. Rechtfertigung und Freiheit: 500 Jahre Reformation 2017; Ein Grundlagentext des Rates der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) [Justification and Freedom: The Fifth Centennial of the Reformation in 2017; A Fundamental Text of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany], Gütersloh 2014, pp. 18–19. 7. ‘Frequens generalium conciliorum celebratio, agri dominici praecipua cultura est, quae vepres, spinas et tribulos haeresium, errorum et schismatum exstirpat, excessus corrigit, deformata reformat. . . .’ Decretum Frequens, Sessio XXXIX of the Council of Constance, 9 October 1417; quoted after the edition in Carl

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Mirbt/Kurt Aland, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des römischen Katholizismus [Source Book on the History of the Papacy and Roman Catholicism], vol. 1, Tübingen 1967, no. 768, p. 477. 8. ‘. . . in his quae pertinent ad fidem et exstirpationem dicti schismatis, ac generalem reformationem dictae ecclesiae Dei in capite et membris.’ Decretum Haec sancta, Sessio V, 6 April 1415; quoted in Mirbt/Aland, Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums, no. 767, p. 477. 9. See e.g. Rechtfertigung und Freiheit, p. 23. 10. Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg, Die Emeis, quoted after the excerpt in Ruth Kastner, Quellen zur Reformation 1517–1555, Darmstadt 1994, no. 1, pp. 31–6: pp. 32f. 11. Kastner, Quellen, p. 32. 12. Kastner, Quellen, p. 34. 13. Ibid. 14. Martin Luther,‘Explanations of the Ninety-­Five Theses’, trans. Carl W. Folkemer, in LW 31, 250; WA 1, 627, 27–31. 15. See the references in Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Römisches und evangelisches Jubeljahr: Konfessionskulturelle Deutungsalternativen der Zeit im Jahrhundert der Reformation’ [‘Roman and Protestant JubileeYear:Alternative Interpretations of the Times in Denominational Cultures in the Century of the Reformation’], in Millennium: Deutungen zum christlichen Mythos der Jahrtausendwende [Millennium: Interpretations of the Christian Myth], Gütersloh 1999, pp. 73–136: p. 131 and context. 16. The most systematic application of this usage among recent works is that of Carlos Eire, Reformations. 17. See, most recently, Rublack (ed.), Protestant Reformations. 18. In a letter to Pope Leo X prefaced to his explanations of the Ninety-­Five Theses, Luther wrote in regard to his entering the controversy over indulgence: ‘Ego sane, ut fateor, pro zelo Christi, sicuti mihi videbar aut si ita placet pro iuvenili calore urebar. . . .’ Holman 1, p. 46; WA 1, p. 528, ll. 18f. 19. See Holman 1, p. 47 (WA 1, p. 529, 8f.).

Chapter 2 1. On the transmission and context of this saying, see Dieter Mertens, ‘ “Europa id est patria, domus propria, sedes nostra . . .”: Zu Funktionen und Überlieferung lateinischer Türkenreden im 15. Jahrhundert’ [‘On the Functions and Transmission of Latin Speeches on the Turks in the 15th Century’], in Franz Rainer Erkens (ed.), Europa und die osmanische Expansion im ausgehenden Mittelalter [Europe and the Ottoman Expansion at the Close of the Middle Ages] (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, supplement 20), Berlin 1997, 39–57. 2. From the ‘roteiro’ of an anonymous member of Vasco da Gama’s crew; quoted in Klaus Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig and Mariano Delgado (eds), A History of

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E n dnot e s289 Christianity in Asia,Africa, and Latin America, 1450–1990:A Documentary Sourcebook, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007: Eerdmans, 8. 3. Quoted in Koschorke, Ludwig, and Delgado (eds), A History of Christianity in Asia, p. 9. 4. ‘Un wan sie von sant Thamas reden, so sagen sy er sey der klain got Doch es sey ain ander got d’ grösser sey’; quoted after the edition in Emil Weller, Die ersten deutschen Zeitungen [The First German Newspapers], Stuttgart 1872; reprint: Hildesheim et al. 1994, 6. 5. Quoted in Frances Gardiner Davenport (ed.), European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648, Washington, D.C. 1917: Carnegie Institution, p. 59. 6. George Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher [‘Scrapbooks’], vol. G 183, quoted in Wolfgang Promies (ed.), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher II, Materialhefte,Tagebücher, Munich 2005, p. 166. 7. Götz-­Rüdiger Tewes, Die römische Kurie und die europäischen Länder am Vorabend der Reformation [The Roman Curia and the European Countries on the Eve of the Reformation] (Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom 95), Tübingen 2001, 356. 8. Geoffrey  R.  Elton, Reformation Europe 1517–1559, 2nd edn, Oxford 1999: Blackwell, p. 95. 9. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographey Oder beschreibung Aller Länder herrschafften und fürnemsten Stetten des gantzen Erdbodens . . ., Basel, S. Henricpetri 1588 [reprint Munich 1977], p. 297. 10. See WA Br 12, p. 387, ll. 16–20; WA 59, p. 395, ll. 8–14; 399, ll. 9–11; 408, l. 3; 500, no. 2075f.; 507, no. 2305.

Chapter 3 1. WA.TR 2, no. 2756b, p. 637, ll. 10f. (autumn 1532). 2. WA.TR 2, no. 2800b, p. 564, l. 12. 3. See Myconius, Geschichte der Reformation, p. 23 f. 4. WA 48, p. 249, RN [Revisionsnachtrag] 120: ‘Meyner Liebenn Mutter Margarethenn Lutherymm’ [‘To My Dear Mother Margarethe Luther’]; cf. WA.B 1, p. 152, ll. 30f. 5. WA.B 2, no. 510, p. 563f. (15 June 1522; letter of Luther to the mayor of Magdeburg, his former schoolmate Claus Storm). 6. CR 7, pp. 995f.; 1007; CR 24, p. 64; CR 25, p. 14; CR 27, p. 628;WA 48 RN p. 284 (ll. 133f.); Johannes Ficker,‘Eine Inschrift Luthers im Lutherhaus’, in Theologische Studien und Kritiken 107, 1936, pp. 65–8; Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur [SuR NR 29], Tübingen 2006, pp. 435ff.; Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Türckenbüchlein’ [FKDG 97], Göttingen 2008, pp. 19f., 227f.; on the amendment of the prophecy to refer to 1517, see the references in Thomas Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation [BHTh 123], Tübingen 2003, p. 343, n. 632.

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7. ‘When I then became a monk, my father was mad and furious, wrote me an angry letter and called me “Du” [thou], prius “vos” [earlier: you].’WA 49, p. 322, ll. 12f. (sermon, 20 Jan. 1544). 8. WA 8, p. 573, ll. 22–4 (preface to De votis monasticis, dedicated to his father, 1521); LW 48, p. 331. 9. WA 8, p. 573, l. 20; LW 48, p. 331. 10. WA. TR 1, p. 439, l. 30; LW 54, p. 109. 11. WA 8, p. 575, l. 2; LW 48, p. 332. 12. WA. TR 4, p. 440, l. 9 f. 13. WA 8, p. 573, l. 32–574, l. 1; LW 48, p. 332. 14. WA 8, p. 573, l. 25. LW 48, p. 331. 15. WA. TR 3, no. 3459; 3479a; LW 54, p. 209; WA.TR 4, no. 4785. 16. WA 31/I, p. 226, ll. 9 f.; LW 14, p. 6. 17. ‘When I first saw it [Rome], I fell to the ground, raised my hands, and said, Hail, O holy Rome.Yes, truly sanctified by the holy martyrs and their blood which is spilled there; but now it is torn, and the devil has shat the Pope, his filth, upon it.’ WA. TR 3, p. 347, ll. 3–6. 18. ‘Similiter [i.e. in analogy to the news of a licentiate from Magdeburg who had predicted the downfall of the papacy] Staupitius audivit somnium Minoritae: Surget eremita sub Leone Decimo, qui papatum adorietur. [Staupitz heard the dream of a Franciscan friar: under Leo X a hermit will arise who will attack the papacy.] We have discerned no such thing in Rome; we looked the pope in the face; nun vero extra maiestatem videmus ei in culum [now we look, besides his majesty, at his arse].’ WA. TR 5, p. 467, ll. 18, 21. 19. WA 6, p. 425, ll. 30–4; LW 44, p. 153. 20. WA. TR 5, p. 99, l. 13 (summer, 1540). 21. WA. TR 1, p. 44, ll. 23, 9 f. LW 54, p. 14. 22. WA. TR 5, p. 75, l. 14. 23. WA. TR 1, no. 137, p. 59, ll. 7–20. LW 54, pp. 19–20. 24. This is the subtitle of their series of disputations, WA 1, pp. 221–8; LW 31, pp. 9–16. 25. WA 51, pp. 539, ll. 3ff.; LW 41, pp. 231–2; Myconius, Geschichte der Reformation, p.  21; on the question whether Luther as a confessor refused absolution to unrepentant buyers of indulgences, see Lothar Vogel,‘Zwischen Universität und Seelsorge: Martin Luthers Beweggründe im Ablassstreit’, in ZKG 118, 2007, pp. 187–212. 26. Cf. WA 1, p. 526, l. 34; LW 48, pp. 68–9; WA 54, p. 180, ll. 12–21; 185, ll. 5–8; LW 34, p. 329; WA. TR 4, p. 440, l. 18f. 27. WA.B 1, p. 118, l. 16; p. 122, l. 56: ‘F Martinus Eleutherius, imo dulos et captivus nimis’ (‘Brother Martin, like a free man, or rather a slave, and a captive altogether’), to Johannes Lang, 11 November 1517. In addition to the known letter to Archbishop Albert, a lost letter to Bishop Jerome of Brandenburg, as the competent ordinary, is also documented.

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E n dnot e s291 28. WA 1, p. 233, ll. 10f. LW 31, p. 25. ‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.’ 29. Felician Gess (ed.), Akten und Briefe zur Reformationspolitik Herzog Georgs von Sachsen [Documents and Letters on the Reformation Policy of Duke George of Saxony], 2 vols, Leipzig and Berlin 1905–17, reprint Cologne and Vienna 1985, vol. 1, pp. 28f. 30. Erasmus, letter to Paul Volz (1518), quoted in Desiderius Erasmus, Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 842–992, 1518–1519 (Collected Works of Erasmus vol. 6), Toronto 1980: University of Toronto Press, p. 79. 31. LW 31, p. 33 (Thesis 91). 32. WA.TR 3, no. 3722, pp. 564–6. LW 54, pp. 264–5. 33. ‘Vocatus’, ‘called’ (i.e. appointed to the faculty chair), from his signature in the letter to Albert of Brandenburg of 31 October 1517: ‘Martin Luther Aug[ustinensis] Doctor S Theologie vocatus’; WA.B 1, p. 112, 69–71; ‘Martin Luther, Augustinian, called Doctor of sacred Theology’; LW 48, p. 49. 34. LW 31, p. 33 (Thesis 95); ‘per multas tribulationes intrare celum’, WA 1, p. 238, l. 20. 35. WA 54, p. 180, l. 21; LW 34, p. 330. 36. WA.B 1, no. 146, pp. 332f. 37. Bucer to B. Rhenanus, 1 May 1518, in Martin Bucer, Briefwechsel/Correspondance, vol. 1 (to 1524), ed. Jean Rott, Leiden 1979, no. 3, pp. 58–72, esp. 61, 54–6. 38. WA 2, p. 742, ll. 18ff.; LW 35, pp. 49–73. 39. WA 6, pp. 261, ll. 23ff.; LW 44, p. 95. 40. See WA 6, p. 465, ll. 22ff.; LW 44, pp. 123–217. 41. WA.B 2, p. 197, l. 8. 42. WA 7, p. 5, l. 33; LW 31, p. 336. 43. DS 1483; cf. WA 1, pp. 624, ll. 34–625, 4; LW 31, p. 245. 44. DS 1484; cf. WA 1, p. 535, ll. 35–9; LW 31, p. 92. 45. Paul Kalkoff, Die Depeschen des Nuntius Aleander vom Wormser Reichstage 1521 [Nuncio Aleander’s Dispatches from the Diet of Worms, 1521], 2nd edn, Halle 1897, p. 69. 46. WA 7, p. 838, l. 7. LW 32, p. 112. 47. LW 32, p. 112. 48. WA 7, p. 838, 9. LW 32, p. 113. 49. Kalkoff, Depeschen, p. 139. 50. Kalkoff, Depeschen, p. 49. 51. Kalkoff, Depeschen, p. 58. 52. Kalkoff, Depeschen, pp. 58f. 53. WA 10/III, p. 26, l. 7. LW 51, p. 81. 54. WA.TR 5, no. 5511, p. 204, ll. 24–6 (1542/3); LW 54, pp. 439–40: ‘There’s no book under the sun in which the whole of theology is so compactly presented as in Locis communes. If you read all the fathers and sententiaries [commentators on the central work of dogmatic scholasticism, the Four Books of Sentences of

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Peter Lombard] you have nothing. No better book has been written after the Holy Scriptures than Philip’s.’ 55. Huldreich Zwingli, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 [CR 89], Leipzig 1908, pp. 144, ll. 32–145, 4 (1523); cf. Werke, vol. 1 [CR 88], Berlin 1905, p. 256, ll. 13ff. (1522). 56. CR 89, p. 145, l. 5. 57. CR 89, pp. 145, ll. 21ff. 58. CR 94 [Zwingli, Werke, vol. 7, Leipzig 1911], p. 114, ll. 7ff. 59. CR 94, p. 250, ll. 11ff. 60. CR 94, no. 181, pp. 457f. 61. ‘Nollem [Luther] vi & cęde pro Euangelio certari; ita scripsi ad hominem [Ulrich von Hutten].’WA. B 2, p. 249, ll. 12f. (Luther to Spalatin, 16 January 1521). 62. ‘Verbo victus est mundus, servata est Ecclesia, etiam verbo reparabitur. Sed & Antichristus, ut sine manu cępit, ita sine manu conteretur per verbum.’ WA. B 2, p. 249, ll. 13–15. 63. WA 15, p. 32, l. 7; LW 45, p. 352. 64. Ulrich von Hutten, Opera, ed. Eduard Böcking, vol. 1, Leipzig 1859, reprinted Aalen 1963, p. 449, l. 24; cf. 448, ll. 17–21. 65. Quoted after a pamphlet by Heinrich von Kettenbach, reprinted in Otto Clemen, Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation, vol. 2, Nieuwkoop 1967, p. 210. 66. Otto Waltz (ed.), Die Flersheimer Chronik, Leipzig 1874, p. 80. 67. Adolf Laube and Hans-­Werner Schütte (eds), Flugschriften der Bauernkriegszeit [Pamphlets of the Peasants’War Period], 2nd edn, Berlin, 1978, p. 26, ll. 18f. 68. In the record of a sermon from the year 1526, Luther ‘defines’ the Gospel by the fact that ‘it conveys Christ, quia deus nihil aliud vult praedicari et laudari, quam Christum et se per Christum . . .’ [because God wants nothing else preached and praised but Christ, and Himself through Christ]. WA 17/I, p. 513, ll. 11f. 69. For documentation of the widely known proverb ‘Die Gelehrten, die Verkehrten’ [‘the learned, the perverted’], see Thomas Kaufmann, Der Anfang der Reformation [SMHTR 67], Tübingen 2012, pp. 253, 281, 470f. 70. WA 15, p. 334, ll. 16–20. 71. WA 15, p. 335, ll. 30f. 72. WA 15, p. 336, ll. 10f. 73. WA 15, p. 336, ll. 32f. 74. WA 15, p. 340, ll. 7f. 75. WA 15, p. 394, l. 20. LW 40, p. 68. 76. Text of the 15 Marburg Articles, German History in Documents and Images, trans. Ellen Yutzy Glebe, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-­ dc.org/sub_document. cfm?document_id=4311. 77. Thomas Müntzer, Briefwechsel [Correspondence], ed. Siegfried Bräuer and Manfred Kobuch, Leipzig 2010, no. 103, 1, p. 360, ll. 15–19. 78. Müntzer, Briefwechsel, p. 355, ll. 3f. 79. Thomas Müntzer, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Günther Franz [QFRG 33], Gütersloh 1968, pp. 228, l. 14; 229, ll. 19f.

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E n dnot e s293 80. Müntzer, Briefwechsel, p. 359, l. 4. 81. Cf. WA 6, p. 528, ll. 20–35; LW 36, pp. 11–126. 82. Cf. WA 18, p. 685, ll. 12–19. LW 33, p. 139. 83. WA 30/I, p. 284a. 84. WA 11, p. 315, l. 22; LW 45, p. 200. 85. WA 11, p. 315, ll. 14f.; LW 45, p. 229. 86. WA 11, p. 336, ll. 28f.; LW 45, p. 229. 87. WA 11, p. 336, l. 35; LW 45, p. 229. 88. Karl Eduard Förstemann, Urkundenbuch zu der Geschichte des Reichstages zu Augsburg im Jahre 1530 [Documents on the History of the Augsburg Diet of 1530], vol. 1, Halle 1833 [reprint: Hildesheim 1966], p. 7. 89. Förstemann, Urkundenbuch, vol. 1, p. 8. 90. WA.B 5, p. 319, ll. 5–9 (15 May 1530, Luther to Elector John). LW 49, pp. 297–8. 91. WA 50, pp. 653, ll. 18–20. LW 41, p. 178.

Chapter 4 1. Mertens, ‘Europa id est patria’, in Erkens, Europa und die osmanische Expansion. 2. See Luther’s famous dictum that real German must be found by ‘observing the people’s mouth as they speak’ (auff das Maul sehen, wie sie reden), WA 30/II, pp. 19–21. 3. Francis Eulenburg, Die Frequenz der deutschen Universitäten von ihrer Grundung bis zur Gegenwart [Attendance at German Universities from their Founding to the Present], Leipzig 1904, p. 288. 4. The figures are based on the Luther bibliography by Benzing and Claus as cited in Bernd Moeller, ‘Luther in Europe: His Works in Translation 1517–46’, in E.  I.  Kouri and Tom Scott (eds), Politics and Society in Reformation Europe. London, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 235–51. 5. WA 12, pp. 73–80. 6. ‘Heylige’; WA 12, p. 79, l. 4. 7. WA 12, p. 78, l. 23. 8. WA 12, p. 78, l. 25. 9. WA 12, p. 78, ll. 25f. 10. WA 12, p. 78, ll. 2–6. Apocalyptic anticipation is also reflected in the final verses of the earlier hymn: ‘Let them lie, they are of little help. We should thank God because His word is come again. Summer is at the door; winter is past; the tender flowers are blooming forth. He who has begun this will complete it.’ Markus Jenny, Luthers Geistliche Lieder und Kirchengesänge [AWA 4], Cologne and Vienna 1985, p. 220. 11. WA 12, p. 79, ll. 2f. 12. For a bilingual edition, see Robin  A.  Leaver, The Whole Church Sings: Congregational Singing in Luther’s Wittenberg, Grand Rapids, MI, 2017: Eerdmans, pp. 55–9; cf. WA 35, pp. 411ff., LW 53, 211–16. 13. WA B1, p. 332, ll. 4–8 (Johannes Froben to Luther, 14 February 1519).

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14. Heinrich Glarean to Zwingli, Paris, 1 November 1520, in CR 94, p. 362, ll. 12–14; see also Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus [Correspondence of Beatus Rhenanus], ed. Adalbert Horawitz and Karl Hartfelder, Leipzig 1886 [reprint Hildesheim 1966], p. 157. 15. See Die Amerbachkorrespondenz [The Correspondence of Amerbach], ed. Alfred Hartmann, vol. 2, Basel 1943, pp. 273f., 279f. 16. Cornelis Augustijn, Humanismus, Die Kirche in ihrer Geschichte 2, Göttingen 2003:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 74. 17. Luther to Duke Charles II of Savoy, 7 September 1523, WA. B 3, pp. 148–53, no. 657, here: p. 153, ll. 137f. 18. Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms, 1485–1603, Abingdon and New York 2013, p. 96 (referring to John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perrilous days [1563], p. 601). 19. WA 10/II, p. 260, l. 11. 20. Martin Schwarz-­Lausten, Die Reformation in Dänemark [SVRG 208], Gütersloh 2008, p. 21. 21. WA B1, no. 146, pp. 331–5; (Johannes Froben to Luther, 4 February 1519). 22. Ugo Rezzo and Silvana Seidel-­Menchi, ‘Livre et Réforme en Italie’, in Jean-­ François Gilmont (ed.), La Réforme et le Livre: L’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v. 1570), Paris 1990, pp. 327–74, esp. 355–60. 23. Carlos Gilly, ‘Juan de Valdés: Übersetzer und Bearbeiter von Luthers Schriften in seinem Diálogo de doctrina’, in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (ARG) 74, 1983, pp. 257–305. 24. WA.B 3, no. 697, pp. 207–19 (Luther to Albert of Prussia, December 1523). 25. WA.B 3, p. 315, ll. 22–5 (Luther to the preacher Johann Briessmann of Königsberg, 4 July 1524). By this account, Luther advised Albert to abandon the foolish, abstruse rule of the Teutonic Order, take a wife, and ‘prussiam redigeret in politicam formam, sive principatum sive ducatum’ (bring Prussia into a secular form, whether as a principality or a duchy), WA.B 3, p. 315, ll. 24f. 26. Cf. the memorandum of the Livonian councillor Johannes Lohmüller of Riga to the Marshall of the Teutonic Order Johannes Platter, in Hans Quednau, ‘Johannes Lohmüller, Stadtsyndikus von Riga: ein Träger deutscher Reformation in Nordosteuropa’, in ARG 36, 1939, pp. 51–67, here: 59–67. 27. WA 15, pp. 348–79; LW 45, pp. 311–37. 28. WA 18, p. 426, ll. 21f. 29. Josef Benzing/Helmut Claus, Lutherbibliographie, vols 1 and 2 [BBAur 10/143], Baden-­Baden 21989/94, no. 204, 514f., 682, 769, 799, 889, 918, 1595, 1697. 30. Thomas Müntzer, Schriften und Briefe, p. 494, l. 17. 31. WA 10/2, pp. 172–4; here 172, ll. 14–173, l. 2. 32. WA 12, pp. 169–96: De instituendis ministris ecclesiae; LW 40, pp. 3–44:‘Concerning the Ministry’. 33. WA B 2, no. 491, pp. 529–32; no. 509, pp. 559–62; cf. pp. 573, ll. 11–574, l. 19; LW 27, pp. 151–410. On the topic of the Eucharist, see Von Anbeten des Sakraments (1523), in WA 11, pp. 417–56; ‘The Adoration of the Sacrament’, LW 36, pp. 269–305.

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E n dnot e s295 34. WA 10/2, p. 181, ll. 36–8. 35. WA 19, pp. 542–615; WA.B 4, p. 126. 36. Text in Janine Garrisson, Les Protestants au XVIe siècle, Mesnil-­sur-­l’Estrée 1997, pp. 160f. 37. Melanchthon-­Briefwechsel (MBW) [Melanchthon’s Correspondence], nos. 1579 (28 June 1535) and 1612 (28 August 1535). https://www.haw.uni-­heidelberg.de/ forschung/forschungsstellen/melanchthon/mbw-­online.de.html; searchable. 38. MBW nos. 1681, 1866. 39. Calvin’s spirit (animum meum), after a long entanglement in the superstitions of the papacy, had been subjected (subegit) to an unexpected conversion to a susceptibility to learning (subita conversione ad docilitatem; Calvini Opera (CO) 31, col. 21). The famous phrase from the 1557 preface to Calvin’s commentary on the Psalms must be understood essentially as a turn towards the ‘word of God’ and a calling to the service of its interpretation. 40. See for example Eberhard Busch et al. (eds), Reformatorische Anfänge (1533–1541), Calvin-­Studienausgabe 1, part 1/1, ed., Neukirchen-­Vluyn 1994, pp. 40, 13.17; 42, 8.27; 44, 20. 41. Ibid., p. 43, 9–13. 42. CO 31, coll. 23f.; Calvin Commentaries, trans. and ed. Joseph Haroutunian, London and Philadelphia 1958: Westminster, p. 53. 43. CO 10, part 1, 91–124. A (French–German) bilingual edition of the 1561 text appears in Eberhard Busch et al. (eds), Gestalt und Ordnung der Kirche, Calvin-­ Studienausgabe, vol. 2, Neukirchen-­Vluyn 1997, pp. 227–79. 44. TRE 7, p. 575, ll. 37f. 45. CR 42, col. 614; cf. CR 36, coll. 868–70. 46. Erasmus von Rotterdam, Novum Instrumentum: Faksimile-­Neudruck der Ausgabe Basel 1516, ed. Heinz Holeczek, Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt 1986, pp. 183, 618. 47. WA 1, p. 624, ll. 34ff.; LW 31, p. 245. 48. WA 54, pp. 141–67; LW 38, 296–319. 49. E. F. K. Müller (ed.), Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche [The Confessions of the Reformed Church], Leipzig 1903, reprint: Waltrop 1999, p. 160, l. 33. 50. Müller, Bekenntnisschriften, pp. 160f., esp. Art. 7, 8, 14, and 15. The latter article insists, in keeping with the Zurich position, that it is not the sacrament, but properly speaking only the holy spirit which can be called a ‘seal’. 51. The term huguenot is probably derived from eyguenot, borrowed from the Swiss German for Eidgenosse, ‘confederate’, meaning a Swiss citizen, that is, a member of the Confederatio Helvetica. 52. Eberhard Busch et al. (eds), Reformatorische Klärungen, Calvin-­Studienausgabe vol. 4, Neukirchen-­Vluyn 2002, pp. 29–77. 53. Hans Joachim Hillerbrand, The Reformation: A Narrative History Related by Contemporary Observers and Participants, New York 1964: Harper and Row, p. 316. 54. Hillerbrand, The Reformation: A Narrative History, pp. 300–22. (Kaufmann cites a German edition of just about the same book: Hillerbrand, Brennpunkte, p. 308, which in turn cites H. Gee and W. J. Hardy (eds), Documents Illustrative of English Church History, Compiled from Original Sources, London 1896, pp. 243–4; but such

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a document doesn’t need a secondary or tertiary source: it’s in The National Archives, Catalogue reference: C 65/143, m. 5, nos. 8 and 9.) 55. Müller, Bekenntnisschriften, p. 516, ll. 8–12. 56. Geoffrey R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Document and Commentary, Cambridge 1982, no. 184, pp. 372–7, §8. 2 57. Müller, Bekenntnisschriften, pp. 511, l. 16–512, l. 36. 58. Martin Bucer, Deutsche Schriften, ed. Robert Stupperich, vol. 6/1, Gütersloh 1988, p. 120, l. 4. 59. WA 51, p. 469, ll. 29f.; LW 41, p. 185. 60. Bugenhagen used the word in the context of planning for Luther’s burial. See Christof Schubart, Die Berichte über Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, Weimar 1917, no. 25, p. 27. 61. Philipp Melanchthon, Historia Lutheri, 1546. 62. Ibid. 63. Arno Buschmann, Kaiser und Reich, vol. 1, 2nd exp. edn, Baden-­Baden 1994, p. 224, §15. 64. The 1540 version held that ‘with bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ are truly offered to those who eat the Lord’s Supper’ (cum pane et vino vere exhibeantur corpus et sanguis Christi vescentibus in coena domini), Bekenntnisschriften der  evangelisch-­lutherischen Kirche [Confessions of the Lutheran Church], 9th edn, Göttingen 1982:Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, p. 65, ll. 45f. 65. DS 1501; The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. Theodore Alois Buckley, London 1851: Routledge, p. 18. (Here and subsequent notes: Kaufmann cites Denzinger-­Schönmetzer (DS) by excerpt number; I’m taking English from the Routledge edn of the Council’s proceedings, which is digitized at: https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canons_and_Decrees_of_the_Council_of_Trent.) 66. DS 1507; Canons and Decrees, p. 19. 67. DS 1515; Canons and Decrees, p. 23. 68. Ibid. 69. DS 1525; Canons and Decrees, p. 32. 70. DS 1605; Canons and Decrees, p. 52. 71. DS 1823; Canons and Decrees, p. 214. 72. DS 1835; Canons and Decrees, p. 252. 73. DS 1500; Canons and Decrees, p. 16. 74. Pope Paul III, Regimini militantis ecclesiae, 27 September 1540; quoted after Mirbt/Aland (eds), Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums [Sources on Papal History], p. 540. (Or, for an English source (likewise containing the L. text): quoted after B. J. Kidd (ed.), Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation, Oxford 1911, p. 338.) 75. Philipp Nicolai, Historia des Reichs Christi, Darmstadt 1610: Balthasar Hofmann, p. 11. 76. Georg Frölich to Lazarus Spengler [March 1530], quoted after the edition in Lazarus Spengler, Schriften, vol. 3: May 1529–March 1530, Gütersloh 2010, p. 402, ll. 8f.

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E n dnot e s297 77. Ibid., p. 389, l. 8 (Frölich’s report on cultural freedom, March 1530). 78. Ibid., ll. 8f.

Chapter 5 1. ‘[V]ere poenitentibus et confessis . . . non solum plenam et largiorem, immo plenissimam omnium suorum concedemus et concedimus veniam peccatorum’. Emil Friedberg (ed.), Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols, Leipzig 1879 [reprint: Graz 1955], vol. 2, pp. 1303f.; Stuart Jenks (ed.), Documents on the Papal Plenary Indulgences 1300–1517 Preached in the Regnum Teutonicum, Later Medieval Europe vol. 16, Leiden and Boston 2018: Brill, (Kaufmann cites not Jenks but Walther Köhler, Dokumente zum Ablaßstreit von 1517 [Documents on the Controversy over Indulgences of 1517], Tübingen 21934, no. 9, pp. 18f.) 2. See the rich documentation in Johann Christoph Gatterer, ‘Über Jubelfeste und Jubelmedaillen’, in Die Jubelfeyer der Georg Augustus Universität an ihrem funfzigsten Stiftungsfest dem 17. Septemb. 1787, Göttingen 1787, supplement P, pp. 50–60. 3. Letter of Luther to his friend Nicolaus von Amsdorf, 1 November 1517, in WA.B 4, no. 1164, pp. 274f.; see also Thomas Kaufmann, Reformationsgedenken in der Frühen Neuzeit: Bemerkungen zum 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert, in ZThK 107 (2010), pp. 285–324. 4. Quoted after the German translation of Historia de vita et actis . . . Lutheri in Melanchthon deutsch, vol. 2, pp. 169–88; 177; the original Latin is in CR 6, no. 3478, coll. 155–70; 161f. 5. WA 48, revision supplement, p. 166 [on WA 48, p. 236]; see also WA 48, p. 116, n. 3;WA.DB 11/2, p. CXLI with n. 7. On the discussion of the historic accuracy of the posting of the Theses, see Joachim Ott and Martin Treu (eds), Luthers Thesenanschlag: Faktum oder Fiktion, proceedings of the Martin Luther Memorials Foundation in Saxony-­ Anhalt 9, Leipzig 2008; Erwin Iserloh, ‘Der Thesenanschlag fand nicht statt’, in Uwe Wolff, Iserloh: Der Thesenanschlag fand nicht statt (Studia Oecumenica Friburgensia 61), Fribourg 2013: Reinhardt, pp. 169–238. 6. Letter of the theological faculty of Wittenberg to John George I, 24 April 1617, quoted in Friedrich Loofs, Die Jahrhundertfeiern der Reformation an den Universitäten Wittenberg und Halle 1617, 1717 und 1817, in ZVKGS 14, 1917, pp. 1–80, here: p. 5. The most important recent work on the topic is Wolfgang Flügel, Konfession und Jubiläum: Zur Institutionalisierung der lutherischen Gedenkkultur in Sachsen 1617–1830 [Schriften zur sächsischen Geschichte und Volkskunde 14], Leipzig 2005. 7. Quoted in Flügel, Konfession und Jubiläum, pp. 47f. 8. ‘Pestis eram vivens, moriens ero mors tua, Papa.’ WA.TR 1, no. 844, pp. 410f.; WA.TR 3, no. 3543a, p. 390, l. 18; LW 54, p. 227; WA 35, pp. 597f.; WA 30/2, pp. 339f., n. 3; WA 30/3, p. 279, ll. 18f.; WA 48, p. 280; WA 48, revision supplement, p. 115 (on WA 48, p. 236).

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9. Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, Ausführliche Historie des Lutherthums und der heylsamen Reformation Welche der theure Martin Luther binnen dreyssig Jahren glücklich ausgeführet . . ., Leipzig 1714: Gleditsch, p. 2692. 10. Demonstrated by Adolf Herte, Das katholische Lutherbild im Bann der Lutherkommentare des Cochläus, 3 parts, Münster 1943. See also Adolf Herte, Die Lutherkommentare des Johannes Cochläus: Kritische Studie zur Geschichtsschreibung im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung [RGST 33], Münster 1935. 11. Gottfried Arnold, Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie vom Anfang des Neuen Testaments bis auf das Jahr Christi 1688, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 1729 [reprint: Hildesheim 1967], p. 616. 12. Arnold, Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, p. 619. 13. On this apocryphal quotation, see WA 35, p. 580, n. 1. An occurrence in a 1775 poem by Johann Heinrich Voss is cited by Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther im Spiegel der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, Göttingen 21970, p. 17, n. 7. 14. Cf. Brad  S.  Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Cambridge, MA and London 2012. 15. Second letter to P., 1753, regarding the case of Lemnius, 1753. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämtliche Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Karl Lachmann, 3rd rev. edn, Stuttgart 1890: Muncker, p. 43, l. 31–p. 44, l. 3. On the context, see also Rudolf Smend, ‘Der Pastorensohn und der Reformator: Lessings Verhältnis zu Luther’, in Zwischen Mose und Karl Barth, Tübingen 2009, pp. 204–29. 16. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Letter I [rebuttal to Goeze, appended to ‘A Parable’, 1778], trans. H. H. Bernard, in Isaac Bernard (ed.) Cambridge Free Thoughts and Letters on Bibliolatry, London 1862: Trübner, p. 13. (Kaufmann’s German source: Bornkamm, Luther im Spiegel der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, p. 201.) 17. Ibid., p. 62. (Bornkamm, p. 202.) 18. For exact references etc. see Martin Kessler, ‘Reformationstheorien um 1800: Charles de Villers und die Preisaufgabe des französischen Nationalinstituts’, in ZThK 112 (2015), pp. 300–36. 19. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Sixth Address, in Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Isaac Nakhimovsky, Béla Kapossy, and Keith Tribe, Indianapolis 2013: Hackett, p. 70. 20. Fichte, Sixth Address, p. 72. 21. Fichte, Sixth Address, p. 74. 22. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Staatslehre oder über das Verhältnis des Urstaates zum Vernunftreiche 1813, Gesamtausgabe series 2, vol. 16 (Nachgelassene Schriften 1813), Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt 2011, p. 150 ll. 20–3; p. 154, ll. 9ff. 23. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Preface, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood, Cambridge 1991: Cambridge University Press, p. 22. 24. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth  S.  Haldane and Frances H. Simson, London 1896: Kegan Paul, p. 150. 25. Hegel, Lectures, pp. 146–7.

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E n dnot e s299 26. Quoted after the excerpt in German translation of Hegel’s Latin address as ­rector of the University of Berlin on the occasion of the tercentennial of the Confessio Augustana in 1830, in Bornkamm, Luther im Spiegel der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, p. 236. 27. Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, Munich and Leipzig 1924, vol. 5, p. 391. (The citation is not present in the English trans. which dispenses with Ranke’s concluding ‘unanswered questions’ and post-­ Reformation observations; Leopold von Ranke, History of the Reformation in Germany, trans. Sarah Austin, London 1845: Longman.) Google Books has an older German edn: Leipzig 1873. There the loc. cit. is vol. 5 p. 360, in ‘Schluß’, zehntes Buch achtes Kapitel, ‘Entwickelung der Literatur’, very end before Beilagen. 28. Ranke, History of the Reformation in Germany, trans. Sarah Austin, London 1845: Longman, vol. 1, p. xii. (Kaufmann’s German cit.: Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 1, p.VII.) 29. Friedrich von Bezold, Geschichte der deutschen Reformation, Berlin 1886, p. 448. 30. Bezold, Geschichte der deutschen Reformation, p. 764. 31. Heinrich von Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation [original publication: Preussische Jahrbücher 52, 1883, pp. 469–86], in Deutsche Lebensbilder, Leipzig 1927, pp. 9–32; 13. 32. Ibid. 33. Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation, p. 15. 34. Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation, p. 17. 35. Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation, p. 24. 36. Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation, p. 20. 37. Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation, p. 28. 38. Ibid. 39. With a fabricated Luther quotation, the Berlin historian put an appeal to ‘his Germans’ in the reformer’s mouth: ‘God’s word and grace is a wandering cloudburst which does not come again where it has once been. It was once upon the Jews, but gone is gone; now they have nothing.’Treitschke, Luther und die deutsche Nation, p. 17. 40. Heinrich von Treitschke, Unsere Aussichten, quoted after the edition in Karsten Krieger (ed.), Der ‘Berliner Antisemitismusstreit’ 1879–1881, 2 parts, Munich 2003, part 1, p. 12. This text, which originally appeared in the Preussischen Jahrbüchern (44, 1879, pp. 559–76), is considered the beginning of the ‘Berlin Anti-­Semitism Controversy’ of 1879 to 1881. 41. Ibid. 42. In Mein Kampf, Hitler mentions Luther in connection with the ideal leader, who would unite the qualities of the ‘programme-­maker’ and the ‘politician’. Such leaders, Hitler wrote, occur very rarely in history and are usually only recognized accordingly by later generations. ‘These, however, are not only the really great statesmen, but also all other great reformers. Side by side with

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Frederick the Great stands a Martin Luther as well as a Richard Wagner.’ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. John Chamberlain et al., New York 1942: Reynal and Hitchcock, p. 287. The Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw (Hitler: A Biography, New York 2000, pp. 157–8) ascribes critical importance to this train of thought for the development of Hitler’s charismatic self-­image during his imprisonment in Landsberg. On Hitler’s reference to Luther as a ‘great anti-­Semite’ in his purported dialogues with Dietrich Eckart, see Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Antisemitische Lutherflorilegien’, in ZThK 112 (2015), pp. 192–228, and 210–12, n. 71. On the tradition ‘from Luther to Hitler’ and its critical and polemical continuation in post-­war discourse, see the references in Thomas Kaufmann, Luthers ‘Judenschriften’: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer historischen Kontextualisierung, Tübingen 22013, p. 2. 43. Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt’, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Berlin and New York 2001, pp. 199–316; 247. 44. Troeltsch, Bedeutung, p. 325 (emphasis in the original). 45. Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 3, 4th rev. edn, Tübingen 1909 [reprint Darmstadt 1990], p. 817. (There are English editions, but the translation abridges the section in question, omitting the critical remarks about Luther! For comparison: the section is the introduction of Book 3, Chapter 4, ‘Die Ausgänge des Dogmas im Protestantismus’.) 46. Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Auffassung und Analyse des Menschen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert’, in Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 2, Göttingen, Stuttgart 111991, pp. 1–89. 47. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, London 1990, pp. 337f. 48. Theodor Brieger, Randbemerkungen zu TroeltschsVortrag über ‘Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt’, in ZKG 27, 1906, pp. 348–55; pp. 350f. 49. Theodor Brieger, Die Reformation: Ein Stück aus Deutschlands Weltgeschichte, Berlin 1914, p. 3. 50. Heinrich Hermelink, Die religiösen Reformbestrebungen des deutschen Humanismus, Tübingen 1907. 51. Georg von Below, Die Ursachen der Reformation, Historische Bibliothek 38, Munich 1917. 52. Heinrich Boehmer, Luther im Lichte der neueren Forschung, Aus Natur und Geisteswelt 113, Leipzig 1913; (English apparently out of print: Heinrich Boehmer, Luther and the Reformation in the Light of Modern Research, trans. E. S. G. Potter, New York 1930: Dial Press). Heinrich Boehmer,‘Die Bedeutung des Luthertums für die europäische Kultur’, in Studien zur Kirchengeschichte, Theologische Bücherei 52, ed. Ernst Wolf, Munich 1974, pp. 124–56. 53. Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, trans. Walter  A.  Hansen, St Louis 1962: Concordia (original: Morphologie des Luthertums, 1931/2). 54. For the pertinent texts by Elert, see the references in Thomas Kaufmann, Werner Elert als Kirchenhistoriker, in ZThK 93 (1996), pp. 193–242.

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E n dnot e s301 55. All the essential texts on this topic are found in Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 1: Luther, Tübingen 2/31923. 56. Cf. Rechtfertigung und Freiheit: 500 Jahre Reformation 2017; Ein Grundlagentext des Rates der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) [Justification and Freedom:The Fifth Centennial of the Reformation in 2017; a Fundamental Text of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany], Gütersloh 2014. Heinz Schilling and I formulated a joint objection to this normative ‘fundamental text’ of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) in the daily Die Welt, 24 May 2014, p. 2. See also my review under the title ‘Lerngeschichte’, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 July 2014, p. 14, and ‘Geschichtslose Reformation? Die EKD droht sich 2017 ins Abseits zu feiern’, in Zeitzeichen 15, no. 8 (August 2014), pp. 12–14. 57. See the introductory remarks in Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Berlin and New York 2001, pp. 317–19, and the facsimile of Troeltsch’s preface, p. 320. 58. Quoted in Martin Schloemann, Luthers Apfelbäumchen? Ein Kapitel deutscher Mentalitätsgeschichte seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Göttingen 1994, p. 28. 59. The first edition appeared in Berlin in 1948; a revised second edition was published in 1952. 60. Alexander Abusch, Der Irrweg einer Nation: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis deutscher Geschichte, Berlin 1946, p. 29. 61. Wolfram von Hanstein, Von Luther bis Hitler: Ein wichtiger Abriss deutscher Geschichte, Dresden 1947: Voco. 62. Quoted in J.  H.  Brinks, ‘Einige Überlegungen zur politischen Instrumentalisierung Martin Luthers durch die deutsche Historiographie im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert’, in Zeitgeschichte 22, Vienna 1995, pp. 233–48; 240. 63. Rudolf von Thadden, ‘Mit Luther Staat machen?’, in Nicht Vaterland, nicht Fremde: Essays zu Geschichte und Gegenwart, Munich 1989, pp. 133–40; 135. 64. Josef Lortz, The Reformation in Germany, trans. Ronald Walls; London and New York 1968. 65. For a thorough analysis of German scholarship on the Reformation and the  religious history of the Renaissance and more detailed commentary on  the  issues briefly sketched here, see Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Evangelische Reformationsgeschichtsforschung nach 1945’, in ZThK 104, 2007, pp. 404–54; Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Die deutsche Reformationsforschung seit dem Zweiten  Weltkrieg’, in ARG 100, 2009, pp. 15–47; Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Die  Deutung des  Humanismus vornehmlich in der deutschsprachigen Kirchengeschichtswissenschaft: Beobachtungen zu älteren und neueren Tendenzen’, in Wolfenbütteler Renaissance-­Mitteilungen 33, 2011, pp. 1–32. 66. The simplest introduction to Oberman’s broad work is the volume Heiko A. Oberman, The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World. New Haven 2003: Yale University Press. See also the obituary by Berndt Hamm, in HZ 203, 2001, pp. 830–4. 67. For a biographically structured analysis of Moeller’s work on urban Reformations and its significance for the history of scholarship, see Bernd Moeller, Imperial

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Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays. Ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr, Philadelphia 1972: Fortress. 68. The best introduction to Scribner’s work is the posthumous publication (with a preface by Thomas A. Brady, Jr) Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), ed. Lyndal Roper, Leiden 2001. 69. I have compiled the most important works of the historical debate and the authors cited in the article ‘Confessionalization’ in Encyclopedia of Early Modern History, vol. 2, 2016. (Kaufmann’s encyclopædia article is in English: https:// referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-­of-­early-­modern-­history­online/confessionalization-­COM_022488?s.num=0&s.rows=20&s.f.s2_parent= s.f.book.encyclopedia-­of-­early-­modern-­history-­online&s.q=Confessionalization.) 70. For a concise summary of trends and tendencies in international research on Reformation history since the Second World War, see vol. 100 of Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (ARG), 2009. 71. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History. London, New York 2004. On my conceptual criticism of MacCulloch, see Thomas Kaufmann, ‘History is good at confounding and confessing labellers’—‘Die Geschichte versteht es meisterlich, Schlagwortexperten zu irritieren und zu verwirren’: Zu Diarmaid MacCullochs ‘Reformation’, in ARG 101 (2010), pp. 305–20. (Kaufmann cited the German edition: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Die Reformation 1490–1700, Munich 2008.)

Chapter 6 1. Johannes Schweblin, Deutsche Schriften, ed. Bernhard  H.  Bonkhoff, Speyer 2009, p. 53. 2. WA 54, p. 180, l. 21; LW 34, p. 330. 3. Johann Cochlaeus, quoted in Robert Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith, Oxford University Press 2009, p. 2. 4. Helmar Junghans (ed.), Die Reformation in Augenzeugenberichten, Düsseldorf 1967: Rauch, p. 450. 5. Ibid. 6. Quoted in Albrecht Dürer, Records of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries, ed. Roger Fry, trans. Rudolf Tombo, Boston 1913: Merrymount, p. 84. (Kaufmann’s citation: Detlef Plöse and Günter Vogler (eds), Buch der Reformation: Eine Auswahl zeitgenössischer Zeugnisse (1476–1555), Berlin 1989, p. 266.) 7. Otto Clemen, Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation, vol. 1, Halle 1907 [reprint: Nieuwkoop 1967], p. 201. 8. WA.TR 2, no. 2756b (autumn 1532), p. 637, ll. 10f. 9. Ein predig vom wolff zu den Geußen [A Sermon by the Wolf to the Goats], Speyer 1524: Johann Eckhart, Verzeichnis deutscher Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD 16) P 4754. 10. For a basic orientation, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Der Protestantismus: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Munich 22010.

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E n dnot e s303 11. ‘Non ille digne Theologus dicitur, qui invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspicit, Sed qui visibilia et posteriora Dei per passiones et crucem conspecta intelligit. Theologus gloriae dicit malum bonum et bonum malum, Theologus crucis id quod res est.’WA 1, p. 354, ll. 17–22; LW 31, p. 40 (Heidelberg Disputation, theses 19–21). 12. WA.DB 7, pp. 2–27; LW 35, pp. 365–80.

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Further Reading

The list below opens with works that present a more general overview.These more general works shed light on numerous aspects of the story told in this book. In ­addition, specific works are suggested for each chapter; it was decided not to include a bibliographical essay as an epilogue.This further reading makes no attempt at completeness. The reference works in the first section present an overview of the  current state of research in all areas of Reformation history. The Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Literaturbericht (Gütersloh, Bd. 1ff., 1972ff.) appears periodically and offers an overview of all areas of Reformation history. For research on the Renaissance and Humanism (since 1966ff.) the following is fundamental: Bibliographie internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance, in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et de Renaissance. The most important German-­language journals for Reformation history are Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (ARG), the Zeitschrift Zwingliana. Beiträge zur Geschichte Zwinglis, der Reformation und des Protestantismus in der Schweiz, Bd. 1ff., Zürich 1897ff., as well as the Luther-­Jahrbuch (LuJ), Leipzig, Bd. 1ff., 1919ff. For early modern history more generally, the most important journals are the Sixteenth Century Journal, Kirksville/MS, Bd. 1ff., 1970ff. and the Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Vierteljahresschrift zur Erforschung des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Bd. 1ff., Berlin 1973ff.—both of them replete with detailed book review sections. Abbreviations in this further reading follow the conventions of the Theologische Realenzyklopädie, compiled by Siegfried Schwertner (Berlin, New York 32015).

General Works Sources, Source Studies, and Bibliographies Aland, Kurt: Hilfsbuch zum Lutherstudium. Edited with Ernst Otto Reichert and Gerhard Jordan, Witten 41996. Benzing, Josef/Claus, Helmut: Lutherbibliographie. Verzeichnis der gedruckten Schriften Martin Luthers bis zu dessen Tod, 2 volumes., Baden-Baden 21989/1994. Bibliographie de la Réforme 1450–1648. Ouvrages parus de 1940 à 1955 [vol. 6: à 1960, vol. 8: à 1975/76], published by the International Commission for Comparative Ecclesiastical History, Leiden 1961–82. Bietenholz, Peter G. (ed.): Contemporaries of Erasmus. A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, 3 vols., Toronto, Buffalo, London 1985–1987, ND Toronto 2003.

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Blickle, Peter: Die Reformation im Reich, Stuttgart 32000. Brady,Thomas A.–/Oberman, Heiko A./Tracy, James D. (eds.): Handbook of European History 1400–1600, 2 vols., Leiden etc. 1994/95. Brady, Thomas  A.–: German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650, Cambridge 2009. Brady, Thomas  A.: Zwischen Gott und Mammon. Protestantische Politik und deutsche Reformation, Berlin 1996. Burkhardt, Johannes: Das Reformationsjahrhundert. Deutsche Geschichte zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionenbildung 1517–1617, Stuttgart 2002. Cameron, Euan: The European Reformation, Oxford 1991. Chaunu, Pierre: –: Église, culture et société 1517–1620. Essais sur Réforme et ContreRéforme, Paris 1982. Chaunu, Pierre: Le temps des Réformes. Histoire religieuse et système de civilisation, Paris 1975. Claus, Helmut: Melanchthon-Bibliographie 1510–1560, 4 volumess, Gütersloh 2014. Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie der Theologie und der Kirchen, ed. by Bernd Moeller mit with Bruno Jahn, 2 vols., Munich 2005. Dingel, Irene/Leppin,Volker (eds.): Das Reformatorenlexikon, Darmstadt 2014. Dixon, Scott C.: The Reformation in Germany, Oxford 2002. Dotzauer,Winfried: Das Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung (1500–1618), Darmstadt 1987. Elton, Geoffrey R.: Europa im Zeitalter der Reformation 1517–1559, Munich 21982. Friedeburg, Robert von:: Europa in der frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt/M. 2012. Gesamtdarstellungen der deutschen und der europäischen Reformationsgeschichte Andresen, Carl/Ritter, Adolf Martin (ed.): Handbuch der Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte vol. 2, Göttingen 21998. Goertz, Hans-Jürgen: Deutschland 1500–1648. Eine zertrennte Welt, Paderborn 2004. Greengrass, Mark: –: Christendom Destroyed. Europe 1517–1648, London 2014. Greengrass, Mark:The European Reformation, c. 1500–1618, London, NewYork 1998. Greyerz, Kaspar von: Religion und Kultur. Europa 1500–1800, Göttingen 2000. Hauschild, Wolf-Dieter: Lehrbuch der Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte vol. 2: Reformation und Neuzeit, Gütersloh 1999. Heckel, Martin: Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter, Göttingen 22001. Hendrix, Scott  H.: Recultivating the Vineyard. The Reformation Agendas of Christianization, Louisville, London 2004. Hillerbrand, Hans  J.: The Division of Christendom. Christianity in the Sixteenth Century, Louisville, London 2007. Hillerbrand, Hans-Joachim (ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols, New York, Oxford 1996. Hillerbrand, Hans-Joachim: Bibliographie des Täufertums 1520–1630, Gütersloh 1962. Hsia, Ronnie Po-chia (ed.): The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 6: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660, Cambridge 2007. Index Aureliensis: Catalogus Sedecimo saeculo impressorum, Bd. 1 ff.ff., Nieuwkoop, Baden-Baden 1967 ff.ff.

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Iserloh, Erwin:in Geschichte und Theologie der Reformation im Grundriß, Paderborn 31985. Joachimsen, Paul: Die Reformation als Epoche der deutschen Geschichte, i. In Vvollständiger Fassung erstmals aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben von Otto Schottenloher, Munich 1951, new edition, Aalen 1971. Kaufmann, Thomas–/Kottje, Raymund: Ökumenische Kirchengeschichte Bd. 2: Vom Hochmittelalter bis zur frühen Neuzeit, Darmstadt 2008. Kaufmann, Thomas: Geschichte der Reformation in Deutschland, new edition, Berlin 2016; French edition: Histoire de la Reformation. Mentalités, religion, société, Geneva 2014. Kaufmann,Thomas: Reformatoren, Göttingen 1998. Klueting, Harm: Das Konfessionelle Zeitalter 1525–1648, Stuttgart 1989. Klueting, Harm: –: Das Konfessionelle Zeitalter. Europa zwischen Mittelalter und Moderne. Kirchengeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte, Darmstadt 2007. Köhler, Hans-Joachim: Bibliographie der Flugschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts. Lau, Franz/Bizer, Ernst: Reformationsgeschichte Deutschlands bis 1555, Göttingen 1964. Laube, Adolf/Steinmetz, Max/Vogler, Günter (Autorenkollektiv): Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen frühbürgerlichen Revolution, Berlin/O. 21982. Lemaitre, Nicole: L’Europe et les Réformes au XVIe siècle, Paris 2008. Leppin,Volker/Schneider-Ludorff, Gury: Das Luther-Lexikon, Regensburg 22015. Leppin,Volker: Die Reformation, Darmstadt 2013. Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3 fully updated new editions, 11 vols, Freiburg/Br. 1993–2001. Lortz, Joseph: Die Reformation in Deutschland, 2 vols., Freiburg/Br. 1939–1940; 61982. Martin Luther, Martin: Schriften I: Aufbruch der Reformation, Schriften II: Reformation der Frömmigkeit und Bibelauslegung, ed. by Thomas Kaufmann, Berlin 2014. Lutz, Heinrich: Das Ringen um deutsche Einheit und kirchliche Erneuerung. Von Maximilian I. bis zum Westfälischen Frieden. 1490 bis 1648, Frankfurt/M. 1983, Studienausgabe 1987. Lutz, Heinrich: –: Reformation und Gegenreformation, Munich 41997. MacCulloch, Diarmaid: The Reformation, New York, London 2004. Marshall, Peter: Die Reformation in Europa, Stuttgart 2014. Martin Luther und die Reformation in Deutschland. Exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth, Frankfurt/M. 1983. Moeller, Bernd: Deutschland im Zeitalter der Reformation, Göttingen 41999. Mörke, Olaf: Die Reformation.Voraussetzungen und Durchsetzung, Munich 2005. Mühlen, Karl-Heinz zur: Reformation und Gegenreformation, 2 vols, Göttingen 1999. Thomas Müntzer, Thomas: Schriften und Briefe. Kritische Gesamtausgabe,. ed. by Günther Franz, Gütersloh 1968. Mykonius, Friedrich: Geschichte der Reformation, ed. by Otto Clemen, Leipzig. Ozment, Steven: The Age of Reform 1250–1550. An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, New Haven, London 1980.

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Pettegree, Andrew –: (ed.): The Reformation World, London 2002. Pettegree, Andrew: The Early Reformation in Germany, Cambridge 1992. Rabe, Horst: Deutsche Geschichte 1500–1600. Das Jahrhundert der Glaubensspaltung, Munich 1991. Ranke, Leopold von: Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, 5 vols., Munich, Leipzig 1924. Rapp, Francis: Christentum IV. Zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (1379–1552), Stuttgart 2006. Reinhard, Wolfgang: Probleme deutscher Geschichte 1495–1806. Reichsreform und Reformation 1495–1555 (Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 10. Fully updated new editions), Stuttgart 2001, pp. 111–356. Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4. fully updated new editions vols. 1–8,Tübingen 1998–2005, Register 2007. Reske, Christoph: Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet. Auf der Grundlage des gleichnamigen Werkes von Josef Benzing, Wiesbaden 2007. Rublack, Ulinka (ed.): Dies.: The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, Oxford 2017. Rublack, Ulinka: Die Reformation in Europa, Frankfurt/M. 2003. Schilling, Heinz: Aufbruch und Krise. Deutschland 1517–1648, Berlin 1988; special edition 1994. Schilling, Heinz:–: Die neue Zeit.Vom Christenheitseuropa zum Europa der Staaten. 1250 bis 1750, Berlin 1999. Schindling, Anton/Ziegler, Walter (eds.): Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und der Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession 1500–1650, 7 vols., Münster 1989–1997. Schnabel-Schüle, Helga: Die Reformation 1495–1555, Stuttgart 2006. Schorn-Schütte, Luise: Die Reformation. Vorgeschichte—­Verlauf—­Wirkung, Munich 62016. Schorn-Schütte, Luise: –: Konfessionskriege und europäische Reformation. Europa 1500–1648, Munich 2010. Schottenloher, Karl (ed.): Bibliographie zur deutschen Geschichte im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung 1517–1585, vols. 1–6, Leipzig 1932–1940; 2nd. edn. vols. 1–7. Vvol. 7 ed. by Ulrich Thürauf, Stuttgart 1956–1966. Schulze,Winfried: Deutsche Geschichte im 16. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/M. 1987, ND Darmstadt 61996. Scribner, Robert W.: The German Reformation, Basingstoke 1986. Seebaß, Gottfried: Geschichte des Christentums III. Spätmittelalter—­Reformation— – Konfessionalisierung, Stuttgart 2006. Skalweit, Stephan: Reich und Reformation, Berlin 1967. Stupperich, Robert: Die Reformation in Deutschland, Gütersloh 21980. Teil I: Das frühe 16. Jahrhundert (1501–1530), Druckbeschreibungen, vol. 1 ff.ff., Tübingen 1991 ff.ff. Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vols. 1–36, Berlin, New York 1977–2004.

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VD 16 = Bayerische Staatsbibliothek [Munich]— – Herzog August Bibliothek [Wolfenbüttel] (ed.): Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachgebiet erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts, vols.vols 1–25, Stuttgart 1983–2000. (www.vd16.de) Nachschlagewerke. Venard, Marc (ed.): Die Zeit der Konfessionen (1530–1620/30). German edition edited byed. by Heribert Smolinsky (Die Geschichte des Christentums Bd. 8), Freiburg/Br. etc. 1992. Venard, Marc– (ed.): Von der Reform zur Reformation (1450–1530),. Edited ed. by Heribert Smolinsky (Die Geschichte des Christentums vol. 7), Freiburg/Br. etc. 1995. Vogler, Günter: Europas Aufbruch in die Neuzeit 1550–1650, Stuttgart 2003. Weimarer Ausgabe (WA), D. Martin Luthers Werke, I Schriften, II Tischreden (TR), III Die Deutsche Bibel (DB), IV Briefwechsel (B), Weimar 1883ff. Wohlfeil, Rainer: Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Reformation, Munich 1982. Wolf, Gustav: Quellenkunde der deutschen Reformationsgeschichte vols. 1–3, Gotha (vol. 3 Stuttgart, Gotha) 1915–1923, ND Nieuwkoop, Hildesheim 1965. Zeeden, Ernst Walter: Die Entstehung der Konfessionen. Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe, Munich,Vienna 1965. Zwingli, Huldreich: Sämtliche Werke, vol. I [CR 88], Berlin 1905, vol. II [CR 89], Leipzig 1908, Zwingli, Werke vol.VII [CR 94], Leipzig 1911.

Further Reading by Chapter 1.  Luther and the Reformation Boockmann, Hartmut: Das 15. Jahrhundert und die Reformation, in Wege ins Mittelalter, ed. by Dieter Neitzert, Uwe Israel, and Ernst Schubert, Munich 2000, pp. 65–80. Ehrenpreis, Stefan/Lotz-Heumann, Ute: Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, Darmstadt 2002. Ehrenpreis, Stefan/Lotz-Heumann, Ute/Mörke, Olaf/Schorn-Schütte, Luise (eds): Wege der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65. Geburtstag, Berlin 2007. Guggisberg, Hans R./Krodel, Gottfried G. (eds): Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten, Gütersloh 1993. Hamm, Berndt: Von der spätmittelalterlichen reformatio zur Reformation: der Prozeß normativer Zentrierung von Religion und Gesellschaft in Deutschland, in ARG 84, 1993, pp. 7–82. Jussen, Bernhard/Koslofsky, Craig (eds): Kulturelle Reformation. Sinnformationen im Umbruch: 1400–1600, Göttingen 1999. Moeller, Bernd: Die Reformation und das Mittelalter. Kirchengeschichtliche Aufsätze, ed. by Johannes Schilling, Göttingen 1991. Moeller, Bernd (ed.): Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch, Gütersloh 1998.

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Moeller, Bernd: Die Reformation als Epoche, in Ehrenpreis et al. (eds),Wege der Neuzeit, ch. 1, Berlin 2007, pp. 21–32. Seebaß, Gottfried: Art. Reformation, in TRE 28, 1997, pp. 386–404. Wolgast, Eike: Art. Reform, Reformation, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe vol. 5, Stuttgart 1984, pp. 313–60. 2.  European Christendom c.1500 Andermann, Kurt/Ehmer, Hermann (eds): Bevölkerungsstatistik an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, Sigmaringen 1990. Andreas,Willy: Deutschland vor der Reformation, Stuttgart 71972. Angenendt, Arnold: Heilige und Reliquien, Munich 21997. Angenendt, Arnold: Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter, Darmstadt 22000. Angenendt, Arnold: Grundformen der Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter, Munich 22004. Appel, Helmut:Anfechtung und Trost im Spätmittelalter und bei Luther, Leipzig 1938. Aubin, Hermann/Zorn, Wolfgang (eds): Handbuch der deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte vol. 1, Stuttgart 1971. Augustijn, Cornelis: Erasmus von Rotterdam. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, Munich 1986. Augustijn, Cornelis: Erasmus. Der Humanist als Theologe und Kirchenreformer, Leiden etc. 1996. Augustijn, Cornelis: Humanismus, Göttingen 2003. Baechler, Jean/Hall, John A./Mann, Michael (eds): Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, Oxford 1989. Bast, Robert J./Gow, Andrew C. (eds): Continuity and Change. The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History, Festschrift Heiko A. Oberman, Leiden 2000. Battenberg, Friedrich: Das europäische Zeitalter der Juden, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis 1650, Darmstadt 1990. Bauer, Leonhard/Matis, Herbert: Geburt der Neuzeit. Vom Feudalsystem zur Marktgesellschaft, Munich 1988. Baumgart, Peter/Hammerstein, Notker (eds): Beiträge zu Problemen deutscher Universitätsgründungen des 15. Jahrhunderts, Neudeln 1978. Baxandall, Michael: Die Kunst der Bildschnitzer.Tilman Riemenschneider,Veit Stoss und ihre Zeitgenossen, Munich 42004. Becker, Hans-Jürgen: Die Appellation vom Papst an ein allgemeines Konzil, Cologne, Vienna 1988. Behringer,Wolfgang/Roeck, Bernd (eds): Das Bild der Stadt in der Neuzeit 1400–1800, Munich 1999. Bell, Dean Philip/Burnett, Stephen (eds): Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, Leiden, Boston 2006. Boockmann, Hartmut: Die Stadt im späten Mittelalter, Munich 31994. Boockmann, Hartmut: Der Streit um das Wilsnacker Blut. Zur Situation des deutschen Klerus in der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts, in Wege ins Mittelalter. Historische Aufsätze, ed. by Dieter Neizert, Uwe Israel, and Ernst Schubert, Munich 2000, S. 17–36.

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Boockmann, Hartmut: Kirche und Gesellschaft im Heiligen Römischen Reich des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen 1994. Boockmann, Hartmut/Grenzmann, Ludger/Moeller, Bernd/Staehelin, Martin (eds): Recht und Verfassung im Übergang von Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, 2 vols, Göttingen 1998–2001. Boockmann, Hartmut/Grenzmann, Ludger/Moeller, Bernd/Staehelin, Martin (eds): Literatur, Musik und Kunst im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, Göttingen 1995. Boockmann, Hartmut/Moeller, Bernd/Stackmann, Karl (eds): Lebenslehren und Weltentwürfe im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. Politik—­Bildung—­ Naturkunde—­Theologie, Göttingen 1989. Braudel, Fernand: Sozialgeschichte des 15.–18. Jahrhunderts, 3 vols, Munich 1985, Studienausgabe 1990. Brinkmann, Bodo (ed.): Cranach der Ältere. Katalog der Ausstellung, Ostfildern 2007. Burckhardt, Jacob: Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch, Stuttgart 101976. Burke, Peter: Die europäische Renaissance. Zentren und Peripherien, Munich 1998; Neuausgabe Munich 2005. Cassirer, Ernst: Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, Darmstadt 51977. Crusius, Irene (ed.): Studien zum weltlichen Kollegiatstift in Deutschland, Göttingen 1995. Dicke, Gerd/Grubmüller, Klaus (eds): Die Gleichzeitigkeit von Handschrift und Buchdruck, Wiesbaden 2003. Divina Officia. Liturgie und Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Ausstellungskatalog der Herzog August Bibliothek, Brunswick 2004. Dörfler-Dierken, Angelika: Die Verehrung der Heiligen Anna in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Göttingen 1992. Döring, Karoline Dominika: Türkenkrieg und Medienwandel im 15. Jahrhundert, Husum 2013. Duffy, Eamon: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400– c.1580, New Haven 1992. Dykema, Peter  A./Oberman, Heiko  A. (eds): Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Leiden etc. 1993. Eckert, Willehad Paul: Erasmus von Rotterdam. Werk und Wirkung, 2 vols, Cologne 1967. Ehbrecht, Wilfried (ed.): Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde in der werdenden Neuzeit, Cologne,Vienna 1980. Ehrenberg, Richard: Das Zeitalter der Fugger. Geldkapital und Kreditverkehr im 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols, Jena 1922. Eire, Carlos M.N.: Reformations.The Early Modern World, 1450–1650, New Haven, London 2016. Eisenstein, Elisabeth: Die Druckerpresse. Kulturrevolutionen im frühen modernen Europa,Vienna, New York 1997.

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Eisermann, Falk: Der Ablaß als Medienereignis. Kommunikationswandel durch Einblattdrucke im 15. Jahrhundert. Mit einer Auswahlbibliographie, in Tradition and Innovation in an Era of Change/Tradition und Innovation im Übergang zur Frühen Neuzeit, Rudolf Suntrup and Jan R. Venstra, Frankfurt/M. 2001, pp. 99–128. Elm, Kaspar (ed.): Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, Berlin 1989. Elze, Martin: Das Verständnis der Passion Jesu im ausgehenden Mittelalter und bei Luther, in Geist und Geschichte der Reformation. Festschrift for Hans Rückert, Heinz Liebing and Klaus Scholder, Berlin 1966, pp. 127–51. Endres, Rudolf: Adel in der Frühen Neuzeit, Munich 1993. Erkens, Franz-Reiner: Buße in Zeiten des Schwarzes Todes, in ZHF 26, 1999, pp. 483–513. Erkens, Franz-Reiner (ed.): Europa und die osmanische Expansion im ausgehenden Mittelalter, Berlin 1997. Ernst,Wilhelm: Gott und Mensch am Vorabend der Reformation, Leipzig 1972. Faix, Gerhard: Gabriel Biel und die Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben,Tübingen 1999. Faulstich, Werner: Medien zwischen Herrschaft und Revolte. Die Medienkultur in der frühen Neuzeit (1400–1700). Die Geschichte der Medien vol. 3, Göttingen 1998. Febvre, Lucien: Leben in der französischen Renaissance, Berlin 2000. Frank, Günter/Niewöhner, Friedrich (eds): Reformer als Ketzer. Heterodoxe Bewegungen von Vorreformatoren, Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt 2004. Fried, Johannes: Aufstieg aus dem Untergang. Apokalyptisches Denken und die Entstehung der modernen Naturwissenschaft im Mittelalter, Munich 2001. Giesecke, Michael: Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt/M. 1994. Goff, Jacques Le: Die Intellektuellen im Mittelalter, Munich 1993. Gotthard, Axel: Säulen des Reiches. Die Kurfürsten im frühneuzeitlichen Reichsverband, 2 vols, Husum 1999. Graus, František: Pest—­Geißler—­Judenmorde. Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit, Göttingen 1987. Greenblatt, Stephen: Die Wende. Wie die Renaissance begann, Munich 2011. Grenzmann, Ludger/Haye, Thomas/Henkel, Nikolaus/Kaufmann, Thomas (eds): Wechselseitige Wahrnehmung der Religionen im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols, Berlin, Boston 2009–12. Grenzmann, Ludger/Grubmüller, Klaus/Rädle, Fidel/Staehelin, Martin (eds): Die Präsenz der Antike im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit, Göttingen 2004. Grenzmann, Ludger/Stackmann, Karl (eds): Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit, Stuttgart 1984. Greyerz, Kaspar von (ed.): Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, London 1984. Griffiths, Richard (ed.):The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Aldershot 2001. Grosse, Sven: Heilsungewißheit und Scrupulositas im späten Mittelalter,Tübingen 1994. Grubmüller, Klaus (ed.): Schulliteratur im späten Mittelalter, Munich 2000.

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Index

Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ”, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Act of Uniformity (1549)  182–3 Affair of the Placards (1534)  2 AIDS/HIV, Lutheranism and  285 Albert, Duke of Prussia  25–6 Alexander VI, Pope  14–15, 24–5 America Anglo-American historiographical perspectives on Reformation  258–9 European discoveries and conquests 13–15 Lutheranism economic achievements in  256 Protestant migrations  284 Puritans in  230 Anabaptism  116–19, 219–24 Anglicanism Act of Uniformity (1549)  182–3 Book of Common Prayer 182–3 confessional culture  274 Eucharist, doctrine of  182–3 High Church  282 retention of Roman traditions  133–4 royal reformation, as  176, 179–88 Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith (1563) 182–3 Anna of Bohemia and Hungary, Archduchess of Austria  26–7 anti-Semitism See Judaism Antitrinitarianism  227–9, 233 Aquinas, Thomas  43 Aristotle 47–50 Augsburg diet and Confession (1530) 128–31 Augsburg, diet of (1518)  33, 79–80 Augsburg, diet of (1530)  53–5, 123–4, 128–31, 189, 240

Augsburg, diet of (1547) (‘armed diet’) 192–3 Augsburg Interim (1548)  193–6 Augsburg, Peace of (1555)  199–201 Avignon papacy  23 Basle, Council of (1431–37/49)  5 Bernardino of Siena  36–7 Beza, Theodor  3 Biel, Gabriel  42–3 biographical historiography  245–6 Bohemia early reformation movements  149–52 Hussite movement  1–2, 26, 37–8, 77–9, 150 pre-Reformation era  26 Book of Common Prayer 182–3 Bora, Katharina von  57–8, 89 Borgia, Cesare  24–5 Botticelli, Sandro  51f Bourges, Pragmatic Sanction of  33 Bracke, Lambert  19f Briçonnet, Guillaume, bishop of Meaux 1–2 Bruyn, Bartholomäus  19f Bucer, Martin  79, 87, 107, 115, 127, 129, 138–9, 156–62, 165–6, 182–3, 189–90, 219 Bulgaria, Ottoman conquest (1388)  10 Bullinger, Heinrich  3 bulls, papal See Catholic Church Bundschuh movement (1502, 1513, and 1517) 20–1 burgesses 20 burghers  31–2, 38–9 Burgmaier, Hans, the Elder  30f, 35f

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Burgundian partition (France/ Habsburgs) 25 Byzantine Empire, Ottomon conquest of Constantinople (1453)  10 Calvinism See also Calvin, John; Reformed churches ‘Calvinism,’ use of term  166 capitalism and  254, 278–9 England, in  187 Geneva as centre of  135 internationalization of reformed Protestantism 165–7 Lutheranism and  164–6 Netherlands, in  171–2, 175 political liberation in Netherlands 171–3 Reformed Protestantism as synonymous with  166 Scotland, in  175 Troeltsch’s historiography  254 Weber’s historiography  278–9 worldly pleasures, and  161 Calvin, John Bullinger, and  164–5 church governance and discipline, on 157–61 earliest Reformation writing  3 intellectual background  155–7 racism, and  284–5 Servetus’s execution by fire, and 161–3 Zwinglian Reformation in Zurich 164–5 canon law, decline of  133–4 capitalism Calvinism and  254 Lutheranism and  278–9 Capuchin order, foundation of 213–14 Catholic Church Avignon papacy  23 Church/State politics, and  122–31 clerical estate  18–20 confessionalization thesis  266–7 Counter-Reformation See Counter-Reformation faith and religion in pre-Reformation era 33–46 forms of piety  36–42

‘good works,’ and See ‘good works,’ doctrine of humanism 48–52 indulgences 44–6 Inter cetera bull (1493)  14–15 Judaism and See Judaism nominalism 43–4 Papal power struggle with Holy Roman Empire  32–3 Papal States (Patrimonium Petri) 24–5 realism 43 scholasticism 42–3 theological diversity  42–4 Charlemagne (Charles the Great), Holy Roman Emperor  19f Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor  1, 23–5, 28–31, 33, 86–8, 122, 144, 154, 167–8, 171–2, 180, 188–200, 207, 241, 250 Charles VIII, King of France  24 Christian II, King of Denmark  1–2, 144–5, 153 Christianization of society  126 Church/State politics during Reformation 122–31 Cicero 49–50 clerical estate  18–20 Columbus, Christopher  13–14 Constance, Council of (1414–18)  4–5 Constantinople, Ottoman conquest of (1453) 10 Copernicus, Nicolas  49 Council of Trent (1545–7, 1551–2, 1562–3) 207–12 Counter-Reformation Capuchin order, foundation of 213–14 Council of Trent (1545–7, 1551–2, 1562–3) 207–12 ‘Counter-Reformation and Catholic reform,’ use of terms  205–6 Jesuit order, foundation and impact of 214–16 monastic reforms  212–17 process of reform  205–7 women’s religious orders, reform of 216–18 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder  1–2 cultural change in Reformation era 132–6

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I n de x351 cultural developments and innovations in pre-Reformation Europe  46–52 curia, Roman See Catholic Church Denmark Christian II exiled (1523)  1–2 early reformation movements  142–6 reformation in Iceland  177 Reformation jubilee celebrations 236–7 royal reformation  177–8 Union of Kalmar (1397)  27, 144 denominational alliances within Holy Roman Empire  122–4 Protestant 135 Díaz, Bartolomeu  11–13 diets Augsburg (1518)  33, 79–80 Augsburg (1530)  53–5, 123–4, 128–31, 189, 240 Augsburg (1547) (‘armed diet’)  192–3 ceremonial aspect  10 Nuremberg (1522–3)  123 Regensburg (1531)  189 Regensburg (1532)  30–1, 199 Speyer (1526)  123 Speyer (1529)  119, 123–4, 219 system of  31–3 Worms (1495)  86–96 Worms (1521)  86–96, 144, 270 dissenters See non-conformism eastern Europe, early reformation movements 147–53 economic expansion in pre-Reformation era 15–16 economics, finance and trade economic expansion in pre-Reformation era  15–16 Reformation era  135–6 Edict of Nantes (1598)  169–71, 232–3 Edict of Nantes, revocation of (1685) 232–4 Eliezer Ha Levi  1–2 Elizabeth I, Queen of England  175, 179, 181–8 England See also Anglicanism; Puritanism Anglo-American historiographical perspectives 258–9 Calvinism in  187

early reformation movements  141–2 Elizabeth I’s Protestant establishment 183–8 Henry VIII’s rebuttal of Luther (1520) 1–2 Henry VIII’s Reformation  179–82 Hundred Years’ War with France  22 Lollard movement  37–8 pre-Reformation era  23 Puritanism See Puritanism royal reformation  179–88 Enlightenment, Reformation and 246–9 Erasmus  50–1, 119–22 estate-based social structures in Europe burgesses 20 clerical estate  18–20 household estate  20–1 noble estate  17–18 peasants 20 system of estates  17 three estates doctrine  18 urban structures  20 Eucharist Anglican doctrine of  182–3 Luther’s teaching on  114–16 Europe cultural change in Reformation era 132–6 cultural developments and innovations 46–52 denominational-based Reformation-era alliances 135 early reformation movements  136–53 economic expansion  15–16 estate-based social structures  17–21 faith and religion in pre-Reformation era 33–46 global discoveries  11–15 humanism 48–52 map of  12f nations and powers  22–7 Ottoman threat  10–11 political structures  20–2 Print Revolution  46–8 evangelical churches, founding of 124–7 faith and religion in pre-Reformation era 33–46

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Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor  26–7, 30f Ferdinand II, King of Aragon  13, 21–2 finance See economics, finance and trade France Affair of the Placards (1534)  2 Avignon papacy  23 Burgundian acquisitions  25 early reformation movements  139–41, 153–4 Edict of Nantes (1598)  169–71, 232–3 Edict of Nantes, revocation of (1685) 232–4 invasion of Italy (1494–1500)  24 ‘Liberties of the Gallican Church’ (1516) 22 persecution of protestants pre-Edict of Nantes 167–71 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges  33 pre-Reformation era  22–3 religious activity, increase in  37 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 169 Francis I, King of France  2, 22, 24, 128, 135, 140, 154–5, 159–60, 167–8 Frederick III (the Wise), Elector of Saxony  25–6, 72, 86–7, 188, 240 French Revolution, Reformation and  236 Froben, Johannes  1–2, 50 Geneva as centre of Calvinism  135 Gensfleisch, Johannes  46 Germanus, Nicolaus  14f Germany See also Habsburg Empire East- and West-German historiographical divisions  259–65 Imperial Germany’s historiographical appropriation after 1870  251–3 peasant uprisings  20–1 Print Revolution  46–8 Gerson, Jean  42–3 global voyages and discoveries  11–15 Golden Bull (1356)  26, 28–9 ‘good works,’ doctrine of  39, 68, 83, 193–4, 203–4, 215–16 Granada, Spanish reconquest of (1492) 13–14

Gravamina movement  32–3 Great Britain See England; Scotland Gregory of Rimini  42–3 Groote, Gerard  40 Gustav I Vasa, King of Sweden  27 Gutenberg (Gensfleisch), Johannes  46–8, 80, 82–3, 272 Henry IV, King of France  135, 169–70, 232–3 Henry VIII, King of England  1–2, 70–2, 128, 135, 142, 151, 179–83, 186 ‘heretical’ movements  37–8 historiography See Reformation HIV/AIDS, Lutheranism and  285 Hochheim, Eckhart von See Meister Eckhart Holy Roman Empire See also Germany burghers 31–2 denominational alliances within 122–4 Gravamina movement  32–3 imperial diet  31–3 Papacy, and  32–3 political system  27–30 reform 30–2 taxation 32 household estate  20–1 Huguenots  168, 284 humanism in Europe  48–52 Hungary early reformation movements  153 Ottoman victory at Mohács (1526) 26–7 Hus, Jan  26, 34–6, 35f, 44, 77–9, 81–2, 85, 87, 138–9 Hussite movement  1–2, 26, 37–8, 77–9, 150 Iceland See Denmark imperial diet See diets indulgences Luther’s objections  2–3, 46, 72–6 system of  44–6 internationalization of reformed Protestantism 165–7 Isabella I, Queen of Castile  13, 21–2 Italy early reformation movements  146–7

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I n de x353 Genoan-Ottoman alliance against Venice 10 pre-Reformation era  24 Renaissance 49 Jesuit order, foundation and impact of 214–16 Joanna, Princess of Castile ( Joanna the Mad)  24 Joan of Arc  22 John of Capistrano  36–7 John, Prince of Asturias and Girona, Infanta of Spain  24 jubilee celebrations of Reformation 235–44 Judaism Anabaptism, and  119, 220 Dutch toleration  172 expulsions of Jews  13–14, 23, 36 intolerance against  36, 54–5, 244, 251–2 Lutheranism and antiSemitism  56, 285–6 Luther’s anti-Semitism  127, 195, 230–2, 285–6 migrations within Europe  36 Reformation’s impact on ChristianJewish relations  230–2, 271–3 Julius II, Pope  24–5 Kalmar, Union of (1397)  27, 144 Kaysersberg, Geiler von  4–5 King Edward VI, King of England  179, 181–3, 186, 194 Knights’ Revolt (1522)  107–8 Knox, John  3, 167, 173–6, 186 Kosovo, Battle of (1389)  10 language, Latin decline and vernacular rise 132–3 Lateran Council, Fifth (1512–17)  5 Lateran Council, Fourth (1215)  18–20 Latin Christianity postReformation 229–34 law, decline of canon law  133–4 Leipzig Interim (1549)  196 Leo X, Pope  22, 66, 79–80, 84, 179 ‘Liberties of the Gallican Church’ (1516) 22

Lichtenberg, George Christoph  15 Lithuania See Poland-Lithuania Livonia, early reformation movements 148–9 Lollards 37–8 Lutheranism AIDS/HIV, and  285 American migrations  284 Anabaptism, and  219–20, 222 anti-Semitism, and  285–6 authoritarianism 196 biographical historiography  245–6 Calvinism and  164–6, 254 capitalism, and  278–9 catechisms  126, 285 conceptualizations of Reformation  6 confessional culture  274 confessionalization thesis  266–7 Confessions  129, 164–5 Dutch toleration  166–7 duty of secular obedience  126 economic achievements of  256 Enlightenment, and  247–8 Erasmus and  119–22 freedom, concept of  285 ‘God’s Chancellery’ (Herrgotts Kanzlei) 197 historiographical concept of Reformation 269 HIV/AIDS, and  285 holidays 279 Hungary 233 iconoclasm 278 irrational aspects  280–1 Jesuits, and  215–16 Knights’ Revolt, and  108 law, concept of  279–80 lay participation  276 Luther and  58–9, 106–7, 126, 195–6, 257–8 ‘Lutheranism,’ use of term  166 ‘Lutherans,’ use of term  87 Lutheran World Federation  283 Magdeburg, in  196–9 modern Protestantism, and  253, 283–4 non-conformism, and  217–18 patriarchalism 126 Peace of Augsburg, and  201 Protestantism and  123–4

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Lutheranism (cont.) racism, and  284–5 Reformation Day celebrations  237–8 Reformation jubilee celebrations 236–43 Reformed churches, and  166–7 ‘Reformed churches’ distinguished from  55, 116 religious images in art, and  278 retention of Roman traditions  133–4 royal reformations in Scandinavia 176–88 sacramentalism 281 salvation, doctrine of  253–4 social influences of  256–7 theological disputes after Augsburg Peace 202–5 Unitarianism, and  228, 233 Wittenberg as centre of  135 women’s religious orders  279 worldly pleasures, and  161 Lutheran World Federation  283 Luther, Martin anti-Semitism  127, 195, 230–2, 285–6 On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (De captivitate babylonica) 1–2 Biel, and  43–4 break with the Pope  76–86 capitalism, and  278–9 Charles V, and  1 To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation) 5 commencement of Reformation  53–5 Complete Works of Luther 1–2 conception of reformation  5 Cranach the Elder’s drawing of  90f death 195 Disputation on the Power of Indulgences (Ninety-Five Theses)  2–3, 72–6 doctrinal positions  68–76 Edict of Worms (1521), and  32 Eliezer Ha Levi, and  1–2 Erasmus, and  119–22 Eucharist, on  114–16 family life  58 freedom, concept of  285 On Good Works (1520)  83 grace and justification, on  68–72

Gregory of Rimini, and  42–3 humanists, and  51–2 indulgences, on  46, 72–6 Karlstadt, and  112–14 law, concept of  279–80 Lutheran historic memory, in  6 Lutheranism, and  58–9, 106–7, 126, 195–6, 257–8 marriage 57–8 monastic career  59–68 Müntzer, and  111–12 Peasants’ War, and  111–12 portrait of  56–9 pub 5 Purgatory, on  75, 86 racism, and  284–5 reformer, as  5–6 reformer through writing and publishing 82–6 refusal to recant  86–9 religious zeal  63–8 secular career plans  59–63 Sickingen’s Knights’ Revolt, and 107–8 start point of Reformation, as  6–9 Suleiman the Magnificent  1–2 theological activism in support of 89–95 theological debates  76–82 wife See Bora, Katharina von Wittenberg movement, and  93–5 Zwingli, and  9, 55, 97–8 Magdeburg, siege of (1550)  196–9 Margaret, Archduchess of Austria  24 Mary, Duchess of Burgundy  25 Mary I, Queen of England  167, 179, 186, 199 Mary of Austria, Queen of Hungary 26–7 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor  23–5, 28–33 Meister Eckhart  42–3 Melanchthon, Philip  70–2, 88–9, 91, 92f, 112, 129–30, 134–5, 153–4, 157, 159–60, 163, 178, 189, 194–6, 202–5, 236–7, 239f, 241–3, 246, 257, 279–80 Mohács, Battle of (1526)  26–7 monastic reforms during CounterReformation 212–17

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I n de x355 Moscow, Duchy of, expansion in eastern Europe 26–7 Müntzer, Thomas  1–2, 92–3, 108–14, 117, 119, 125, 150, 220–1, 224–6, 259–61, 265 Myconius, Friedrich  2–3 mysticism 224–7 Nantes, Edict of See Edict of Nantes ‘nationalization’ of religion  126 nations and powers of Europe in pre-Reformation era  22–7 Nerlich, Nickel  30f Netherlands Calvinism 175 early reformation movements  137–9 independence from Spain (1581) 171–3 Lutherans in  166–7 Puritans in  172 noble estate  17–18 non-conformism Anabaptism 219–24 Antitrinitarianism 227–9 differences from main Protestant denominations 217–18 ‘dissenters’ and ‘non-conformists,’ use of terms  218 motivations for  217–18 mystics and spiritualists  224–7 non-conformity 218 Norway early reformation movements  142 royal reformation from Denmark 177–8 nuns See women’s religious orders Nuremberg, diet of (1522–3)  123 Ottoman Empire Balkan conquests  10 conquest of Constantinople (1453)  10 conquest of Hungary (1526)  26–7 European conquests  10–11 Mediterranean conquests  10 Ovid 49 Paltz, Johann von  42–3 Papacy See Catholic Church Papal States (Patrimonium Petri) 24–5 patriarchalism, Reformation and  126

Paul II, Pope  10–11 peasants social status  20 uprisings 20–1 peasant uprisings in pre-Reformation era 20–1 Pelagius 42–3 Peraudi, Raymond, cardinal  45–6 Philip II, King of Spain  171–2, 183, 199 Philip I (the Handsome), King of Castile 24 Pietism lay participation  276 women’s participation  276 Pius II, Pope  10–11 plague epidemics  36–7 Plato 47–50 Poland-Lithuania early reformation movements  149–50 Muscovite threat  26–7 pre-Reformation era  26 political structures in pre-Reformation era 21–2 politics of Church and State during Reformation 122–31 Poor Conrad revolt (1514)  20–1 Portugal American discoveries and conquests 14–15 voyages to Africa and India  11–13 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges  33 Presbyterianism  175, 187, 284 ‘Princes’ War’ (1552)  199 printing and print industry  3, 9, 42–3, 46–8, 72–3, 91, 94–6, 154, 211–12, 224–6, 271–4 Protestantism See also Anglicanism; Calvinism; Calvin, John; Evangelicalism; Lutheranism; Luther, Martin; Reformation; Reformed churches Augsburg Interim (1548)  193–6 Augsburg, Peace of (1555)  199–201 confessionalization thesis  266–7 founding moment of  123–4 Latin Christianity postReformation 229–34 law, concept of  279–80 lay participation  276 Leipzig Interim (1549)  196

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Protestantism (cont.) Lutheranism and  123–4 Magdeburg, siege of (1550)  196–9 modern Protestantism, Lutheranism and  253 monasteries, dissolution of  279 present-day global Protestantism  282–6 ‘Princes’ War’ (1552)  199 ‘Protestantism,’ use of term  229–30 racism, and  284–5 Reformed Protestantism as synonymous with Calvinism  166 retention of Roman traditions  133–4 Schmalkaldic League  189–93 Prussia, early reformation movements 148 Purgatory  39, 44–6, 75, 86, 215–16 Puritanism American migrations  230, 284 conflict with Anglican establishment 187 conflict with Anglican establishment 274 Dutch toleration  172 import into England by Marian exiles 185–6 lay participation  276 leadership structures  276 racism anti-Semitism See Judaism Protestantism and  284–5 Ranke, Leopold von, History of the Reformation in Germany 3–4 Reformation See also Anglicanism; Calvinism; Calvin, John; Lutheranism; Luther, Martin; non-conformism; Protestantism; Puritanism; Reformed churches Anabaptism, and  116–19 Anglo-American historiographical perspectives 258–9 Augsburg diet and Confession (1530) 128–31 biographical historiography  245–6 capitalism and  278–9 Charles V’s religious reunification policy, and  188–205 Christianization of society  126 Church/State politics, and  122–31

commencement 53–5 conceptualizations of  3–6 current historiographical challenges 265–8 disputes within  106–22 duty of secular obedience  126 early reformation movements  136–53 East- and West-German historiographical divisions  259–65 Enlightenment and  246–9 European scale of  1–3 expansion in eastern Europe  147–53 founding of evangelical churches 124–7 French Revolution, and  236 ‘heretical’ movements and  37–8 iconoclasm 277–8 impact on Modern West  273–82 Imperial Germany’s historiographical appropriation after 1870  251–3 individualism and  280–2 internationalization of reformed Protestantism 165–7 jubilee celebrations from 1617 to 2017 235–44 Latin Christianity post-Reformation  229–34 law and  279–80 Luther as start point of  6–9 Luther Renaissance thesis  257–8 ‘nationalization’ of religion  126 patriarchalism 126 plural ‘reformations,’ whether?  6–9 present-day perspectives on impact of 269–73 radical relativistic historiography after 1906 251–3 rationalism and  280–1 ‘Reformation,’ use of term  3–4 religious images in art, and  277–8 royal reformations in Scandinavia and England 176–88 sacramentalism and  281 scientific historiography  249–51 Sickingen’s Knights’ Revolt, and 107–8 subsequent historical interpretations 244–68 sui generis historic period, as  269 urban 95–6

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I n de x357 Wittenberg movement  93–5 Zwingli in Zurich  96–106 Reformed churches American migrations  284 Anabaptism, and  219–20 confessional culture  274 confessionalization thesis  266–7 holidays 279 lay participation  276 Lutheranism and  166–7 Lutheranism distinguished from  55, 116 monasteries, dissolution of  279 non-conformism, and  217–18 Protestantism and  123–4 racism, and  284–5 Reformation jubilee celebrations  240, 242–3 sacramentalism 281 World Alliance of Reformed Churches 283 Regensburg, diet of (1531)  189 Regensburg, diet of (1532)  30–1, 199 relativistic historiography  251–3 Renaissance 49 Roman Catholicism See Catholic Church sacraments Anglican Eucharistic teaching  182–3 Luther’s Eucharistic teaching  114–16 Reformation and  281 salvation, Lutheran doctrine of  253–4 Scandinavia See Denmark; Norway; Sweden Schmalkaldic League  189–93 scientific historiography  249–51 Scotland 1–2 Calvinism 175 John Knox and Scottish Reformation 173–6 ‘scripture alone’ (sola scriptura), doctrine of  55, 97, 99–101, 115 secular obedience, duty of  126 Serbia, Ottoman victory at Kosovo (1389) 10 Sickingen, Franz von  107–8 Sixtus IV, Pope  24–5 social structures in pre-Reformation era 17–21

Socrates 49–50 sola scriptura See ‘scripture alone’ Spain American discoveries and conquests 13–15 early reformation movements  146–7 pre-Reformation era  23 Reconquista 13–14 Speyer, diet of (1526)  123 Speyer, diet of (1529)  119, 123–4, 219 Spiritualism 224–7 Springer, Balthasar  13 St Ambrose  50 Stamler, Johannes  35f St Arnobius  50 State/Church politics during Reformation 122–31 St Augustine  49–50 Staupitz, Johann von  42–3 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) 169 St Cyprian  50 St Hilary  50 St Irenaeus  50 St Jerome  50 St John Chrysostom  50 St Thomas the apostle  13 Stumpf, Johannes  29f Suleiman I (the Magnificent), Ottoman Emperor 1–2 Sweden early reformation movements  142–4 independence from Denmark (1523) 27 Reformation jubilee celebrations 236–7 royal reformation  178–9 Union of Kalmar (1397)  27, 144 Swiss Confederation Geneva as centre of Calvinism  135 pre-Reformation era  25 Zwinglian Reformation in Zurich 96–106 Tacitus 50 Tauler, Johannes  42–3 taxation in Holy Roman Empire  32 Teutonic Order in pre-Reformation era 25–6 Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith (1563)  182–3

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Thirty Years’ War (1618–48)  240, 250–1, 266–7 three estates doctrine  18 Timur Lang (Tamerlane), Mongolian Emperor 10 Tordesillas, Treaty of See Catholic Church Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo  13 trade See economics, finance and trade Trent, Council of (1545–7, 1551–2, 1562–3) 207–12 Tyndale, William  141–2, 143f, 181 Unitarianism  227–9, 233 United Kingdom See England; Scotland universities growth and influence of  34–6 humanism 49 Reformation era  134–5 ‘urban affinity’ of Zwinglian theology 104–6 urban piety  38–9 urban Reformation  95–6 urban social structures  20 Varna, Battle of (1444)  10 Vasco da Gama  11–13 Vienna, Concordat of (1448)  32

Virgil 49–50 Vladislaus II, King of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia  26–7 Vogtherr, Heinrich, the Elder  29f Waldensians 37–8 Westphalia, Peace of  172, 201, 233–4 William of Ockham  43–4 Wittenberg movement  93–5 women’s lay participation Pietism 276 women preachers  273 women’s ordination  282 women’s religious orders Counter-Reformation reform  216–18 Lutheran 279 World Alliance of Reformed Churches 283 Worms, diet of (1495)  86–96 Worms, diet of (1521)  86–96, 144, 270 Wycliffe, John  34–8, 44, 82, 141, 143f, 231f Zwingli, Ulrich (Huldreich)  54–5 clerical career  96–104 Luther, and  9, 55 ‘urban affinity’ of his theology  104–6 Zurich, in  96–106