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  • Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes
  • Ralph Keen
Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes. By Irena Backus. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Pp. xxxiii, 259. $114.95. ISBN 978-0-754-66055-2.)

Who were the Reformers? A question that today would be dismissed as irrelevant, even impertinent, was genuinely important during a time when the merits of a person’s teachings were validated by the sanctity of the person advancing them. Irena Backus, whose work has detailed the confessionalizing of humanism and various Reformers’ retrieval of the church Fathers, approaches the topic of early-modern biography with the sure eye of one who knows the theological literature as few others.

Backus makes clear that the Lives of Reformers are not biographies in the modern sense, but rather a genre of religious writing conditioned by confessional controversy during a time when divine agency in human affairs was a largely uncontested given. Hence the early Lives of Martin Luther depict that Reformer as an instrument of God for good or ill, depending on the author’s perspective. Backus recognizes that religious writing before the formation of confessional canons was a swirl of texts, each polemical to some extent; and [End Page 588] hence she reads sixteenth-century documents inclusively and sees the ways in which the authors’ perspectives shape their narratives. Backus places Johann Mathesius alongside Johannes Cochlaeus and Philipp Melanchthon on Luther; Jerome Bolsec, Papire Masson, and Cardinal Richelieu as well as Theodore Beza on John Calvin. Heinrich Bullinger wrote a Vita of Leo Jud and would himself be the subject of a biography by his son-in-law, Josiah Simler, who also would write Lives of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Conrad Gesner. The resulting impression can be somewhat kaleidoscopic and would surely be confusing without Backus’s expert guidance.

In Backus’s interpretation, Reformers’ lives form a genre beyond the merely polemical, in which the subjects are presented either as instruments of divine benevolence toward a church in dire need of healing or as diabolical agents unleashed on a sinful world. Such intensification of the roles of these figures in the history of salvation invited equally vehement counter-portrayals, a result of which was what Backus rightly calls the confessionalization of the biographical genre. Although the individual Reformers would not have been as conscious of their confessional categories as their heirs were to be, their successors portrayed them as agents of the divine will to establish or reinforce specific traditions and as models of piety, sanctity, erudition, political acumen, or whatever other virtue the author wished his subject to model.

Backus’s narrative clarifies the way in which the lives of specific individuals became the means by which they became icons for the churches that later claimed them as founders. The authors of these lives constructed confessional icons, in some cases emphasizing nuances of doctrinal positions that would be critical only in later decades. To see biography as a theological and polemical genre is a significant step forward for our understanding of religious writing in the early-modern period. As Backus makes clear, the earliest Lives of Reformers were based on—or at least were organized around—factual biographical details. Over the course of time, however, they became vehicles for praise and invective, conceived more with the ecclesiastical factions with which they were identified than in their efforts to reform the dominant church.

Backus has identified the salient nuances that make the life-writing genre so variegated. The mix of characters notable and obscure, guided by a range of motivations and drawing on a variety of sources, yields an intimate look at a body of religious writing more complex than previously recognized. Some of these Lives are hagiographical; others are “Plutarchan” in their depiction of psychological forces. Backus effectively demonstrates that reductive generalizations distort the genre beyond recognition; indeed, the only generic property is that these are lives of figures who were religious leaders prominent in their day. We can be grateful for such a careful analysis of this body of writing. [End Page 589]

Ralph Keen...

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