what was the reform?
That’s something that has changed a lot over time and has probably become a more complicated question than it used to be. one could almost say that reform used to be an event, and now it has become a process, and a very long process.
You are reading: Books on the reformation
even half a century ago, the reformation was something that happened in the middle of the 16th century and started with martin luther. it was primarily an event in the history of the Protestant church. I think it’s also fair to say that it was overwhelmingly seen—in the language of 1066 and all—as a good thing: the replacement of an inferior or even bad form of Christianity with a better one, and the beginning of a process of change leading to modernity and the world we know today.
A lot of that has changed. there are now quite a few scholars who don’t think we should speak of ‘the’ reform with the definite article at all, preferring the vaguer idea of ’reforms’ in the plural. I am somewhat resistant to that, probably because I have been describing myself as a reform historian for many years. one of the authors we’re going to talk about, john bossy, says that something important happened to western christianity in the sixteenth century, and the word “reformation” is as good a guide as any to help us investigate what that was. . I think that’s a useful way to approach it.
“I often tell my students that one of the really important things to remember about martin luther is that he was not a protestant. he was a late medieval Catholic ”
What is certain is that not only in the brief moment of the mid-sixteenth century, which coincided with the life of Martin Luther and his meteoric successes, but during a much longer period between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, There were dramatic changes in many aspects of European life, in politics and society and in culture. Many of these are importantly related to changes in church doctrine and organization, and the splitting of what had been a much more culturally united Europe into rival confessional camps. that was mainly in catholic and protestant, but within the protestant world there were also splinters. The creation of a more complex and plural Europe is clearly what emerges from the reform.
Maybe it’s not fair to ask this given the way you just explained it, but why did it start in Germany?
It’s an absolutely fair question and there are easy answers. Germany was a relatively urban and politically highly fragmented society. there were many printing presses that were quite free from direct external control.
on the other hand, sometimes the theory of history is the most persuasive. It’s like asking why, four centuries later, the communist revolution started in Russia, which seems like a pretty unlikely place for it to happen. If you’re looking for areas of Europe where there seems to be deep dissatisfaction with medieval Catholicism, Germany might be one of the last places you’d look. There is not really a native heresy movement in Germany, as there is, say, in Bohemia. it is an orthodox society, and now it seems to us a society where traditional forms of piety, pilgrimages, veneration of saints and devotion to mass were absolutely thriving.
“It has been half-jokingly said that reform is a bitter 200-year dispute over the exact meaning of each of those four words: this, is, me, and body. people were literally sentenced to death for having wrong opinions about it”
but here, I think, we may be getting to the crux of one of the really important ways that our understanding of reform has changed. we used to think of the reformation as a reaction, a rejection, a departure from medieval Catholicism. in a sense, that is true. but when you think about how things actually change, evolve, develop, and appear over time, that doesn’t make much sense. I often tell my own students that one of the really important things to remember about Martin Luther is that he was not a Protestant. he was a late medieval Catholic.
Reformation is really an aspect of late medieval Christianity and has deep roots in Catholic culture. It did not necessarily arise from dissatisfaction, rejection, anticlericalism, or hostility towards the institution of the church (although some of that is important), but from some of the main devotional tendencies of medieval Christianity itself.
Let’s explore those topics in more detail as we look at the books you’ve chosen. The first on your list that you have already alluded to, John Bossy’s Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (1985).
In a way, perhaps, this is a self-indulgent choice. the book has simply been one of my favorites for a long time. my own copy was bought fresh off the press in 1985 when I was a 20-year-old college student, and it’s covered in some pretty punchy bright green felt-tip highlighting. It was a book that completely changed my thinking about the history of religion. a theme that seemed quite dry was revealed to be really exciting.
One thing I would say is that it is a very misleading book. maybe I was misled when I originally bought it, because it looks like a textbook for students. it’s less than 200 pages long, pretty big print, hardly any footnotes, a brief bibliography at the end, and a title that’s also deceptively simple: Christianity in the West. so it looks like a primer, things you should know.
In fact, it is an extremely daring and iconoclastic book that covers an extraordinarily wide variety. some of his claims may be exaggerated, or we might think differently about them, as he went so far as to say bossy. but the kind of book that makes you think differently about an entire field is very rare and absolutely worth treasuring.
“In the Middle Ages, Christianity or ‘Christianity’ meant a group of people. by the time we get to the end of this process at the end of the seventeenth century, Christianity has become an ‘ism’. it has become a body of doctrine”
somehow, it is a difficult book to describe because it is very rich and almost every sentence carries an important thesis. The argument is that Christianity in Western Europe was profoundly transformed over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, not only as a result of Martin Luther’s theology, but as part of a much larger process of religious, cultural, and political transformation. in that the Protestant Reformation and what we used to call the Counter Reformation, and now tend to be called the Catholic Reformation, are not only rivals but also, in many ways, work in parallel to transform people’s experience of Christianity. /p>
That’s a really important development that other scholars have also picked up on in the last few decades. The Reformation is not the same thing as the Protestant Reformation, and indeed, if it were, it would be a less significant phenomenon, because only the northern third of Western Europe, in the end, actually conformed to Protestantism. Catholicism remains the majority faith. In John Bossy’s view, the Catholic Reformation is just as transformative of Christianity as the Protestant Reformation.
john, who died in 2015, was a very slippery and subtle writer who used powerful metaphors. one of them is what he calls “moral arithmetic.” the guiding principle of Christian morality changes, over time, from focusing primarily on the seven deadly sins to focusing much more on the ten commandments.
That sounds very obscure, but it provides insight into a larger process. In Bossy’s view, Christianity had originally been a means of ordering social relations. it was deeply communal and collective, and cared about the seven deadly sins because they involved things like anger and envy that were socially disruptive. Christianity was a way of managing these social conflicts.
but towards the end of the middle ages, it began to be much more internalized, much more doctrinal. the “you must not” of the ten commandments have much more to do with the inner life of the christian, with his direct relationship with god, than with his neighbor. so it is a profound set of not only spiritual but also political and cultural transformations that, in a sense, are summed up in that deceptively simple title, Christianity in the West.
bossy is extraordinarily interested in the meaning of words, crucial terms like “charity” or even “religion”, which radically change meaning over time. the key, perhaps, is in the title: “Christianity”. In the middle ages, Christianity or “Christianity” meant a group of people. by the time we reach the end of this process at the end of the seventeenth century, Christianity has become an “ism.” it has become a body of doctrine.
even so, the fact remains that the reformation led to religious wars between catholics and protestants throughout europe, so the differences between the two cannot have been entirely insignificant. people at the time certainly didn’t think so. what were the differences between catholics and protestants after the reformation?
that’s an important question, and I think you’re absolutely right that some of the recent scholarship (and bossy isn’t entirely free of this) has seen reform primarily as a process of social discipline of populations and greater political centralization. and cultural uniformity, has been tempted to smooth out the differences. Of course, as historians, what should really interest us are the differences, because this was the most important thing for the people of the time.
There are many great doctrinal debates in the reformation, aspects of which may seem strange, if not almost incomprehensible, to modern people. Perhaps the greatest is what Jesus meant on earth when, at the Last Supper, he said, “This is my body,” and then exhorted his disciples to “do this in memory of me.” reform is a bitter 200-year dispute over the exact meaning of each of those four words: this, is, me, and body. people were literally put to death for having wrong opinions about it.
the temptation is to say, ‘oh my god. these ridiculous and barbaric people of the past. Thank goodness we’re over it! I think it’s a dereliction of duty. one of the things that I think all my chosen authors share is a willingness to try to understand it instead of just dismissing it, and to enter imaginatively into that world that is, in some ways, like ours, but, in others, very different. . of her.
yes, because as I think you say in one of your books, they seem minor differences to us, but for them eternal salvation was at stake.
absolutely. And that’s probably an opportunity to start talking about another of the books on the list, which is Brad Gregory’s book, with the perhaps slightly questionable pun in the title, Salvation at Stake (1999).
This is a very interesting and important book that talks about the aspect of Reformation-era Christianity that is sure to make modern people, and perhaps especially modern Christians, uncomfortable, which is intolerance and violence.
It’s a very, very spooky period. How many people died?
We do not know the exact figures, but without a doubt more than 5000 people were judicially sentenced to death for their religious beliefs. That’s not to mention the many thousands of people who were killed in religious conflicts or wars with a strong religious base. Gregory, of course, doesn’t endorse any of this, but he says we have to take it seriously. this book was published in 1999, but I think that after 2001 it is imperative to take it even more seriously. that provocative, challenging and difficult word, ‘martyrdom’, has been in the news a lot.
“in previous centuries, each religious tradition rather celebrated its own martyrs and ignored the others”
then the theme of the book of gregory is the phenomenon of martyrdom, of Christians who were sentenced to death for their beliefs. that has always been an important feature of scholarship. What I find important and original about this book is that it tries to examine comparatively the whole range of martyrs.
In previous centuries, each religious tradition had rather celebrated its own martyrs and ignored the others. and people who died who had no direct modern institutional successors tended to be quite careless. Although much of our historical memory is of the mainstream Catholic and Protestant martyrs—the priests of England or Holland who were hanged or the Protestants who were burned in the reign of Mary—in reality, the vast majority of those who were sentenced to death at this time were neither Catholic nor Protestant. they were that variety of really radical or spiritualistic Christians that we group together under the heading “Anabaptists.” his ideas were equally offensive to leading authorities in Protestant and Catholic territories.
arguing about things that, nowadays, we probably couldn’t even tell the difference.
They are arguing about things like the precise nature of the relationship between god the father and god the son, and the kind of flesh that christ may or may not have taken from his human mother. so yes, things that clearly seem less important to us but that arise from a deep reflection on the Christian revelation. In the case of most of these radical Anabaptists, it comes from a reading of the Bible, which the Reformation had made more accessible in the perhaps naïve belief of people like Luther that the meaning of the Bible was absolutely clear and direct and that no sensible person could deviate from the authoritative view of it. But of course, once the bible gets into the hands of ordinary people, really searching questions are asked about major Christian doctrines like the trinity, which doesn’t appear in a very developed form in the scriptures.
one of the things that this phenomenon and gregorio’s account put an end to is the very general idea that doctrine was only a matter of the clergy, intellectuals and universities. ordinary people just weren’t interested, they went on with their lives and did what they were told if they thought about it. that may be true for some, but there is plenty of evidence throughout europe that really humble people, with no formal education, took the business of their salvation, of what god expected of them, remarkably seriously, to the point where they were willing to die for it.
“one of the most important points of the reform is that although all sides are totalitarian and intolerant, neither side was able to completely triumph and totally eradicate its opposition. not even the Spanish inquisition could do that”
The will to die, of course, is only one aspect of martyrdom. As modern people, we can understand it, to some extent, although we may not want to do it ourselves. the other aspect is the will to kill. that’s more challenging. it goes against all modern assumptions about the uncertain or relative nature of truth and mutual obligations and duties within a liberal civil society.
and, here, we confront something about the reformation, about why it is such an extraordinarily interesting and indeed violent period, because any notion of a relative or divisible truth simply does not exist. there can be only one revelation, one true religion. for a couple of hundred years, you’ve got this extraordinarily awkward position where that’s a universally shared assumption, but the reality on the ground is that unity and agreement on what that true religion was has completely broken down. /p>
here we can move away from the idea that these are just very arcane or irrelevant doctrinal questions, because early modern people were convinced that the health and coherent functioning of a society absolutely depended on unity in faith. the people who challenged that also challenged the basic ability of society to work and hold together. the radicals known as Anabaptists were particularly offensive in this regard, because their reading of the scriptures led them to believe, for example, that taking oaths was not permitted. Failing to take the oath means you cannot hold civic office or serve on a jury. they also refused to perform military service. therefore, really fundamental political and social questions are tied to his reading of the demands of the scriptures.
one of the things i admire about gregory’s book, and i think what it shares with bossy and indeed all the books on my list, is that it’s bold and provocative. not necessarily in a polemical way, selecting particular earlier interpretations to attack, which is the game historians often play, but by making us think, to use a cliché, outside the box.
Gregory’s particular bête noire is what he sees as reductive approaches to the history of religion and of such an apparently strange phenomenon as the will to die or the will to kill. in the hands of some modern scholars, it seems to require that we translate this into terms that are more explainable to us. they may be talking about the doctrine of the eucharist, but there are actually other agendas at play (psychological, political, economic) for which this is simply a cover.
That kind of approach is rooted in a classic Marxist approach where economic forces are everything and culture and ideology are just kind of icing on the cake. but it is also very prevalent in more recent postmodern theories that are very concerned with hidden power structures.
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gregory is saying something deceptively simple, with which I am very sympathetic: we have to take these people at their word, even though we don’t necessarily share, sympathize or admire these beliefs. we have to accept that they were very serious with them and that they were willing both to die and to kill for them.
In the end, part of the paradox of this intolerant world you’re painting is that out of it grows a world that is much more recognizable to us. One of the most important points of the reform is that although all sides are totalitarian and intolerant, neither side was able to completely triumph and completely eradicate its opposition. not even the Spanish inquisition could do it.
So out of the religious wars of the early modern period comes a kind of truce, a very reluctant acknowledgment that, in reality, tolerance, if not tolerance—those are slightly different things—of opposing points of view, it had to be accepted within societies for the sake of social peace. and while it is too simple to say that this leads very quickly or directly to secularization, it nonetheless leads to a relocation of religion out of the public sphere—and away from the essential symbolism and identity of the state—and into a more social realm. and private.
for a long time, actually in very modern times, rival religious groups reluctantly lived alongside each other, disliking each other to varying degrees, but stopped killing each other.
let’s now talk about lyndal roper’s biography of martin luther, because luther is a key figure. who was he and how does he fit into the story?
the reason why people all over the world, and particularly in germany, talk about the reformation in 2017 is that 500 years ago martin luther published his ninety-five theses attacking the indulgences on the church door of the wittenberg castle it is a moment we can commemorate, and is conventionally seen as the beginning of reform. one could have a long discussion about whether it is really useful to think of it as the ‘beginning’ of the reformation, or whether the reformation as a longer process of social, cultural, and political transformation goes back a few centuries beyond luther. /p>
nevertheless, luther is very important to this story. can pose the counterfactual question, ‘would there have been a reformation without martin luther? the answer to that is, ‘who knows?’ but, without martin luther, it certainly would have been a different kind of reformation. he is clearly a very important figure.
He was a monk. Why was he angry?
At the risk of sounding pedantic, he was actually a friar. Like the monks, the friars are part of the religious communities, but they had more pastoral functions. they were more likely to be preaching, hearing confessions, and engaging with the outside world. In Luther’s case, that’s important, because he happens to be such a brilliant communicator, preacher, and writer. he is not a completely cloistered figure.
luther’s own personal history is extraordinarily interesting, which we don’t know as much about as we would like. Luther tells us a lot about his own life, but in fragments revealed over many decades, which are not always consistent with each other.
what is clear is that luther’s decision to become a friar is, in itself, an act of rebellion. his family originally came from a peasant population, but in his generation they were quite well off. his father was an entrepreneur with a mining business in the eastern part of germany known as saxony. Luther grew up in the mining town of Mansfeld in the early 16th century, and his father wanted his clever son to become a lawyer.
“there are things in luther that are very difficult for modern people to understand”
luther defies his father and enters the church in his place. he tells us that this is the result of a vow made to st. anna, the mother of the virgin mary, during a terrifying storm—that if she saves his life, he will consecrate himself to god. that may well be true, but it may also be a fabricated story used to justify this rebellion.
luther strives to be a good friar, but that leads to a spiritual crisis. Luther, I suppose, is facing the question that all medieval Christians faced, which is “what must I do to be saved?” There were answers for that: obey the teachings of the church, be open to receiving God’s grace through the sacraments. .
There was a rather poignant motto among medieval theologians: ‘facere quod in se est’ or ‘do what is within you’. if you do your best to be a good christian, that will be enough for god. God does not demand more from people than they can really give.
but this doesn’t make sense to lutero. he becomes convinced of his own intrinsic sinfulness and unworthiness, though, as far as we know, he was a good, pious, and celibate friar. he obsesses over the problem of righteousness or justification, what he must do to be acceptable in the eyes of god. He tries all the remedies the church suggests—frequent confession, good charitable works of various kinds—but can’t understand how God could possibly be willing to save someone as miserable and sinful as he is.
“roper flips us on the paradox of luther, which is that in 1517 he was really just a somewhat serious catholic friar protesting abuses within the system and seeking to reform it, but by no means seeking to rip the whole book apart . How do we get, in a few years, to an open schism?”
and i guess it was one of those moments of coincidence, this extraordinary conjunction in western christianity of the inner spiritual crisis of an obscure friar in an obscure east german town, with what becomes a very public debate about indulgences.
>
This is probably not the time to tell everyone about the complicated theology of indulgences. it was an aspect of the church’s teaching on sin and penance that, to some degree, had been corrupted or monetized by the papacy and other institutional forces. The impression that was being received—not only by Luther but by a large number of reputable theologians and preachers—is that the Christian’s true moral demands for penance were being undermined by what seemed like a ‘cheap’ offer of grace and forgiveness.
Basically, you could give the church a little money in exchange for a place in heaven.
It’s inevitably more complicated than that, but that’s certainly part of the perception. Actually it is not as a protestant maverick, but as a serious catholic theologian that luther takes up this dispute. Although 1517 is seen as this great moment of the revolution, and countless books will tell us that this is when the Protestant Reformation began and Luther raised the banner of rebellion against Rome, that is fundamentally hindsight.
in 1517, luther is not denying the authority of the papacy. he is not denying the existence of purgatory, which later Protestants, eventually including himself, come to reject. he is not even rejecting the value of the indulgences themselves.
is opposed to the way they are presented and preached in Germany. and while the tone is certainly combative, there is nothing at the time to make a church split seem inevitable or even likely.
in fact, while i side with those who think luther didn’t post the ninety-five theses on the church door, even if he had, it wouldn’t have been a particularly revolutionary act. these theses were proposals for a public, academic debate and in a medieval university that was where you publicized them. the castle church door is basically the bulletin board for the university of wittenberg.
It’s through a whole series of retrospective lenses that this comes to seem like a radical moment.
of all the luther biographies, why did you choose this one?
not only because it is one of the most recent, nor because it is from a woman, although that is not irrelevant. Almost all serious biographies of Luther in English have been written by men. many of them have also been insider accounts written by people who are Lutheran or Protestant, or at least very politically or culturally sensitive to that point of view.
lyndal roper is a wonderful historian. she is a regius professor of history here at oxford and she is not, to my knowledge, a lutheran or practicing christian. she is a self-proclaimed Australian feminist historian. she is an alien and properly critical look, but she also takes that imaginative leap and empathizes with this strange world. it would be very easy to do a hatchet job on luther from a modern liberal perspective. lyndal roper doesn’t do that.
It is a very complete, complex and fascinating portrait of Luther, whom roper herself says is a difficult hero. there are things in luther that are very difficult for modern people to understand. certainly a strain of misogyny, which was more or less normal in the early modern period. in fact, for a feminist historian, roper does a little less than one might expect.
Don’t you say you want to focus on your inner development?
yes. it had become almost an article of faith among historians that the last thing we should be trying to do is psychoanalyze or “get into” our subjects. An earlier biography of Luther from the late 1950s called Young Luther, written by an American psychoanalyst named Erik Erikson, was a very Freudian reading of Luther’s development. it almost became synonymous with how not to do a biography.
roper is not afraid to try to enter the mind of his subject. it is bold, daring and imaginative. there are aspects that we may not always agree with, but it is exciting to see a historian use modern insights from psychology to understand an issue and place it in context. Roper takes Luther’s social, cultural, and indeed doctrinal context very seriously, though he seeks to understand Luther’s own psychological impulses and his relationship with his father, the authoritarian mine owner.
“the fall of the berlin wall and the reunification of germany has had a real impact on reform scholarship”
the other thing that is interesting and important about roper’s biography of luther, which perhaps could not have been written 30 years ago, is that he does not see luther in the way several previous biographies had, as a kind of man for all ages, a lonely hero, almost existing outside of time and place. find luther he places him physically in those small towns in eastern germany where he grew up, and in the small university town of wittenberg where he developed his entire career, first as a catholic friar and then as an evangelical, to use a slightly anachronistic word . —a Protestant preacher and a minister. interestingly, he lived in the same building at all times. the former Augustinian monastery is given to luther and mrs. luther for the elector of saxony.
Before 1990, all of this was in the German Democratic Republic, a place where it was difficult for historians to access archives. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany have had a real impact on Reformation scholarship. It allowed Roper to place Luther within that social context, and a whole network of relationships with friends and enemies. enemies are, in a way, as or more important than friends.
roper brings us to luther’s paradox, which is that in 1517 he was really just a somewhat serious catholic friar protesting abuses within the system and seeking to reform it, but by no means seeking to rip the whole book apart. How do we arrive, in a few years, at an open schism? why did luther’s theology radicalize so quickly? a lot of that is down to the way the opposition energizes him. and roper, I think, is very good at tracking how that works. Luther really does have an extraordinary capacity for both friendship and hate, and people who had been friends often become bitter rivals.
At the heart of the book is a rather sad story of the relationship between Luther and his former disciple and friend Andreas von Karlstadt, who begins to take a more radical political line than Luther’s. Luther sees this not only as a deviation from the word of God as he understands it, but as a personal betrayal.
his hatred for karlstadt was even important for doctrinal questions. For example, Luther retains, in his version of the German communion service, the raising of the bread after his blessing. Almost all Protestants were very concerned about it because they thought it would encourage the worship of bread, an ‘idolatrous’ practice that medieval Catholics had indulged in, but Luther retained it, mainly because Karlstadt eliminated it. Only when Karlstadt is dead does Luther take that extra step for himself.
I think roper uses the word “stubborn”.
He is extraordinarily stubborn. at one point, she writes about her complete inability to see other people’s point of view, which makes it somewhat unattractive from a modern perspective. On the other hand, someone who always sees the other’s point of view, who is instinctively a conciliator or collaborator, like Luther’s younger friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon, could not have achieved what Luther did. this is where the stubbornness becomes most admirable. who the hell does luther think he is? He is someone who believes he is right and has the word of God on his side.
after the publication of the ninety-five theses, the most famous moment in luther’s career comes in april 1521 when he stands up in the diet of worms, the parliament of the holy roman empire, in front of man most powerful in the world, emperor charles v, and the princes and ecclesiastics of germany assembled. he is ordered to retract his writings and admit that he was wrong. knowing full well that his life could be lost as a result, he gives this tremendous speech in which he may or may not have said ‘here I am’. I can not to do other thing’. he does say that his conscience is captive to the word of god, and that it is not safe or right to act against one’s conscience.
There we recognize something modern and admirable in Luther: this sense of the sovereignty of an individual conscience. Perhaps less familiar to us is the idea that you can’t just believe what you want, your conscience needs to be held captive by God’s word, and not all consciences are equally valid. however, the heroism that drives luther to confront the most powerful forces in the world of his time remains admirable.
Another of Luther’s least attractive traits is his virulent anti-Semitism. this is something that various other luther biographers have not necessarily tried to ignore or explain, but the line has been that, ‘of course this is terrible, but he is conventionally antisemitic in the way that sixteenth century people were ‘. /p>
roper suggests, I think quite convincingly, that Luther’s hatred of the Jews goes beyond what is normal, even in the sixteenth century. Central to their religious identity is the idea that Jews stand in the way of the evangelical movement, with evangelicals or Protestants being God’s new chosen people.
luther is famous for writing what appears to be a fairly tolerant and friendly pamphlet in 1523 with the title “Jesus Christ was born a Jew”, in other words acknowledging a kinship with the Jews. what roper points out is that luther was basically offering the jews a unique opportunity to convert. his offer of friendship to the Jews is entirely conditional, and when he is rejected, he reacts with that sense of hostility and betrayal that is seen in other aspects of his career.
if it was the opposition that encouraged luther, if the pope at the time had said, ‘oh, this martin luther guy is making some good points. let’s get them on board’, wouldn’t the reform have happened?
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Certainly there are scholars who think so. as i said before, i don’t think luther published his thesis on october 31, 1517, but what we know for sure is that, on that day, he wrote to his ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop of mainz. he says, in respectful but forceful terms, that these indulgences are preached in a terrible, commercialized and crude way. he requests that the archbishop do something about it, but that he will refrain from opening a public debate.
If Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, or the other German Catholic bishops, had controlled it, then it is certainly conceivable that the furor we have in Germany in the 1520s would not have taken that form.
Of course, this is extraordinarily hypothetical. luther is a pious catholic friar. Archbishop Albrecht is a career politician. his sense of religious calling is probably a bit underdeveloped, to put it mildly. he obtained the archbishopric at the age of 24. he is the youngest son of one of the great German noble families.
I’m not sure there is a realistic scenario in which all the big vested interests, ecclesiastical and economic, could have reformed the sale of indulgences in 1517. It is tied to all kinds of political and commercial interests, including huge debts that archbishop albrecht has the fugger bank in augsburg.
It’s a nice fantasy and often a catholic fantasy that luther was potentially a great catholic reformer. There has been a stream of biographies, including a very recent one by Catholic journalist Peter Stanford, saying that this is the great tragedy of the Reformation. It certainly has some merit, but I think it may be idealistic to imagine a scenario where everyone would have jumped on it at that point.
let’s move on to the voices of eamon duffy’s morebath. this sounds fascinating. is it a village in devon that had a single vicar from 1520 to 1574? is that possible?
here we have moved from the best known aspect of the reformation to the dark isle of england. It’s not about big events or great individuals. Duffy is best known for writing an important overview of the Reformation in England, The Stripping of the Altars, which appeared in 1992 and tells the entire story of the English Reformation in the 16th century as one of the imposition of the Protestant Reformation and the destruction of a thriving religious culture.
I’m a big fan of looting altars, but I decided to pick the morebath book because I think it’s more interesting in a way. The story, briefly, is that it is a small rural parish on the outskirts of Exmoor in North Devon. it is not a rich, important, or significant place on the road to anywhere, but we know of it due to the serendipitous survival of the so-called “church book”. expenses and income of the parish. Potentially pretty dry sources, actually.
what makes them very interesting here is that the accounts were kept by the vicar, a man named sir christopher trychay. It is probably important to explain right away that in medieval England ‘sir’ is the normal way of addressing a priest who does not have an advanced university degree. they are not knights, but ordinary parish priests.
“it’s kind of a tragic story where an unexpected event from outside (there doesn’t seem to have been any kind of native protestantism in morebath) hits this community almost like a meteor from outer space”
sir christopher himself keeps the accounts and writes in his own comments at various times over the course of a very long tenure, over 50 years, as vicar of this parish. it is a kind of microhistory, which is a jargon term used by historians to approach a particular place or a particular episode, but not a typical one. although other historians have written histories of towns, they tend to do so only when there has been a wide range of different documents: tax records, lots of wills, all sorts of sources that can be put together to really work out the whole thing. of a community there are other sources of evidence for morebath, but in the end, it all comes down to this one source. In a way, Eamon Duffy’s book is a virtuoso exercise in how a historian with the right reserves of imagination (and Duffy is one of the most imaginative Reformation historians working today) can extract meaning from a source like that. and make her sing.
Although morebath is an unexceptional place, it would be a mistake to say that it is “typical” and that it speaks to how reform has been experienced in other places. sometimes we have to recognize that the search for typicity, for the global image, is actually a mistake, and that when we have an idea of the individual lives that were lived, it is part of our responsibility with the past and with the people of the world. past to try to enter those lives and reconstruct them imaginatively.
can you give an example you like from the book?
is full of them. It gives us a wonderful insight into the character of Sir Christopher himself, who is clearly a rather pedantic and fussy figure, often berating parishioners for not paying the full dues they are supposed to pay. Although Duffy is sometimes criticized for having a rosy view of medieval Christianity, that is a bit unfair. he fully acknowledges that morebath is not a rural idyll. There are tensions and Sir Christopher does not always agree with his parishioners.
He is, however, a devout and obedient priest who takes seriously his obligations to the smooth running of the parish. and it could have been a normal life except for the fact that his tenure in this parish coincides with the extraordinary revolution of the english reformation, which began in the reign of henry viii but then entered a much more radical phase under henry’s son , eduardo vi.
There is a tragic element to this. One of Sir Christopher’s pet projects is getting the parish to purchase a new set of funeral vestments. For many years, through small individual donations, he raises money for a new set of requiem vestments, which are finally ready right at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. In a few months, under the new regime of Edward VI, masses for the dead and the celebration of traditional Catholic requiems will be outlawed.
“although people tend to think of the english reformation as a fairly peaceful process, tell that to the peasants of devon and cornwall, who were massacred by the thousands after a couple of very one-sided battles in 1549”
another of sir christopher’s pet projects is the cult of st. sidwell, a local devon saint, highly revered in exeter, the local capital city. promote the worship of st. sidwell is something he does avidly and indeed we can detect some success in this, for there is evidence that some local families are beginning to name their daughters ‘sidwell’ and then, in the midst of his tenure, the veneration of the Saints. is also prohibited.
Devotional life and, indeed, much of the social and cultural life of this small parish was based on the maintenance of lights: candles lit in front of various statues of saints in the parish church. groups of parishioners came together to form what were called guilds or fraternities in other places, but were called “tents” in other baths. the purpose of these is to pay for the wax to keep the candles burning. the shops were also a kind of social club: there is a shop for young maidens and a shop for young men. They are in charge of raising money, generally through the sale of wool from sheep belonging to the church. the parish’s economy is largely based on sheep, and these stores host fundraising and town fair-type events. the religious, social and cultural life of this community is very united, so it is a good reminder that we must not artificially separate the religious aspect from the social or cultural aspect of the people.
it’s kind of a tragic story where an unexpected event from outside (there doesn’t seem to have been any kind of native protestantism in morebath) hits this community almost like a meteor from outer space.
duffy, along with christopher haigh and my predecessor at warwick, jack scarisbrick, is generally thought of as a revisionist historian. in English reform terms, revisionism is associated with the idea of resistance and rejection of reform.
morebath’s story, as duffy recounts here, is different and a bit more interesting, because the dates of trychay’s tenure as vicar span the entire reform period. He remains in his place under Henry, Edward, the Catholic Restoration of Mary I, and then the return to Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth. It is a story of conformism, of obeying the rules, of doing what you are told.
Conformism is often seen as mere conformity, or the idea that people don’t really care about change. However, we know from the evidence Duffy gathers that Trychay was a deeply pious Catholic of the traditional type. he’s not a martyr, so he’s not one of brad gregory’s people. the vast majority of people at that time, as in any other period, were not the stuff of martyrs. if you were extraordinarily magnanimous, you might see this as a kind of moral cowardice, but I think there are other ways to look at it as well.
for christopher trychay, fulfilling his vocation as pastor of the people of morebath is central to his identity as a christian priest. he and the parish find ways to navigate, to adapt, to come to terms with the new religious world, and trychay, who begins his career as a catholic priest saying mass in latin, ends it as a protestant minister reciting church services. common prayer book in english There probably won’t be any dramatic conversion moments at any point in that story, but it’s nonetheless a story of real, genuine change and how people and communities embrace it.
but morebath did participate in the prayer book rebellion in 1549, didn’t he? so not everything is conformism.
no, it isn’t, and that is, in a way, the central incident of the book. The Morebath Church Book These accounts of the church keeper have been known for a long time. a partial edition was published around 1900 and other scholars have used them. Duffy himself used them to dispossess the altars.
these refer to the arming and equipping of five young men from the parish in the summer of 1549. it had always been assumed that they were to join the royal army, which was putting down the rebellion that had broken out in devon and cornwall earlier in the summer of that year, after the old Latin mass was replaced by a new English service book.
This was a step too far. We can get by with getting rid of the pope, but we’re not replacing our Latin Mass with what the rebels called, in their demands, a service that sounds “like a Christmas game,” a kind of festive and trite entertainment. the idea that everyone was desperate to have religious services in their own language, which is one of the clichés about reform, is something we should reconsider.
once duffy started looking at the accounts closely, he realized this didn’t quite add up, and this couldn’t be the royal army, but in fact it must have been the parish that sent five of their young men to join. the rebel army is an extraordinary find. here in black and white there is a record of betrayal, and part of the reason historians have misunderstood it is that there seems to have been some attempt to manipulate and change accounts to hide it. But, Duffy argues, the culture of financial responsibility toward parishioners in Morebath is so strong that even this dangerous expense had to be formally recorded in the book.
It’s a sad story for this community. the rebellion of 1549 is put down very bloodily and the reform goes ahead. Although people tend to think of the English Reformation as a fairly peaceful process, tell that to the peasants of Devon and Cornwall, who were massacred by the thousands after a couple of very one-sided battles in 1549.
This is really the exception to morebath’s compliance story. it is a time of trauma and crisis, after which, perhaps, there is a gradual reconciliation.
Let’s move on to your latest book. This is for the Sake of Simple People (1981) by Robert Scribner.
This is a book from the early 1980s, when that older, ecclesiastical view of reform history was beginning to change. it’s about the early reformation in germany, and although luther appears in it, it’s not really about luther’s grand narrative of the revolt.
It’s about how the reformation was received, how the reformation was understood, how a Lutheran movement was created, particularly in a society that was overwhelmingly illiterate. particularly in the countryside, literacy rates were very low. if reform was all about the printed word of the bible and people’s ability to read it, it wouldn’t get very far.
is a book about images, about visual propaganda for reform. this approach was really innovative for the time, to take images out of the special discipline of art history and into mainstream history, and also to be interested in images that were not high art. scribner images are woodcut illustrations that present protestant arguments and typically denigrate or attack catholics.
The images are often extraordinarily scatological: a group of demons sitting on top of the gallows shitting monks, friars and popes in a large pile below. there are a lot of droppings and farts.
The idea that scribner is presenting us with crude rather than decorous reform is quite appealing, but there is also an important point to this. I think it goes back to something he was saying earlier about the importance of understanding that reform doesn’t come out of nowhere. Scribner, I think, would have described himself as a social or cultural historian of religion, rather than a historian of theology. he is primarily interested in how religious ritual functions within society. and the key question here is how these apparently very radical new evangelical protestant ideas of luther and his followers clicked with people.
“The idea that the reform unfolded in ways its leaders did not necessarily want or expect is one of the most important things we need to understand about it”
Part of the explanation was that they found ways to root themselves within accepted cultural norms. various pictures of scribes, pictures of luther at the very moment he raises the banner of rebellion against rome, they portray him as a catholic friar, almost like a catholic saint. Luther’s followers not only reject but exploit the expectations of medieval Catholicism to advance the message. The way in which the image of the cross or the image of the crucified Christ seems to be almost omnipresent in these Lutheran prints is very important. that is clearly a symbol that is at the core of medieval Catholic Christianity, but is adopted or adapted or incorporated into this modified Lutheran version.
It also draws on ideas embedded in popular culture about humans and animals. Thus, for example, there are representations of popes and cardinals as wolves, or lions threatening the sheep of Christ.
there are ideas about the carnival, the reversal of social norms to point out truth and falsehood. These are deeply embedded in popular culture, particularly in Germany, where during carnival or fasching celebrations the world turns upside down for a day or two. that is a very important theme in these images.
The book takes us a long way from altruistic doctrinal debates to, quite literally, the blood and filth of reform, but it is very important in helping us understand how something seemingly so radical, so new, could possibly make sense to people within that society.
There must be a pretty clever mind behind all that propaganda.
I’m not sure it’s necessarily a conscious strategy or a committee of people sitting around and figuring out how to do this. there is a whole range of authors behind these ephemeral and popular texts that are being produced. In some ways, it could be said that Luther’s message is perhaps misunderstood, and Luther himself would not always have approved of it, particularly the idea that he himself was a saint. But the idea that the reform unfolded in ways its leaders didn’t necessarily want or expect is one of the most important things to understand about it.
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