With the appearance in 1991 of Manfred Schulze's Fürsten und Reformation (rev. this Journal xliv [1993], 126–9) historians were alerted to the continuities of religious reform in princely territories which spanned the Reformation era. Schulze drew particular attention to reform endeavours by the Catholic Duke George of Albertine Saxony, an avowed opponent of Luther. At the time we were promised a second volume, which has yet to appear. But the gap has now been filled by a full-length examination of George's religious policies up to 1525 (though without detailed consideration of the last decade of his rule since the relevant sources are only now being edited). Christian Volkmar's meticulous account does not offer any startling revelations, but in its accumulation of detailed insights it succeeds in presenting George as a devout ruler (abetted by an even more devout mother), who well recognised the shortcomings of the Catholic Church of his days, both its institutions and its personnel, and who was quite prepared to pre-empt the supposedly evangelical phenomenon of territorial church governance (landesherrliches Kirchenregiment) if a pope or general council were incapable of effective intervention.

To understand George's concern, we must begin with his education. Initially destined for a clerical career, George received a scholar's education (he was able to follow Luther and Eck at the Leipzig disputation of 1519 in Latin). Yet he was not conventionally pious: he undertook no pilgrimage, was sceptical of indulgences (or at least of their quackish preaching), and – unlike his cousin the Elector Frederick the Wise – showed no interest in accumulating relics. Rather, he was a follower of the new Christian humanism and conducted a brisk correspondence with Erasmus. A striking feature of George's religious policies was his reliance upon secular advisers at court and officials in the localities. The two principal bishoprics on Albertine Saxon soil, Meissen and Magdeburg, were effectively mediatised (George had a protracted tussle with Johannes vi of Meissen in the 1500s, who attempted to assert his independence), and George used them essentially as his lieutenants. His attempts to restrict the use of ecclesiastical courts were, however, only moderately successful. It was George himself who energetically promoted the canonisation of Bruno of Meissen and his attendant cult, not the bishops. He also saw himself as oberster Collator, even though, unlike many other princes, he controlled only one-tenth of the advowsons in his territory. Perhaps surprisingly, however, George pursued no active policy of ecclesiastical visitations until the 1530s.

At the heart of George's hostility to Luther lay his rash and mistaken identification of the Wittenberg reformer as a Hussite. The threat of heresy spilling over the border from Bohemia was ever-present in George's mind, and Eck's cunning indictment of Luther as a Hussite sympathiser at Leipzig in 1519 sufficed to convince George that Luther was not an advocate of church reform but an apostate: he never subsequently altered his views. Yet, as Volkmar reminds us, not a single evangelical adherent was put to death on Albertine soil. George resorted to banishment as the appropriate punishment for heresy (following Titus iii. 10–11); the two who were executed, Michael Rumpfer and Hans Hergot, were arraigned for rebellion, not heresy (Rumpfer had been the leader of the 1525 rebellion in Leipzig). George proved himself a most effective counter-propagandist against evangelical doctrines, both in promoting and financing the printing of pamphlets and broadsheets, and in enabling the laity to read Scripture in the vernacular: he did not share the apprehensions of the church hierarchy, and indeed the translation of the New Testament undertaken in 1527 by his court chaplain, Hieronymus Emser, was essentially a reworking of Luther's own, albeit shorn of the latter's antipapal glosses and woodcuts.

George's misfortune was that his attempts at church reform fell foul of curial indifference and of political manoeuvrings at the imperial diets, although, as Volkmar insists, the auguries for successful Catholic reform in Albertine Saxony in 1525 stood no less favourably than in Bavaria. Volkmar's study is long, but it is clearly structured and elegantly written, a pleasure to read. Scholars will debate his findings, but for the foreseeable future his book will remain an indispensable point of reference as an outstanding contribution to Reformation scholarship and to the biography of a prince too long the victim of a triumphalist Protestant historiography.