Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (review)

One cannot say that this book is unexpected, since Burnett has been publishing prodigiously about Basel since 1998: eight articles in seven different learned journals, including this one, plus four more contributions to various edited collections.¹ The good news is that she manages to do exactly what she promises, and do it convincingly—to examine the more than 250 men who comprised Basel's Protestant clergy during its first century in terms of their principal mission of indoctrinating the laity, primarily through preaching the Gospel. The bad news is that she tells us disappointingly little about their audience in one of Europe's liveliest small sixteenth-century cities.

Except for seven parishes west and south of the city, which were recovered by Basel's Prince-Bishop in the 1580s and re-Catholicized, Basel's Protestant clergy served the same territory throughout the century after the Reformation—a dozen urban posts (two of them tied to professorships in theology at the university) and twenty-seven rural parishes, which split off in the 1830s to form today's half-canton of Basel-Land. Burnett has mastered the rich body of locally preserved evidence about Basel's pastorate in the century following its Reformation. Using more than fifty published sermons, mainly between 1577 and 1610 (412–414, 416); 600 theological disputations printed between 1580 and 1625 (147–154, 282, 289), and records of stipends awarded to locally born students awaiting pastoral posts, visitations, and synods, she has crafted a convincing portrait of Basel's theological evolution as it "turned Swiss," moving from irenical Protestantism to orthodox Reformed by the 1580s. A sympathetic portrait of Simon Sulzer, who guided Basel through its mid-sixteenth-century transitions, and a subtle analysis of Ramism's effect on Basel's clergy highlight her account.

Burnett merges prosopography with theology, tracing Basel's shift from an early reliance on former Catholic priests, drawn from a broad region of upper Germany, to an airtight reliance on its native sons to fill its pastorate. Among Basel's twenty-seven rural pastors, most of whom served less than ten years, barely 7 percent gained promotion to urban posts (207). Her concluding section confronts Strauss' venerable polemic about the "failure" of the German Reformation (254–259).² Although Burnett comes down persuasively on the side of "success," her explanations stress Basel's advantages—a university, printers, and a smaller rural hinterland than many other Protestant churches.

Burnett's concentration on theology and pastoral training, however, prevents her from engaging with the cultural history of a truly exceptional early modern city-state, wedged between the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederation. With Erasmian families like the Amerbachs or the Platters, Basel sheltered a remarkable collection of refugees ranging from David Joris to a cluster of Italian radicals. Yet, religious radicals fail to register on Burnett's radar: Castellio and Joris appear, but neither is in her index (93, 210). At Basel, a blindfolded birthplace of toleration, printing censorship seems to have been surprisingly lax; only long after his death did its ecclesiastical and civic authorities learn Joris' identity.

Burnett also fails to develop her insights about the marriage policies of Basel's leading state-supported theologians. In 1541/42, a remarkably distinguished Italian theologian was passed over in favor of a lesser candidate whose new wife was related to two of the magistrates supervising the appointment (81–82). The next key appointee, in 1554, also married a woman with family members in Basel's Senate (131). Another, in 1575, had married a former ward of Erastus, and his successor married his Doktorvater's daughter shortly after his appointment (140). Although Burnett asserts that appointments to Basel's prestigious urban parishes were "also based on merit," kinship ties seem extremely important among this increasingly hereditary pastorate (265; my emphasis).