Among the dozens of books that poured forth during the quincentennial anniversary of Luther's posting of his ninety-five theses, Ulinka Rublack's Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations stands out, both for its comprehensiveness and the sheer variety of analyses it contains. Her use of plural in Reformations gestures at the most productive tension in the collection, between the commonalities that distinguished the “Protestant” reform and its antecedents and the utter diversity of their forms and impacts. On the one hand, the OHPR is not a history of “one tradition” but of many; accordingly, the volume rejects “linear grand narratives” that present the Protestant Reformation as the origin of all things modern—“freedom, democracy, toleration, market capitalism” and so on. On the other hand, the volume's chapters extend far beyond the mutations of doctrine and religious practice, tracing relationships between Protestant reform and modes of perception and communication, education, legal and material cultures, commerce, sexuality, and the senses. The result is a volume of remarkable chronological span and breathtaking thematic scope. Few of the insights offered are new to this volume, but—rather like the sixteenth-century reformations themselves—their combination yields a profound impact.
Like several earlier volumes in Oxford's series of historical handbooks, the OHPR approaches its topic thematically. Its thirty-six chapters are organized into six parts. The four chapters in part 1 (“The New Theology”) seek to define the Reformations’ common core: the combination of elements that generated new knowledge about salvation and grace (Ocker), time and eternity (Barnes), and secular power (Burgess). Alec Ryrie pursues an elusive Protestant spirituality in the “experiential mode of encountering Scripture.” What part 1 combines, part 2 (“Geographies and Varieties”) contextualizes, beginning with Graeme Murdock's incisive critique of historical cartography, both as a product and a retrospective distortion of the Reformations’ spatial dimension. Thomas Kaufmann asserts the centrality of Luther to the Reformations writ large and distinguishes between the “hard core” of confessional cultures and the outer reaches where mixing and blending occurred. Several of the contributions in this section sketch the unfolding of Reformation in distinctive regional cultures and structures of power, such as those of the France (Holt) and the British Isles (F. Heal). Others map the dizzying variety of alternative Protestantisms (Dixon, Gleixner, Hotson); still others analyze Protestant patterns of interaction with religious outsiders, be they Catholic (Soergel), non-Christian (Gow & Fradkin), or non-European (Häberlein).
The four essays in part 3 (“Communicating the Reformations”) underscore the centrality of the word to Protestant cultures and show how it was communicated, whether in print (Pettegree), through sermons (Puff), in the form of ritual action (Karant-Nunn), or via epistolary exchange (Greengrass). Here, arguably, the distinctiveness of Protestant cultures stands out most clearly—in their reliance on printed word and image, in their performative negation of traditional Catholic religious. The contributors to part 4 (“Sites, Institutions, and Society”) are concerned with the way critiques grounded in Protestant theologies played out in a variety of milieus—from universities, compelled to grapple with the tension between intellectual training and salvation sola fide (Heyd), to rural society, attracted or repulsed by aspects of Reformation theology, often depending on its perceived bearing on village autonomy (Kümin). Here the social-disciplinary aspects of Protestantism come most clearly into view—in education, for example, where training to literacy fused with moral uplift (Methuen), and in law, where the new teachings sharpened prosecutorial focus on sexual and public morality (Harrington). Guido Marnef shows how urban elites fitted Protestant reform into the institutional pluralism of “civic religion,” and Ronald Asch recalls the blunt force of political and material interest in shaping the attitudes of among low- and middle-ranking nobles throughout Europe.
Most of the contributions to this volume side-step the question of causes—why the “Luther Affair” proved so incendiary, how transformations so comprehensive could have arisen when and where they did. Craig Koslofsky tackles this question head on, offering a culturalist account of causes that fuses necessary preconditions—new attitudes toward poverty and community, a new culture of print, a widespread perception of reform as “intractable”—with the authorizing force of the reformers’ critiques. Theology, in other words, did not determine the shape of cultural change so much as validate it. The remaining chapters in part 5 (“Identities and Cultural Meanings”) show how the agents of cultural reformation, so to speak, reconstituted visual and material cultures in the aftermath of iconoclasm (B. Heal), or how they reconfigured silence and music in the service of evangelization (Boyd Brown). Hermann Roodenburg asks whether distinctively Protestant preaching and hearing were embodied in art; Kathleen Crowther shows how conflicting definitions of “natural” informed debates over marriage and sexuality. The ghost of Max Weber hovers over Ute Lotz-Heumann's discussion of “desacralization” and the enduring power of belief in the supernatural; Christine Johnson's analysis of Protestant commerce and consumption seeks actively to dispel the ghost. Alisha Rankin, finally, finds that empiricism found more traction among Protestant natural philosophers than among their Catholic peers. In her concluding essay, Merry Wiesner-Hanks draws parallels between the European Reformations and parallel developments in South Asia (Sikhism) and China (Ming Confucianism); in his contribution, Bruce Gordon reflects on the interplay of between religious identity and collective memory with historical understandings of the Reformations.
No project as sprawling as this can cope without a common purpose that, inevitably, also sets limits. So it is not surprising that the Catholic half of sixteenth-century religious reform rarely appears in these pages (the exceptions include Soergel, Methuen, Roodenburg, and Wiesner-Hanks). Nor do these essays dwell on the negotiation of confessional difference in everyday life (Marnef is the exception here). But these are quibbles; one can only hope that an Oxford Handbook on early modern Catholicism would achieve the conceptual and thematic breadth that distinguishes Rublack's volume.
