The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on November 17, 2008
The English Historical Review 2008 CXXIII(505):1539-1540; doi:10.1093/ehr/cen324
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© Oxford University Press 2008. All rights reserved.
Reformation Europe
Trinity College, Dublin
Reformation Europe, by Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005; pp. xiv + 208. £55; pb. £14.99).
The Reformation has proved to be a very durable concept among researchers who analyse the changing patterns of religion and culture in early modern Europe. It has also held enduring appeal for teachers, whether those providing courses on the early modern period or those responsible for more general courses on the history of ideas. All of these will be grateful to Ulinka Rublack for tackling the difficult challenge of providing an effective synthesis of Reformation Europe. In framing this book, Rublack has taken the needs of a student audience into account by producing an accessible but detailed account of the Reformation. She focuses above all on key personalities, then discusses their ideas about God and the Church, how those ideas were transmitted, and their reception. A clear structure is adopted, beginning with Luther, spreading out to cover a varied range of characters including Zwingli and Bucer, before turning to Calvin. Rublack then considers popular responses to Protestant beliefs and considers the cultural history of the Reformation. While much attention is rightly paid to events in the Empire, this text also commendably spreads its attention across the breadth of Reformation Europe from the Atlantic Isles to Central Europe. The book does not, however, include any significant coverage of the Catholic Reformation which may disappoint some teachers accustomed to treating the development of Europe's three main confessional blocs in an integrated and parallel fashion.
The critical questions covered by this account of Reformation Europe are, first; how Luther and Calvin ‘who seem so strange to us in many respects nowadays’ (p. 10), managed to gain so much influence; and, secondly, what their message meant for ordinary people in their everyday lives. The proposed answers in the introduction are that understanding the ‘success of Lutheranism and Calvinism’ demands analysis of the specific places in which reformers operated, and the specific institutions and resources which they were able to mobilise to support their agenda. Rublack also suggests that to understand Protestantism's cultural and social significance, it must be returned to the proper context of early modern mentalities rather than being seen merely as contributing to the disenchantment of the world, or, still worse, being associated with the spread of capitalism and liberal democracy.
The story begins, then, with Luther and Wittenberg. Rublack discusses Luther's key ideas and his chosen means of communicating them through sermons, through carefully-controlled debates, through printed words and visual images. Rublack argues that it was the effective means by which Luther, as well as his allies Cranach and Melanchthon, disseminated their truths which enabled them to catalyse existing attempts to reform the Church and society across the Empire and beyond. This emerging Reformation movement is then discussed as it expanded in different contexts through the action of individuals such as Zwingli, who projected a vision of urgent moral and ritual reform in Zurich. Attention then turns to the complex character of Calvin and his self-image as a prophet of integrity and honesty who aimed to exemplify godly, temperate and sober behaviour. The development of Reformed religion is not easy to summarise. Rublack begins with Calvin and Geneva, and then turns to consider how Reformed religion acquired its ‘increasingly international character’ through exiles, print and correspondence. Thankfully all roads in Reformed Europe are not entirely presented as beginning at Calvin's door in Geneva, and there is some coverage of the role of Emden in the development of the Dutch Reformed church. The influence of Heinrich Bullinger's Zurich, though, is oddly overlooked, and Bullinger himself is given only two brief references in this chapter.
Finally, the book turns to the impact of Protestantism on ordinary church-goers. Leading reformers were able to sustain their truth claims through institutional, political and social strategies, but did Protestantism ever become a ‘popular’ religion? Rublack considers how the vernacular language of Protestant reformers became embedded in popular vocabulary through sermons, printed texts, hymns, prayer and catechism classes, as well as through the material culture of church buildings. How Protestant words were understood inside the heads of ordinary people, and how those words might have been translated and appropriated for daily use, is rather difficult to demonstrate. Rublack calls on a range of interesting examples to test the case of Protestantism's popular ‘success’, and to discuss the role of education, discipline and the re-modelled clergy (and their wives) in emerging forms of Protestant culture.
Rublack's book concludes with a short discussion of new approaches to studying the Reformation and a summary of key elements of the text. We finish by discovering that the recent conflict in Northern Ireland ‘shows that religious allegiance can still influence European politics today’ (p. 199). Such allusion to Northern Ireland risks suggesting to the ill-informed the apparently fixed and uniquely pre-modern nature of its politics and society. This author is far from alone among early modern historians in asserting the contemporary relevance of the religious passions of Reformation Europe by making vague and simplistic references to Northern Ireland. But such references only act to hinder any real appreciation of the wide variety of ways in which politics and society across many parts of Europe remain influenced by religious loyalties.
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