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

This is a not very brief history of reformation. But as with that earlier work, A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton University Press, 2010), Eire has produced a volume with radiant prose sure to garner critical acclaim. He has constructed the book for an educated, nonspecialist audience, with minimal footnotes, focusing the seventy-three page bibliography wholly on twentieth century and later works in English. He may have intended the tome for an undergraduate audience of history majors. Slipping it into a backpack, however, will be no small feat. However, given the goals Eire set out, the girth and heft seem perfectly reasonable. Covering two hundred tumultuous years, Eire has generated four books in one. In the first, he treats the later medieval period as a prelude to 1517. In the second and third, he examines topics most expect to find in Reformation overviews: the emergence of Protestantism and the reform of Catholicism, respectively. In the volume's final section, he traces the effect of the reformations upon global civilization even beyond 1700.

Eire has delivered a picture of reformations informed by the central insight of historians working across the last two scholarly generations: portrayals of the past must reveal the vast human complexity found in the documents we study. Myths and stereotypes about the past that ostensibly identify the roots of what we love or loathe in the present obscure rather than illuminate history. It is long past time to expose such myths, plus the corrective human complexity. Such correctives are needed most where historical myths tenaciously endure, and where evidence of human complexity too often is ignored: in textbook literature and popular accounts for nonspecialist audiences. In this sense, Eire has delivered great history. He has depicted Luther and other famous reformers up front, in living color, exposed with both their glowing inclination toward theological brilliance, and their distasteful propensity toward vicious intolerance. Eire has not placed Luther, or any of the others, at the center of his narrative, however. There instead are multiple reformations, incomprehensible as individual events. Eire's Luther cannot be understood apart from both the German princes who took his side, and the Müntzerite radicals and Swiss Zwinglians who opposed him. Eire has presented the Catholic side of the story as unfolding in five discrete phases, affected not just by reaction to Luther and his sarcastic propagandists, but more so by the intellectual habits of Renaissance humanism that allowed numerous theological outcomes. When examining the British Isles, Eire argues that conflicting religious positions of various monarchs must be considered not just the cause of a wild devotional rollercoaster ride for subjects, but also the consequence of complex geopolitics.

And yet, Eire has described the age of reformations with terms sometimes evoking old stereotypes undermined by his eight-hundred-page barrage of details. While acknowledging that some medieval clerics and laity engaged in decidedly non-Christian practices such as magic, necromancy, and witchcraft, Eire nonetheless has insisted that one can still "speak of medieval piety and of the Church" in generic, rather monolithic language (pp. 41–42). Falling back on a well-worn path, he considers conciliarist inability "to trump [medieval] political realities" of heresy and disfunctional authoritative structures a tragic failure (pp. 54–55). His paragraphs on Renaissance "privileging" of the past, as in Italy, where "urban life and commerce" allegedly "broke through the feudal order" and helped "make the Reformation possible," have a decidedly neo-Burckhardtian ring (pp. 66–67). Eire describes central Europeans in 1505—right down to the "rudest peasants"—as deeply infused with "unquestioned assumptions" about heaven, good works, and sin (p. 138). In these and other passages, he evokes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concepts long under fire from medievalists and early modern scholars, particularly those who scoff at the idea of widespread Christian belief prior to the age of "confessionalization."

Many specialists will be gratified by Eire...