The Early Reformation in Germany

Tom Scott, Honorary Professor in the School of History at the University of St Andrews, is the author of numerous influential works on the social, economic and political history of late medieval and early modern Germany. He has immeasurably enriched the field of German Reformation Studies through his research on the peasantry and the Peasants’ War, town-country relations, Radical Reformers such as Thomas Müntzer, and German regionalism—his knowledge of customs, climate, topography, geography, political structures and means of production in the myriad entities that made up the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation is unrivalled among English-speaking historians. All of this learning and expertise is on display in The Early Reformation in Germany and it is directed towards a single end: to invite scholars to return to the study of the origins and early development of the Reformation in the German lands. The volume consists of ten essays, three of which are published here for the first time, and seven of which have been revised and reworked for this book. The volume also contains an Afterword that details Scott’s research experience in the former German Democratic Republic, which has been so influential on the shape of his scholarship. Scott writes of the ten essays, ‘They reflect my conviction that the early Reformation in Germany, far from being a worked-out seam of research, still contains new adits and shafts of exploration into unresolved questions’ (p. 1). He goes on to explain how after the heady days of urban Reformation research in the 1970s and 1980s, historians turned their attention to the later Reformation and its establishment in the German lands. This change in research agendas was to be expected and even welcomed, but it was informed by an assumption that Scott seeks to challenge throughout the volume, namely, that all possible researches into the early Reformation have been exhausted. According to Scott, nothing could be further from the truth. His ten essays are meant to begin to fill the numerous lacunae that he continues to see in our knowledge of the early Reformation.

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