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

Christopher Ocker is a well-established historian of theology in the medieval and early modern period. In this work, he turns his attention to the ideas underlying the confiscation of religious property in the Holy Roman Empire during the early reformation. This is a formidable undertaking as there were a multitude of states within the Holy Roman Empire with different legal customs and practices and varied relationships with the Catholic Church. Information about some aspects of the confiscations is patchy, and even the precise numbers of religious houses in the area remains to be established.

Ocker's interest lies almost exclusively in examining the arguments that reforming theologians formulated about church ownership of property and how these related to the way in which different cities and states within the Holy Roman Empire acted when they resumed or redirected the use of church property. He is primarily concerned with what he sees as a Europe-wide standard (p. 5) and the 'universal' civil and canon law where discussions of property turn on issues of legitimacy and theft. He ascribes the only significant arguments to theologians, whom he describes as 'the technicians of religious legitimacy' (p. 13) and asserts that only the church had a 'truly impersonal concept of property' (p. 21).

This is highly abstract as he formulates it, and sometimes leaves the course of events he is attempting to elucidate largely unintelligible, since he does not examine the concepts of law and justice and forms of rights over property embodied in territorial and feudal law, that are not necessarily similar to Canon law abstractions, but which are the usual basis for action in the secular courts of the realm and which justify the rulers' rights to make demands on church property. Even though Ocker recognizes that the major threat to the Augsburg confession was legal action not theological opposition and discusses the way the League responded in the Imperial Chamber Court, he gives a very limited explanation of the basis of that action. He begins from Canon Law dicta that viewed property once dedicated to religious purposes as inalienable, a general position that was modified in practice by a negotiated agreement that allowed rulers certain powers. He then struggles with the theologians' distinction between use and ownership, between rights that depend upon service and unencumbered Dominion, claiming that the Sachenspiegel – the vernacular recording that John III ordered in the fourteenth century of formerly unwritten Saxon law- – illustrates this. He also struggles with the need to allow the ecclesiastical institution to use its property in various ways to support the purposes for which it is held.

This concentration on academic theory ignores the long history of changing use or confiscation in the previous thousand years, such as the process associated with the fall of the Templars and the almost routine granting of papal permission for altered use of church property where its original purpose could not be maintained. After the Black Death, for instance, where the numbers of religious had dropped below a viable level, papal bulls permitted their property to be converted to other educational or welfare purposes.

Ocker's largely factual account of the actual process of secularization in a selection of areas within the Empire and the Low Countries and the different approach of the secular rulers to appropriation of church possession does not elucidate the traditional power on which those rulers relied and the support they may have received from the representative assemblies in the individual states. Instead, he examines the complex relationship between the social hierarchy and the more privileged personnel of the church especially bishops and cathedral chapters, monks and nuns that, in the absence of the level of centralization that had developed in the Western monarchies, he thinks helps explain the diverging processes by which rulers...