Over the past generation, historians' approaches to the German lands from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries—that is, during “The Reformation”—have changed radically, largely owing to a cohort of scholars including the author of this book, Thomas A. Brady, Jr. The rich, older literature operated largely within two incompatible tropes: confession and modernity. Confessional historians continued debating the events of Germany in the 1520s on the assumption that salvation remained at stake and thus focused on the substance of the Reformers' positions while producing lively polemics against the “other side” on theological issues that had crystallized by 1560. Meanwhile, a separate, more-or-less Protestant and progressive narrative of Luther's modernity and the Protestant contribution to secularism flourished in the Anglo-American world, where it still shapes schoolboy narratives of the period. Scholars of early modern Catholicism who went beyond confessional stances faced the dilemma of either adopting the triumphalist teleology of the Protestant mainstream or becoming marginalized. Confessional and Whig historiography still continues to offer useful contributions, but around 1970, both schools lost their grip on academic scholarship of the Reformation to the generation that included Brady and his peers.

The course of scholarship over the thirty years from 1970 to 2000 was turbulent, with social history evolving out of earlier materialisms and the cultural turn responding to impulses from philosophy and anthropology. The enormous expansion of specialized academic production over the same period ensured energetic debate and a proliferation of approaches, and change only accelerated as scholarly communication entered the digital age. For a time, early modern European history became a vanguard field for other historians, not least owing to the richness of the earlier scholarship. One sign that this generation of creativity is slowing is the emergence of new or synthetic works that connect the new back to longer traditions. Among such works, Brady's magnum opus will take its place as the richest and deepest synthesis on what happened in the German lands between 1400 and 1650.

Brady's own contribution to the generational project includes not only his monographs on Strasbourg, on Turning Swiss (or not), and on German imperial politics from the 1520s to 1540s, but also a lifetime's work of intellectual leadership and mentorship best exemplified by the Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, which he edited with Heiko A. Oberman and James Tracy. When coupled with his own abiding interest in the philosophy of history and the work of earlier generations of Reformation scholars, Brady's accomplishments make him signally qualified to pull together a generation's revisions of old schools and contributions on new questions, including gender, the economy, the environment, the Ottomans, and many other questions left largely untouched by confessional scholars and modernizers alike. That German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 is an important book is thus no surprise; that it is simultaneously masterful and intensely personal is a very pleasant one, revealing as it does a scholar who can be both magisterial and pithy, commanding even when a little cantankerous.

Readers will immediately notice that the book's title emphasizes two plurals—Histories and Reformations. That the German lands followed political trajectories of unusual diversity in the early modern period is reflected in the first, while the second incorporates the growing consensus among historians that religious change in the sixteenth century occurred along multiple pathways, rather than constituting a single well-defined Reformation with secondary variants or reactions. A second crucial choice that shapes German Histories' significance lies in its periodization from 1400 to 1650. In contrast to portraits of fifteenth-century Germany in dark colors of waning or corruption alleviated only by the coming of Luther, Brady follows Oberman in placing religious reform after 1517 into the context of a century's efforts to reform both church and political system—“in head and members,” as contemporaries put it. From this perspective, Luther and his cohort of reformers represented not a break point of modernity, but fit into a regionally specific trajectory of reform, shaped by the structural features and historical legacy of the Holy Roman Empire: the Reformation of the Protestants thus forms the middle, rather than the beginning or end of Brady's narrative, with wide-reaching consequences.

German Histories carries out Brady's agenda in four major sections. The first, “The Empire, the German Lands, and Their Peoples” lays out the givens in geography, politics, culture, and the particular shape of the church in the German lands. The second, “Reform of the Empire and the Church, 1400–1520,” narrates the success of one reform, of the Empire, and explains why the second, reform of the church, remained illusory despite the profound engagement of leaders and thinkers over a century. The third section takes up the movement initiated by Martin Luther and its consequences under the heading “Church, Reformations, and Empire, 1520–1576.” During this period, Brady argues, a new constellation of political and religious affairs took shape, which he describes under the headings “old confessional order” and “imperial public life.” The final section, “Confessions, Empire, and War, 1576–1650,” explores the instabilities as well as the tenacity of this order and life as it absorbed the formation of multiple Protestant confessions and the successful reform of the old church (blocked during the fifteenth century but now possible owing to support from outside the German lands as well as changes within).

Both the broad scope and fundamental framework of Brady's analysis become clear through his section and chapter headings. On the one hand, he includes phenomena from every dimension of life in the German lands, from production and consumption through education, intellectual life, family structures, and social groups. Women, religious radicals, and marginalized groups such as Jews and witches all get their full due as Brady draws generously on research from the last forty years. On the other hand, his perspective always returns to the core issues of political and spiritual order: the book is emphatically a political history of the German lands, which as Brady persuasively argues, includes ecclesiastical and family politics as well as the imperial, princely, urban, and rural dimensions. He repeatedly puts special emphasis on the distinctive role of the Imperial bishops, whose singular status as both prelates and princes set the German lands on a path of reform of politics and religion distinct from both western and eastern kingdoms. In the fifteenth century, the very success of political and financial consolidation under reform bishops and abbots helped to undermine what Brady calls the “Caesaropapist illusion” of reform guided by emperors and incorporating bishops, as happened in France and Spain. In the sixteenth century, the Imperial bishoprics became crucial sites for Catholic renewal, in Würzburg and Bamberg as in the Bavarian-controlled Rhenish archbishoprics. In the seventeenth, disputes over princely control and the “Ecclesiastical Reservation” belonged among the triggers of the Thirty Years' War.

As Brady's narrative rolls through three centuries, he takes stock of nearly every important theory that has emerged from the singular circumstances of central Europe. One of his lodestars is Ranke's interpretation of the German predicament, a view whose tragic elements Brady firmly rejects even as he shows how it has, over and over, shaped interpretations of particular events. A more recent point of reference is the “confessionalization thesis” that shaped research in the 1990s. Again, Brady absorbs the key lessons of this research while keeping clear of the larger teleologies that confessionalization's proponents asserted. Writing as a historians' historian, Brady emphasizes the distinctiveness of the Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist paths to spiritual reform and political order within the Empire, even as he recognizes how important the “old confessional order” was to the Empire's survival and even flourishing as a political system through these centuries. He therefore reaches for a different term and settles on convivencia to describe the difficult, intolerant, yet functional and tenacious way that Catholics and Protestants lived together in Germany from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Throughout, Brady fully vindicates the first words of his text: “This book seeks neither to praise nor condemn the past, neither to justify the present nor to impose a mortgage on the future” (p. xiii). Rather, he weaves an extraordinarily vivid and detailed narrative that brings the vast complexity of German histories into a compelling framework.

One of the most engaging aspects of German Histories is the way the author combines balance and scholarly generosity with sharp-tongued commentary. Pithy remarks appear on page after page. Describing the state of affairs at the accession of Emperor Frederick III in 1440, he notes that anyone then predicting the Habsburgs' continuity for almost 500 years would “today be considered certifiably mad” (p. 89). The compromises that closed the Diet of Speyer in 1526 earn the description “the era's most pregnant act of political weaseling” (p. 215). And in a comment that brings personal conviction as well as historical judgment into view, Brady writes:

The combination of analysis and engagement that this passage reveals marks every page of Brady's opus.

Any work of this scope leaves openings for critics. Structuralists of various schools may take issue with Brady's frequent concentration on the men in power, from Frederick III to Ferdinand II, though Brady is unapologetic on this point. His description of the Diet of Worms expresses his stance: “History has moments when the normally invisible forces that propel become visibly represented by—Hegel would have said embodied in—the actors of a particular drama” (p. 152). As this quotation illustrates, Brady's approach to the constitutive functions of culture is firmly anchored in traditional rather than postmodern philosophy. More surprising, in light of Brady's long engagement with the Empire's southwestern corner, is the limited role that the two hearths of republican politics—the Netherlands and the Swiss Confederation—play in his narrative. Although each was on a trajectory out of the Empire in national terms (especially looking backward), their importance for developments in the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries already appears as largely exogenous to “the German lands” in Brady's account. Still, the scale of German Histories means that many local historiographies caught up in local issues are not germane to Brady's perspective. Ultimately, German Histories vindicates synthesis as a distinct art with its own rules. Brady's version is neither the synthesis of a textbook (cautious and hewing to a canon) nor that of the macrohistorian (abandoning the particular for the generalizable), but rather that of a historical scholar in his prime. Audacious in its general assertions while rich in its particulars, Brady's German Histories represents a summa for an extraordinary generation of historians of Germany.