Les deux réformes chrétiennes: Propagation et diffusion (review)

This interesting collection of conference papers presented at the University of Haifa in 2000 and 2001 surveys the propagation and diffusion of the sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic Reformations, mainly in meridional Europe. Taking advantage of the benefits of cultural history and historical anthropology, the authors explore the confessional and social systems as constituents of both denominations as a whole. The book's twenty-six essays are divided into six parts: "Réforme et Contre-Réforme Militantes," on writing, orality, reformers' biographies, and Lent sermons; "Réforme et Contre-Réforme Militantes," on the Disciplines Ecclésiastiques, visitations, nuncios, and Jesuit mission; "Agents d'Éducation," on parental rhetoric, horoscopes, cartography, ethnography, and satire; "Idéologie et Comportement," on behavior, monarchomach tracts, confessionalization, and miracle cults; "Voies de Propagation et de Perception," on communication, polemics, and education; and "Arts et Représentation," on singing, images, dress, and morality. In the introduction Bernard Roussel puts this kaleidoscopic constellation into a systematic perspective. Although a central thesis and tentative conclusions are missing, the editors have succeeded in offering a fascinating tour d'horizon. For the active reader the parallel analyses of both Reformations — which were faced with analogous problems and opportunities — produce startling contrasts, similarities, and differentiations of historiographical clichés. Let me cite a few instances.

As a tool of social disciplining and congregation building, preaching was not a Reformed prerogative: in France, Lent sermons served to propagate reformational ideas (until the 1540s) just as much as the orthodox opposition to them (Marc Venard). The misconception regarding the alleged primordial role of the printed book in the early dissemination of Protestantism, aptly labeled by A. G. Dickens "the doctrine of justification by print alone," proves to be invalid once more: actually, in France reading, preaching, and conversation in conventicles went hand-in-hand (Jean-François Gilmont).

John Calvin's oral style — in his approximately 5,000 one-hour sermons Calvin spoke thirty-three million words — did not significantly influence his style of writing, as is generally assumed: he maintained the distinction between what was intended for the ear, and for "the public eye," all his life (Francis Higman). Calvin's prose, which functioned as a major vehicle of the Calvinist Reformation, can be read as an autobiography, namely as the personal expression of Calvin's own experience and interpretation of the Catholic faith as terror and hatred of God instead of fear and love of the Lord (Denis Crouzet). Crouzet's contention that Calvinism lent Calvin's biography universal value, and should therefore be understood as biography itself, seems an oversimplification to me. Calvin's real biography, appended in 1564 to a unique and popular anthology of biographies of Luther, Oecolampadius, and Zwingli, was meant to introduce not so much a new model of holiness as just a model of the Protestant Reformation as a homogeneous eschatological movement, aiming at the restoration of the Gospel (Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard).

According to the Catholic polemist Florimond de Raemond (1605), Calvin's horoscope indicated heresy, as did those of Melanchthon and Luther, Mars and Jupiter being in conjunction either in the third or the ninth house of all three reformers. In his attack on Calvin, Raemond pillaged the res publica astrologorum, which the reformer abhorred — and yet with his conception of the world as determined by the stars he came close to Calvin's double predestination doctrine (Max Engammare). As a Protestant counterpart on the border between text and image, the Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique (Geneva, 1567) presents a sweeping cosmographic allegory of the vices and abuses of popedom by combining cartographic and theatrical fiction (Frank Lestringant).

Collective psalm singing in the vernacular was an outstanding means of propagating Protestantism, school children launching the melodies during worship and at school and bringing them home (Édith Weber). At home the ideas of [End Page 1369...