The literary legacy of Lutherjahr 2017 reminds one of the supernatural landscape of post-Reformation central Europe when, in popular imagination, the unquiet dead stalked the land. Many of the books published for 2017 had the whiff of the revenant about them: Erikson's psychohistory, Iserloh's challenge to the historicity of the Thesenanschlag, Oberman's late-medieval and distinctly un-modern Luther, and Grisar's critique of Luther's egoism, all came back to haunt us. Christopher Ocker's elegant and richly documented study also inspires a sense of déjà-vu, echoing the debates of the 1970s and ’80s which pitted social historians of the Reformation against church historians, almost as if the religious and cultural turns and the confessionalisation thesis had never happened. That the index cites Thomas A. Brady Jr more than twice as often as it does the book's purported subject tells us something.

Ocker's essay offers none the less a highly readable perspective. It is a particularly welcome addition to the stream of 2017-related literature because his approach helps him to sidestep some of the shortcomings which have afflicted other recent books about Luther. Despite the prominence of Luther's name in the title, and of his portrait on the front cover, this is not a book about Luther. Instead it is about the structural stresses in politics and society that the Luther affair caused. ‘The book before you is … a kind of anti-biography’, Ocker tells us disarmingly on p. 13, before listing the topics that it is not concerned with. It is an extensive list, and covers almost everything to do with the reformer's life and works. The man from Wittenberg remains an off-stage presence for most of the book, not so much Hamlet without the prince as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And, as with Stoppard, there is a great deal of brilliance on display. Ocker's mastery at combining breadth with depth, for instance, never fails to impress. He is as adept at the grand narrative sweep as at the telling vignette drawn from the archives. So a general account of the implementation of Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire is given a poignant counterpoint in the tragic-heroic tale of Göbel, a lay brother of the Augustinians at Boedekken (pp. 43–8). The book's principal focus is on German-speaking lands, which is understandable in the light of the author's background, but the wider canvas of European and international significance is never neglected. Not everyone could pull this off successfully; but Ocker is one of the most versatile Reformation historians of our day, with publications covering a wide variety of fields from biblical hermeneutics to church property disputes, and the reader is in safe hands.

Ocker understands the Reformation as a controversy which has never been resolved, and in which the fact of religious and political conflict matters much more than the reasons for it. The opinions of those he calls ‘the experts’, about such recondite matters as the date of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, its nature, and when (if at all) Luther stopped being Catholic, are dismissed in a sort of iconoclastic litany: they do us little good, Ocker tells us three times (p. 107), like the Bellman. The key to the Reformation's early progress therefore lies in its four ‘political’ contexts, which are set out in the book's pivotal third chapter on ‘The political anatomy of the Luther affair’: the Empire, the papacy, the hoped-for general church council and the appropriation and disposal of church property. Once established, the Reformation's two major orthodoxies, Lutheran and Reformed, ensured permanent conflict not just with one another and with the third orthodoxy, Catholicism, but with Jews, Muslims and eventually with the forces of secularism. Our modern condition of pluralism is, therefore, one which the Reformation both reflects and helped to bring into being.

Ocker's essay reminds one of Brad Gregory's Unintended Reformation. Indeed, he offers us a similar-sounding ‘accidental Reformation’ (p. 41) while on the whole taking a more positive view of its effects than Gregory. But the book makes an original contribution to the distinguished canon of US Reformation historiography. By presenting the Reformation as an ‘unresolved controversy’, a provisional and incomplete process, Ocker is able at last to disentangle it from the big claims traditionally made for it by American historians such as Bainton: the idea that Luther and his followers ushered in religious liberty and the separation of Church and State never really rang true. By reading the Reformation as a permanently ‘unconcluded controversy’, Ocker makes it accessible to a country rent by its own ‘culture war’ which is just as much a product of ‘confessional’ identity politics, and seemingly just as intractable, as its early modern counterpart. That does not lessen this book's value to non-US readers. As a provocative perspective on the Reformation, it will have broad appeal.

The book itself, in its paperback incarnation, is handsomely produced. Fully one-quarter of its 500-odd pages is taken up with a detailed chronology, structured after the four ‘political’ contexts introduced in chapter iii. The rest of the apparatus is less helpful. It must be a specialised readership indeed that is familiar with chancels and rood screens (p. 55) and with the Qur'an (p. 262), but needs ‘cathedral canon’ (p. 26) and ‘the New Testament’ (p. 41) explained. The footnotes have been poorly proof-read. Cantabrigians will surely be puzzled by the reference to ‘God and Magog’ (p. 258), for instance. There are also some errors in the main text. Cochlaeus is described as ‘the Dominican firebrand’ (p. 165) when he was a secular priest. Not even Cardinal Wolsey's vast powers encompassed the ‘bishop of Herford’ (p. 127): Charles Booth, bishop of Hereford, is meant. And it was Cromwell, not Cranmer, who in 1530 confided to the said cardinal that he wished Luther had never been born (p. 143).