Book Reviews 311

Caspar Schwenckfeld, Reluctant Radical: His L$e to 1540. By R. Emmet McLaughlin. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1986. xii + 250 pp. E25.00. Biographies in English of leaders among the ‘radical’ or ‘left wing’ of continental Protestantism are surprisingly rare. On that account alone a critical study of all but the last twenty years of the life of Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig is to be warmly welcomed. The delay in the appearance of any such study in German or English to

replace the less than critical work of S. G. Schultz in 1946 is all the more surprising as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article/6/3/311/577202 by guest on 29 September 2021 the beautifully produced nineteen volumes of the monumental Corpus Schwenck- feldianorum, which began to appear in print in 1907, was completed in 1961;and further the well-equipped Schwenckfelder Library in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, has now been open for some forty years. In considering the stages of Schwenckfeld’s career from that of a landed nobleman and courtier to that of a ‘notorious religious radical’, McLaughlin divides his book into two virtually equal parts. The first covers his life in Silesia to 1529, and the second the succeeding eleven years to ‘the first quasi-official condemnation’ of him by some Protestant theologians at Schmalkald in 1540.In the period not covered Schwenckfeld was hunted and persecuted by Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and the Reformed alike. In his early life as a courtier, set ‘in an atmosphere marked by a bitter-and active-anticlericalism’ (pp. 9 f.) Schwenckfeld was challenged and won over by the developing reform movement. He became actively involved, but his participation was shaped by his emphasis upon ‘inner spiritual change over outward formal change’ (p. 35). McLaughlin, by arguing that Schwenckeld’s theology at this stage was firmly rooted in the Tautheran tradition, disagrees with other scholars, even although he does admit that there might be some evidence that he was straying from the Lutheran fold. That Schwenckfeld fully comprehended Luther’s theology in all its profundity is questioned. The theological bases of disagreements as they developed and Schwenckfeld’s immersion in speculative ideas, which, it is recognized, may have been conditioned by the perils that confronted the Reformation in the mid-Iszos, are clearly analysed. A possible debt to Hilary of Poitiers, in the way in which Schwenckfeld looked with ‘an increasingly jaundiced eye on the outward church, the sacraments, and the written and spoken word’ is of more than general interest. The fundamental cause of the break and subsequent exile was his opposition to Luther’s ‘tarrying for weak brethern’. In the second half of the book, in which are discussed Schwenckfeld’s wanderings in the Protestant cities of southern Germany, much attention is given to both Schwenckfeld’s own ‘spiritualist’ teaching and those of his opponents among the Reformed and the Anabaptists. With both he had much in common, but nevertheless fundamental disagreements. Today we may justifiably see him in many respects as far ahead of his time. ‘Perhaps what is most striking is his insistence that state churches, persecution, and religious coercion were disastrously dangerous to both church and state and that tolerance was the only practical and practicable approach’ (p. 146). The author is to be congratulated in presenting a highly informative, well-researched study of one of the minor but none the less significant figures of the Reformation.

Universit.)! of St Andrews JAMES K. CAMERON