What Did the Lutheran Reformation Look Like A Hundred Years After Martin Luther: Community and Culture in Ansbach, Germany in the Seventeenth Century by Richard G. Cole (review)

Taking up again the longstanding question of the Reformation's relationship to modernity, Richard Cole turns to three Lutherans, namely, Johann Eberlin von Günzburg, Laurentius Laelius, and Johann Valentin Andreae, in order to illustrate the Lutheran tradition's more advanced elements and to reject emphatically that Lutheran theologians handed "concern with life in the world over [to] the Machiavellian designs of early modern princes" (iii). Eberlin (d. 1533) was a sometime associate of Martin Luther, a productive popular pamphlet writer of the first half of the 1520s and pastor at Wertheim. Laelius (d. 1634) was the city preacher of Ansbach, and Andreae (d. 1654) held a similar position in Württemberg. Cole found a shared ethic of social equity and mutual obligation between prince and subject in their writings on politics: Eberlin's Wolfaria and Andreae's Christianopolis were utopias, Laelius's contribution was a funeral sermon for Margrave Joachim-Ernst of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Their core beliefs, in Cole's view, include a spirit of civic engagement, which derived from the humanist tradition; state-sponsored universal elementary education for boys and girls, which was an educational program leading to widespread literacy, the promotion of individual usefulness, and the suppression of superstition; the restricting of ecclesiastical influence in secular affairs; and responsible, if not humane, government policies to promote a non-exploitive economy and a just society. This ethic Cole characterized as "ameliorative." What kept Lutheran social thinking from verging into self-immolating revolution, were the acceptance of hierarchy, a princely right to make and enforce laws (confirmed by the consent of the territorial estates or diet), and a joint sense of duty between prince and subjects to build and maintain a just, well-ordered and prosperous state.

Cole usefully introduces to a general audience figures who are not well known outside of scholarly circles, especially Eberlin, who was one of the most important and productive Lutheran publicists of the first years of the Reformation. On the other hand, the small work is more suggestive than demonstrative of the continuity of Eberlin's outlook. Readers might wish to see not only a closer comparison of major texts that he discussed, but also more extensive quotations of them—more than the scant twelve pages devoted to Laelius and the fourteen to Andreae allow. Moreover, the century that separated Eberlin from the others is not as inconsequential as Cole seems to assume. Writing as court officials at the time of the Thirty Years' War, Laelius and Andreae could not have reached the same audience with the same message as the provocative Eberlin writing to harness Luther's movement to commoners' anticlerical discontent. One is left wondering if the three are comparable without significant qualifications. Finally, readers are left with the question of impact. Simply, to what extent were these writers listened to? This question can only be answered with an examination of the actual Protestant regimes that these writers addressed.