The Reformation between Deconstruction and Reconstruction

We have come a long way since Thomas Carlyle could declare, ‘The Diet of Worms, Luther's appearance there on the 17th of April 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise.’ The days when the sage of Ecclefechan could stylize Luther as the ‘Hero as Priest’ are long gone,1 and accounts of the Reformation which ascribed the victory of Protestantism to manifest destiny, or indeed to the hand of God, have expired and are now unlikely to be resurrected, except by right-wing American fundamentalists. Amongst historians, pluralism, gradualism and uncertainty have become watchwords in interpreting the spread of evangelical beliefs. Yet the cooling of religious ardour in a post-Christian age, when it has become politically incorrect to profess anything other than ecumenical principles, has led to no visible lessening of interest in the Reformation, whatever we understand it to be. A glance over the past fifteen years reveals a profusion of new textbooks with ambitious titles and encompassing agendas: Euan Cameron led the way with The European Reformation, Carter Lindberg followed with The European Reformations; then came James Tracy's Europe's Reformations, 1450–1650, Andrew Pettegree's The Reformation World, Peter Wallace's The Long European Reformation ... 1350–1750, Ronnie Hsia's compendium, A Companion to the Reformation World, and most recently Diarmaid MacCulloch’s, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490–1700, Ulinka Rublack's Reformation Europe and Andrew Pettegree's Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion.2 The use of the plural by Lindberg and Tracy (not to mention the extra-European dimension consciously essayed in Hsia's and MacCulloch's volumes), and the increasingly attenuated chronological span evident in Wallace's and MacCulloch's subtitles, show that the Reformation is now seen not as an event but as a process, whose outcome was neither predictable nor predetermined. This view of the Reformation as a subset of Darwinian evolutionary biology may now be in the ascendant, but it has not been able entirely to submerge the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s, which focused on the Reformation's ‘storm years’ in the German cities, the raging pamphlet wars, and its links to social revolution. This early Reformation has been addressed within the last decade or so only by Andrew Pettegree's The Early Reformation in Europe, by Owen Chadwick's The Early Reformation on the Continent, by the avowedly cultural approach in Rublack's Reformation Europe, and for Germany by the papers edited by Bernd Moeller in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch (‘The Early Reformation in Germany as Upheaval’).3

Civilization · Early Modern Europe · German · Of Reformation · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Theology · Victory · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies

• From the Strange Death to the Odd Afterlife of Lutheran England

  Open Access•David Scott Gehring, David Gehring•The Historical Journal•2014

  Añadir item

• Burying Money? Monetary Origins and Afterlives of Luther's Reformation

  Philipp Rössner, Philipp Robinson Rössner•History of Political Economy•2016

  Añadir item