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POLITICS and SOCIETY in REFORMATION EUROPE Sir Geoffrey Elton Politics and Society in Reformation Europe

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POLITICS and SOCIETY in REFORMATION EUROPE Sir Geoffrey Elton Politics and Society in Reformation Europe POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN REFORMATION EUROPE Sir Geoffrey Elton Politics and Society in Reformation Europe Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday Edited by E. I. Kouri Professor of History Oulu University, Finland and Tom Scott Lecturer in History University of Liverpool © E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-41737-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1987 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-18816-1 ISBN 978-1-349-18814-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18814-7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Politics and society in Reformation Europe: essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his sixty- fifth birthday. I. Europe-History-1492-1648 I. Elton, G. R. II. Kouri, E. I. III. Scott, Tom. 940.2'32 0228 ISBN 0-333-41737-2 Transferred to digital printing 1999 Contents Sir Geoffrey Elton frontispiece Preface ix Acknowledgements xii Editors' Notes xiii Notes on the Contributors XV I The Impact of the Reformation: Problems and Perspectives 3 Heiko A. Oberman II 2 Martin Luther and the Political World of his Time 35 Gerhard Muller 3 The Holy Roman Empire in German History 51 Volker Press 4 'Comme representant nostre propre personne'- The Regency Ordinances of Charles V as a Historical Source 78 Horst Rabe and Peter Marzahl 5 Police and the Territorial State in Sixteenth-century Wiirttemberg 103 R. W. Scribner 6 Is There a 'New History' of the Urban Reformation? 121 Hans-Christoph Rub/ack 7 The Common Man and the Lost Austria in the West: A 142 Contribution to the German Problem Thomas A. Brady, Jr 8 Church Property in the German Protestant Principalities 158 Henry J. Cohn 9 The Problem of 'Failure' in the Swiss Reformation. Some Preliminary Reflections 188 Hans R. Guggisberg v vi Contents lO Economic Conflict and Co-operation on the Upper Rhine, 1450-1600 210 Tom Scott III II Luther in Europe: His Works in Translation, 1517-46 235 Bernd Moeller 12 Europe as Seen Through the Correspondence of Theodore Beza 252 Bernard Vogler 13 Bodin's Universe and its Paradoxes: Some Problems in the Intellectual Biography of Jean Bodin 266 P. L. Rose 14 'History of Crime' or 'History of Sin'? Some Reflections on the Social History of Early Modern Church Discipline 289 Heinz Schilling 15 What is a 'Religious War'? 3ll Konrad Repgen 16 Cardinal Reginald Pole and the Path to Anglo-Papal Mediation at the Peace Conference of Marcq, 1553-55 329 t Heinrich Lutz 17 Orange, Granvelle and Philip II 353 H. G. Koenigsberger 18 The Shape of Anti-clericalism and the English Reformation 379 A. G. Dickens 19 For True Faith or National Interest? Queen Elizabeth I and the Protestant Powers 411 E./. Kouri 20 Queen Elizabeth I, the Emperor Rudolph II and Archduke Ernest, 1593-94 437 R. B. Wernham 21 The Settlement of the Merchants Adventurers at Stade, 1587-1611 452 G. D. Ramsay Contents vii 22 Two Revolutions in Early Modern Denmark 473 E. Ladewig Petersen and Knud J. V. Jespersen 23 The European Powers and Sweden in the Reign of Gustav Vasa 502 Sven Lundkvist 24 The Conclusive Years: The End of the Sixteenth Century as the Turning-Point of Polish History 516 Antoni M{lczak IV 25 The Reformation and the Modern World 535 Thomas Nipperdey Index 553 Preface The knighthood recently conferred upon Sir Geoffrey Elton acknow­ ledges his unique contribution to the history of Tudor and Stuart England over more than thirty years and his unrivalled place in the first rank of British historians, to which his presidency of the Royal Historical Society and his appointment to the Regius Chair in Cam­ bridge have already borne witness. His many studies on the Tudor polity and his broader reflections upon the historian's craft reveal the true affection in which Geoffrey Elton holds his adopted country; yet he has never disavowed the intellectual heritage of his Continental back­ ground. The son of Victor Ehrenberg, the eminent historian of ancient Greece, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton was born in Tiibingen in 1921 into a family which over the generations had established a modest scholarly and professional dynasty. In 1929 his father was appointed to the chair of ancient history at the German University in Prague, but the darkening menace of National Socialism brought Victor Ehrenberg and his family to England in 1939. The dislocations and privations of the war and its aftermath may have disrupted, but could not destroy, the single-minded determination with which Geoffrey Elton applied himself to historical research as a student, under Sir John Neale in London, in new and unfamiliar surroundings. In his subsequent career as scholar, teacher, research supervisor and editor, briefly at Glasgow and thereafter as a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, Geoffrey Elton has been associated above all with the history of England. Although, as he insists, England is not part of Europe in its modern historical development, he has nevertheless maintained links of learning and of friendship with the world of Continental scholarship. Among Geoffrey Elton's scholarly achievements, which include some twenty books, his works on the international history of the Reformation have always held an important place. In 1963 Reforma­ tion Europe, 1517-1559 was published and has since remained no less a trusty textbook to generations of students than his England under the Tudors. So popular- and provocative- did it prove that it was trans­ lated into several languages including German and Japanese. In 1963 Geoffrey Elton also edited a collection of sources, Renaissance and Reformation, 1300-1648, now in its third edition, in the series Ideas and ix X Preface Institutions in Western Civilization. The crown was set upon his contribution to European scholarship by the appearance in 1968 of the eagerly awaited second volume of The New Cambridge Modern History, entitled The Reformation, 1520-1559. As well as an Introduction of magisterial authority and magical concision, he wrote both the chapter on 'The Reformation in England' and a lucid survey of 'Constitutional Development and Political Thought in Western Europe'. It was entirely fitting, therefore, that he should be invited to join the board of management of the internationally renowned Archive for Reformation History, in whose 1977 issue he contributed the portrait 'Thomas Cromwell Redivivus', a Continental clarion for the figure at the centre of his historical endeavours. Elton's mastery of both English and European Reformation history has found further expression in numerous other articles collected in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, including his study in German on England and the Reformation in Upper Germany. Published forays into his mother tongue do not stand alone. Who can forget Geoffrey Elton addressing the International Luther Con­ gress in Erfurt in August 1983 in fluent and faultless German, without text or notes, and in language so pithy that it astonished the staid assembly of scholars and divines? The Luther quincentenary took Elton to other conferences in West Germany, where his iconoclasm and pricking of conceits were worthy of the great Reformer himself. With the same vigour he has presented problems of Reformation history to audiences in all five continents. In honour of his sixty-fifth birthday this collection of essays on Politics and Society in Reformation Europe by friends and colleagues at home and overseas pays tribute to Sir Geoffrey Elton's standing beyond England's shores in the world community of historians. In bringing together scholars from many countries, the editors, whose own doctoral research, guided by Geoffrey Elton, was devoted to European history, have sought to convey the wealth of original and challenging scholarship in which the Reformation era now abounds. No single volume can do justice to every facet of current debate. The collection therefore concentrates upon two principal themes: the politi­ cal conditions within Germany in the age of the Reformation and the interaction of religion and society; and the dissemination of Protestan­ tism beyond the German-speaking lands, and its repercussions upon international relations and the development of the early modern state. Spanning these topics are introductory and concluding surveys which reflect upon the Reformation's impact on the modern world. Preface xi In his recent biography of F. W. Maitland, Geoffrey Elton stresses that the historian's graces can come only from hard work, hard thought and concentrated research. By their plurality of subject and approach the authors in this Festschrift seek to observe another of his fundamen­ tal maxims: that true historical understanding derives not from rever­ ence towards established opinion but from the critical scrutiny of evidence and the courage to engage in controversy and debate. In their willingness to submit their arguments to one of the most trenchant critics of our time, they fulfil Sir Geoffrey's most earnest desire: to uphold 'the comity of scholars in a discommodity of nations'. E. I. KOURI TOM SCOTT Acknowledgements The editors acknowledge with gratitude the financial assistance of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn towards the publication of this volume. They also wish to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce the map of the Swiss Confederation on page 189.
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