The Intentional Challenge of The Unintended Reformation

Think small. Eschew grand theories. Plumb the local; forget the universal. Focus on the common people; downplay whatever relates to elites. Revere quantitative data; distrust whatever is qualitative. Focus on issues of class, status, race, and gender. Disdain intellectual history, but pay special attention to rhetoric and discourse, and the almighty linguistic turn. And, under no circumstances, ever, dare to attribute causality to ideas and beliefs, or to engage in the search for ideological or cultural genealogies. These are some of the guiding principles drilled into several generations of historians since the dawn of the Atomic Age nearly seventy years ago—principles still very much in play, and very much the marrow of current historiographical orthodoxy. And also principles that are brazenly challenged by Brad Gregory in his Unintended Reformation.

In many ways, the chief contribution—and the consummate affront of this book, as many will see it—is its unabashed return to an older approach to history. And its most controversial cheekiness is not the fact that it seeks to theorize on a grand scale, scandalous as that may seem to some, but that it also wields history as a sharp-edged weapon to critique contemporary culture. To fully understand the radical departure taken by Brad Gregory, one must first come to terms with the historical mindset he rejects.

Deconstruction became the order of the day in much of humanistic scholarship after the 1970s, and this included history, even though most historians prefer to think of themselves as social scientists. Traditional periodization became contemptible, as did all the conceits that undergird it. Was there ever really a Renaissance? Forget it. Since there was really no cultural rebirth of any kind for the vast majority of Europeans in the 15th century, what was the use of any such concept in the first place? Changes in high culture that affected only a few male elites should not only be dismissed as a hegemonic fiction, but reviled as politically incorrect.¹

How about the Reformation, then? Forget that, too. Better to speak of the "early modern" period, and to focus on aspects of history other than religion. Secularization.² Confessionalization.³ Social Disciplining.⁴ Transition to Modernity.⁵ These became the reigning paradigms for understanding the Reformation era in our own day. Whether it is state-building, or the emergence of the public sphere, or the triumph of lent over carnival, or the revolution of the common man, or any other such entry point into the realm of grand summation, all of us who work in the early modern period are stuck with these conceptual formulations—like it or not—which make much more sense to us now than they would have to the very people who are the subject of our studies.

Discerning what differentiates "modern" from "medieval" became a fixation, too.⁷ And in this search for boundaries, the concept of secularization still looms large, with "medieval" as synonymous with religion, superstition, and mumbo-jumbo and "modern" as the liberation from such dreck. And in most formulations of the transition from medieval to modern, all changes in religion tend to be seen as wrinkles within some other matrix that was more tangible, as modes of social exchange that flowed from deeper material needs. What people do rather than what people think or believe: that's the real thing, the stuff of history. Religion is an activity: "consecrated behavior,"⁶ "symbolic behavior,"⁷ or a "social glue."⁸ In brief, religion, in and of itself, is never the ultimate or proximate cause of anything.⁹

Though Brad Gregory is intensely obsessed with the transition from medieval to modern, his fixation is markedly different from that of most of his contemporaries. Instead of tracing an inevitable teleological arc from the 16th century to the present in which the virtues of secularism are extolled—a trait epitomized by Stephen Greenblatt's much-celebrated prize-winning The Swerve¹⁰—Brad Gregory questions any such triumphalist teleology as well as the virtues of secularism itself and of the relativist "hyperpluralism" that currently holds sway in the West. In various ways, despite its intense focus on...