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M. Greengrass

Centre Roland Mousnier

University of Warwick - 24 November 2014

HI203: The Unfolding of the European Reformation

You have had lectures about Luther, about Calvin, and about the Radical Reformation. Next week’s lectures are devoted to the Catholic, or Counter-Reformation. My task is to give shape to the notion of ‘the European Reformation’, to put the different pieces together. Reformation as ‘renewal’ is hard-wired into Christianity. It starts with baptism as a ‘second birth’, when Christians renounce the works of the Devil and turn to Christ. It continues with conversion, an ongoing theme in Christian history. For the church, ‘renewal’ was embodied in the efforts of a succession of councils of the church to secure its reform. So the first point is a paradox. On the one hand, reformation was part of an ongoing Christian tradition. On the other hand, the Protestant Reformation was something unique. That something was a permanent schism in Western Christendom which has no parallel in Eastern Christianity. The schism was messy, long drawn-out, and fundamentally divisive. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book entitled Reformation on your reading-list has as its subtitle: ‘Europe’s House Divided’(*). If you read its 830 pages you will see why that messy divisiveness is complicated to analyse and explain. My own book presents the Reformation as a key component in the destruction of Christendom, the project which had united Europeans for over a millennium. But it does so by showing it as interweaved with everything else (740pp). John Bossy, in a powerful little book Christianity in the West,1400-1700hardly uses the term at all.(*)For ‘Reformation’ in the index, the first subheading is: ‘term discussed’. Look up that page and Bossy writes: ‘That something important happened in the sixteenth century is evident, and the term “Reformation” is probably as good a guide to investigating what it was’. But it should be used, he says, as sparingly as possible,’not simply simply because it goes along too easily with the notion that a bad form of Christianity was being replaced by a good one, but because it sits awkwardly across the subject without directing one’s attention anywhere in particular’.

Here is a second paradox. We use the term ‘Reformation’ to describe a unique event, but we also use it to delineate a process. Patrick Collinson’s The Reformation(which, at 200 pages, offers a Reformation for Dummies which is hard to beat (*) puts it in a nutshell: ‘There is a tension here between event and process which, presented onto a larger screen is the tension between the Reformation as part of the continuum of history and the Reformation as an extraordinary historical moment - as it were, a meteor strike at history’). That meteor struck somewhere between 1515 and 1523, in the Rhineland, in Wittenberg, and in Zurich. Butit became the beginning of a long, dynamic evolution, with its own chronology and geography, in which the Reformation takes on many different colours and textures. In the process, it decomposed. It becamea Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic, Anabaptist, radical, urban, rural, refugee, ‘further’, Counter- reformation - different flavours of Reformation, like ice-cream. But you will notice that all the books on your reading-list continueto refer to something ‘singular’ (the Reformation). Thar is because it is an accepted way of looking at things. But it is also historically useful to have a term for referring to a complex basket of things. In this instance, the basket could as easily be labelled religious change and its impact.

(*) To try and analyse these processes further, it helps to imagine what happens in terms of generational change. A generation was typically seen as 30 years long, but I have stretched the periods a bit here and there to present something of what I see as something of the evolution of the Reformation, from schism and chaotic dynamism, through its attempted repression, reactions to that repression, and a process of consolidation of its impact, to the period of the wars of religion, a period which was also accompanied by experiments in religious pluralism. When does the Reformation end though? That is the wrong question, for processes do not have endings. You will notice that those historians we have mentioned have different chronologies. Maculloch ends in 1700, Greengrass in 1618/1648, Collinson with the onset of the Enlightenment towards the end of the 17C. With its contradictory tensions, the Reformation was chronologically and geographically unstable, going in fits and starts, offering local divergences and variable geometries. Because its unfolding was the result of a multiple series of negotiations, of the outcome of contrary tensions, there was no end to it. Rather those negotiations were overlaid by other concerns and different imperatives in the period that we know as the Enlightenment. Here is an important point, through. The longer the time-frame that we allow for the processes of the Reformation, the more it is that what we ascribe as occurring directly because of the Reformation is actually because of what happened intermediately, or for other reasons. The longer the time-framewe give the Reformation, the less certain we can be that what we are trying to analyse is actually about the Reformation at all.

(*) The dynamics of the Reformation were multi-layered, driven by forces which were in tension with one other. One layer was political and polemical, operating at the short and mediumm term. Here the forces of the Reformation were those which, on the one hand, could be manipulated by rulers, and which strengthened the authority of the state. On the other hand, the forces of the Reformation destabilised established political authority, creating dissident minorities, which threatened the forces which legitimised the state, embittered political processes, and fomented ‘wars of religion’, and promulgated (on the basis of older notions) doctrines of legitimate resistance to wrongfully exercised rule,. The unfolding of the Reformation was therefore one in which the outcomes were uncertain, debated and contradictory. Then there was alayer which was confessionally configured: a Reformation which was Lutheran, Zwinglio-Calvinist (in due course ‘Reformed’), Radical, etc. This layer, too, had its contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there were the processes of ‘confessionalisation’. This is an English term which translates the German ‘Konfessionalisierung’. The confessions involved were not simply Catholic and Protestant, of course. There were Lutheran and Calvinist, Gallican, Belgic, Anglican, Anabaptist, Mennonite, Quaker, etc. The term is used to describe the impact of the desire to unify beliefs around a territorial unity - the imposition of the same religious observances, saying the same psalms in the same way, the same prayers, according to the same calendar. The process was more marked because the enlargement of state control over Church affairs was a growing reality in the post-Reformation. Not only did states assume a greater role in the appointment and supervision of clerics, they also took on responsibilities for poor relief, education and the daily lives of their subjects through police regulations governing marriage, family life and moral beahaviour in public. In some places, this amounted to a conscious process of state-building - bureaucratic, top-down conformity. Confessionalisation became a way of projecting a sharper sense of religious conceived identity - whether in the hands of aristocrats who sought to rally support for their cause, or in those of godly rulers, presenting themselves as leading an elect nation. Confessionalisation would be at its strongest wherever state churches prevailed, and where a religious confession became aligned with the authority of a ruler. On the other hand, confessionalisation could be thwarted by the existence of religious minorities which were too entrenched to be eradicated, and by the rural world, which often proved stubbornly resistant to being acculturated to religious changes. The Reformation strengthened the hand of rulers in smaller and medium sized states. Top-down bureaucratic confessionalisation was much less successful in larger entities like Elizabethan England. Very often churches and states had to adapt to the uncomfortable and difficult reality of religious pluralism, and the pragmatic compromises which resulted from it.They had to accept the limits of the possible within political frameworks which allowed elites (aristocrats, local magistrates, bishops, law officers and church officials) a say in what happened, and who might or might not be persuaded by the imperatives of confessional unity. Instability was a fundamental component of the unfolding of the Reformation because the compromises that the ecclesiastical and confessional settlements rested upon in practice were inherently instable, dependent on the skills of those who initiated and implemented them, and the forces which put them in place. Instability was inbuilt into the processes of Reformation by the dominant dynastic nature of European rule, and the fact that Europe’s dynastic houses were split along religious lines, some (like the Tudors, or the Bourbon) within their core and main collateral lines, others (more numerously) through marriages which crossed confessions for political and dynastic reasons.

Further layers of these contradictory processes of Reformation lay in the cultural implantation of the Reformation, which played out more in the medium and long-term. This is the most contradictory for historians to analyse because it happened over a time-scale which stretches beyond our four generations. These are ‘open questions’. To what extent, if at all, did the Reformation change relationships within the family, and towards women and children? On the one hand, Luther’s own marriage became a media event. His theology of gender, which sanctified marriage, became a subject of polemic in its own right in the 1520s. On the other hand, the Reformation progresively inscribed itself in the increasingly strident voices and values of patriarchy and promoted the image of the godly household, in where life was supposed to be structured life around domestic prayers, a grace before meals, discreet religious imagery around the hearth, etc.(*) Religious themes and images inspired generations of domestic art and artefacts - reminding us that religion was not just what went on in church.(*) The Biblical nature of the themes were more pronounced, but there were continuities with the pre-Reformation world. And it would not be impossible to find such images in parts of urban Catholic Europe, from the Southern Netherlands for example, or from Venice. Although the Protestant Reformation removed marriage from one of the church sacraments, thus opening the door to the possibility of divorce(*) in practice, divorce was strongly discouraged by Protestant jurisdictions. Protestantism minimised the role for women within the sphere of organised religion. The closure of monasteries and nunneries was presented by the Protestant reformers as an act of liberation. It was certainly more complicated than that. The evidence suggests that the conventual life could provide a zone of fulfilment and influence for women.

To what extent, and how, did the Reformation influence the patterns of literacy? Literacy was not the preserve of Protestants. The pressures to become literate and numerate were not uniquely religious-inspired. Some of the highest rates of literacy in Europe in the seventeenth century occur in unlikely places - Sweden, for example, or the rural Cévennes in southern France. In the latter case, they seem to be not so much the result of the Protestant Reformation as the contesting forces of Catholic and Protestant missions in this frontier zone between the confessions, leading to huge investment in education as a way of indoctrination to a faith. The Protestant Reformation attracted the literate to its cause, so it is not really surprising that it should appear, then, to have sponsored it. (*) There was considerable imagination, it is true, invested by Protestants, in using literate devices tol internalise the beliefs contained in its confessions and creeds. Butthere was considerable mimeticism ini using such techniques - catechisms, hymns, plays, etc. - between the Catholic and Protestant Reformations. (*) And some of this effort was deployed because, so it seems, some Protestant beliefs - notably the emphasis on the Ten Commandments (*) or, in later sixteenth-centtury orthodox Calvinist circles upon God’s predestination, (*) God’s foreknowledge that some of us were condemned as sinners, whereas others were saved as the elect - got a cold reception among believing congregations, wondering whether they were elect or damned.

Did the processes of Reformation create, among various confessional groups, new taboos - towards religious images or music, for example? The answer to that question has to be nuanced because the Protestant Reformation contained, as we shall see, very different attitudes towards images and music in religion. And there was a big discrepancy between what was preached and taught, and what happened in people’s homes, where (as we have seen) religious images continued to play an important part in their lives.Did the different ways of expressing religious belief profoundly affect the way that people expressed their fears and hopes? Did it increase the sense of God’s presence in the world? And that of the devil too? Did it desacralise the landscape by abolishing pilgrimage sites, holy wells, places of miraculous cure? There was doubtless some relationship between the massive increase in prosecutions for witchcraft in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Europe and the impact of the Protestant Reformation. Butthe pattern of prosecutions was not confessionally related. Witchcraft was prosecuted as readily in Protestant as Catholic Europe. And the relationship may have something to do with the anxieties provoked by fundamental divisions, of which the Protestant Reformation was only one part, and with the transfer of jurisdictional responsibility for the prosecution of witchcraft to states, of which, again, the Reformation was only partly responsible.

To what extent did the Reformation change people’s relationship towards money and wealth, towards work and leisure? The great German sociologist Max Weber at the turn of the twentieth century offered a conceptually sophisticated framework and some evidence to suggest that there was a relationship between Calvinist Protestantism and Capitalism.His argument was not that the one caused the other, but that there was an ‘elective affinity’ (by which he meant ‘certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics’) between one sort of Reformation and the attitudes which it generated among its adherents towards the rewards of work and investment. The evidence which he adduced in support of it, however,came from the nineteenth-century Rhineland. That highlights the difficulty we have in understanding the cultural impact of the Reformation over the very long term. For so much happened in Europe outwith the Reformation to explain the economic success of what turned out to be Protestant, Northern Europe which had nothing to do with the Reformation. And when it did have something to do with it, it was as a result of the political and geographical processes of reformation, for example, to the concentrations of skill and capital created by the enforced movement of peoples created by the political tensions of the Reformation - in the movement of Calvinists from the southern Netherlands to the Northern Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century, or the emigration of Huguenots from France at the end of the seventeenth century. It might not have so much to do, then, with the social morality inculcated by Protestant beliefs as such. So these are ‘open’ questions, worth discussing (and I have just indicated one or two of the many issues one could raise in relation to the Reformation), but in the context of literacy, of witchcraft, of wealth, of domestic life. They are open because the processes of the Reformation contained fundamentally divergent tendencies, and because they are long-term.

What of the geo-politics of the European Reformation?Its fundamental dynamics had begun to emerge early on in German and Swiss lands in the explosive first decade of the 1520s. The Reformation meant different things to different people, spreading through multiple media and bringing fresh political players into action. (*) The exodus of monks and nuns from monasteries, the controversies raised by clerical marriages, and the polemic against priests’ ‘whores’ (concubines), symbolising the corrupt old church, imbued the early reformation with a sense of liberation, a sizzling sexual energy which the disturbing nudes of the Wittenberg painter, Lucas Cranach, (*) Luther’s long-standing friend and supporter, reflected. Without willing it, Luther became a touchstone of Reformation, in Wittenberg, among the officials of the electorate of Saxony, among the humanists of the Rhineland and in southern German cities, he had supporters. Among the members of his own Augustinian Order, as well as more widely among the preaching clergy, his message vibrated ouwards. The processes of the Protestant Reformation are laid out in the printed pamphlets (Flugschriften) which accompanied its first decade in German-speaking lands. Produced in handy formats, and distributed on a regional basis, they sold into a competitive market. More than half of those of which we have a copy were only 8 pages long, and cost a sixth of the daily wage of an artisan apprentice. Woodcuts were used to illustrate the title-page on about three quarters of them. The variety of literary forms testify to their being derived from other means of communication - sermons, letters, poems, songs, prayers, complaints and petitions. Although religious themes predominated, other subjects impinged too - the war against the Turks, the uprising of the commons, miraculous signs and prophecies, and usury. Over 10,000 pamphlet titles are known to have been published in German lands in the 1520s, although the vast majority of them had appeared by 1527. There were possibly about 3 million pamphlet copies in circulation by 1525. For a population of 12 million, that figure sounds modest, but in relation to those who could read it was impressive. Despite the impact of the Reformation elsewhere in Europe, nowhere experienced this intensity of printed output. Only perhaps in Calvin’s Geneva in the late 1550s and 1560s would printing and the Reformation converge on the same scale.