Wabuda on Diarmaid Macculloch, 'The Reformation' and Macculloch, 'The Reformation: a History'

H-Albion Wabuda on Diarmaid MacCulloch, 'The Reformation' and MacCulloch, 'The Reformation: A History'

Review published on Tuesday, November 1, 2005

Diarmaid MacCulloch. The Reformation. New York: Viking Press, 2003. xxiv + 792 pp. Diarmaid MacCulloch. The Reformation: A History. New York: Viking, 2003. xxiv + 750 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-670-03296-9; $20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-14-303538-1.

Reviewed by Susan Wabuda (Department of History, Fordham University) Published on H-Albion (November, 2005)

Reformation Resurgens

The Reformation was such a startling break in the cultural and political fabric of Europe that it has often had to be understood in slices. So vast in its consequences, historians and theologians have frequently chosen to explore it in terms of their own discreet specialties. The lives and writings of its leaders, and the efforts of its opponents, have been examined in countless works. Nearly every religious affiliation has used it to focus on its own history, until the Reformation has sometimes seemed like a hostage to denominational studies. To explore the entire breadth of the Reformation without partiality or favor, to come to grips with the challenges of source material that stretches across several linguistic boundaries, and to deal with the historiographical and denominational issues of interpretation, are all enormous tasks. In The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch has written a superb, nuanced account of what he terms "the greatest fault line to appear in Christian culture since the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman Empire went their separate ways a thousand years before" (p. xviii).

As an editor of The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, one of the premier quarterlies in the field, MacCulloch is well placed to survey that fault line through the latest scholarly trends. He has called upon important studies of the last four decades, including work by Margaret Aston, Patrick Collinson, Eamon Duffy, Mark Greengrass, Ole Peter Grell, Henry Kamen, John W. O'Malley, Heiko Oberman, Andrew Pettegree, R. W. Scribner, Margo Todd, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks. The Reformation follows on from MacCulloch's previous successes, among them:Suffolk and the Tudors (1986), Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996), and Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (2000).

In The Reformation, MacCulloch has produced a compelling analysis that ranges over the whole of Europe, from the fringes of the Baltic states to the western edges of the Atlantic archipelago, and beyond to the New World and the Asian coasts. Though some events and years were crucial (1517 was the beginning of the great watershed), MacCulloch's is a Long Reformation, lasting until about 1700, though the English experience (as well as the Scottish) was distinctive, and moved at its own pace. It was also a magisterial Reformation, for Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, and Martin Bucer, among other leaders of reform, worked in partnership with the secular leaders of Europe to impose religious and social change.

The miasma of antagonism between Christianity and Islam hovers over this book from its early pages. Buda was sacked by the Turks in 1526, and Vienna was threatened only three years later, diverting the attention of both Emperor Charles V and Pope Clement VII at crucial moments when the Protestant threat might have been smothered in its cradle. Long after the victory over the Ottoman Empire at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Christians were still being stolen from the Mediterranean and Irish coasts and enslaved by Islamic traffickers.

MacCulloch is a master at unpacking the complications that the Reformation poses. His discussion of the emergence of varieties of "Protestantisms" (p. 166) is valuable and revealing, especially for Reformed Protestantism, represented by the thinking of Philip Melancthton, Bucer, and Cranmer in portions of Switzerland, France, and England. He makes nuanced yet clarifying distinctions, as in his discussion of the struggle over the key doctrine of justification by faith alone that emerged among Luther's followers for control over his legacy after his death in 1546: between the "Lutheran ultras" who have become known as the "Gnesio-Lutherans--gnesio being Greek for 'the real thing,'" or those like Melanchthon, the "Philippists" who wished to keep the Protestant movement united even if they had to depart from some aspects of Luther's thinking (pp. 337-341). Calvin split his doctrinal ticket: he supported the Gnesio-Lutherans on predestination, but sided with Melancththon against aspects of Luther's Eucharistic thinking, and each convolution had long-term consequences that MacCulloch explores.

His descriptions of well-known figures, including SS. Theresa of Avila and Francis de Sales, as well as many of the more obscure, are vivid. He provides neat deflations of what most people think happened, but never did: Geneva's Theodore Beza promoted the doctrine of double predestination that is more usually associated with Calvin. Luther almost certainly did not say "Here I stand; I can do no other," though those words might be the motto of all western civilization (p. 128). Much of the doctrinal discussion is relieved by wit. Though "medieval scribal error" multiplied the number of St. Ursula's companions to eleven thousand, still the ladies managed to generate "an obligingly large number of bones" for the Jesuits to distribute as devotional aids to reclaim believers in central Europe and elsewhere (p. 440).

Readers of The Reformation will come away with many new insights (not the least of them, at the start and end of the book, concern patterns of sexual behavior). The complexity of experience in East and Central Europe still offers fresh surprises. Transylvania is highlighted here for the three-way split Hungary experienced in the 1520s between the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and a mÃ©lange of evangelical belief, Lutheran and non-Lutheran. The result was an inventive and flourishing spirit of toleration, which culminated in the Declaration of Torda in 1568 that as faith was a gift of God, no clergyman should be imprisoned or banished for his teachings. Military adventures wrecked Transylvania's compromises in the seventeenth century, and MacCulloch deplores the modern tendency to fixate on "the imaginary grotesqueries of Count Dracula" rather than on the innovative open-mindedness of Transylvania's pioneering toleration (p. 654).

MacCulloch manages to introduce small elements of exquisite detail, like his brief notice of how the distinctiveness of the Reformation in England is represented even in the mathematical certainties of the tradition of English change ringing, which will be readily appreciated by those who have lived within hearing distance of an English parish church with a fine peal of bells or enjoyed Dorothy L. Sayers's masterpiece of detective fiction, The Nine Tailors. Those who are interested in the history of

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Wabuda on Diarmaid MacCulloch, 'The Reformation' and MacCulloch, 'The Reformation: A History'. H-Albion. 03-26-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/16749/reviews/17928/wabuda-diarmaid-macculloch-reformation-and-macculloch-reformation Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Albion the Reformation in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales will find MacCullogh's book essential reading (especially chapters on "Protestant Heartlands" and on the "British Legacy, 1600-1700"). Graduate students will find this book invaluable. But even in a book of over 700 pages, not every topic that will interest its readers could be addressed. While the colonies of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island established their own distinctive cultures, a glance at Connecticut too would have been welcome for the interesting choices its leaders made in religious and political stances. Some subjects do not fit easily within MacCulloch's narrative framework. His discussion of witchcraft in chapter 13, while valuable, reads a little like an addendum.

The book ends around 1700, when two centuries of warfare and the attendant strengthening of the nation-state, were bringing the immediate consequences of the Reformation to a close. The study of natural philosophy was beginning to give rise to the abstractions of scientific thought. The leaders of the Enlightenment sought to shrug off all of the old constraints that religion imposed.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation is a triumphant achievement.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=10944

Citation: Susan Wabuda. Review of Diarmaid MacCulloch,The Reformation and MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. November, 2005.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10944

Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected].