A. G. Dickens and the continental Reformation

This article assesses A. G. Dickens's contribution to the study of the continental Reformation, and of German Lutheranism in particular. Dickens's main theses, as formulated in a group of five thematically linked major works that were published between 1964 and 1974, concerned the cultural and historical significance of European Protestantism as an emancipatory national movement whose urban, ‘bourgeois’ variant was subject to constraints of far-reaching historical consequence in Germany. Dickens's further writings, war diaries and private papers are adduced to illustrate the conceptual assumptions underlying this interpretation, which are shown to have been influenced by his Protestant religious convictions and an apparent fascination with Oswald Spengler's theory of civilizations. The article questions Dickens's account of the link between humanism, Lutheran thought and incipient German nationalism, but stresses the relevance of his critique of contemporary German scholarship for adopting a too narrowly national perspective.