Herrschaft und Glaubenswechsel: Die Fürstenreformation im Reich und in Europa in 28 Biographien ed. by Susan Richter and Armin Kohle (review)

In a year when all attention seems fixed on a single act by a single actor in Wittenberg, this volume is a timely reminder that the Protestant Reformation endured because prominent rulers embraced it from the start and their regimes sustained it for centuries. Consisting of 28 profiles of 31 sixteenth-century rulers—21 of whom are Germans—the collection honors Eike Wolgast, a pioneer in research on reforming rulers. Richter's introduction proposes that each chapter be read as a case study of the ruler as a "change manager." Like modern-day executives, the Reformation-era rulers facilitated this fundamental transformation in three phases: First building momentum behind and forming a plan for change, second carrying out consensus-oriented policies via intensive communication, and then formalizing gains and acclimating constituents to the new environment. In the process these rulers created a new significance for themselves as heads of state, new solidarities among themselves, and the early modern territorial state.

While these brief remarks cannot relate much of the depth of the work, Anglo-American readers are likely to find most of the sketches worthwhile; especially, Beate Kusche on Fredrick III of Saxony, Franz Brendle on Ulrich of Württemberg, Saskia Schmidt on Elizabeth of Braunschweig-Calenberg, Jens Klingner on Elizabeth of Saxony, Lars Adler on Joachim of Brandenburg, Oliver Plate on William of Orange, Thomas Maissen on Jeanne d'Albert and Henry of Navarre, and Richter on Gustav I Vasa of Sweden. Several, however, proved disappointing. For example, while Gury Schneider-Ludorff's remarks on Philip of Hesse understate the signal importance of this ruler for his generation and in the strategically significant west-central region of the empire, Sebastian Schütte argues for the significance of the regency of Edward VI of England, something that few would dispute in the first place. Likewise, it is questionable that the editors accorded Francis I of France and James V of Scotland their own chapters, when Henry VIII of England has none.

For whatever its value, the change manager model of a Reformation ruler feels lifeless next to the sanguinary reality of sixteenth-century politics implicit in the work. A fuller characterization of the rulers' impact could have included several other observations. First, excepting England, the Reformation was a small state phenomenon, partly because of the Holy Roman Empire's decentralized character, but also because Protestantism was a movement that attacked Europe's central structures—Roman Catholicism's claim to a universal jurisdiction (on which even some Catholic rulers infringed) and the policies of big state rulers who sought to cobble it back together. Second, while turning Protestant offered tangible benefits for rulers (it enlarged their right to oversee souls and allowed them to craft new tendrils of territorial authority), it also heightened risks. Those risks came from the Hapsburgs (Charles V in the Empire and his successor Philip II in most of Western Europe), from regional states that did not follow their neighbors into the new creed, from internal dissenters, and from the future (successors who could reverse years of policy almost at a stroke). In short, the Reformation increased pressures along the old and new fault lines of Europe's political geography. Third, for as much as political calculations mattered, the personal religious sensibilities of the rulers were not irrelevant. Examples include Frederick the Wise whose support for Martin Luther is hard to reconcile with his lifelong devotion to the practices of late medieval piety that Luther attacked, and Elizabeth of England whose tastes for vestments, crucifixes, church music, and much else found their way into the 1558–9 reestablishment of Protestantism despite the chronic controversy they engendered. On the other hand, having been raised a Lutheran, converting to Catholicism, and dying as a Calvinist, William of Orange's personal religious views are a matter that careful inquiry has yet...