Euan Cameron

For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed? Religion for the People in Early Modern Europe

There has long been some measure of agreement that European people in the middle ages adhered to a form of Christianity which was ‘folklorised’, ‘enchanted’, or ‘magical’. Interwoven with the traditional creeds and the orthodox liturgy were numerous beliefs and practices which were intended to ensure spiritual and bodily welfare, and guard against misfortune. To the endless frustration of theologians, ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ stubbornly refused to remain clearly separate, despite the intellectual effort expended in forcing them into different compartments. ‘Superstitious’ rites or beliefs repeatedly intersected with the official Catholic cult. It was believed that if a talisman were placed under an altar-cloth during mass, it would acquire spiritual potency. Orthodox prayers were constantly adapted to serve the needs of popular magic. Clergy, let alone layfolk, found the line between acceptable and superstitious practice difficult to draw. For a graphic illustration of this problem, one need only look at the following recipe for curing a hailstorm caused by sorcery: But against hailstones and storms, besides those things said earlier about raising the sign of the cross, this remedy may be used: three little hailstones are thrown into the fire with the invocation of the most Holy Trinity; the Lords Prayer with the Angelic Salutation is added twice or three times, and the Gospel of St John, ‘In the beginning was the word’, while the sign of the cross is made against the storm from all quarters, before and behind, and from every part of the earth. And then, when at the end one repeats three times, ‘the Word was made flesh’, and says three times after that, ‘by these Gospels uttered, may that tempest flee’, then suddenly, so long as the storm was caused to happen by sorcery, it will cease.

Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs

Two themes which figure repeatedly in the history of the Western Church are the contrasting ones of tradition and renewal. To emphasize tradition, or continuity, is to stress the divine element in the continuous collective teaching and witness of the Church. To call periodically for renewal and reform is to acknowledge that any institution composed of people will, with time, lose its pristine vigour or deviate from its original purpose. At certain periods in church history the tension between these two themes has broken out into open conflict, as happened with such dramatic results in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers seem to present one of the most extreme cases where the desire for renewal triumphed over the instinct to preserve continuity of witness. A fundamentally novel analysis of the process by which human souls were saved was formulated by Martin Luther in the course of debate, and soon adopted or reinvented by others. This analysis was then used as a touchstone against which to test and to attack the most prominent features of contemporary teaching, worship, and church polity. In so far as any appeal was made to Christian antiquity, it was to the scriptural texts and to the early Fathers; though even the latter could be selected and criticized if they deviated from the primary articles of faith. There was, then, no reason why any of the Reformers should have sought to justify their actions by reference to any forbears or ‘forerunners’ in the Middle Ages, whether real or spurious. On the contrary, Martin Luther’s instinctive response towards those condemned by the medieval Church as heretics was to echo the conventional and prejudiced hostility felt by the religious intelligentsia towards those outside their pale.

Review Article : Humanists, Reformers and Scholastics

Léon-E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, translated by John Tonkin, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, ISBN 0-631-16929-6 (hbk), 0-631-19388-X (pbk), 1993; xvi + 360pp.; £14.99 (pbk). R.J. Schoeck, Erasmus of Europe: The Prince of Humanists 15011536, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0-7486-0384-0, 1993; xx + 416 pp.; £44 (hbk), £16.99 (pbk). Bob Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds, The Reformation in National Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-40155-0 (hbk), 0-521-40960-8 (pbk), 1994; x + 236 pp.; £30.00 (hbk), £10.95 (pbk). Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Reformation of the Parishes: The Ministry and the Reformation in Town and Country, Manchester, Manchester University Press, ISBN 0-7190-4005-1, 1993; xii + 244 pp.; £35.00. W. Fred Graham, ed., Later Calvinism: International Perspectives, Kirksville, MO, Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, ISBN 0940474-22-0, 1994; viii + 564 pp.;

On Editing Luther's Writings on Scripture

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Words, Matter, and the Reformation: Revisiting the “Modernity” Question

Much of Martin Luthers prodigious output consisted of exposition and editing Scripture. While a series in English cannot do justice to his greatest achievement, his Bible in German, much can be learned from his prefaces and commentaries, which are selected in volume 6 of The Annotated Luther. Luthers attitude to interpreting Scripture evolved in a constant dialogue with his theology of justification. While he held to the absolute authority of Scripture, his approach was pre-critical but not uncritical. His exposition constantly balanced the consolation of grace and warnings against complacent trusting in our own works. His relentless emphasis on seeing Christ everywhere in the Bible, praised in past generations, poses problems today insofar as it determined his stance against Judaism.

The Consensus Tigurinus and the Göppingen eucharistic confession: continuing instabilities in Geneva's relationship with Zurich and the Lutheran world

The forthcoming 500th anniversary of the 95 theses and the debate over indulgences will undoubtedly focus minds on the meaning of the Reformation processes as a whole. Historians and historical theologians will seek to explain to an undogmatic age why disputes over doctrine mattered so much. Surely such a profound process of cultural change must, in some senses, have altered Europe? In a recent conference, the prevailing argument for the broader meaning of the Reformation still evoked the “confessionalization” thesis in one or another of its manifestations. In this view, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations mattered because they provoked secular leaders in one way or another to take the spiritual and moral lives of their subjects under much more thorough review and control than ever before. A related interpretation, associated rather with French than German scholarship, used to argue that the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in parallel and even equal ways raised the clergy above the cultural level of their people: a more educated clergy sought to impose more authoritative leadership on their congregations, and (so the argument went) called for an end to many folkloric practices that had accrued around rural religion especially. The Gallic version of the argument has fallen from favor recently. Some cultural and social historians over past decades have tended to minimize the impact of clergy-led “acculturation.” After all, the people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still lived in the small, short-lived and definitely enchanted cosmos of the Middle Ages. Historians were not always so hesitant to find in the Reformation profound changes, which were specific to the Protestant movements. A century ago German scholarship and philosophy celebrated the Reformation for its decisive challenge to the idea that an ordained priesthood, by the fact of performing certain rituals authenticated by its ordained status, could transform physical things so that they became spiritual vessels of that quantifiable essence known as sacramental “grace.”

Nearly 500 years and still Counting: The Reformation in Recent Scholarship and Debates

The Zurich Agreement of 1549 between Calvin and Bullinger (the Consensus Tigurinus) aspired to bring eucharistic teaching in the churches of Zurich and Geneva into harmony. However, while on a diplomatic mission in 1557 to secure the intercession of political leaders in favour of the Waldensian communities under threat from the king of France, Theodore Beza wrote a eucharistic confession which differed radically from the 1549 text; his hope was to persuade South German Lutherans that the Waldenses were closer to Lutheran eucharistic doctrine than the Germans thought. The fallout from this incident, copiously documented in the reformers’ letters, provokes in this study some interesting speculations about the differing priorities of Zurich and Geneva on the issue, 8 years after the Consensus.

The Debate over Superstitions and the Struggle for a British Protestant Identity

The sixteenth-century Reformation remains important to historians and theologians. Over the past 15 years new and revised accounts have appeared, both textbooks and more speculative pieces. Digitization of key texts is impacting the discipline. The ‘cultural turn’ has opened up Reformation history beyond ideas, politics and economics to include gender, the emotions, architecture and the arts (including music). It has identified psychological needs that the reformers had to address. Literary scholars have joined in Reformation studies. The vitality of the pre-Reformation church is now generally recognized; the question of how far the Reformation adumbrated ‘modernity’ remains controversial. New fronts in intellectual history are opening up in historiography, and biblical scholarship and exegesis.

Cosmic Time and the Theological View of World History

Abstract In the debates over religion in England and Scotland in the sixteenth century, reforming writers of various kinds used the term “superstition” to designate mistaken or obsolete forms of religion. Renaissance humanists often used the term to criticize those who clung stubbornly to traditional religious practices. William Tyndale (d. 1536) precociously proposed many key Protestant arguments against Catholic “superstitions.” Subsequent English writers were heavily influenced by the Zürich reformers, Bullinger and Gwalther. By the end of the century many disputants were locked in debate over whether the ceremonies of the Church of England itself could, or could not rightly be described as “superstitious.”

Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe . (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.) Pages xviii+827. £75.00.

To Christian people of the Middle Ages and the Reformation era, history contained the narrative of God’s dealings with humanity, located within and related to the history of the Christian Church. During the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, people tried to make sense of what was happening within world history and the divine plan. Scholars, including Luther and Melanchthon, interpreted history in terms of the four-monarchies system derived from the Book of Daniel. They discovered in Scripture not only divine governance of political affairs, but also affirmation of their theological principles. Swiss theologians, such as Oecolampadius and Bullinger, understood God’s relations with humanity as an eternal covenant, expressed in different transient forms. The quest for ever greater precision in the seventeenth century eventually discredited the providential, scriptural view of world history. It proved to have been one of those transient cultural movements within Christian experience.