Im Zeichen von Kirchenreform und Reformation: Gesammelte Studien zur Kirchengeschichte in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (review)

Heribert Smolinsky has been one of the towering figures in the late-twentieth-century interpretation of Early Modern Catholicism. A careful reader of Reformation-era dogmatic treatises and an original researcher in the area of Catholic confessionalization, Smolinsky has over three decades helped shape our understanding of political and religious history during the sixteenth century. Since much of his work appeared in collected volumes and is not available in digital form, this collection by three former students of twenty-two (from a total of over a hundred) of his papers is especially welcome.

Organized in four sections representing the distinct research areas to which Smolinsky has contributed (Humanism and Educational History; Reformation History and Church Reform; the Reformation in the Upper Rhine; and History of Theology and Scholarship), these articles taken together demonstrate a mastery of detail combined with a methodological acuity that is instructive for church historians of any era or region. For many American historians of Early Modern Catholicism, Smolinsky's 1983 essay on Reformation History as Church History stands alongside the contributions of Hubert Jedin and John O'Malley for its clear grasp of the religious aspects of the Catholic response to the Reformation. Whether elucidating Thomas Murner's polemical use of satire (1987) or analyzing in 1991 the ecclesiastical diplomacy of Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg, Smolinsky is careful to set his findings within the extended Reformation narrative that includes late-medieval thought and Catholic Reform. Historians of late-medieval theology will find in the 1976 essay on Jean Gerson a detailed account of that chancellor's reform initiative at Paris. This was Smolinsky's first statement of the thesis that university reform was a precursor to religious reform, an argument supported in this volume by a 1994 survey of reformist tendencies in the universities and a close reading (first published in 1990) of Johann Eck's lectures on Genesis at Ingolstadt in the 1520's and '30's. These investigations expand our understanding of the role humanism played in religious reform; and Smolinsky's contributions also include wide-ranging essays from 1990 and 2002 on humanism in the Catholic theological faculties during the Reformation period and in the Rhineland, as well as a 1996 revision, using Jodocus Clichtoveus as the test-case, of the view that the Romanist controversialists were as opposed to humanism as they were to Protestantism. Popular religion also comes under scrutiny in studies of educational and catechetical reforms in Jülich-Cleve-Berg (1989); of literary forms of popular piety in Freiburg and its environs (1996); and (from 1998) of the "language controversy" of the immediate post-Tridentine decades, in which vernacular translations of scripture and liturgy were promoted in the interest of pastoral care. Smolinsky's 1995 essay on literary "Mirrors of Marital Life" (Ehespiegel) offers an illuminating glimpse of early-modern moral theology in vernacular form; and his depictions of the Jewish convert Paulus Weidner and of Jakob Feucht, the bishop of Bamberg who described in detail the 1577 conversion of two Jews, add little-known figures to a controversy long associated with the names of Johann Eck and Andreas Osiander. Two final essays, on patristics and exegesis in the Catholic controversialists (1999) and on the concept of apostolic succession (2004, originally for an ecumenical working group of German theologians) display a rare constructive subtlety and are likely to be especially influential in coming decades.

As the dates of original publication indicate, all but two of these essays were no more than twenty years old in 2005, and many remain the latest contributions on their topics. Heribert Smolinsky's work remains influential, and the editors are to be lauded for bringing it to the attention of a wider range of historians.