The Reformation and the Common Man:
A Historiographical Essay on the Popular Reformation
The Reformation has been a topic of intense historical research for nearly five hundred years. Early modern contemporaries and modern historians alike have found themselves challenged in trying to bring reason and rationale to, arguably, one of the most important social revolutions since the so-called Jesus movements of the first century. The greater body of Reformation research has been centered on the theology and biography of the Reformers themselves and, as a result, the study of Reformation-as-history has suffered.[1] Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union[2], a very peculiar trend in Reformation historiography emerged that focused not on theology, politics, or elite personalities but on the social movement of the Reformation and its impact on the common man in Europe. But as the historian Peter Blickle has argued, one cannot divide the common man or social elites from the shared culture that produced them.[3] In light of this, social historians have continued to look carefully for clues that will help them understand not only why the Reformers took issue with the Church but, more importantly, why the populations of Europe were so willing to discard over a thousand years’ worth of tradition and religious conviction.[4] As with most historical research, there is no significant consensus among the scholars on many ideas expressed in each of the studies I have researched for this essay. From ideas about socio-economic conditions to clerical abuse, political power struggles, and a developing hunger among contemporaries for a new kind of ethics, it is possible to come away from each text with more questions than answers. Many of the questions regarding the Reformation in all of its forms – radical, popular, and magisterial – are still unresolved and I do not intend, in writing this essay, to reinvent the proverbial wheel of Reformation social history. Social history itself, finding its roots in the populist social movements of the mid-twentieth century, is still a fairly new field within history. As such both the historical methods and the results are still subject to debate and controversy. This essay will attempt to trace the intellectual evolution of the Reformation as a “social history” in order to understand the questions it has raised, the fresh viewpoints it has unveiled, and the significant contributions it has made to our understanding this groundbreaking movement.
In any attempt to understand the Reformation as a social movement, it is important to understand the culture that produced the movement on the eve of its inception. There are four scholars that have provided important glimpses into late medieval lay culture and nearly all of them utilize identical but specific vocabulary in order to convey their own particular messages. Words like burgher,[5] radical,[6] magisterial,[7] and bourgeois[8] are among some of the more frequently employed expressions. In one of the earliest texts dealing with the Reformation as a period in social history, Hans J. Hillerbrand’s The Reformation begins with a brief but revealing explanation of German piety in the late medieval period. Drawing upon a wide range of “autobiographical reflections… letters, official documents, polemic papers, and the like”[9] Hillerbrand claims that Germany was an “intensely religious country” with a deep concentration on outward piety and religious observance. This, he explains, is peculiar to Germany, as they had not experienced the same kind of cultural destabilization of the Church in the period of high Renaissance that southern Europe had.[10] Hillerbrand was a pioneer in the discipline of social history and sought to bring to light that element of history that often goes unnoticed: the story of the “common man.” In this new kind of study Hillerbrand concluded, on the subject of lay culture, that Germans were not only very pious but their culture was also marked, in the late fifteenth century, by strong mystical traditions and a profoundly entrenched “cult of sainthood.”[11]
Michael Mullett concurs that in the late fifteenth century, the personal piety of the laity was on the rise and finding expression mostly by way of mystical and contemplative meditation. Perhaps unique to Mullett’s interpretation of the source material is the claim that the laity’s meditations were concentrated on the humanity and “humanness” of Jesus.[12] Significant to Mullett’s methods was that he wrote Radical Religious Movements in Early Modern Europe with the express purpose of “[synthesizing] some of the work that has appeared in recent years on dissenting Christianity and on millenarianism.” Mullett analyzes many sources that are common to Reformation research and finds a great many of them support his thesis of it was the “radical reformation,” separate from the Protestant Reformation, that contributed most to the widespread social upheaval of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.[13] In order to present his views on late medieval lay piety, Mullett cites various pieces of mystical literature, including “The Scale of Perfection, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Prick of Conscience, The Ancrene Riwle,” and, of course, the Bible itself.[14] These sources suggest to Mullett that the increasingly individualistic study of Jesus’ ethical teachings and his humanity led the laity to view the clergy critically and to come to a suspicion that they were, in fact, immoral and unqualified to lead their communities in spiritual devotion.[15] While Mullett’s thesis is certainly plausible, it is also not closed to criticism. It is certainly known among historical researchers that all research projects are adopted with certain preconceptions. These preconceptions should not always be regarded negatively since they help the historian approach a set of texts with questions. They provide the academic curiosity behind all ambitious works of scholarship and drive the historian to formulate inferences. My criticism of Mullett’s work is that it seems to me that he arrived at the conclusion first, and then chose research that was most suited to support his positions. Many of his chapters involve very broad and bold inferences but do not contain many, if any at all, potentially alternative explanations. History may prove Mullett’s arguments correct in the end, but the absence divergent views is difficult to dismiss entirely.
Steven Ozment’s study of lay piety takes a slightly different direction, focusing not on the individual meditations of the layperson, but on the laity’s relationship with the local and regional clergy. He claims that the medieval Church suffocated the laity with “too much religion”[16] – in the way of institutional religion versus individual devotion – and that the needs of the local community were ignored. This, according to Ozment, gave the two-fold effect of leaving the laity to their own devices as well as encouraging them to seek out new and individual means of expressing their faith.[17] Not only were the needs of the local communities not being tended to but also on the eve of the Reformation only one bishop in Germany was of burgher origin. By continuing to draw almost solely from its traditional source of the nobility to fill its ranks, the effect in the cities of coming to believe that the Church was out of touch and disinterested in the lives of its flock.[18] Indeed, the subsequent Reformation-era demands by the burghers to create endowed, full-time and local preacherships was a “[monument] to local determination to create conditions for an institutionally viable lay piety.”[19] By enumerating and explaining the grievances leveled against the church in the cities, Ozment is able to shed light on one of the most difficult-to-answer questions of the Reformation: why the townsmen on central Europe so quickly abandoned their Catholic confession for the new, and potentially dangerous, Protestant faith. It is hard not to see the undertones of a “democratized” church in Ozment’s line of thinking. His arguments easily be seen many of the political revolutions of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the disenfranchisement of the local population against an aggressive and overbearing foreign power. In this case, however, the local power is the Swiss and German townsmen and the “foreign” power is the Roman Church. In his description, the burghers had reached a point of intellectual, social and political maturity, developed a localized identity and demanded that the Church allow for greater enfranchisement of the ecclesiastical power or face open revolt. Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli could just as easily have been Cromwell, Jefferson, Abbé Sieyès and Lennin. The question left partially unresolved by Ozment’s arguments, however, is why the burghers should have had any expectation for representation in the Church at all? The presence of this expectation by the common man to franchise and local administration of their church, either inherent or developed over time, is only partially explained by the fact that such an arrangement is common today. The outstanding question is how or when this expectation crept into the minds of the burghers, which is not entirely clear in Ozment’s writings. That question aside, Ozment’s arguments are clear and well explained with plenty of source references to trace his work.
Miriam Chrisman, in an essay on the proliferation of Reformation literature, argues that it was the successful dissemination of ideas that contributed most to the success of the Reformation. Religious pamphlets proliferated in the early days of the Reformation. Attempts by prominent humanists to provide viable copies of the New Testament in the vernacular and powerful sermons delivered by the earliest Reformers and Protestant preachers informed lay communities all over Europe of what they suspected all along: that the monks and priests had been withholding the Bible and falsifying its contents for their own purposes.[20] It was at this critical juncture in the development of lay culture and lay piety that, according to Ozment, perhaps one of the most unexpected events of the Reformation took place: widespread and violent urban iconoclasm.[21] It is disappointing that so few of the Reformation historians simply explained this particular situation as “clerical abuse” and left it to the reader to draw many of their own conclusions. The fact that Chrisman and Ozment expound not only on the definition of clerical abuse but also delve into the psychology of betrayal felt by the Reformation-era common man is both fascinating and unique to their research into late medieval lay piety in this study.
In one of the most recent works dedicated to Reformation social history, Lee Palmer Wandel attempts to explain the significance of sixteenth-century European iconoclasm. In, what could be considered a response of Carlos Eire’s claim that more modern scholarship be dedicated to Reformation iconoclasm[22], Voracious Idols and Violent Hands produces a wonderful exposition on what, he believes, the burghers were rebelling against and at whom these violent acts were directed.[23] Wandel’s survey of Reformation iconoclasm begins with a brief clarification of the significance of images and objects in medieval cosmology and ritual, and ends by analyzing three case-studies of major Reformation iconoclasm: Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel, respectively. Wandel explains that medieval Europe’s landscape was both physically and metaphorically dominated by churches. Within the local community of a common layman, and especially within the church itself, one encountered images. They were nearly inescapable to the common man.[24] The images in the churches at the end of the medieval period were not simply representational art. They were not intended, according to Wandel, to simply focus the meditations of the worshipper but rather to be mystical centers of the world where the sacred met and interacted with the mundane. These images and relics, like the Eucharist itself, was the instrument by which God’s immanent presence was communicated to the common man. To be in the presence of an image of a saint or of Christ was to be in the presence of the saint or Christ himself.[25] As the Protestant preachers brought the message of the Reformation to the cities of Europe, the laity reacted violently – and sometimes incoherently – against these centers of sacred power. Some men dismantled the images with axes; some items were melted down or burned into ash; some were donated and the proceeds given to the needy within the city; and other times objects were just victims of random rage and vandalism. Wandel then turns his attention to the acts themselves and to the potential significance and the “message” each act was intended to convey. Claiming that, “[t]he theologian spoke through the sermon and pamphlet, the magistrate through law” and the common man through iconoclasm,[26] he then draws a correlation between each city’s specific brand of iconoclasm and the institutional changes that accompanied the Reformation in those cities.[27] In Zurich, the Reformation took on the form of a new system of ethics and social responsibility and, thus, the iconoclasts, offended by the developed and sophisticated “Christian economy,” broke down the objects into materiel that could benefit the needy.[28] In Strasbourg, the object of Protestant ire was the celebration of the Mass and, in the mind of the Strasbourg laity, it was a blasphemy against the transcendent sacrifice of Christ on the cross. It was, thus, the altars and retables – the “locus” of the priestly power in the mass[29] as well as a stinging reminder to the commoners that there was a celebrated and rigid preferential hierarchy within their community[30] – that were the object of iconoclasm in this city.[31] In Basel, the Reformation’s largest contribution to the community was the dissolution of divisions between clergy and laity and, in Basel, an armed mob broke into the local Cathedral, “chopped up the rood screen, the retable, ‘the idols of stone and wood.’ Everything, every ornament, every precious object that would have been inside the church was smashed into little pieces.” [32] This suggests to Wandel that the “iconoclasts came not to steal, nor even to ‘take away’ as Zurich iconoclasts had done,” but only to destroy those objects which illuminated the separation between cleric and layperson.[33]
Carlos Eire, in a similar interpretation of Reformation iconoclasm, explains that iconoclasm was the most visible, “radical and ‘democratic’” change of the Reformation.[34] His primary complaint with the modern study of Reformation iconoclasm is the apparent lack of an acute “awareness of the significance of iconoclasm.”[35] He desired to correct the most recent mischaracterizations by presenting iconoclasm as a “revolutionary act… of direct violence against” against the social mythos of Catholic idolatry.[36] Arguing that Reformation ideology was mostly a religious “cover” for outright political revolution[37], he adds that there was, in many cases, a significant social and economic motivation for common participation in iconoclasm[38] and cautions Reformation scholars not to look past the potentially obvious for a deeper meaning to the violence.[39] There is no doubt in Eire’s mind that the popular adoption of Reformation criticisms against the Church was the lynchpin of success for the Reformers.[40]
It is with the aims of the Reformers that he takes issue. His primary argument is that the Magisterial Reformers – especially Calvin – were disgusted by widespread “idolatry” in Europe[41], from the common man all the way up to some of the monarchs[42], and they greatly desired to rid Christendom of it. While Eire cites Steven Ozment generously in his research, it should be noted that these citations and acknowledgements do not translate, in any substantive sense, to the two historians sharing a common perspective on the subject of Reformation iconoclasm. Taking, perhaps, a third path of interpretation on Protestant iconoclasm, Steven Ozment places a greater emphasis on iconoclasm-as-outrage. Returning to his arguments about lay piety, Ozment argues that the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century amounts to a collective cry from among the laity: “We care!”[43] Iconoclasm, to Ozment, is the common man’s way to shout loudly to his peers and social “betters” alike that he does not take his devotions lightly and will not continue to suffer the indignity of clerical deception and exploitation. As was stated before, there is widespread scholarly belief that, the common man held longstanding suspicions of egregious clerical abuse[44] and that the earliest Protestant preachers were only too eager to bring those abuses to the attention of the people. While none of the proposed explanations for Reformation iconoclasm are necessarily mutually exclusive, Ozment does provide a very tangible explanation for the particularly violent aspect of this expression. To him the violent anticlericalism and iconoclasm of the Reformation is tied to outrage and finding out the depths by which the laity were betrayed by the clergy.[45] The indignation of the laity at having “been had” by the clergy, however, is explained in light of a very devout current in medieval lay piety and individual spirituality which Ozment abstracts from “[e]arly Protestant pamplets” and, even, a popular German play written in 1523.[46] The study of Reformation-era iconoclasm brings a significant new view of the popularization of Protestantism, as it gives access into the collective psychology of the common man and how they reacted to the teachings and sermons of the Reformers. It should not be understated that while the iconoclastic acts of commoners in the early 1520s are a microcosm within the greater history of the Reformation, the information retrieved from these acts are potent reminders of the popular currents that flowed powerfully beneath the eloquent writings of the Reformers.
The Reformation was a religious revolution and was initially, according to Robert Scribner, one that began within the institutional Church and spilled out into the rest of society.[47] In order to understand exactly why the Reformation generally, and contemporary iconoclasm specifically, took on such a revolutionary tone for the common man, it is important to bring to the reader’s attention what grievances and perceived injustices were shared in the affected communities. There are two prominent ideas that nearly all scholars agree on concerning the Reformation. The first is that if the “common man” had not identified with the claims of the Reformers, the Reformation would never have become the sweeping movement in Europe that it was.[48] The second idea that Reformation scholars generally agree upon is a potential explanation for the popular adoption of Protestant ideas: the people believed their spiritual overlords were abusing their privileges, were engaging in rampant corruption, and were doing so at the expense of the common man. One of the more broad claims about clerical abuse in the late medieval period is that the majority of Church officials had devolved into various self-interested parties that vied with each other instead of contributing to the needs of the greater whole.[49] As was mentioned earlier, Ozment charges the medieval Church with gross negligence in regards to feeding the spiritual hunger of their constituencies. In addition to following a divergent path from the local laity in terms of practical piety, those services that the communities felt necessary for spiritual growth were only delivered by the clergy at substantial cost.[50]
One of the most articulate demands of the local communities in Germany and Switzerland was that the clergy should not be “upcharging” for preaching or conducting various religious services for the community.[51] Peter Blickle’s detailed account of grievances made by the common man in Communal Reformation makes clear that local communities, both in the cities and in the countryside, felt taken advantage of by the clergy, who neglecting many essential services in order to focus on ones that were more lucrative for them. Blickle’s explanation is essential to understanding the context of many grievances and demands posted by the common man in Germany in the 1520s regarding the disposition and responsibilities of the clergy. Furthermore, as Thomas Brady, Jr. argues, the laity had an expectation that the clergy were to go about promoting the Gospel – furthering peace, justice, and unity among Christians towards a more egalitarian and just social system – and that they failed spectacularly at this.[52] The increasingly “evangelical” character of Christian piety, beginning in the late fifteenth century, fed these expectations among the laity, thus prompting them to turn to the synoptic Gospel narratives[53] as a “blueprint” for a perfectly ordered Christian society.[54]
Perhaps one of the most important themes that figures into Reformation social research is the yearning, among the common man, for a more ethical social system.[55] Nearly two-thirds of the nineteen scholars researched for this essay believe that the search for a new system of ethics among Christians was one of the most important factors in popular adoption of Protestant theology. Peter Blickle, in Communal Reformation, argues that Protestant theology tapped into the same kind of social angst that led to the German Peasants’ War of 1525 and, thus, aided in the popular adoption of the Reformation.[56] Furthermore, according to Blickle, even some of the Reformers themselves that fell outside of the Lutheran movement – men like Bucer and Zwingli, whom he calls “Christian humanists” – saw the Reformation as an opportunity to lead the people in creating a “kingdom of peace and harmony.”[57] Blickle joins a number of social historians that see the Reformation as integrally joined with the contemporary German Peasants’ War of 1525, especially since both movements had a significant attachment to the social demand that serfdom be abolished for all time.[58]
As several historians have noted, the early sixteenth century saw the creation of a new money economy in Europe, which the Church was only too eager to take advantage of in any way that they could. Hillerbrand claimed that the Church did little to improve upon their reputation as simply “another worldly Italian court, characterized… [by] intrigue and bribery.” This reputation was earned moreover by its participation in the new money economy by way of indulgences, the purchase of ecclesiastical offices, and a burgeoning ecclesiastical bureaucracy.[59] It was, of course, the predatory practice of indulgences that pushed Martin Luther to begin down the tumultuous path of papal criticism. Mullett viewed this new commercial and urban wealth as a vehicle for a true separation of classes, which insulted the ethical notions of social justice, charity, and communal responsibility that are so heavily espoused in the New Testament.[60] As was pointed to previously, the idea of returning evangelical ethics to economics in Europe, such as wealth redistribution, was an inspiration to the iconoclasm of the time and the members of some of the newly Protestant communities wasted little time in undoing the efforts of the Church by redistributing its wealth for the needs of the community.[61]
To Blickle, the idea of a new social ethics was not limited only to money or goods, but also incorporated ideas about a new system of government and social order. He perceived a trend, beginning in the early sixteenth century, of commoners all over Germany beginning to clamor for new relationships with their rulers based not upon arbitrary autocracy, but on a literalist interpretation of the New Testament, which they called the “Godly law.”[62] This “Godly law”, as Blickle expertly explains, was a “pointing to the gospel as the source of all norms in human life, [which] introduced into the hardened mental categories of this pre-Enlightenment society new possibilities of thinking about the nature of man.”[63] Providing a veritable tour of German thought around 1525, Blickle supplies an abundance of contemporary sources to demonstrate common ideas of evangelical social theory. In the end, he concluded, the “Godly law” became a front for an incredibly progressive social theory which “had thus made the entire political order suspect and had cast its very legitimacy into doubt.”[64] Similarly, Gunther Vogel claims that Nuremburg’s laity at this time had a profound expectation for social reform that would overturn the Church’s domination as the “intellectual, social, and political representation of the feudal order.”[65] By the time of the Peasant War of 1525, many Germans had come to a powerful concept that all people were equal under God and that the society had an obligation to treat everyone without distinction in regard to class, vocation, or residency[66] and that the peasantry of Germany are, essentially, torn between two masters: God and their temporal overlords.[67] It is just this kind of a blurry line between a new religious, and evangelical, ethic and the German Peasant War that leads scholars like Heiko Oberman to confidently declare that, “the so-called Peasant War is for both its moderate critics and its radical leaders basically a religious movement.”[68] Inserting a modern Marxist interpretation of the German Peasant War, Max Steinmetz puts forth the notion that the “bourgeois heresy” demanded “the restoration of early Christian relations of equality, that is effective restoration of bourgeois equality, including equality of wealth.”[69]
Returning to Protestant communal efforts to create a new social order, Ozment claims that the lay congregations of the Reformation did not differentiate at all between the high theology of the Protestant preachers and their expectation for social reform.[70] It was in this context, Ozment suggests, that the importance of pastoral responsibility was created. The new value of ministry in Protestant communities was based solely on the degree to which it operated as a vehicle to serve one’s neighbor.[71] Going directly to such sources as the Letter of a Young Student in Wittenberg to His Parents in Swabia Written in Defense of Lutheran Doctrine, Ozment asserts that the earliest Protestant writings present a message that the new faith is an “inner freedom from religious superstition and its many anxieties and as a new ethic of social service.”[72] Referring specifically to early Zwinglian and Calvinist theology he insists that this “urban theology” retained an egalitarian nature for its values and a strong sense of communal solidarity.[73] Ozment, here, is differentiating between the way that these reformers targeted the needs and grievances of the burghers above the needs of the country peasantry. The cities, like Zurich, Geneva, Basel and others, provided a culturally rich environment for the intellectual message of the reformers whereas the peasantry had a separate, if not similar, set of needs, which were addressed in other ways. There is little doubt in Ozment’s view that many commoners came to believe that the Reformation stood for the political and social freedom of the common man.[74] Cutting straight to the point, Bob Scribner alleges that the “Gospel”, as reformers presented it, was popular because it was in many ways a “Gospel of social unrest” and the actual synoptic Gospel tradition itself was widely considered to be addressed to “the poor” and the “disenfranchised.”[75] This led him to the conclusion that it was “undeniable” that the Reformation was, itself, a popular movement that had developed over time to include religious demands to the long list of desired political and social reforms.[76] This groundswell of support for a new religious, political, economic, and social ethics, according to a vast majority of Reformation historians, was the focus of popular support for Protestantism. It was when these demands reached a fever pitch that the early movement of the Reformation took its most peculiar, and controversial, turn in the form of the German Peasant War of 1525. While Heiko Oberman boldly professed that the German Peasant War was “basically a religious movement,”[77] there are others that have claimed that the German Peasant War – as well as the entire Reformation in Germany – was, in fact, an “early bourgeois revolution.” This Marxist trend in Reformation historiography has not only led to the Reformation being studied as social history, as R. Po-chia Hsia claims, but has also cut along a major modern ideological division of Germany from 1961 to 1989 between a capitalist democracy and a communist dictatorship.[78]
For all of the turmoil associated with the ideological and political Cold War of the twentieth century, it should be noted that the conflict provided a backdrop by which new scholarship could be undertaken and Reformation history is no exception. While the Stalinist dictatorships of the twentieth century failed to achieve the ideal expression of Marxism, the ideological foundation remains as firm and controversial as ever. Debates between the capitalism and communism have lessened in the decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the methods developed to legitimize the social theory of communism, such as social history, are still valuable doorways to understanding our shared past. For centuries historians have relied on the writings, monuments, and remains of those exceptional individuals and events that warranted the efforts of chroniclers. The resultant political, military and intellectual annals most common to modern academics represent the “low-hanging fruit” on the tree of history. Social history requires more obscure methods than normal historical research, as each of these scholars has demonstrated. The methods, like their results and the ideological debate that has produced them, is not without controversy. Likewise, the means by which the information is interpreted can be, at times, highly inferential and, thus, contentious as well. By analyzing 450-year-old court documents, written grievances, polemic tracts, religious pamphlets, art, literature and archaeological remains, social historians have the difficult task of finding needles of truth in a proverbial haystack of obscurity. As Scibner notes, “The German Peasant War has always been the subject of controversy. The most persistent point at issue has been that of its relation to the Reformation.”[79] The recent debate between Marxist and non-Marxist scholars has revolved mostly on whether or not the “Peasant War [was] an expression of socio-economic conflict, of which the Reformation was an ideological expression” or simply an organized series of riots against the political establishment.[80]
In the introduction to The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, Bob Scribner’s very first claim is that the German Peasant War must be viewed both as the last medieval peasant revolt and the first modern revolution.[81] Steinmetz, in his essay, “Early Bourgeois Revolution Theses,”[82] produces an insightful window into what he calls the “the first proletarian element in a decaying feudal order” as he traces various phases of a developing German nationalism and an increasing social emphasis on equality, justice, and the common weal throughout the late medieval period.[83] Steinmetz, like many Marxist historians, maintains that capitalism is merely a modern extension of feudalism as the aristocracy transitioned from a sociopolitical class to a socioeconomic one.[84] From this position, he argues that the more socially radical elements of the Reformation were, in fact, the beginnings of a social revolution in Europe that placed the common weal above the arbitrary and self-serving interests of the elite. The eventual defeat of the peasant insurrection, according to Steinmetz, lies squarely on the shoulders of Martin Luther. In perhaps the most direct criticism of Luther’s role in the crushing of the peasant revolt he blames Luther for “[summoning] the princes to murder the peasants… this process of the bourgeois Reformation was so cut to shape that it can be adequately labeled the ideological expression of the limited ‘small state’ outlook.” In other words Steinmetz accuses Luther, and ultimately the entire movement of Magisterial Protestantism, of breaking with the radical implications and ideals of the Reformation for a more conservative status quo that reinforced feudal oligarchy where the common man was shut out of German polity.
Peter Blickle, in an analysis of early sixteenth German agricultural records, finds that the German Peasant War – which, to him is a slight misnomer as it was a revolution by the entire strata of “common man” – was dominated by a “noticeable [loss] of income on every farm.”[85] Looking to the economic conditions of German commoners, Blickle surmises that the feudal system itself was strained as the “ethical content” of seigniorial relationships deteriorated.[86] In a line of reasoning similar to Steinmetz, Blickle alleges that the “Peasant War failed as a revolution because the concerns of the common man were not compatible with those of the Reformers.”[87] Blickle’s argument hardly makes Luther out to be the devil, but it is not a stretch to infer from the study his disapproval of Luther’s involvement in the psychological, moral, and military defeat of the Peasants. Acknowledging the political dimensions of the Reformation in Communal Reformation, Blickle alleges that the communal reformation turned into a “conscious class movement” of democratic “anomalies” which, as movements of this nature tend to do, threatened the stability of the political order. At the height of radicalism within the Reformation, the state had begun to associate the potentially threatening aspects of the evangelical doctrine with “high treason”, thus leading to collaboration between the most prominent reformers and the princes and, ultimately, the assumption of the Reformation by the magistracy.[88] In a dissection of Calvinist economic and social theory, Michael Mullett attempts to explicate the longstanding and ongoing ideological debate by analyzing arguments provided by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney. Throughout the chapter, Mullett describes the progression of Christian economic ethics under Catholicism and Protestantism eventually coming full circle within Tawney’s own arguments that the “capitalist system… had come about because Christian teachers had failed in their duty to speak out against it… the resultant Victorian Christianity which praised wealth was not a valid form of Christianity, but rather the victory of economics over morality.”[89] It is not difficult to see how this argument was controversial. Mullett, via Tawney, is both challenging the ethical legitimacy of capitalism as a socioeconomic theory as well as claiming that more modern interpretations of Christianity are also invalid. In his argument, Christianity is a social condition by which all men are both free and equal, not based on rights but rather based on a communal responsibility to provide for the needs of one’s own neighbor. It is, in most rights, a criticism of the foundation of Western civilization. As radical a position as this may be, Mullett provides ample citations, both from theological writings, as well as studies of the contemporary communal arrangements of radical Christian conventicles, to support his conclusion.
Ronnie Hsia, in perhaps a more neutral position on the question of the “early bourgeois revolution,” acknowledges the debate in The German People and the Reformation, mildly asserting that Marxist historiography has provided crucial insights into the Reformation that must be taken seriously. Agreeing with the revolutionary character of the Reformation as a whole, he concludes that the social history of the German Reformation, and its inherent “religious” changes, were the foundation of greater cultural, political, and societal changes in the modern age.[90] Even Steven Ozment demonstrated an affinity to Marxist historiography when, in The Age of Reform, he laments the “[un]favorable press” that “nonconformists” and “the radical reformers” had historically received.[91] While, as he states, “few would today follow Frederich Engels in classifying Luther among history’s ‘great bootlickers of absolute monarchy,’ historians of various ideological persuasions believe” that Luther did, in fact, deliver le coup fatal to the “original social promise of the Reformation.”[92] A slightly earlier publication of his, Reformation in the Cities, demonstrates this openness more clearly. In a chapter devoted to religious attitudes of the laity in the late medieval period, Ozment contends that the Reformation-era complaint against indulgences was not so much on the basis of theological corruption, but an economic argument: these indulgences took money away from needy German communities and sent that money to the decadent city of Rome.[93] By this, Ozment would have scholars interpret Luther’s opposition to indulgences as an inequitable trading arrangement and that Luther is behaving not as an ecclesiastical shepherd of Germans but rather as an economic protectionist.
Of course, not every scholar sees the German Peasant War or the Reformation in a Marxist light. Several prominent scholars on the subject attempt to completely discount any notion of socio-economic oppression in Germany and propose a counter-Marxist interpretation of the data as a purely political struggle for the expansion of the German franchise. George Hunston Williams, placing the German Peasant War in a precursory position to the so-called “Radical Reformation,” claims that the German Peasant War was actually a much broader – and older – social movement that sporadically developed over the course of nearly three hundred years. Claiming that this “radical revolution” actually began in 1291, Williams arrives at a theory that unrest wasn’t due to poor conditions among the peasantry so much as it was because of the conflict caused by lords – ecclesiastical and civil – trying to fight over lands and jurisdiction “at the expense of the peasantry.”[94] In a sense Williams is trying to use the arguments of the Marxists against them. By claiming that the Reformation was the result of a 300-year-old political conflict in Europe between church and state, in which the commoners were caught in the middle, he is attempting to weaken the legitimacy of claiming that the Reformation was a social movement. He claims – though he fails to cite his sources – “the unrest [of German peasants from 1291 onward] occurred in areas where the peasants had been prosperous and relatively free.”[95] Their longstanding tradition of uprising against the authorities was rooted mostly in the revival of the Code of Justinian and the increase of political absolutism. While Williams is not expressly insisting on the mutual exclusivity of each interpretation, the implications of his research is that the Marxist historians are only seeing what they want to see in the historical records. Horst Buszello, likewise claims that the motivation of the rebels was a weakened Emperor and strong confederacy of self-ruled territories akin to the nearby Swiss Confederation, not poor economic conditions as Marxist historians claim.[96] According to Buszello, “Peasants’ and burghers’ demands for local autonomy… ran like a red thread through all the petitions and proposals of the Peasant War.”[97] Moreover, he asserts the political nature of the Peasant War at the expense of the economic arguments when he charges the movement of having “a desire to uphold peace and justice more effectively, combined with a hope also to protect ‘the common man’ from the ruler’s arbitrary use of prerogative.” The underlying claim here is that the financial burdens of the common man were either not existent or not important. One must wonder, on the other hand, how Buszello is able to reconcile this argument with one-third of the grievances and demands in the so-called Twelve Articles that address, specifically, the economic burdens of the commoners placed by both temporal and ecclesiastical authorities.[98] This seems like an odd omission for what should be a rigorous scholarly interpretation of the Peasant War. And, still, another problem with his thesis arises in the form of the so-called “Jewish question” presented in the Twelve Articles: if the goal of the Peasant War was simply “self-rule” or “local autonomy,” why include a demand that the Emperor exterminate the Jewish population of the Empire?[99] The Jewish communities of Germany were thoroughly disenfranchised from imperial polity while Christians all over Europe regarded Jewish usurious practices as both unethical and economically burdensome for farmers and townsmen alike. An official demand for the “extermination of the Jews” undercuts the claim that there were no significant socioeconomic interests at stake in the German Peasant War or the Reformation.
It is true that Buszello later in his essay[100] does attempt to address some of these economic questions but always returns it to the theme of political considerations and local autonomy. The abolition of serfdom, the reestablishment of hunting, fishing, and gathering rights, and demands for a repeal of clerical economic privileges are all described as “the common man [wanting] to achieve political equality among all subjects” and explained as attempts to “protect ‘the common man’ from further treachery, coercion, and spoliation.”[101] There is certainly a political element to these claims. That is not in question. What is curious about this interpretation is that each of these demands is of an economic nature. The abolition of serfdom is, as Lockean political economists would later claim, an insistence of the right to own the value of one’s own labor. Allowing the peasants to return to living off of common lands is an insistence of the right to provide one’s own means of survival. It is peculiar that Buszello would, so dismissively, categorize these as demands of a purely political nature. Yet, in the midst of all of the ideological conflict, perhaps the original scholarly assessment is the most balanced and fair. In The Reformation, Hans Hillerbrand cuts directly to the heart of the debate-to-be and maintains that German nationalism, economic grievances, and power politics were, all taken together, as influential in the Reformation as theology and “zeal to restore the Gospel.”[102]
It is a common axiom among historians that a topic will receive as many unique interpretations as there are scholars researching it. The Protestant Reformation, while able to be loosely grouped into a finite number of contending groups, is no exception. Perhaps one of the strongest qualities of modern historical research is the diversity of viewpoints offered among scholars. There should be no doubt that the rigid ideological divide between Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers in the twentieth century on the topic of the Reformation irrevocably impacted the modern historical discipline and, by my estimation, for the better. It could be argued that without Marxist ideological perspective, the social history paradigm might never have gained the attention of Reformation scholars. Marxists historians, while perhaps motivated by a desire to legitimize the political structure of the German Democratic Republic, have undoubtedly contributed a fresh perspective, that of an “early bourgeois movement,” presenting a historical continuity for Western revolutionary social movements across four hundred years. Perhaps more importantly, however, this socialization of historical research provided both the inspiration and the means for scholars to research the most underrepresented demographic in history: the everyday person. From comprehensive social studies, like The Reformation, to micro-historical research projects, like Voracious Idols and Violent Hands, social history of the Reformation has cast an increasingly bright light into the shadows of our common past. Understanding such an important turning point in Western history is crucial for understanding the world we currently live in. It is difficult to resist, in history, the dangerous temptation of an easy explanation and the potential overzealousness to draw direct causalities, especially on a subject so profoundly important as the Reformation. The rich heterodoxy of Reformation research provides generous material for not only understanding the nature of the Reformation itself, but also insights into the culture that produces the historiography.
[1] Steven Ozment, Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, 1; Lee P. Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands, 2
[5] A member of the urban middle class in Germany, particularly from among the group that city officials could be drawn. This word is similar to its French cousin, “bourgeois.”
[6] A distinct and separate reformation movement that sought, according to G. H. Williams, not to reform the church but to reform all of society. Most scholars agree that the Anabaptists, Evangelical Rationalists, and Spiritualists comprise the “radical” element of the Reformation.
[7] Pertaining to the governing authorities of a region. In Reformation studies, this refers to the three Protestant confessions that were, eventually, adopted by various princes in Europe: Lutheran, Calvinist, and Zwinglian.
[8] French translation of German “burgher.” Strictly interpreted as townsmen, but loosely defined as a member of the common classes. Typically meant within Marxist definitions as a disenfranchised member of society.
[20] Miriam Chrisman, “Printing and the Evolution of Lay Culture in Strasbourg,” in Hsia, The German People and the Reformation, 84-85
[52] Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “In Search of the Godly City: The Domestication of Religion in the Urban Reformation”, in Hsia, The German People and the Reformation, 19
[53] The term “synoptic Gospel” refers to the canonical New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
[55] Peter Blickle, “The ‘Peasant War’ as the Revolution of the Common Man – Theses”, in R. W. Scribner, The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, 21
[65] Gunther Vogler, “Imperial City Nuremburg, 1524-1525: The Reform Movement in Transition”, in Hsia, The German People and the Reformation, 48
[66] Heiko A. Oberman, “The Gospel of Social Unrest,” in Scribner, The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, 41
[69] Max Steinmetz, “Theses on the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, 1476-1535,” in Scribner, The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, 12
[96] Horst Buszello, “The Common Man’s View of the State in the German Peasant War”, in Scribner, The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, 109
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