This is a book that those of us who teach courses on the European Reformations have been awaiting for many years. Aimed at students and specialists alike, the twelve essays which comprise this collection, wide in their geographical scope, and commissioned from experts in the field, set out to explore, as the book’s blurb explains, ‘how and why the Reformation unfolded as it did in each separate setting’. Following a helpfully concise, yet comprehensive introduction by the editors, each essay is written in a lively and accessible style, aided by section headings and, in most cases, although not all, clearly signposted conclusions. Each essay also includes a select list of suggested further reading. While studies of the Reformations in Saxony, the Swiss Confederation, Bohemia, the Low Countries, and Britain and Ireland will be familiar territory to many, the course of the Reformations in Hungary, Transylvania, and the Southern Baltic Littoral will be less so. Equally, Liudmyla Sharipova’s treatment of the impact of the Reformations on the Eastern Orthodox Church in East-central Europe is a welcome addition, highlighting a fertile—and thus far under-studied—area for Reformation historians.
The volume opens with what might be termed Christoph Volkmar’s tale of Two Saxonies. Partitioned in the Treaty of Leipzig in 1485 in an arrangement between brothers Ernest and Albert, the Saxony which was ruled by Luther’s protector Elector Frederick the Wise (Ernest’s son) supported the early Reformation, while Ducal Saxony, ruled by Frederick’s cousin George (Albert’s son) remained staunchly Catholic, the historian Otto Vossler even terming it ‘the birthplace of the Counter-Reformation’. For Volkmar, this division, right from the start, represents sixteenth-century ‘Europe’s dilemma in a nutshell’ (p. 20). While George had at one point been regarded as a church reformer and moderniser, his opposition to Luther’s Reformation, which he regarded as heretical, relegated him to ‘a conservative back-seat’ (p. 40).
Amy Nelson Burnett examines how the Swiss Confederation’s political structure (not a state, but a set of concentric-circle-like alliances) saw the Reformations play out differently there. Burnett is at pains to point out that the paradigm of the well-known Zurich reformation should not be applied to the Swiss Confederation as a whole. Indeed there was a good deal of pushback against the reforms enacted in Zurich, and councils in Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen respectively refused to abolish the mass or remove images from churches. The Second Peace of Kappel in 1531 would allow the five Catholic confederates to maintain ‘the true, undoubted Christian faith’ and Catholic practices were restored in a working out of the principle of cuius regio eius religio that foreshadowed the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 by almost a quarter of a century. Crucially, while Protestant cantons looked to a larger Reformed network in northern Europe, and Catholic cantons looked to Italy, there was nonetheless little appetite on either side for forging alliances with co-religionists abroad, thus avoiding conflict within the Confederation and the horrors of the Thirty Years War.
Howard Louthan’s chapter comparing Reformations in Austria and Bohemia identifies three challenges facing Reformation scholars studying its manifestations in Central and Eastern Europe—a series of artificial divisions, national and linguistic, which have distorted the historiography of the region; Central Europe’s distinctive political and social structures, and a weak imperial, royal and ecclesiastical authority; and what he terms a ‘complex constellation of political and social powers’. There’s also the question of chronology—the Bohemian reformation is often dated from the late fourteenth century, for instance—and then the geographical question of what exactly one means by Austrian and Bohemian lands. Louthan’s essay is rich and thought-provoking, and full of quotable lines such as the observation of the future Pope Pius II that, by the mid-fifteenth century, Bohemia’s peasant wives knew their Bible better than most Italian priests (p. 69). There is also an important reminder that, despite its Baroque heritage today, at one point Vienna was a Lutheran stronghold (in which some 70-75% of its population were adherents), so much so that the Jesuit Peter Canisius feared it had the potential to become another Wittenberg or Geneva.
Hungary and Transylvania are the subject of Béla Vilmos Mihalik’s chapter which explores how by the mid-sixteenth century the medieval kingdom of Hungary had fragmented into three different components over which neither the Habsburgs, nor the Ottomans, nor the Transylvanian princes were able to exercise absolute power, resulting in a political uncertainty that facilitated the emergence of a multi-confessional society. There are some fascinating insights into the linguistic difficulties which affected the progress of the Reformation in Hungary, in particular the language barrier between Hungarian and German-speakers in the kingdom. In Wittenberg some Hungarian students refused to take communion at German-language services which they did not understand (or perhaps, also, did not want to understand), and they petitioned Luther for the provision of Latin services. While Luther would disappoint, Melanchthon facilitated a Latin service for them, a concession for which he would be held in high regard. Mihalik outlines how the Ottomans saw certain advantages to having rival confessions co-exist under their rule; not least, it succeeded in retaining local populations in place, while also ensuring that competing confessions would each remain dependent on the Ottoman administration. In 2017 a collaborative research group began work on the theme of a ‘Long Reformation’ in Hungary from 1500 until 1800. However, the volume’s editors are keen to point out that this concept applies more often than not across many of the regions studied in this collection; and Göran Malmstedt’s contribution on Nordic Reformations compared is a good example of this.
The premise of Malmstedt’s chapter is that the early Reformations in the Nordic countries moved at different paces, even within the jurisdiction of the kingdom of Denmark itself, ruled by King Christian III (d. 1559), which also comprised Norway and Iceland, and the independent kingdom of Sweden under its king Gustav Vasa (d. 1560). While under Christian III of Denmark, the Church Ordinance of 1537/39 constituted the foundation of a strictly Lutheran confessional state, reformist measures would proceed cautiously and fitfully in the newly-acquired Norway, and even slower in Iceland which, unlike heavily urbanised Denmark, had no towns whatsoever, and where the Reformation would not be imposed until the 1550s. Sweden, unlike Denmark, never received a Church Order during King Gustav Vasa’s reign; it would be 1571 before this occurred, and its provisions were much more tolerant of the old religion, preserving twice as many traditional holidays as the Danish Ordinance had. It’s telling that in a series of rebellions between 1524 and 1543 against Vasa’s rule in Sweden, complaints against religious change featured prominently. An attachment to traditional religiosity in many rural regions would obtain long after the Reformation was secured in Sweden by the end of the sixteenth century. Malmstedt’s chapter is both an insightful and useful introduction to the implementation of the Reformation in the Nordic lands, although I was struck by the omission of Northern European Reformations: Transnational Perspectives (Palgrave, 2020), a volume I co-edited with James E. Kelly and Henning Laugerud, from his discussion of the historiography.
Meanwhile, the historiography of the Reformation in the southern Baltic region, as noted by Maciej Ptaszyński, has long been hampered by political developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading each region to develop its own historiography, which was often confined to local studies. Ptaszyński’s chapter identifies specific patterns characteristic of the Baltic region, arguing that these commonalities are stronger than the political divisions that have atomised the historiography of the region over the past two centuries. Here too there are examples of divergent responses to the Reformation within families. When Bogislaw X, duke of Pomerania, died in 1523, his two sons Georg and Barnim ruled jointly, the former a strong supporter of the Catholic Church, and the latter a convinced follower of Luther, having spent two years in Wittenberg. Confessional change would not come until after Georg’s death in 1531. And, as ever, confessional lines were occasionally pragmatically blurred. The first Baltic ruler to change confessional sides was the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, who, inspired by Luther, secularised the Teutonic state and ruled it as a secular prince. While King Sigismund of Poland hardly applauded his vassal’s religious change, he nonetheless confirmed his authority in the new duchy of Prussia and offered him consistent protection over the following two decades.
One of the most rewarding and thought-provoking chapters in the volume is Christine Kooi’s treatment of Reformations in the Low Countries (and here the plural Reformations is particularly important) in which she points out that ‘nearly every species of Reformation that could be found anywhere in Europe’ could be found there (p. 167). She wisely cautions against projecting modern-day boundaries (and indeed modern confessional allegiances) onto the sixteenth-century reality of a region that was in political and confessional flux. Instead of thinking in terms of a northern-southern division of the Netherlands and Belgium (with its associated confessional division between largely Protestant and Catholic populations respectively), Kooi suggests we remember that during the sixteenth century the most meaningful division was between the urban, maritime west and the rural, agrarian east. A further challenge to modern assumptions is the fact that in the mid-sixteenth century, Reformed Protestantism enjoyed its greatest success in the southern regions such as Tournai, Brabant and Flanders, while little evidence exists of Reformed congregations north of Brabant and Flanders before 1566. It would be war and its effects which would transform confessional geography; the Habsburg reconquest of Flanders and Brabant forced thousands of Protestants to flee north to what would become the Dutch Republic. In effect, Kooi observes, ‘the bifurcated Low Countries exchanged religions’ (p. 173), and the Dutch Republic would become an ‘accidental state created out of the exigencies of war’(p. 177).
With Richard Rex’s chapter on Reformations in England and France, and Henry A. Jefferies’s chapter comparing British (and Irish) Reformations, we are into more familiar territory, but no less valuable for this. Both chapters are exemplary and will be of enormous benefit to students and course lecturers alike. Rex’s discussion of political obedience as the leitmotif of the English Reformation was of particular interest. Rex points to an ingrained Tudor culture of the duty of obedience to a Christian monarch, which led those disappointed by the ruling confession to simply wait patiently for another monarch to recognise and implement their confessional preference. In this respect, Rex surmises,’In England, Protestantism was the daughter of time’ (p. 211).
The final two chapters of the collection, by Michel Boeglin and Simone Maghenzani respectively, treat of the progress of the Reformation in two geographical regions which have become synonymous with Catholicism in the post-Reformation period – the Iberian peninsula and Italy. The volume closes with Maghenzani’s essay, which is followed directly by the index.
Reformations Compared is a very welcome survey collection and its essays are perfectly suited to being assigned as student readings. Moreover, those working in Reformation Studies will seek them out as accessible introductions to the broad contours of the Reformations in each region. That said, for a collection which places such an emphasis on the comparative aspect, the volume as a whole might have been further improved had the editors made the essays ‘talk to each other’ a little more. This could have happened at the compilation stage, in which commissioned contributors might have agreed to read each other’s work. Granted, valuable as this might have been, it would have entailed a huge commitment of time. A less time-consuming option might have been for the editors to cross-reference the various contributions throughout, and to make editorial links where appropriate. This would have helped the contributions to cohere to a greater extent. To some extent, the editors do make an effort to do this in the Introduction, but it might have been profitably expanded to the work as a whole. Furthermore, a short epilogue would have also been helpful in drawing such a fine body of work to a close.
These observations aside, Reformations Compared is to be heartily welcomed. It will remain an important resource for students and scholars of the Reformations alike for many years to come.
