The Freedom of Spirit, Social Privelege, and Religious Dissent: Caspar Schwenckfeld and the Schwenckfelders.

R. Emmet McLaughlin. (Bibliotheca Dissidentium, Scripta et studia, 6.) Baden-Baden: Editions Valentin Koerner, 1996. 271 pp. bibl. n.p. ISBN: 3-87320-886-5.

These volumes both deal with dissident movements that failed to claim a place among the dominant religious communities of sixteenth-century Europe. Freedom of the Spirit is a collection of eight of Professor McLaughlin's essays on Schwenkfeld (1979-1994), including some in publications not normally seen by Reformation scholars, plus an introduction for this volume. Schwenkfeld (1489-1561), a Silesian nobleman, promulgated his spiritualist understanding of the gospel first in his native Duchy of Lausitz, then after 1529 in Strasbourg, Augsburg, Ulm, and Esslingen. In Reformation polemics on the nature of the Lord's Supper, Schwenkfeld's position was that Christians should feed on the Lord in their hearts, indeed he favored a Stillstand or cessation in the celebration of the external rite until such time as it might again be a sign of unity among the faithful. Encouraged to conform outwardly to rites decreed by state churches, his followers often met in private conventicles, perhaps at times "with a form of worship something like the later Quaker meeting" (23). Since the Schwenkfelders of Silesia are reasonably well covered in German scholarly literature, McLaughlin devotes his attention to south Germany, where he finds several reasons for the spread of the movement, and its persistence over several generations, despite persecution. First, the decision by leading reformers in south Germany to seek a politically necessary theological compromise with Lutheran colleagues left many adherents of the spiritual interpretation of the eucharist (first promulgated by Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich) feeling betrayed, and receptive to a Schwenkfeldian alternative. Second, influential followers of the aristocratic Schwenkfeld - especially court nobles with territories of their own - helped ward off persecution, and provided havens for pastors of a Schwenkfeldian persuasion. Finally, it was Schwenkfeld himself on his incessant travels who made the key contacts; his most important followers were also disciples and friends. McLaughlin argues that Schwenkfeld's championship of man's spiritual freedom was vindicated by the passage of time: "victors write the history, but over time the victors change" (35). In my view conclusions of this sort imply a view of history that is not dialectical, not rich enough to reflect real human complexity. But McLaughlin's more fundamental point - that the appeal of Schwenkfeld's message suggests for Reformation-era Germany a stubbornly diverse religious landscape - is a salutary corrective to the picture of competing uniformities that sometimes emerges from the recent convergence of opinion around the idea of confessionalization.

Professor Macek's revised dissertation deals with the polemical writings of Tudor prelates and theologians (also some lay writers) who first resisted the Protestantizing tendencies of Cranmer and his associates under Henry VIII and Edward VI, then rallied to the support of Mary's efforts to re-establish Catholicism in England. There is in fact a gap in the literature on this point. The professedly Roman Catholic controversial writings of More and Fisher and the later Jesuits have been well studied, but the "conservative" authors (a reasonable appellation), writers who were in effect groping towards a new formulation of Catholicism under Henry VIII and Edward VI, have been studied, if at all, only as ecclesiastical politicians. Particularly interesting is Macek's treatment of the nuanced historical arguments of Stephen Gardiner, who was Bishop of Winchester from 1531 until his death in 1555, save for a few periods in the Tower of London in Edward's reign. Macek argues that an understanding of "conservative" theology also helps explain the ultimate failure of the Marian Restoration. She finds the writings of Gardiner and his colleagues flawed by a fundamental inconsistency: they left English Catholics no reason for resisting royal religious decrees, for they themselves accepted Mary's Counter-Reformation because it was commanded by the queen, just as they had once accepted Henry's Reformation because it was commanded by the king. They also seemed to lack any sensitivity to the lay person's quest for greater spiritual dignity, a concern that helped win many to Protestantism. Macek stresses the first of these failings, but she might have given greater attention to the second, especially in light of recent arguments (one thinks in particular of Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altar) for continuing attachment to the rituals of the old faith on the part of ordinary men and women; it seems as if conservative writers were in the dark not just about popular sentiments that favored the Reformation, but also about sentiments of a quite different kind that might have been marshalled for their own cause. One might summarize the two books by saying that if both Schwenkfeld and the English conservatives sought to nurture opposition currents within churches that were in the process of becoming established, the wandering preacher who made a deep personal impression on his followers had better luck than the mitred shepherds who seemed to be not well acquainted with their own flocks.

JAMES TRACY University of Minnesota