Im Schatten der Confessio Augustana: Die Religionsverhandlungen des Augsburger Reichstages 1530 im historischen Kontext ed. by Herbert Immenkötter and Gunther Wenz (review)

768BOOK REVIEWS Im Schatten der Confessio Augustana: Die Religionsverhandlungen des Augsburger Reichstages 1530 im historischen Kontext. Edited by Herbert Immenkötter and Günther Wenz. [Reformationsgeschictliche Studien und Texte, Band 136.] (Münster:Aschendorff. 1997. Pp. vi, 226. DM 80,-.) The present volume is a collection of papers from a conference held at Augsburg in 1994 concerned with the discussions in the summer of 1530 that led to the Confessio Augustana and its Catholic refutation. By looking beyond the Protestants' Confession, the imperial Confutation, and Melanchthon's Apology, the authors ofthese essays have provided rare glimpses into the deliberations at Augsburg and new insights into the theological significance of the texts those deliberations produced. Several contributors continue well-established lines of inquiry into partisan politics before and after the Diet. Among these are Rolf Decot, whose study of the history of political jurisdiction over religious affairs sets the 1530 Diet in contrast to medieval conceptions of the unity of church and empire and in harmony with assumptions in effect since the Diet of Speyer in 1526 and the church visitations that followed it. Eugène Honée, the dean of historians of the Diet, argues from his knowledge of the negotiations that the August and September proceedings, usually seen as different initiatives, should actually be seen as a single movement. Thus even though the Protestant minority changed its position during these months, the Catholic majority maintained continuity. And working from newly published sources, notably her own 1992 volume in the "Deutsche Reichstagsakten," Rosemarie Aulinger describes the efforts of Catholic princes from Mainz and the Palatinate to achieve peace with the Protestants. Aulinger's analysis, and the texts appended to it, provide valuable context for understanding the Nuremberg Peace of 1532. Other essays are concerned with issues in the history of dogma, and rely on material that has long been available but not yet exhausted. These include Günther Wenz's study of the conflict over administering the cup to the laity, in which he makes careful use of a German translation, published by Theodor Kolde in 1906, of the (lost) Latin "ur-text" of CA 22. The late Bernhard Lohse's contribution assesses Erasmus's influence on participants at the Diet. Through scrupulous reading ofthe surviving correspondence Lohse finds an Erasmus far more conservative than the Protestant sympathizer of conventional historiography . As it turns out, Erasmus was fully informed of the proceedings at Augsburg, and hoped that the Emperor, as the Pope's agent,would allow no deviation from the Roman faith. Christian Peters makes use ofboth published and unpublished material in his exploration of the genesis of Melanchthon's Apology. By means of scrupulous analysis of Melanchthon's surviving correspondence, Peters has discovered that the quarto edition that had appeared by early May, 1531, and which has been regarded as the authoritative version, was in fact only a provisional response BOOK REVIEWS769 to the Confutatio, and that the long-neglected octavo edition that appeared in September of that year must be considered the definitive form of Melanchthon's Apology,especially with respect to the doctrines ofjustification,penance,and the Mass. As Peters makes clear here and in his fuller study,Apologia Confessionis Augustanae (Stuttgart, 1997), Melanchthon revised these articles, and especially the fourth article, on justification, carefully between May and August, 1531. Not all of the papers focus on the events of 1530 or their aftermath; indeed the "shadow" of the title extends far, to remind us that the Diet was but one episode in a long course of development. In this spirit Reinhard Schwarz contributed two studies, one of Eck's doctrine of concupiscence in a series of theses for disputation from 1519, and the other of the degree of agreement on theological anthropology that can be found between Eck and Melanchthon. Schwarz finds the origins of Eck's position both in 1530 and at Regensburg in 1541 in these early theses, and also sees that differences between Eck and Melanchthon which had begun as semantic disagreements became substantive differences after 1530. In his introductory essay Herbert Immenkötter makes note ofthe complexity of the documentary evidence that needs to be assessed before we can have a clear...