Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire (review)

This may be a case of a qualified reviewer in the wrong journal, since this lengthy and thoughtful survey of early modern Christianity makes no effort to be interdisciplinary. Even when religion and politics seem “really inseparable,” Eire insists that “distinguishing between the process of selfdefinition and the enforcement of theological and ethical norms . . . is absolutely necessary” (564). Less than 2 percent of his text is devoted to “Christian soldiers,” and the Puritan Revolution receives more space than the Thirty Years’ War (548–561). Religion always remains dominant, pulling everything else into its orbit. Eire’s preface names three major features of this work, “the first . . . [being] the conviction that religion is a real factor in history.” “The chief overarching assumption of the entire book” is that “we cannot begin to comprehend what we are now as Westerners without first understanding the changes wrought by the Reformations” (xvii). His epilogue proposes to “consider an approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries ..., and bundles as many perspectives as possible” (744), but it soon affirms that “religion is the axis from which these other aspects radiate” (746).

In addition to an award-winning memoir about his native Cuba, Eire brings a cross-confessional mix of scholarly credentials to this task; he has published a major research project about early Swiss Protestant iconoclasm and later an investigation of testaments in Philip II’s Madrid.¹ Suitably equipped, Eire examines each classical subfield of the history of Latin Christianity from 1450 to 1650—late-medieval Christendom, Protestantism, Catholic Reform, and a permanently religiously divided Europe—in considerable detail. His twenty-six chapters are divided into four nearly equal-sized parts, each introduced by a prelude in Rome with the dates 1450, 1510, 1564, and 1626.

Eire’s reach is broad, but so is his grasp. At the book’s heart, his six chapters about Catholicism form a neater and more coherent package than his seven chapters about Protestantism. Probably unwittingly, his three chapters about Martin Luther reproduce the tripartite schema of ardent monk, cocksure disputant, and grumpy reactionary, first used in 1928 by Febvre, Luther’s outstanding French biographer, accompanied by contemporary woodcuts of each Luther iteration.² Because of its historiographical emphasis, Eire’s chapter about the “Radical Reformation” differs from everything else; it retouches George H. Williams, “whose massive survey of the subject [The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962)] proved definitive” (253). Nothing else rates as “definitive” in these 750 pages, although occasional tirades appear. In the Catholic section, two pairs of chapters work together extremely well. Chapter 16, Eire’s exceptionally rich account of new Tridentine-era religious orders, precedes one about the Jesuits. His next pair of chapters about Catholic missions west and east of Europe also makes rewarding reading for any non-specialist.

Several memorable incidents enliven this account, beginning with two women fighting about the right to a particular pew in a fifteenth-century Castilian village (19). An ironic reflection about victorious Swiss Catholics burning Huldrych Zwingli’s corpse and scattering his ashes to prevent his followers from collecting relics overlooks that a more appropriate relic, Zwingli’s split-open helmet, has been preserved (247; illustration, 233). Later, a macabre thread places the unfortunate Saxon “Philippist” statesman Nicholas Krell, executed in 1601, into three consecutive chapters (568, 586–587; illustration, 618–619).

Eire’s Catholic vignettes are even richer. Two statues of St. Francis Xavier made for Jesuits c. 1700 remain in their original locations—one on a famous bridge in Prague and the other (a wooden replica of Xavier’s incorruptible body, which still remains in India) in a mission church near Tucson, Arizona (519–521). Eire’s sketch of a little-known (at least to this reviewer) teaching order, the Poor Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, “mercifully known as Piarists or Scolapians” (430–432), exemplifies some of the best and worst features of Tridentine Catholicism. Its founder, a future saint, was removed...