Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547: Confiscation and Religious Purpose in the Holy Roman Empire (review)

The confiscation or destruction of church property in the Reformation has, in the English-speaking literature, commonly been seen under two signs: either the wave of image-breaking in the early phase of enthusiastic activism, or the expropriation or dissolution of ecclesiastical corporations, principally the religious houses, in the later years of calculated policy. For the Holy Roman Empire this has always been too simple a view. The legal status, administration, and deployment of church assets have in recent years been touched upon in studies of the Schmalkaldic League (Haug-Moritz), ecclesiastical governance in the territorial states (Sieglerschmidt), Protestant politics on a regional level (Brady), the ecclesiastical principalities themselves (Wolgast), or Luther and Melanchthon's concept of secular rule (Estes), but none has addressed the issue of "church robbery" head-on. Reading Christopher Ocker's detailed and scholarly analysis (which draws heavily upon these works), one can see why: the picture he paints is of an issue at once legal and theological, territorial and imperial, confronting long-standing Catholic efforts at church reform with attempted Protestant innovation, the outcome of which was often messy, at times contradictory, and always prey to wider political and diplomatic considerations. One of the most startling of Ocker's findings is how infrequently and haltingly Protestant theologians in the 1520s and 1530s sought to elaborate a coherent doctrine of the legal status of church property, but then they were caught between the competing interests of princes and cities, evangelical and Reformed wings, and within the Wittenberg camp between Melanchthon and Luther himself. When a clear line emerged at the end of the 1530s (in submissions to the Eisenach diet of the Schmalkaldic League), it was Wolfgang Musculus and Bonifacius Wolfahrt (rather than the eirenic Martin Bucer) who affirmed that confiscations or reassignments could be justified under existing Catholic legal teaching, underpinning their case with copious citations from both canon and Roman law. Their argument, that all church property had been given to honor God and Christ's ministry, meant that it belonged to the community of believers as a common possession for the common good.

This essentially religious view of church property, however, came up against the assertion of the right of secular princes as God-ordained upholders of peace and justice to interfere in—or control—the administration of the Church; yet the latter stance entailed a further complication for Protestants, inasmuch as any secular claim over church property necessarily involved acknowledging the competence of the Imperial Chamber Court (dominated by Catholics, or by Habsburg allies) to hear suits of restitution. For well over a decade, the league succeeded in having the court's jurisdiction suspended, but with the league's defeat in 1547 at the hands of Charles V (himself an ardent sequestrator in the Low Countries), the issue was thrown open once more, until the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 achieved a (provisional) compromise.

The signal merit of Ocker's study (of which only the merest flavor can be given here) is that it emphasizes the irreducible complexity of the issue within Germany (unlike Scandinavia or England) and the shifting alliances that bore upon it. That he achieves by a chronological rather than a systematic approach—the only one that can hope to reflect historical reality—but it comes at a price. Even those well versed in the politics of early sixteenth-century Germany may struggle to identify the interests and policies of, say, the imperial cities as opposed to the princes, or the arguments of the theologians over against the lawyers (perhaps because no clear lines of demarcation existed), but that does not make for easy reading. Ocker's convoluted prose style (strewn with some bizarre lapses of English usage) certainly does not help—could not the Brill copyeditor have intervened? As a result, the book will be quarried for its wealth...