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  • The Chancery of God: Protestant Print, Polemic, and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg, 1546–1551
  • William Bradford Smith
The Chancery of God: Protestant Print, Polemic, and Propaganda against the Empire, Magdeburg, 1546–1551. By Nathan Rein. [St.Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Pp. xvi, 257. $114.95. ISBN 978-0-754-65686-9.)

The resistance of the city of Madgeburg to imperial forces during the Schmalkaldic War has always presented something of a puzzle to historians of religion. Dubbing itself “The Lord God’s Chancery,” the city produced hundreds of pamphlets, outlining the reasons and justification for their resistance. The most famous of these tracts, the Magdeburg Confession, has long been of interest to students of political theory. But here lies the problem: the Confession has generally been seen as a starting point for the development of modern—hence secular—theories of resistance. Nathan Rein’s insightful analysis of the Magdeburg pamphlets provides an alternative reading of the texts, one that places them squarely within their proper social, political, and religious context.

The book is based on an analysis of 228 of the 360 pamphlets known to have been produced in Magdeburg between 1546 and 1551. The author sets out to explain the circumstance that led the city to continue to fight a propaganda war well after the apparent imperial military victory. In the process, he seeks “to interpret [Magdeburg’s] resistance in terms of a Protestant worldview and sense of identity” (p. xiv).The first chapter surveys the pamphlets, considering their utility as sources. Here the author provides a careful and reasonable assessment of the challenges and opportunities involved in the study [End Page 559] of polemical literature. The second chapter considers the revolutionary character of the Protestant Reformation, stressing the essential contradictions between the political theology of the Habsburg emperors and nascent Lutheranism. Key here is the contrast between “German Liberty,” understood in terms of communal self-government, and the universalizing imperial notions of the Habsburg.

This contradiction becomes even clearer in the chapter that follows, dealing with the Augsburg Interim of 1548, Charles’s flawed attempt to find a middle path between Confessional parties. A fatal weakness of the interim was the separation of the means of salvation from liturgical practice—while the former was presented as a modification of Lutheran solafideism, the Catholic liturgy was preserved not on account of the efficacy of the sacraments but almost entirely on historical grounds. The larger political implications were equally suspect: “the Interim structures ‘religion’ in a way that is particularly amenable to absolute governments” (p. 104).Whereas the imperial creed “revolves around hierarchy and order” the view of politics espoused in Magdeburg “centers on faith and scripture, placing liturgy at the service of the believing individualand minimizing the power of institutions to mediate holiness” (p. 120). The fourth chapter focuses on the pamphlets produced during the siege of the city between 1548 and 1551, focusing primarily on the Magdeburg Confession. The final chapter summarizes the overall Magdeburg view of the Christian community, examining specific ways in which the pamphleteers’ vision of civic and religious polity lay behind the ideas presented in the texts.

One theme that runs through the book is the highly topical character of the pamphlets. Most modern treatments of the subject stress the influence of the Magdeburg pamphlets, emphasizing the universal character of their arguments. But as Rein points out, the authors did not aim to articulate a universal theory of resistance. Quite the opposite—much of their argument stressed the singularity of the struggle among the German people, the emperor, and the papacy. The “Protestant worldview” presented in the texts is firmly rooted in the traditional social structures of the autonomous urban commune. This is not to suggest that religious points of view were determined by social and economic realities, but rather that sixteenth-century people did not conceive of a separation between the two: any threat to their way of life was likewise a threat to their religious identity. While the “Protestant worldview” was necessarily confessional in nature, the author demonstrates how far removed the Magdeburgers’ conception of the social, religious, and political order was from...

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