© Mark Greengrass, University of Sheffield, 1997


The Protestant Reformation: religious change and the people of sixteenth-century Europe ©

Author: Mark Greengrass


00.01 Introduction

In the sixteenth century, something important and unique happened to the history of western European Christianity. It did not occur in orthodox Christianity in Russia or what was left of the Byzantine Empire in Greece and it is difficult to find appropriate comparisons for it in the other advanced civilizations of Eurasia. It is called the protestant reformation and it was initially an attempt to reform the traditional 'fabric' of the western church. By fabric, we mean not merely the institutions of the church but also the supporting rationale for offering a means of salvation. Protestants sought to change things by using the Bible as the primary authority for doctrine and the early Christian church as an institutional model. In the process, protestants rejected papal authority and (with it) much of the traditional beliefs and practices of the established church.

Within a generation of its appearance, the protestant message had begun to divide families, cities and states. Persuasive protestant preachers and theologians, aided by the enormous diffusive power of the new printing press, could compel attention, create controversy and capture converts. The protestant reformation also generated resistance and hostility, not least from the institutions of the traditional church and its defenders. In the ensuing sectarian conflicts of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, protestantism developed further its distinctive theology and patterns and thought, behaviour and consciousness. So the protestant reformation was a highly complex and not particularly coherent movement. But its shadow is difficult to avoid at any moment from 1520 onwards in European history.

There are many aspects of this complex movement that this tutorial will not explore in any detail. Our aim is not to provide a history of the reformation throughout Europe. Instead we want to show why the issues raised by the protestant reformation mattered to people. To do this, we shall invite you to approach the religious changes of the sixteenth century in a number of different ways. You will be able to experience the variety of 'reformations' which occurred in Europe through some carefully selected case-studies. These will also enable you to appreciate how much the political, institutional and social context affected the way the protestant reformation developed in different locations. You will then be able to explore for yourselves the way in which changes to established patterns of belief (which in a late-modern secular society like ours may seem distant or abstract) had practical effects and consequences which affected and influenced ordinary people and invited them to acknowledge and participate in those changes. You will be able to do this by examining in detail the iconographic and symbolic representations of these changes in the broadsheet literature of the period and comparing them with the doctrinal statements of the protestant reformers themselves. In each case, you will see how the popular response to religious change in sixteenth-century Europe is filtered to us through sources which refract it in various subtle ways. Finally, at the end of the tutorial you will be invited to formulate your conclusions about the relationship between religious change and the people.

It will help you to grasp the structure of the tutorial if you glance at the accompanying overview of the material which it contains.

00.20 Overview Map

This also gives you some estimate of the amount of time you should allow for serious consultation of each of its sections. After each section there is an open-ended exercise for you to attempt using the materials provided in the tutorial. You can access each of the individual sections separately via the 'contents' icon. But you will find it helpful to orientate yourself if you read through this initial document first.


00.02 'Reformation' and 'People'

Some definitions and distinctions. The word 'reformation' is not a conceptual device invented solely by historians. It was already in use among religious reformers (including Martin Luther) in the sixteenth century. For Luther, however, the Latin term reformatio generally meant the reform of the curriculum at the University of Wittenberg, where he was a professor of theology. Luther's contemporaries also applied it, however, to the reform of a particular institution such as a monastic order. Luther himself was a monk from a 'reformed' Augustinian house of monks of strict observance ('Eremites') at Erfurt and Wittenberg. The word 'reformation' was also used (more rarely) to mean a cataclysmic change in the world-order, such as the changes which heralded the end of the world and the coming of the millennium. In both cases, as the historian Euan Cameron has recently reminded us, the sense of change was very different from our own.

00.21 Usage of the term 'reformation' (reformatio) on the eve of the reformation

We have a notion of change leading to a world very different from the one in which we currently live. We can perceive change as possible, even necessary, in order to achieve variously humanly conceived social goals. The sense of change in the sixteenth century was to 're-form' something, to remove the inevitable corruption of the centuries and recover something which had been gloriously fresh and pristine when it had been conceived by God.

Our modern sense of the 'reformation' as a historical concept only gradually took shape in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, developing alongside the protestant reformation's own sense of its past. Inevitably this happened along confessional lines. In France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the term 'Reformed' came to be applied to the Calvinists whose churches (to their critics) were 'pretended reformed'. And by the time of the centenary of Luther's pinning of the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the cathedral church at Wittenberg in 1517, the term 'Reformation' was adopted by German Lutherans rather narrowly to refer to the events which had surrounded what we now call 'the Luther Affair'. It was not until the eighteenth century that the term 'Reformation' was used to characterize a broader process of religious change. A century later, the German historian, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) would refer to 'the Age of the Reformation' to delineate the whole period of European history from 1520 until the end of the Thirty Years War (1648). Catholic contemporaries of Ranke, however, preferred to conceptualize the period as 'The Age of Schism'. Confessionally-rooted interpretations of the protestant reformation have been a fundamental difficulty in its historiography until the twentieth century.

Nowadays, historians are in broad agreement that the term 'protestant reformation' usefully delineates all those religious reformers in the sixteenth century who were inspired by the insistence on scripture alone (in Latin, 'sola scriptura') as the unique validating authority for religious belief and who sought to rid the church of the 'superstition' and corruption which had been introduced into its practices over the centuries. Inevitably, however, the reformers diverged on how to interpret scripture and over how to simplify the ceremonies and practices of the church. They were in broad agreement, however, in rejecting monastic vows and the traditional conception of the monastic life. They united in their abandonment of many well-established devotional practices of the church such as the veneration of saints, pilgrimages, indulgences, and a good deal more. They generally reduced the number of sacraments from the seven (which had been accepted in the medieval western church) to two (or, in some cases, three). There was a good deal of disagreement over the question of images in and around churches, and over the precise role of music in church services, but there was a universal belief that divine services should be held in the vernacular and that the laity (the 'people') should participate in these services.

So the protestant reformation invited lay involvement. It also claimed to have popular support. As you read the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, you quickly form the impression that the pre-reformation church must have been very unpopular. According to their critique, it was manifestly decadent and corrupt, its failings evident, its inability to reform itself apparent. Already the butt of anticlerical satire and ridicule, they presented it as an institution which could scarcely command the respect of the broad mass of Europe's population. 'Antichrist is enthroned in God's very temple' wrote Luther of the papacy. 'Farewell you unhappy, lost and blasphemous Rome. The anger of God is come upon you at last'. Given the speed and intensity of the spread of the protestant reformation in its early decades, it was easy for protestant reformers to conclude that the reformation was succeeding because God had inspired the righteous frustrations of people against a corrupt, unpopular and out-of-touch institution.

Their critique has provided later historians with a readily available explanatory framework for why the protestant reformation occurred at all. This tutorial does not directly investigate the causes of the reformation, which were inevitably as complex as the phenomenon itself. Any sustained discussion of the causes of the protestant reformation would have to include the fundamental changes which were made to the institutions of the church in the central Middle Ages during the Gregorian reforms (which are the subject of another tutorial). It would also have to examine the profound social changes which were at work in Europe, most notably in its economically more advanced urban heartlands. It would need to investigate the irreversible changes in intellectual perspective which had been brought about by the Renaissance and by what is often referred to as 'Christian humanism'.

We should note, however, that the protestant reformers' critique of the established church almost certainly tells us more about their own aspirations and ideals than it does about the reality of the church on the eve of the reformation. A good deal of recent research has been devoted to demonstrating how much the pre-reformation church embraced popular customs and legitimised ways of behaving which were already part of everyday life. The institutional failings did not always have the negative impact which the protestant reformers claimed for them. The pre-reformation church was not unresponsive to changing circumstances. It benefited from an enormous flow of benefactions, especially from the urban elites, to fund many aspects of its activities. The invention of printing was not regarded as a great threat by individual churchmen. Even the regular orders saw some merit in it - one estimate is that the Dominicans and Franciscans were responsible for 40% of all the extant incunabula titles (i.e. books printed before 1500). Amongst these books were devotional manuals, works for parish priests and confessors, the statutes of diocesan synods and provincial councils. They were, however, generally in Latin and the use of the vernacular (French, German, Spanish etc.), especially for the scriptures, was regarded as problematic.

If we accept that the negative picture of the pre-reformation church created by the reformers is hardly the right way to approach the historical reality, what of the protestant claims to the convictions and loyalties of contemporaries? Historians readily accept that the protestant reformation in its various manifestations was capable of generating remarkably widespread popular support and lay involvement, but these differed widely in their nature, chronology and extent depending on the particular reformation in question. This popular support reflected a variety of motives. These were generally of a religious nature, but political, social and economic aspirations could influence, help to formulate, even overwhelm, issues of religious conviction. While the protestant reformation drew its support from all segments of sixteenth-century society, the conflict between different social groups played a significant role in shaping (and limiting) the support which it was able to mobilise. Generally speaking, the protestant reformation in the sixteenth century tended to be more urban than rural in nature. When rural society was involved, it was often with violent consequences, as in the German Peasants' War. These tendencies are reflected in the balance of the more detailed case-studies of this tutorial.

The efforts of twentieth-century historians to analyse the social components of the reformation have led to the abandonment of the traditional distinctions of the movement into its more traditional and separate 'confessional' components (Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist . . .) in favour of other specific 'reformations' within the larger concept. So, for example, the historians of anabaptism and the other dissident movements within protestantism have utilised the term 'Radical Reformation' to identify these groups as in some way more fundamental (in the sense of 'returning to the roots') as well as politically and socially radical. This tutorial does not attempt to investigate these groups at all because their overall influence in Europe was patchy and (partly the result of sustained persecution from both protestant and catholic Europe as well as their tendencies to exclusivism) marginalised.

00.22 map of anabaptism in sixteenth-century Europe

But we should be aware that they represent particular and distinctive claims to loyalty for profound religious change and that such loyalty generally came from ordinary people. The examples of religious experience and practice afforded by the sects give us a point of comparison with the more 'inclusive' or 'mainstream' protestant reformations. German Marxist historians have identified a 'People's Reformation' (Volksreformation) that allegedly came to an abrupt end with the German Peasant's War and the 'Princely Reformation' (Fürstenreformation) which followed it. More recently, the German historian Peter Blickle has advanced the concept (and analysed the contemporary terminology) of a 'Communal Reformation' (Gemeindereformation). Historians in the liberal tradition, for their part, have written about the 'Civic Reformation' to describe the particular shape of the reformation movement as it took place, especially in Europe's economically more advanced heartlands - and not merely in Germany. They have more recently attempted to delineate a 'Refugee Reformation' in an effort to disentangle the distinctive reformation movements created amongst those communities of exiles from France, the Netherlands and the Mediterranean lands where the initial reactions to the reformation had been hostile and repressive.

What distinguishes all these various attempts at subdivision and distinction is that they are trying to locate and analyse the diverse relationships at various moments between the protestant reformation and its social constituency. Many of these distinctions have proved useful to historians but they have also created controversy and disagreement. These disagreements indicate how the relationship between the protestant reformation and the people is a provoking and challenging question for historians.

Exercise One


00.03 Martin Luther and his message

The reformers themselves certainly did not set out to court popularity. Luther himself repeated and reinforced the Biblical passages which presented Jacob wrestling with the presence of God or St Paul speaking of 'running the race' for Christ (Hebrews 12:1) or 'like a boxer' saving his best punches to advance the Christian faith. But he presented that struggle as nothing out of the ordinary or exceptional. It was part of the human condition. Luther said, and it was the essence of his Biblically-inspired religious genius, that God was not locked up in heaven, not the preserve of churchmen, not tucked away in plaster-cast statues or wrapped up in relics. God was active and at work in the world and fighting within each one of us. There were two kingdoms ('Zweie Reiche') - a kingdom of darkness and a kingdom of light - and both were active on this earth and in us. His famous hymn 'Ein Feste Burg', best-known to the English-speaking world in the vivid Victorian translation by Thomas Carlyle, captures some of the essence of this message.

00.23 A Hymn of Luther

So the world was, as Luther presented it, often a wicked and miserable place. Princes were often tyrants, for example, and subjects were helpless against them. Merchants were avaricious and there was great greed in the world. Institutions such as the church manifestly failed to live up to their high ideals. The bedrock components of our lives, our daily tasks, our marriages and our families, were often pure drudgery. Luther wrote meaningfully about all these things. And yet, he said, within this world of evil, wickedness and meaninglessness, God was at work and capable of transforming it through the 'miracle' of grace. Just as you are about to despair, the tyrant dies, the baby smiles, the kiss comes and the God's 'strange work' of redeeming grace goes on. What is important is that we must have faith in God's mercy. Indeed, to Luther, we have no other choice, for God is pre-eminent, a great sovereign Lord over his creation and we cannot bargain or barter our way to a better life, let alone buy our way into Heaven. At the point of the extremity of the struggle - and Luther wrote with the experience of his own extraordinary battle with the Papacy and the Emperor in mind - we shall be justified in our faith. This was Luther's 'theology of the cross'.

It is easy to make 'justification by faith' into a theologically abstruse doctrine. It did, of course, have enormous implications for the way in which sixteenth-century protestant theologians viewed salvation. But in Luther's hands, it became a Biblically-rooted message which empowered ordinary men, women and children. Salvation depended on a direct encounter with God in the Bible through reading it and hearing the word of God preached. His great treatise, published in 1520, on the 'Liberty of a Christian' stressed the liberating, empowering nature of 'evangelical' Christianity, once the message of God was truly understood.

00.24 The Liberty of a Christian

There is a tradition which makes Luther responsible for the beginnings of the Christmas carol which we now know as 'Away in a Manger'. It is certainly true that he often talks about our relationship with God as being like a baby suckling at its mother's breast. Luther certainly saw our relationships with God as everything represented by the vulnerable child in the stable.

There is, of course, a good deal in Luther's writings which is strident, vulgar, certainly prejudiced - earning him as many enemies as friends sometimes. Calvin was amongst those who criticized this aspect of his writings. But Luther was no saint. Was he a 'man of the people'? He liked to claim to his students later in his life that he was just the son of a peasant, and the grandson of a peasant - an ordinary background of which much would be made in due course by Lutheran hagiography. In a sense, the claim was literally true but, then again, it was only half the truth. His father, Hans Luther, had chosen to enter the growth industry of Thuringian Saxony, that of silver-mining, and had married the daughter of a well-healed, prosperous, educated notable family, Margareta Lindemann, from the nearby town of Eisenach. So you could also say that Luther was not from peasant stock, but from a well-respected, almost patrician, background. Social background was not, however, of importance to Luther when it came to the 'theology of the cross'. Here is where Luther's famous last-recorded words come into full focus: 'We are all beggars; that is the truth'.

At this point, you may wish to work your way through the 'Luther' section of the case-study on the 'magisterial' reformers. This provides you with a summary of Luther's own theological development, a basic chronology for the 'Luther Affair' which began the process of the reformation, and a series of extracts from his writings which explain in further detail his 'economy of salvation'.

Case-study 1a: Theologian's Reformation: Martin Luther
Exercise Two


00.04 The Engraven Reformation in Germany

The protestant reformation coincided with the first mature age of printing. It took two generations for the process which had been invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s to become standardised and defused. It was natural that the first printed books should have looked rather like manuscripts. Only gradually did they become recognisably distinctive. The outward appearance of a book or pamphlet was vital because this was what was displayed at fairs and on counters and trays; so a (frequently illustrated) title-page was added. The design of the printing characters was standardised, abbreviations were abandoned and there was a gradual drift towards vernacular publication which was accelerated by the protestant reformation.

00.25 The Linguistic Division of Latin and German Books Published in Strasbourg, 1480-1599

The possibilities for new formats, especially that of the larger illustrated broadsheet, were exploited.

The numbers of presses in Europe also increased dramatically. The German lands had an acknowledged primacy in the new business of publishing in 1500, and this was reinforced by the existence of a number of larger German publishing houses who had distribution networks which extended beyond one particular region.

00.26 Printing centres of Incunabula books in Europe

By 1520, however, they were being rapidly overhauled by other regions and by the other great European printing centres - Venice, Antwerp, Paris and Lyon. In one respect, however, German lands retained an advantage which was important to the reformation printers. The political fragmentation of Holy Roman Empire prevented the efficient operation of any real degree of censorship. As the cases of Wittenberg and Geneva were to prove, becoming a centre for protestant reform attracted printers to the town and proved a profitable business. Wittenberg rapidly became amongst the leading publishing centres of Germany in the 1520s; and the effect on Geneva would be identical in the 1560s.

00.27 The major centres of pamphlet production in Germany during the years 1518-1529

00.28 The Rise of Geneva's Publishing Industry, 1536-1572

In retrospect, some sixteenth-century protestants were tempted to see the hand of divine providence in the coming of printing. John Foxe, the author of the great English protestant martyrology the Acts and Monuments (generally known as 'Foxe's Book of Martyrs') called it a 'divine and miraculous invention'. But, like many authors, Luther had less than high respect for his printers. He accused them of twisting what he had written, being careless and of easy profiteering at God's expense. More generally, he thought that the multiplication of gross and harmful books caused by printing was one of the evils of the age. His attitudes were perhaps shaped by the extraordinary pamphlet war which developed in Germany between around 1520 and 1525. It was this pamphlet war which contributed substantially to the spreading Luther's reputation everywhere and to the wave of popular reforming enthusiasm of those years.

Historians now speak of that enthusiasm as an 'evangelical movement' and the term is a good one to represent the heady tonic that swept across Germany at that time. It is a useful concept, firstly because it reminds us of the appeal that was endlessly made back to the earliest years of the Church. There was a sense of truth suddenly revealed after years of darkness. The 'Gospel' had been released to the world afresh. Secondly, it helps us to put the pamphlets of these years into focus. Although for us as historians these works are almost the only way by which we can hope to recapture anything like the intensity of those years, for contemporaries the preachers were at least as important as the written word in spreading the message. The preachers became the new 'evangelists' for the word of God. The two forces went hand-in-hand. Reading vernacular Bibles became a powerful symbol of the new faith and attending a Lutheran sermon a sign of a revived and restored faith.

We should not over-emphasise the early 1520s in our discussion of the effects of printing on the protestant reformation. The pamphlet war of these years was limited in time-scale and largely confined to German lands. The protestant reformation needed powerful and sustained means of putting across its message and there is a big distinction to be drawn between the impact of, to take typical (but varied) examples of the protestant genre, a protestant Bible, a liturgical service-book, a catechism, a theological treatise and a pamphlet.

00.29 Genres of protestant literature (Strasbourg 1519-1560)

The greatest challenge would remain, however, how to simplify a complex theological message without distorting it. We can investigate that challenge more fully by examining in detail the use which protestant printers made of the already sophisticated German engravers to illustrate and exemplify the overall themes of the protestant reformation. At this point, you may wish to work through the case-study of the 'engraven reformation'.
Case-study 2: the Engraven Reformation

Exercise Three


00.05 The Peasant Reformation

One of the most remarkable features of the evangelism in German lands in the early 1520s was the way in which it reached out into the rural world. As we shall see, the protestant reformation generally found its tasks the hardest amongst the peasantry of Europe. The countryside was claimed for the protestant reformation either by the forces of the state (through a 'princely Reformation' enforcing it in the countryside); or (as in France, Bohemia, Hungary and possibly Poland) the rural population followed the local nobility which patronised the protestant faith in and around their estates. In Germany, however, it was different. Especially in southern Germany, eastern Switzerland and in Upper Austria, the peasantry participated in the protestant reformation. This participation culminated in the Great Peasants' War of 1524-6. This complex, highly regionalised and rather disparate phenomenon paralysed Germany in an extraordinary fashion and had a significant longer-term impact on the development of the Lutheran reformation.

Historians often write about the 'peasantry' as though it was an undifferentiated and unchanging social mass. This was far from the case in sixteenth-century Europe. There were marked differences in the economic burdens placed upon them. They had an increasingly divergent personal legal status. Some rural communities were relatively poorly organised and untouched by the challenges and demands of producing goods for the local town market. Others were highly independent, well-organised by groups of local notables (including rural lawyers, schoolteachers and clerks), sought to participate in regional representative assemblies, and were capable of responding positively to the changing (and unpredictable) needs of market production. It was almost certainly of significance that the rural world which was most able to participate in the protestant reformation came into the latter category.

This did not mean, however, that they were immune to the changing economic burdens or challenges to their personal legal status which faced many of Europe's rural communities. Resentment towards such changes would surface during the Great Peasants' War. In addition, one of the associated components of the growing authority of states (which affected the smaller principalities of Germany as well as the larger states of Europe such as France) was the introduction of a greater degree of standardised written and generalized legal norms. These were often associated in Germany with the adoption of Roman law by princely councils and magistrates. Customary (often unwritten) law, where the local community provided juries of presentment and trial to judge the rights and wrongs of a particular question in accordance with immemorial right, was bypassed or ignored. This doubtless explains the significance of the peasants' stress upon the 'divine law' (as opposed to princely fiat) during the Peasants' War as the 'pure gospel', a gospel which came directly from God and which had no human (or princely) hand in it. It was a gospel which, by implication, would emerge from, and reflect, the local community.

The 'pure gospel' depended, as rural communities saw it, upon the local election of ministers (rather than by the church hierarchy or local noble patrons) and upon their regular residence in the locality. There were demands for the revenues from the tithe to become determined by the community. The 'pure gospel' could also become a 'gospel of social unrest'. There were also strong millennial sentiments expressed during the Peasants' War.

Much of this disturbed Luther. In the early 1520s, he had published pamphlets which had sympathised with the lots of the peasants, attacked clerical celibacy, usury, merchant monopolies and noble brigandage. In these and other works (and perhaps unconsciously) Luther had appeared to proclaim a 'gospel of social unrest'. With the spread of armed insurrection, things were different. It was apparently only the demand for the appointment of ministers by local communities amongst the famous 'Twelve Articles' of the peasants which he considered to be legitimate. He was most alarmed by the kind of revolutionary millenarianism preached by his adherent and former preacher at Wittenberg, Thomas Müntzer. Müntzer is a good example of how the evangelism of the early 1520s worked out in different ways on different people. For Müntzer, the enthusiasm of the epoch quickly became transmuted into a Biblically-based espousal of divinely-ordained authority of all sorts. Müntzer was driven by a radical apocalyptic vision where the coming of the millennium would bring to an end the glaring injustices suffered by Christians in this world.

Müntzer became a leader of one of the armed peasant bands of Thuringia during the Great Peasants' War. Initially, Müntzer called on the princes to hasten the coming of the millennium. When they seemed to prevaricate, he threatened them. From the castle town of Allstedt, situated in an enclave (i.e. a territorially separate part) of Saxony, he threatened that they would suffer the wrath of God if they did not follow and support him in attempting to establish the kingdom of God and root out the ungodly.
00.30 Thomas Müntzer at Allstedt
In the same treatise, he urged his followers on in language which still has the capacity to send a shiver down one's spine.

00.31 Thomas Müntzer to his followers

Luther's response to Müntzer in 1525 was harsh and uncompromising. Müntzer became the archenemy of the Gospel, the minister of Antichrist. Müntzer became a standing example of how the kingdoms of good and evil were at work in the world and how easy it was, under apparent support for the one, to end up working for the other. God did not ask us to do his great work for him. We must be patient and accept what providence decreed, and not undertake a phantom search for a New Jerusalem of our own making.

00.32 Luther: Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, May 1525

Expelled from Allstedt in August 1524, Müntzer became preacher at Mühlhausen in Thuringia, one of the free imperial cities of the Empire. Although he was expelled from Mühlhausen too, he returned there in February and established 'The Eternal League of God', a body to which local peasants and townspeople swore allegiance. Using the contingents raised by the League, Müntzer took part in military campaigns in April and May 1525 which culminated in a cataclysmic rout of his bands outside Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525. Müntzer had identified himself with Gideon in the Old Testament (Judges, 6-8) and told his adherents to stand firm in battle and let God claim the victory. Müntzer himself was decapitated outside the walls of Mühlhausen a fortnight later. Although the Peasants' War would continue into 1526 in some areas (most notably, upper Austria), the back of the revolt was broken by the princes in the summer of 1525. The peasants' reformation was at an end.

You now have an opportunity to examine the peasant reformation in greater detail. You will find that there are chronologies of the great peasants' war as well as detailed maps of the regions affected in the attached case-study. These will provide you with the necessary background to a more extensive analysis of peasant aspirations. With these you can assess this unique rural response to the protestant reformation.

Case-study 3: the Peasant Reformation in Germany

Exercise Four


00.06 The Evolution of the Reformation

With the evangelism of the early years fading and the defeat of the peasants, the future of the reformation in Germany depended on the princes and the cities. Its chronological evolution at the political level is not difficult to trace. By the time of the formal 'Protestation' of 19 July 1529 (which gave its name to protestantism) published after the diet at Speyer, the protestant reformation could claim the support of a small number of princes and 14 cities of the empire. By Luther's death in 1546, there was a rather larger contingent of firmly Lutheran princely states, mainly in northern Germany. They would prove able to deploy rather more military forces than the Emperor himself during the Schmalkaldic War which began that same year. Their difficulties in co-ordinating and paying them led to their military defeat in April 1547. The political resolution of the issues between the Lutheran political entities of the Holy Roman Empire and the Emperor would have to wait until the famous Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The first major armed military conflict within states in which the issues raised by the reformation played a prominent role had taken place. The protestant reformation had come of age. A summary of the political chronology of the empire in the period is provided by way of background to the material which follows.

00.33 Political Chronology of the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire, 1521-1555

If you have worked through the case-study on the Peasants' Reformation, you will have already seen that princes indicated their adherence to the reformation through the issuing of reformed church ordinances for their particular region. Typically these instituted the closure of monastic foundations and the transfer of their assets and revenues to a branch of the princely council. They also took over the authority of the local bishops and laid down procedures for instituting ministers in local churches in their place. Some church orders made particular provision for schools, preachers and social poor relief. They often contained the arrangements for an annual visitation of each parish in the territory too. The attached list charts the initial ecclesiastical ordinances of the major protestant principalities in the Holy Roman Empire.

00.34 The Spread of the Lutheran Reformation in the German Principalities, 1521-1555

This list obscures, however, the variety of ways by which the process occurred. Princes were well aware of the possible advantages to be gained from annexing neighbouring ecclesiastical bishoprics and land. The latter were particularly significant in the government and social order of the Reich.

00.35 Ecclesiastical Territories in the Holy Roman Empire in the Sixteenth Century

For a prince, there was much to be gained from their secularization . But they were also concerned about the possibilities of imperial reactions to their conversion, not to mention the possible retaliation from their neighbours. Two changes (that of Württemberg and Brunswick [in German: Braunschweig]-Wolfenbüttel) did in fact occur as a result of direct military intervention. Dynastic rivalries as well as conscientious decision played their part in a complex process. For each successive change had a destabilising effect in the empire. This was especially so where an electorate was concerned, since this had potential implications for the imperial succession.

The princes' reformation was a matter of princely conscience and fiat. Outside advice was mediated through counsellors, theologians and retained lawyers. The 'people' played no part. In the cities, however, it was more complex. The rapidity of the spread of the Lutheran evangelism we have already discussed through the cities of Germany in the decade of the 1520s is difficult to encapsulate, but it left an indelible mark on the protestant reformation. This is where it found its greatest dynamism and variety. Each town had its own internal evolution and, although Luther's message remained the basic touchstone, individual preachers in particular cities felt free to take up issues and develop it in their own fashion. Determining the precise date of the reformation in any one city is not always easy since it was often a movement which magistrates chose to undertake gradually and piecemeal. The 'magistrate' of a German city was often a convenient synonym for its inner governing councils. They tended to proceed cautiously, prudently, and on the basis of internal consent wherever possible. Often the process began with the urban magistrates issuing revised church ordinances which laid down different patterns of worship in the city or closing its monasteries. In others, especially in the central Rhineland, the significant changes were marked by ordinances which permitted evangelical preaching in the city alongside the traditional patterns of worship. Eventually internal pressure from within the city (especially via the trade guilds) would eventually force the magistrates to complete the process of reformation. Many of the initial changes in the cities took place in the 1520s but the process had not been completed by 1530. It was most precocious in the central Rhineland and Franconia. It was more tentative in the southern German cities and more leisurely still in the cities of the Baltic litoral and the north. Whilst the princely reformation consolidated itself in the territories where protestantism was adopted as the main religion, the 'civic reformation' went on to become the basis for a continuing reformation.

The attached table provides a survey of the dates of the advent of the protestant reformation in various selected towns in Germany.

00.36 Dates of the Protestant Reformation in Selected German Cities

However, there is no better way of indicating the complex interplay of popular pressure and magisterial initiative in these cities than by way of example. You should examine the relatively simple case of the market-town of Schwabach first.

Case-study 4: The Reformation in Schwabach

Then proceed to the more complex and subtle affairs of the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg.

Case-study 5: The Reformation in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg

Whether it was a city or a principality, however, the evolution of the protestant reformation increasingly became one of uphill and ongoing struggle to establish the fundamental features of the protestant reformation in people's hearts and minds. The American historian Gerald Strauss has used the term 'indoctrination' to describe the process. In a noteworthy article, he examined visitation articles of the kind you have an opportunity to look at for yourselves in the Nuremberg case-study. His conclusion was that the second and third generation of Lutheran ministers and ecclesiastical administrators were pessimistic about their success in inculcating essential elements of the protestant reformation to the broad mass of the population. This article led to a number of further studies which have attempted to use visitation records in a more systematic way to evaluate the 'success' or 'failure' of the protestant reformation in Germany in so far as it had an impact upon the popular consciousness. You now have an opportunity to review an extract from that article.

00.37 Success and Failure in the German Reformation

You may then proceed to a further study which evaluated similar evidence but reached rather different conclusions.

00.38 Successes and Failures: the evidence from Strasbourg

There are obviously substantial problems concerning the relative standards by which the crude measures of 'success' and 'failure' are being measured. We have recently been shown that a broader comparative context might be more helpful by which to make a judgement. Geoffrey Parker uses the related experiences of the protestant reformation in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England and France to suggest that the proximity (or otherwise) of a contending religious faith, as well as the long-term political stability of a particular region may well play a significant part in determining the relative success of the reformation in determining popular consciousness in the long-term.

00.39 Success and Failure in the European Reformation

If you have worked through these secondary readings and the case-studies on the reformation in the German towns and countryside, you are in a position to undertake the next exercise in the tutorial.

Exercise Five


00.07 Geneva and the Calvinist Reformation

We have concentrated so far on the reformation in German lands. It is now time to look at the reformation more broadly. We can do so best with the aid of a map. The attached map provides you with an opportunity to measure the implantation of the protestant reformation across Europe by the 1560s (slightly later for the northern Netherlands). As you will see, it attempts to make rough distinctions between those areas where protestantism was (at least formally) the dominant faith. These were predominantly to the north of Europe.

00.40a Reformation and Counter-reformation in Europe: top third

Around the Mediterranean lands lay a further substantial part of Europe where the traditional church remained overwhelmingly the dominant (and generally exclusive) religion and where protestantism had failed by that decade to sustain any impact.

00.40c Reformation and Counter-reformation in Europe: bottom third

In between, lay a broad middle band stretching from Ireland in the west over to Hungary and Poland in the east. Here was where the fate of the reformation lay in the balance. The map tries to take account of the continuing dynamism of the protestant reformation at this period by shading those areas where the protestant reformation was growing rapidly (parts of France, Switzerland, Germany and Poland and Hungary). It also takes into account those areas where protestantism had established a substantial local presence but was growing less fast as well as those areas where it had made some inroads but could not be described as dominant.

00.40b Reformation and Counter-reformation in Europe: middle third

You may have noticed as you surveyed these maps that behind the dominant shading lay a further, less dominant division of protestant Europe into confessional blocs. The internal divisions which occurred over fundamental points of doctrine between the protestant reformers began to emerge in the later 1520s. At the famous colloquy of Marburg in October 1529, Luther and the leading protestant reformer from the Swiss canton of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli had agreed about much; but they failed to come to any meeting of minds over the key theological question of the eucharist.

To medieval theologians, the elements of bread and wine were miraculously changed into the very body and blood of Christ (the 'Real Presence') at the moment when the priest uttered the words of consecration. They explained the process as 'transubstantiation' (transubstantio). By this, they meant that the 'substance' (the reality within) the bread and the wine was 'transformed' into the substance of the body and blood of Christ leaving only the 'accidents' (or superficial properties - what you could see, touch or taste) unchanged. In common with some later medieval philosophers and theologians, Luther was prepared to accept the notion of a 'Real Presence' but rejected 'transubstantiation' as a means to explain it. For Luther, the fact of the 'Real Presence' had undisputed Biblical attestation. It was analogous to the fact that Christ incarnate (both God and Man) had been on earth. Christ's body and blood were not to be equated with the bread and the wine but they lay 'in, with, and under' it in ways that God had not intended us fully to understand.

00.41 Luther: 'That these words of Christ ...'

Zwingli, however, went much further than Luther. He refused to accept that the body and blood of Christ could be in any way connected with the material objects of the bread and the wine. To make such a connection was to engage in superstition and idolatry. If the body and wine were a eucharistic sacrament, it was because, in our hearts and minds, we could envisage them as representing the body and blood of Christ. The rejection of the 'Real Presence' led to supporters of Zwingli being often described by contemporaries as 'sacramentarian'. It is difficult for us to appreciate fully why such issues should have mattered so much, especially to those in positions of authority. But we should remember that Zwingli was proposing a radical shift in how holy power was conceived. It further desacralised the material world and invested holy power within the consciences of individual people and the authority of collective worship. That had profound implications for how other forms of power were to be regarded.

The 'confessionalisation' of the reformation is a process which took root and deepened from 1530 onwards. The French reformer Jean Calvin was one of the inheritors of this process of gradual confessionalisation. In fact, on the narrow issue of the eucharist, both Calvin and the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer tried to formulate a middle way by advocating the existence of a 'real but spiritual presence'. But it is Calvin's name which has become indelibly associated with the Zwinglian-influenced reformations at Bern, Constance, Basel, Strasbourg and, eventually, Geneva.

The distinctive features of the Zwinglian-influenced reformations in these cities left their mark. Although in many respects they experienced 'civic reformation' like those which we have encountered elsewhere in Germany, there were differences of emphasis. There was an insistence on removing all traces of idolatry from their worship - reinforced by incidents of popular image-breaking from time to time. There was a greater significance attached to education and indoctrination, which showed through in a more radical recasting of church services and liturgies. You will find this distinctive element most graphically illustrated (and the differences over the Eucharist practically exemplified) by comparing the key elements of the communion service within the various confessions as they emerged.

00.42 Eucharistic Prayers in the various confessions compared

Finally, there was an emphasis placed on a public and 'civic' concern for obedience, social discipline and responsibility. Underlying the Zwinglian-influenced reformation was a sense that the Lutheran reformation had not gone far enough.

These elements were already implicit in the Zwinglian-based reformations. The influence of Jean Calvin and the reformation which he drove forwards at Geneva made them explicit. It is difficult to encapsulate briefly the extraordinary energy and capacity which made Calvin into the outstanding figure of what is sometimes called the 'second-generation' reformation. His great 'systematic' work was the famous Institution [or, following their first English translation, the Institutes] of the Christian Religion (Christianae Religionis Institutio) which was first published as a non-controversial compendium of evangelical faith in 1536. It was divided up into sections based on Luther's catechisms. Calvin added and enriched it so that, by the final Latin edition of 1559, it was many times the size.

00.43 Title-page of the final Latin edition of Calvin's Institution

It was also substantially reorganised. The 'clarity' of Calvin's exposition of the major tenets of the protestant reformation had only been achieved after sustained effort.

00.44 The Organization of Calvin's Institution

It would become an outstanding work of sixteenth-century Biblical exegesis, religious apologetic and sustained theological interpretation.

The Institution was not intended, however, for use by ordinary people. How did Calvin conceive of the task of implanting the reformation more widely? The answer to that question involves some understanding of how Calvin's humanist and legal education had influenced his view of how we learn and behave as human beings. It also requires some appreciation of Calvin's positive view of the role of the church and the state as legal instruments which could be used positively to foster a complete reformation of both church and society at large. The next case-study and exercise will help you to appreciate some of the characteristic features of Calvin's thought on such matters.

Case-study 1b: Theologian's Reformation: Jean Calvin

Exercise Six

You should undertake these before you attempt to look at the case-study of Geneva's Calvinist reformation.

Geneva was where Calvin attempted to put such ideas into practice. It had already declared its independence from the Savoyard bishop who had been its ruler in 1526. In consequence, it had increasingly fallen under the influence of the Swiss canton of Bern, a reformed canton. But it was a quarrelsome and divided city. It required a combination of sustained and determined effort as well as the effects of French refugees to the city to turn it into the 'School of Christ' which John Knox, a Scots' refugee, affected to find at the end of the 1550s.

Case-study 6: The Genevan Reformation


00.08 Sectarian violence and wars of religion

The impact of the protestant reformation was everywhere unpredictable. It was nowhere more unpredictable than in those areas where the religious dimensions of the reformation interlinked with national and local political divisions, and could draw on a variety of economic and social discontents. It threatened the survival of powerful states like France and divided for good the congeries of principalities which had been held together by the Habsburg dynasty in the Low Countries. The Wars of Religion in France (1562-1598) and the Dutch Revolt (1566-7; 1572 onwards) are a testimony to the destabilising political effects of the reformation.

These complex political events are beyond the scope of this tutorial. But acting at the heart of, in and around them, lay ordinary people, engaging in political action in a way which was unusual and distinctive in the sixteenth century. That is an important part of our overall theme. To illustrate it, we have chosen to return once more to the urban setting and to examine more closely the sectarian conflict in one of France's major provincial capitals on the eve of its civil wars, Toulouse.

France was one of those many areas of Europe where the official reactions to the appearance of protestant 'heresy' became one of growing and more sustained hostility and suppression. A summary of the edicts against heresy issued by the French monarchy in the period from 1525 (when Lutheranism made its first public appearance in France) until 1559 indicates the efforts and determination which were entailed.

00.45 Summary of French edicts against heresy

The patterns of official 'persecution' (as the protestants regarded it) in France were influenced by the dictates of international tension and high politics. Its impact, however, was to 'politicise' ordinary people. They became heroes - and martyrs too. One of the effects of the writings of the French martyrologist, Jean Crespin, was to dramatise the role which ordinary people could play on the martyr's stage.

00.46 'The Theatre of Martyrdom'

Individual refugees voted with their feet and made for Geneva or one of the other reception points for those who were prepared to take their chances as stateless individuals, cut off from the important ties of family, kin, community and locality which defined a person's social place and identity in the sixteenth century.

00.47 Refugee centres in the Rhineland with a list of stranger churches

We have already encountered their presence in Geneva. Although some of the most prominent of them were notables and from well-established families, others were of humble origin, and for whom the protestant reformation provided an extraordinary moment for changing the patterns of their own destiny and that of their families.

Jean Calvin attempted, and with some limited success, to limit and channel the activities of the unanticipated and unexpected body of support which he received from congregations in France during the 1550s. His surviving correspondence with these congregations reveals how difficult it was to counsel caution and prudence when the circumstances seemed to call for the opposite reaction.

00.48 Calvin's correspondence with French churches

His efforts were increasingly unheeded in the short period between 1559 and 1562, when state repression of protestantism began to fall apart as the French state itself faltered under the triple weight of monarchical bankruptcy, aristocratic faction and a royal minority government. As French churches became formally established in France and claimed the rights to worship in public, so they encountered entrenched resistance. Protestants and Catholics became victims in the subsequent sectarian conflict. What they were victims for is the question that you might consider as you examine the materials in the final case-study of this tutorial and undertake its related exercise.

Case-study 7: 'Great Troubles over Religion' (Toulouse, 1560-1562)

Exercise Seven

By understanding the more limited case of sectarian violence in Toulouse at the beginning of the civil wars, you are then equipped to appreciate the kinds of tensions which lay at the heart of the much more complex and tragic affair of the massacre of St Bartholomew a decade later. The events on the streets of Paris, which began on the night of 24 August, left thousands of protestants dead. The example spread to several provincial cities in the weeks which followed, resulting in a what some historians have christened as 'the season of St Bartholomew'. This was the climax of sectarian tensions provoked by the reformation in Europe; its effects would haunt French protestantism for centuries thereafter.


00.09 Conclusion

This tutorial has examined a variety of ways in which the protestant reformation engaged the loyalties of ordinary people and the limits of that engagement. In this, as in other respects, it was fundamentally different from the movements of heresy which had occurred in various parts of Europe during the Middle Ages such as the Albigensians in France, the Hussites in Bohemia, the Waldenses in the Alps or the Lollards in England. These previous movement had been contained, localised and repressed by the instruments of the established church, coupled with the political authorities. Although they had often succeeded in drawing on the support of ordinary people, the amalgam between that support and the engagement of others in positions of influence within society had never been strong enough (save, perhaps, amongst the Hussites in Bohemia) to affect a permanent change. The protestant reformation created a sufficiently powerful amalgam to hold together the potentially divergent elements from amongst those whose loyalties sustained it at various stages.

This was, at least in part, because protestant reformers were concerned to reach ordinary people and to unleash them from the 'idolatry' and 'superstition', the 'Babylonian captivity' in which the established church held them. This was why Luther and Calvin translated the Bible into the vernacular (despite the huge difficulties which it caused them to do so). But books were expensive and the majority of Europe's population could not read. Only in the advanced civil societies of Europe's dorsal region, where the population was densest, were the literary and numeracy skills to be concentrated.

00.49 European population densities, c.1600

It is not surprising that this region would continue to be the heartland for Europe's protestantism throughout the sixteenth century.

The problems of literacy were one reason why Luther, amongst others, wanted to see his message broadcast by means of images - 'above all' (as he wrote) 'for the sake of children and simple folk, who are more easily moved by pictures and images to recall divine history than through mere words or doctrines'. But we have also encountered in this tutorial other imaginative ways by which the reformers sought to educate and inculcate their message as broadly as possible. We should not ignore the significance of preaching, of hymns and psalm-singing, of Sunday-school Bible-reading and catechismal learning. Should we not be impressed by the often remarkable capacity of ordinary people in the sixteenth century to be able to cite Biblical passages and long catechisms from memory?

Beyond these formal educative elements explicitly planned by the protestant reformers and churches, lay manifold 'unplanned' elements of protestant experience which we have not touched on but which we need to be aware of. 'Household religion', for example, cannot be ignored. A house belonging to one of the protestants from lower Languedoc who took up temporary refuge in Geneva in the 1550s had the Ten Commandments prominently painted over his fireplace. It is a reminder of the importance of household prayers, Bible-reading and fireside religious experience in the sixteenth century. French protestants were much criticised by their catholic contemporaries for being familiar with God. This was because their prayers and Bible made extensive use of 'Thou' ('Tu') rather than 'You' ('Vous'). In this subtle way, a profound point about the protestant nature of God was being conveyed. The unplanned, 'spontaneous' and unpredictable protestant experience was what Luther had always said was the most important. As the English translator of the Bible William Tyndale put it, echoing Luther: 'Faith is a lively thing, mighty in working, valiant, and strong, ever doing, ever fruitful . . . He asketh not whether good works are to be done or not, but has done them already, ere mention be made of them; and is always doing, for such is his nature'. At the other extreme, however, we have the testimony of the protestant martyrologists - telling us the life-stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Behind their obvious pedagogic purpose, these passages tell us at least something about the indelible experience of the protestant reformation upon individual people's lives.

People - 'men' and 'women'. We have not encountered many of the latter in the course of this tutorial. That is perhaps telling us something important about the paternal dominance inherent in the protestant reformation. It is also highlighting for us the more general problem of sources. It is not easy to find the authentic voices of ordinary people. When we do, the circumstances are often unusual or terrifying, such as a legal trial. Even in the evidence from wills, the testimony is either suspect of being distorted by the legal clerk or difficult for us to interpret. One Englishman on his deathbed was questioned by a minister: 'Being demanded what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man'. What is that statement telling us (if anything) about this person's encounter with protestant England? Our sources overwhelmingly mediate the reactions and impact of the protestant reformation at the popular level to us through the writings and testimony of their elders and betters. But that fact is saying something significant about the relationship between the protestant reformation and the people. There is a sense in which all change had to be 'brokered' by and through intermediaries in the sixteenth century. We should not expect things to be different for religious change. The protestant reformation made headway where it could rely on the subtle influences of peer-groups and local notables as well as the more formal injunctions from state and church authorities. Like all brokerage, this involved an element of negotiation. Leading protestants in their localities accepted their responsibility under God ('leaven in the lump' - a familiar Biblical allusion, much used by Martin Bucer and Jean Calvin) to play the part their position in society dictated in order to bring forward God's kingdom. But they were also well practised at accepting the limits of the possible and working within them, patiently and steadily. The general problems of evidence are raised in the final exercise which you should only attempt when you have worked through the various case-studies of the tutorial and covered a good range of the primary materials which it contains.

Exercise Eight

So the timescale in which one measures the impact of the protestant reformation upon people becomes highly significant. In one sense, the changes had occurred very rapidly. The institutional fabric of the catholic church was demolished relatively quickly, religious images were removed, traditional rituals abandoned, the church year refashioned. In another sense, however, the deeper changes in consciousness took much longer. As we have seen in this tutorial, parish visitations still encountered magic, divination and other frowned-on 'superstitious' practices after the reformation, and often well into the seventeenth century. Luther had said that true Christians did not worship saints; but this did not stop him from being turned into one by his followers. He was even painted with a halo, one of his statues was recorded as weeping over the miseries of German suffering during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), whilst another was rescued, mysteriously untouched by the flames, from a church fire. Protestant consciousness (and, with it, distinctive confessional identities) was probably the achievement of the seventeenth century, rather than the sixteenth century.


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