Political Obedience

The Reformation had a profound impact on European thinking about political obedience. This chapter explores the way in which the Reformation “mood” embraced theories of absolute authority, but also led to a questioning of authority. It explores the development of resistance theory and ideas of popular sovereignty, and of toleration, all of which cast significant limits on the authority of secular rulers. Reformation impulses also inspired some to genuinely revolutionary attempts to transform the social and political order, and these revolutionary ideas are explored too. The approach taken is to avoid narrative, and to explore particular moments at which the implication of Reformation ideas becomes apparent.

Civic Religions

As centers of a vivid socioeconomic, cultural and religious life cities acted as important agents of religious change. This chapter starts with a survey of the multilayered religious landscape of the late medieval cities. Civic authorities played an increasing role in the administration and supervision of the sacred and developed a specific type of civic religion. The religious Reform movement launched in the 1520s by Martin Luther and other evangelic-minded Reformers was to a large extent an urban event. The pace and the dynamics of Reform were complex and diverse depending on the political and social context of the cities involved. City governments aimed for civic unity and religious uniformity but this ideal was difficult to realize in a period of increasing religious fragmentation.

Visual and Material Culture

This chapter considers the Protestant Reformation’s impact on visual and material culture. The evangelical reform movements that transformed European religious life during the sixteenth century have generally been associated with iconoclasm. Yet the Reformation is no longer seen as a disaster for art. In Lutheran Germany, where iconoclasm was limited in scope, a rich visual culture emerged that incorporated not only printed propaganda and the well-known paintings of Lucas Cranach and his workshop, but also preserved medieval paintings and sculptures and produced images and artifacts for domestic display and devotion. In other parts of northern Europe iconoclasm provided a stimulus to artistic creation, for both churches and homes. The chapter argues that despite its fetishization of the Word, Protestant life was shaped by images and by the visual. Europe’s Protestant visual cultures were rich and varied, and constituted important elements of confessional consciousness.

Introduction

This handbook provides a novel approach by treating the Protestant Reformations as a broad movement within and beyond Europe which aimed to create new knowledge, ideas, and practices in relation to what it conceived as supernatural and divine. The handbook gives voice to the distinctness of a historically situated set of beliefs and investigations into the nature of the divine and evil, formed in particular sites, through particular interpretative communities, institutions, and media of communication, rooted in interaction with symbols and the imaginary of the time. It brings to life the plurality and vitality of ideas which remained. In these ways, the handbook stresses that the Protestant Reformations in all their variety, and with their important “radical” wings, must be understood as one of the lasting long-term historical transformations which changed Europe and, subsequently, significant parts of the world. A global and connected account of the Reformations is long overdue.

The Body in the Reformations

This chapter explores the physiology of Protestant inner emotion. Drawing on recent studies on the practice of piety and on rhetoric and medicine, it briefly sets out the period’s Aristotelo‒Galenic theory, its views on the faculties of the soul, and their role in literally moving the believers’ hearts when incited by the ministers’ affective art of preaching. I conclude with a tentative comparison with the Catholic art of preaching, looking at the outer sense of touch in particular. The continuities and resemblances are striking, both in terms of affective rhetoric and physiological theory. The major difference seems to relate to the period’s sensory anxiety. The Reformations queried the most proximate of the outer senses, that of touch.

History and Memory

This chapter explores the challenges presented for marking the anniversary of the Reformation as a historical event. It considers the role of memory and commemoration in contemporary accounts of the Reformation, particularly the efforts to create public narratives. History and memory, so central to the ways in which the Reformation is understood as a seminal moment in Western culture, were also integral to the movement itself. The chapter examines the ways in which the Reformers of the sixteenth century sought to establish their claim on history in order to justify and make sense of the present. The Reformers believed that change was part of continuity with the past.

Music

Aural culture, including music, was central to Protestant efforts to redefine authentic Christianity and Christian practice. Inheriting from medieval Christianity both a rich musical tradition and anxiety over the spiritual value of sound, Reformers sought to delimit and deploy music as means and mark of the spread of the Reformation and to employ it in their institutions: in churches and schools as well as in homes. Across confessional boundaries, but in ways distinct to each, the practice of music served to define confessional identity and to bridge or to separate public and private spaces, the sacred and the secular or profane. Despite significant differences in content and context, for the large majority of sixteenth-century Protestants (and in the eyes of their theological opponents), communal singing of hymns (chorales) or metrical psalms became a defining and enduring feature of Protestant identity.

Explaining Change

Delineations of the causes of the Reformation have long been synonymous with claims about its significance on a personal, spiritual, confessional, national, or world-historical level. Conversely, these levels have presented a single clear or overriding account of the causes of the Reformation (e.g., “Luther's Reformation was the work of the devil”; or “the Reformation reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie”), rather than a complex story of equal parts faith, force, and fortune. By exploring these complexities, scholars have shown that social and political causes of the Reformation were quite diverse, as were its intellectual origins. Historically speaking, the Reformation arose not from a shared doctrine of justification, nor from a vision of a church reformed according to Scripture, but from the common cultural challenges it addressed, and from the common solutions authorized by the Reformers’ diverse views.

Luther and Lutheranism

This contribution sketches controversial, historical, and contemporary interpretations of the Reformation and of Luther and argues for an understanding of the Reformation that takes account of the unique historical significance of the stimuli that originated from Wittenberg. It draws a succinct biographical and theological account of Luther’s development. In his life but also in the history of the “Lutheran” confession that came to bear his name, theological controversies proved particularly important events and galvanizing factors. Distinctive features of Lutheran confessional culture were informed by Luther’s literary and ecclesiastical‒political initiatives and by the particular significance of universities in the Lutheran Reformation.

Sexual Difference

This essay that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans told many competing and conflicting stories about sexual differences and gender identities. These stories came from a wide range of sources, including the Bible, natural philosophical and medical texts, and travelers’ tales of exotic locales. Ideas about sexual difference were profoundly shaped by three interrelated historical developments: the religious upheavals of the Reformation; dramatic changes in medicine and science; and European exploration and colonization. The Protestant rejection of clerical celibacy led to new views of the differences between men and women and their respective roles in marriage and in society as a whole. Developments in science and medicine, specifically the recovery of ancient Greek medical texts, the rise of anatomical dissections, and the new importance of alchemy, as well as exploration and colonization of non-European lands and peoples, all shaped understandings of sexual differences.