The Impact of the European Reformation: Princes, Clergy and People (review)

Insofar as Reformation studies have in the past been guided by grand syntheses, the focus has been on modernization, and especially on ways in which Protestantism has been seen as providing an impetus to modernization. As Bridget Heal remarks here, most scholars nowadays pursue their own paths, no longer feeling a need to respond to the grand syntheses. Hence this volume is intended to "counteract" the trend toward "fragmentation" by providing "a broad perspective on the impact of the European Reformation" (p. 1). But a broad perspective may simply display the centrifugal tendencies instead of counteracting them, and that is largely the case here.

Three of the essays do address elements of the modernization thesis in one way or another. Luise Schorn-Schütte (chapter 5, "The 'New Clergies' in Europe: Protestant Pastors and Catholic Reform Clergy after the Reformation") surveys recent literature and concludes that overall trends were largely similar in both religious camps: Clerics were not only more educated; they were also more and more likely to come from bourgeois households. In effect, Max Weber's Protestant-inspired modernity here gives way to the "confessionalization" thesis, according to which rival churches worked in tandem to change the outlook and behavior of ordinary believers. Christopher Haigh (chapter 6, "The Clergy and Parish Discipline in England, 1570–1640") argues, as against the distinction that Margo Todd has recently made between the Kirk of Scotland and the Anglican Church, that ministers and churchwardens in England worked effectively and largely behind the scenes to maintain parish discipline. More interestingly, and against his own previous understanding of things, he contends that anticlericalism is a constant in religious history, rising to prominence "sometimes and in some places" largely in response to "clerical sensitivty to criticism" (p. 125). Alexandra Walsham (chapter 10, "Sacred Spas? Healing Springs and Religion in Post-Reformation Britain") shows how Protestant writers came to accept and promote many of the holy wells of pre-Reformation Britain, not because of their association with popish saints, but because their waters were found to contain minerals thought to have curative power. There was thus a connection between Protestantism and desacralization, but not in the simple way that has often been proposed.

Five other essays are worth citing as fine examples of Reformation scholarship done well, each in its own sphere. Tom Scott (chapter 1, "Hubmaier, Schappeler and Hergot on Social Revolution") shows that for the radical thinkers in question, there were indeed circumstances in which Christians might legitimately seek to overthrow the existing order. His larger point is that there was a "continuum" (p. 17) between these ideas of social revolution and the idea of resistance to tyranny as propounded by leading Reformers, notably Ulrich Zwingli. Kevin Gould (chapter 4, "The Contest for Control of Urban Centres in Southwestern France during the Early Years of the Reformation") begins in medias res, at a point when Catholic and Huguenot parties were already at daggers drawn in many cities of the southwest. The essay shows how Huguenot assaults on centers of power and control were thwarted in towns where leading Catholics were able to fashion a new kind of solidarity by drawing together co-religionists from many different social ranks. Michael Graham (chapter 8, "Kirk in Danger: Presbyterian Political Divinity in Two Eras") adopts the novel strategy of comparing the political engagement of ultra-Presbyterians among the Scots clergy in the 1590s and the 1690s. By doing so, he shows both the emergence of a historical memory within the Kirk and the continuity of clerical views on the Crown's duty to true religion. Margo Todd (chapter 9, "Fairies, Egyptians and Elders: Multiple Cosmologies in Post-Reformation Scotland") offers a variant on the caveat that has often accompanied studies of Scotland's thorough-going Calvinist Reformation. Even among the educated, faerie belief persisted into the eighteenth century, in...